What Iran Just Did in Hormuz... Trump's Entire Fleet Is Now Useless

Over the past few days, the pressure on commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz has not let up for a single day. The International Maritime Organization, the United Nations agency responsible for civilian shipping, keeps a record of it. As of June eleventh, the agency had logged forty-six confirmed attacks on ships. Fourteen innocent seafarers have lost their lives. The list grows longer every week, and it does not get any shorter when you look away. Tankers, cargo ships, gas carriers, supply vessels, ships sailing under flags that have nothing whatsoever to do with this war. According to the same records, around one thousand ships with some twenty thousand crew members are stuck in the Persian Gulf, and they have been for more than one hundred days. One hundred days. That is no longer a delay, that is a condition. It is worth stopping for a moment to think about what that number means for the people on board. A merchant crew normally sails on contracts that run for a few months, with fixed rotation dates and flights booked well in advance. When a ship cannot reach port, there is no rotation. The crew stays on board past the end of the contract, with no shore leave, no replacements, and no reliable word on when anything will move. Twenty thousand people are in that situation right now, and not one of them belongs to an army. For a long time, the shipping companies tried to respond with the limited tools they had. Convoys, night transits, transponders switched off, shorter port stays. Doing any more was too expensive and too dangerous. But the situation in this strait is now changing at a fundamental level, because both sides in this war have stopped treating commercial shipping as a sideshow and started treating it as the main stage.

September fifth made that clearer than ever before. On that day, the Revolutionary Guards fired ballistic missiles at two warships of the United States Navy. One was an aircraft carrier, the other a guided-missile destroyer. Both ships evaded several attacks. US Central Command said that neither ship had been hit and that no service member had been injured. Take a moment to picture what actually happened there. A regional power fires ballistic missiles at an American aircraft carrier. Five years ago, that would have been the opening scene of a world war. Today, it is a Tuesday. The American response came the same day, and it did not target military objectives. The US military struck three Iranian crude oil tankers. According to Central Command, one tanker was permanently disabled off Kharg Island, and another near Jask. Kharg is the most important oil export terminal in the entire country. Jask lies on the Gulf of Oman, outside the strait, and for years it had been built up precisely for that reason, as a way around it. Hitting both places means the way out is hit just as hard as the main route. And this is the point where the war stops being a series of battles and turns into something else. It becomes a fight over who is allowed to move oil.

To understand why this strait has become a problem for the most powerful navy in the world, you have to look at what is actually facing off there. On one side, an arsenal that is deliberately not built for size. Cruise missiles stored in underground bunkers, meant to survive both surveillance and a first strike. Anti-ship missiles, weapons built for one purpose only, to attack ships. One-way drones that no pilot ever brings back, because the drone itself is the warhead. Naval mines and fast attack boats, harmless on their own and dangerous in a swarm. Together, these five categories add up to what military planners call asymmetric naval warfare. You study your opponent's strengths, and you build nothing that could go up against them. You build whatever makes those strengths useless. A cruise missile flies low and slow and hugs the terrain, which makes it extremely hard to catch for radar systems designed to track high, fast targets. The fact that these missiles are stored underground is not a detail, it is the whole point. A weapons stockpile you cannot destroy from the air has to be intercepted after launch, and after launch there are often only minutes left. Anti-ship missiles are the second category, and they are built for exactly one job. They are meant to hit a ship that is moving, on open water that offers no cover. One-way drones, meanwhile, are the thing this war has changed around the world. They cost a fraction of what an interceptor costs, and they force the other side to fire something expensive at every cheap aircraft. Naval mines are the oldest weapon on this list, and in a strait they are the most effective, because they do not have to aim. A mine simply sits there, and the mere possibility that it is there keeps captains at a distance. And finally, the fast attack boats work on the principle of numbers. One at a time, a destroyer can take them out with ease. When thirty come at once from three directions, the defense system has to prioritize, and every priority means something else gets through. None of these systems on its own can sink an aircraft carrier. That is not what they are for. Their purpose is to make every transit so expensive that it never happens. On the other side stands a concentration of warships the region has rarely seen. The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, hull number CVN seventy-two. The USS Gerald R. Ford, the most advanced and most expensive warship ever built. The nuclear submarine USS Charlotte, hull number SSN seven sixty-six. And destroyers whose names barely even show up in the situation reports anymore. These ships can strike targets hundreds of kilometers away. They can fly air strikes that reach an entire country. What they cannot do is keep open a strait that, at its narrowest point, is only a few kilometers wide. Because there, range counts for little and open space counts for nothing. There, the only thing that matters is how many threats arrive at once, and from how many directions. And that is exactly what the smaller arsenal is built for. That is the real reason this strait is so hard to solve militarily. It does not reward the stronger side. It rewards whoever can attack more cheaply than the other side can defend. Just how serious this equation has become was shown by a statement made on September twentieth.

That day, Major General Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, gave an interview to the Qatari network Al Jazeera. In it, he said Iran had tested a new anti-ship missile during the attack of September fifth. What set it apart, he said, was the warhead. It was a cluster munition warhead. A warhead like that breaks apart before it reaches the target, scattering many smaller submunitions. Against an armored hull, that does very little. Against everything standing on the deck, it is devastating. Radar antennas, launchers, aircraft, lifeboats, people. At this point, accuracy matters more than any headline. According to the Iranian account, this missile landed near the ship, not on it. That is an Iranian claim, made by Rezaei, and it has not been confirmed by the American side. So we are reporting it for exactly what it is: the statement of an official, not an established fact. But even in that careful form, the core of it remains remarkable. Because what matters is not whether this one missile hit its target. What matters is that a new type of warhead was tested while an aircraft carrier was within range. The Revolutionary Guards described their choice of targets along the same lines. They said they had aimed several ballistic missiles at an American aircraft carrier and a destroyer because those ships had obstructed Iranian vessels and taken part in a naval blockade. That is the justification Tehran is giving its own population and the region. Not an attack, but a response to a blockade. And whether you accept that justification or not, it explains why these strikes are not being treated as a one-off escalation, but as part of a consistent line. If you classify a blockade as an act of war, you can justify any response to it as self-defense. And that is exactly where the legal problem of this war lies, the one the evening news almost never talks about. Under international law, a naval blockade is not a gray area. It has traditionally been considered an act of war, and whoever imposes one has to own it as such. That is why the question of who started it in this strait is not just a matter of public relations for either side. It decides whether their own attacks go down in the record as aggression or as a response. Now let us assume one side decides to reopen this strait by force.

What would that actually cost? At its narrowest point, the Strait of Hormuz is only about thirty-nine kilometers wide, and the usable shipping lanes are much narrower still. And narrow is not just a figure of speech here. The actual traffic separation lanes, the separate channels for inbound and outbound ships, are each only a few kilometers wide, with a buffer zone in between. A fully loaded supertanker needs several kilometers to come to a stop, and it cannot turn around in that channel. A convoy that has to pass through there cannot dodge anything. It can only go faster or slower. This war has already shown more than once what that equation looks like. The Iranian frigate Dena was sunk. On March twentieth, according to reports, sixteen boats burned in the port of Bandar Lengeh, and the attacks that end up in the Maritime Organization's statistics have not stopped since. That is the real answer to the question of whether this strait can be fought open. You can try, but every attempt means lost ships on both sides, and not only gray ones. Because sailing between the warships are the one thousand merchant vessels we talked about at the start. Opening this strait by force would not be an operation against a navy. It would be an operation straight through a waiting line of civilian ships.

So how big is the force the United States actually has on the scene? It is substantial, and it is visible. The aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, the Gerald R. Ford, the nuclear submarine Charlotte, plus destroyers carrying some of the best defense systems in the world. An aircraft carrier is a floating air base with dozens of combat aircraft. A destroyer of this class can track and engage dozens of targets at the same time. A nuclear submarine can stay underwater for months without surfacing. On top of that comes something you cannot see on a situation map. A carrier strike group is never a single ship, it is always a formation. The carrier carries the aircraft, the destroyers carry the defense, the submarine carries the hidden element, and supply ships keep the whole thing running for weeks. That division of labor is the reason a formation like this is practically impossible to attack in open water. In open water, it has room. It can move, it can hide its position, and it can force any attacker to cover hundreds of kilometers to reach it, becoming a target itself along the way. On paper, this lineup outclasses every regional navy in the world. And the commanders talk accordingly. Admiral Cooper, the American commander responsible for the region, said the killing of Iranian naval commander Tangsiri made the region safer. Lines like that are standard in wartime. They are meant to project resolve. But they do not answer the question that is now being asked in the Gulf every single day. Because whether the region has actually become safer is very easy to check. All you have to do is count how many merchant ships pass through this strait on an ordinary day, and that number has not gone up in months.

Which brings us to the point where the limits become visible, and not Iran's limits, but America's. In this context, the American president said something that was easy to miss, but that reveals more about the situation than any threat. He said the Strait of Hormuz would have to be guarded and policed, as necessary, by other nations, by the countries that use it. Other nations. That is the largest navy in the world publicly admitting that it cannot keep a waterway open on its own. It is important not to mock that as weakness, but to read it for what it is: a sober statement about cost. Securing a strait permanently means round-the-clock mine clearance, an escort for every convoy, uninterrupted air surveillance, and an interceptor for every threat. And all of that not for a day, but every single day for months, with the same level of attention. Militarily, it is the most exhausting mission there is, because it has no victory, only the absence of an incident. An offensive has an end. A security mission has none. It ties down ships, crews, flight hours, and ammunition in a place where nothing is won, for as long as the other side is willing to keep going. A single number shows how grueling even the first part is. By August twenty-fifth, more than one hundred suspected mines had been cleared. More than one hundred. And every one of those mines had to be found, identified, and neutralized one at a time, in waters where shots are being fired at the same time. Mine clearance is the slowest work there is at sea. A minesweeper crawls through the water. It cannot speed up, it cannot get out of the way, and the whole time it is the easiest target in the entire area. If you want to understand why this strait is still not open despite all the aircraft carriers, you will not find the answer in the air. You will find it on the seabed. Which leaves the question of how long the other side can keep this up.

Because after seven months of war, Iran is not unscathed either. According to reports, the country has resumed ballistic missile production in underground facilities. But the volume of that production is well below prewar levels, and it relies heavily on components that survived earlier strikes. That is an important difference. It is not rearmament in the real sense. It is putting things back together from what is left. At the same time, Iran is buying more. The Reuters news agency reported that Iran has acquired between three hundred and four hundred shoulder-fired air defense missiles of the QW-12 and FN-16 types from China, and that a first delivery of up to four hundred launchers has been prepared. Shoulder-fired means a single soldier can carry one and fire it from almost anywhere, from a boat, from a rooftop, from a coastal road. These are not weapons against aircraft carriers. These are weapons against anything that flies low and slow. Helicopters, drones, reconnaissance aircraft. And it is the drones where the real number lies. According to an assessment by the Centre for Information Resilience, the country has the industrial capacity to produce around ten thousand drones every month. Ten thousand a month. You have to set that number next to the interceptors a navy can carry on board to understand why this equation is so uncomfortable for the stronger side. A carrier strike group can stop a lot of threats. It cannot stop them an unlimited number of times. And that is the most uncomfortable feature of this war for the technologically superior side. Here, superiority no longer decides who wins. It only decides how long it takes before the stockpiles run out. If you have to fight cheap one-way drones with interceptors that cost many times as much, you win every single engagement and still lose the math. Put it all together, and the picture in front of us becomes fairly clear.

On one side stands the largest navy in the world, with ships that are technologically superior. On the other side stands an arsenal that is not trying to win, but to deny. And in between are one thousand merchant ships with twenty thousand people on board, who have been waiting for more than one hundred days. Forty-six confirmed attacks, fourteen seafarers killed, more than one hundred mines cleared. A statement from Washington that other nations would have to secure this strait. That is where things stand after seven months. The strait has not been liberated, it has been locked, and neither side holds the key alone. For Europe, this is not a distant matter. A significant share of the oil that reaches refineries across Europe through the world market flows through this waterway, and every day of delay gets written into insurance premiums, freight rates, and, in the end, prices. The ships waiting there are not waiting on their own. They are waiting with cargo that has already been sold, already been scheduled, and already been priced in. And the longer that line stands still, the more expensive every product that has to take this route becomes. That is why a strait just a few kilometers wide decides prices in countries thousands of kilometers away. It looks as though the coming months will not see the dark clouds over this waterway clear, but gather. What do you make of this shift in the military balance of power in the Persian Gulf?

Do you believe a carrier strike group can keep a strait just a few kilometers wide open for good? Or do you, like many experts, see the point approaching where the cost of keeping it open outweighs the benefit? Share your view with us in the comments, and tell us why, because on this subject even the experts are sharply divided, and in our experience the best arguments come from this comment section, not from the studios. We read every comment and take up the strongest objections in one of our upcoming episodes. If this analysis gave you something, leave a like, subscribe to the channel, and hit the bell so you never miss a new breakdown. Stay with us if you want to know how the situation in this strait develops over the coming weeks. Thank you for staying with us all the way to the end.