Why can't the U.S. just take over the Strait of Hormuz? | About That

Taking the Strait of Hormuz should be easy for the U.S., right? On the one hand, you have the world's most powerful navy, 11 aircraft carrier strike groups backed by hundreds of ships, thousands of planes, tens of thousands of missiles and bombs. And on the other hand, you have this tiny waterway, only tens of kilometers across at its narrowest point,

obstructed only by a regime that has been pummeled now by airstrikes for nearly two straight weeks with no sign of letting up. Fighting for a passage the US desperately wants to reopen because it may just be the most economically important maritime choke point on earth,

with 20% of the world's oil transiting through, and they can't take it? I mean, they sound like they can take it.

We have capabilities that no other nation on earth has. The mullahs are desperate and scrambling. If Iran does anything to stop the flow of oil within the Strait of Hormuz, they will be hit by the United States of America 20 times harder.

But the flow of oil has largely stopped, and the U.S. hasn't been able to get it going again. And actually, a quick scan of headlines maybe even suggests the opposite is happening. Iran laying mines, international cargo ships in the vicinity being hit, dark smoke pouring into the sky. Why can't the U.S. just take over the Strait of Hormuz and get oil tanker traffic moving again? Well, because it's a lot harder than it sounds. Almost every problem with the U.S. defending the Strait of Hormuz

stems from its size and geography. The fact that it's so narrow means there are just two designated shipping lanes

deep enough to accommodate the world's biggest oil tankers. The fact that it's so narrow means there are just two designated shipping lanes deep

enough to accommodate the world's biggest oil tankers. That's one lane in, one lane out. Just three kilometres wide each and three kilometres apart. Now if you're Iran and you've just threatened to set ablaze any tanker that tries to go

through...

Attention all ships, attention all ships from now on. All navigating through the Strait of Hormuz is forbidden.

Then you have a very predictable, very tightly confined kill box to work with.

They can hone in very easily on some of those ships trying to navigate those difficult waters. You can't pass a lot of ships through, You can't get ships through there at high velocity.

Oil tankers are big, slow, clunky targets through the strait itself. They travel at most at around 20, 30 kilometers an hour. Huge targets on well-known paths would make for a very appealing, very easy ambush. They provide for a target-rich environment for the Iranians trying to fire a fire drone.

Almost all attacks benefit for being very close to land from an Iranian point of view. So Iran can use a lot of weapon systems that are short range. So rockets, short range missiles.

Coastal artillery for literally direct fire that's close to inside of Iran and inside of areas where they've hidden artillery, the rounds that could hit from a local distance, but then also from a greater distance, further away.

An attack or multiple attacks at once from so close would leave American warships very little time to defend. Typically, when we think about the kinds of munitions Iran has used to attack its Persian Gulf neighbors, we're talking about a transit time of several minutes or even hours for the slowest moving cruise missiles and drones. That's the kind of lead time you'd like to have to reliably shoot them down. But against an attack from so close,

the defender in the Strait of Hormuz might have just seconds to react.

You have to detect, track, identify, track,

and then intercept a missile, and it goes very, very fast.

And when you think about how many tankers there would be to defend, typical traffic is 3,000 a month. That's 100 a day. That's a challenge. These are not military ships. These are transport ships. They do not have any defenses. And that's to say nothing of the threat from Iranian airspace.

Iran is launching waves of drones and missiles while the United States and Israel are scrambling

to shoot them down. Just this morning, three ships in the Persian Gulf reported being struck by suspected Iranian drones.

What makes the Strait of Hormuz so risky to transit is that it is within striking distance of one of Iran's most efficient weapons of war. Shahed drones, depending on the model, have a theoretical max range of up to 2,500 kilometres. That's long enough to strike the St straight from literally any part of the country,

which is devastating when you consider the impact of a 100-pound warhead costing in the tens of thousands of dollars to manufacture, slamming into these hulking, lumbering targets worth potentially hundreds of millions. Just the oil they carry alone, a big chunk of that. This is a big problem. Then there's the threat from the water.

Iran could use a number of small boats that could perhaps evade detection at least briefly, use them in combination to overwhelm ships' defenses.

Swarms of drones, mines that are laid, jet skis, small boats that wreak havoc. Think a terrorist attack that would take place on land someplace. Do the same thing. Get close enough to a tanker with a bomb and explode it there. Blow a hole in the side of it, sink it. That's really what their capability is right now.

Now, the U.S. Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, has continuously minimized whatever is left of Iran's Navy.

The Iranian Navy is largely no more. So their ability to project any power in that area in a naval sense is diminishing. Diminishing and will be increasingly diminished.

But the experts we spoke to told us it doesn't take much to cause damage.

For Iran to disrupt that, they just have to put three mines in there. And once an area is mined, you never, it's never technically un-mined. So once you introduce that uncertainty, which is extremely cheap, and it introduces unconfidence in insurance markets and commerce.

And so, so there's a huge cost asymmetry here. And this begins to touch on another problem for the U.S., which is that it doesn't take many Iranian successes to equal an American loss. One political problem with Trump's war in Iran is that it is unpopular, especially among Democrats, but even among Republicans.

NBC News polling shows a majority of voters disapprove of the president's handling of the situation in Iran.

I mean, I don't know about you, but I have found the explanations lacking.

This happened because Israel wanted it to happen.

Six American families must now lay to rest their sons and daughters.

And for what?

So the tolerance for loss, any loss of American military strength, military lives, is extremely low. Especially compared to what Iran's leaders can tolerate while still maintaining control of the country.

For the Iranian regime, they see this as existential. And this regime has shown previously that it's willing to kill thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of its own people to stay in power. On the other hand, in the United States, President Trump hasn't made the case for war to the American people. And of course, if there are casualties, especially heavy casualties on the US side, that's going

to decrease popular support as well. Iran may suffer far more damage, but it is certainly willing to suffer more damage than is the United States.

It should go without saying, in conventional open naval combat, the US Navy would absolutely crush Iran's. But that's not what a battle for the Strait of Hormuz would be. And even if the US were to eventually win that fight, whatever winning in this case means, it would only take a few successful strikes from Iran to cost the global economy billions of dollars in damage and to completely shut down commercial shipping if ever it did

resume. Because the key thing to remember is that all of those oil tankers sitting around, they're not stuck because they can't go through the strait. They're stuck because they don't want to.

The main obstacle that's keeping ships from traversing the Strait of Hormuz is not weapons or threats or mines or anything else. It's insurance. Insurance companies have been really quickly scaling down the level of insurance they have, the kinds of insurance they have, and in some cases the insurance policy entirely, and just said it will not apply if you traverse through the Strait of Hormuz.

So for the US to take over the Strait in such a way that gives the corporations that use it enough confidence to actually do so, it would have to all but destroy Iran's ability to strike from land. It would have to suppress its drone capability, neutralize its naval bases, disarm its mines, not to mention the US would have to put its own military assets at risk in the direct line of enemy

fire. So the United States has got to create an environment that those ships feel safe. Perhaps there'll be some American flag ones, they'll get escorted through, but it's going to take probably weeks more of military operations.

The first phase was decapitation strike, take out the leadership. The next phase is to deplete the ballistic cruise missile and drone capability, hitting the launchers, the stockpiles, the facilities and whatnot. This takes time. So that's not just a run-of-the-mill naval escort mission. That's large-scale war requiring, quite possibly, the comprehensive destruction of Iran's armed forces. Meanwhile, if any ship were to sink in the Strait of Hormuz, how do you get it out? How do you free up enough of the lane to make it useful again?

What good is a passageway once it's turned into a war zone?

This is a situation where the world is going to learn that this is just too important of a choke point that can never be risked again. And opening it up, should it go down, will take time and time is money when it comes to moving of natural gas and oil.

The bottom line being, one of the most important waterways in the world is also apparently one of the easiest to disrupt because Iran, to make good on its threat, never actually needed to control the never actually needed to control the

strait. It only needed to make it too dangerous to use.