By Jim Geraghty
Wednesday, March 11, 2026
The good news is U.S.
Central Command reported that American forces destroyed 16 Iranian
minelayers near the Strait of Hormuz Tuesday.
The bad news is that the remaining Iranian military has
quite a few mines — an estimated 2,000 to 6,000 naval mines largely produced by
Iran, China, or Russia, according to U.S. officials talking to CBS
News — and they don’t sound particularly difficult to deploy.
Back in 2019, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency’s analysis of Iran’s naval
capability concluded, “Iran has an estimated inventory of more than 5,000
naval mines, which include contact and influence mines. Both navies have
devised strategies to rapidly deploy mines while improving force survivability.
Iran has a variety of vessels that can lay mines, but the IRGCN has integrated
its doctrine of using smaller, faster vessels into its mine-laying strategy.
Iran has equipped many of its Ashoora small boats with mine rails capable of
holding at least one mine.” While that report could not specify how many
Ashoora boats the Iranian navy has, it noted they have “hundreds of small boats
throughout the Persian Gulf.”
Scott
Savitz is a senior engineer at RAND and a professor of policy analysis at
the RAND School of Public Policy, who worked in Bahrain supporting the U.S.
Navy from 2001 to 2003. He offered a detailed perspective on the uses and risks
of mines in a March 5 interview with the China-Russia Report, including
this concise explanation of the two main types of mines: “Contact mines
detonate when a ship collides with them, while influence mines respond to the
characteristic signatures of a ship in their vicinity, such as a ship’s
magnetism, the sounds it generates, and the pressure drop it creates. Most
contact mines are moored or drifting, and moored contact mines are the classic
‘spiky balls’ that most people envision when they think of mines, while most
influence mines are bottom mines.”
And according to U.S. officials talking to CNN, Iran is starting to put
those mines to the Strait, which is about 21 miles across at its narrowest
point:
Iran has begun laying mines in
the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important energy chokepoint that carries
about one-fifth of all crude oil, according to two people familiar with US
intelligence reporting on the issue.
The mining is not extensive yet,
with a few dozen having been laid in recent days, the sources said. But Iran
still retains upward of 80 percent to 90 percent of its small boats and mine
layers, one of the sources said, so its forces could feasibly lay hundreds of
mines in the waterway.
One wonders how many mines the Iranian regime wants to
put into the Persian Gulf or Strait of Hormuz, because this is their primary
trade route, and vital for their customers in China. (More on Iranian oil
shipments to China below.) Once mines get laid, they are a pain in the neck to
mitigate, as Savitz explained:
Mines create a cornucopia of
problems for those trying to transit and operate in potentially mined waters.
They may not know that the minefield exists or what its boundaries are, let
alone the number and types of mines present. For example, all three U.S.
warships that were damaged by mines in the Persian Gulf from 1988-1991 had no
idea they were in minefields until mines detonated beneath them. Mine
countermeasures (MCM) operations are slow and painstaking, frustrating the rest
of the fleet as it waits to enter the mined area. MCM assets move slowly in
predictable patterns with few defensive capabilities of their own, making them
easy targets, and they’re generally designed for low signatures rather than
durability. Mine clearance is often incomplete, and there is always uncertainty
about the extent of residual risk, aside from the tough judgments about whether
it has been reduced to an acceptable level. After all the delays associated
with MCM, the fleet has to slowly transit a cleared lane, making its movements
predictable while diminishing ships’ ability to maneuver in response to other
threats. Mines have powerful synergies with other weapons that can take
advantage of these vulnerabilities. . . .
Iran depends on the Strait of
Hormuz for its own commercial traffic, so it will likely prefer to mine other
areas of the Gulf, as it did in the 1980s. It can selectively target ships in
the Strait of Hormuz using other weapons, such as missiles and explosive-laden
boats (with or without people aboard). The speed with which mined waters can be
reopened depends on risk tolerance and resource commitment. Tankers were
willing to run the gauntlet of mine risk in the Persian Gulf during the 1980s,
paying correspondingly elevated insurance rates, and some of them were damaged.
. . .
While the Iranians are presumably keeping detailed maps
and GPS coordinates of where they’ve laid their mines, the more mines that the
Iranians lay in the Gulf, the more likely it is that a mine ends up damaging
one of their tankers or China’s tankers. Then again, the Iranian military may
not be doing a lot of long-term thinking right now. They need ships to be
afraid to sail through the Strait, for oil prices to skyrocket, and for the
U.S. to decide to call it a day.
Then again, the U.S. may have some new countermeasures
against enemy mines. Back in late 2022, DefenseNews reported, “The Navy has a number of programs in
the works for small mine warfare and mine countermeasures UUVs — Unmanned
Underwater Vehicles, or basically underwater drones.”
At 4:07 p.m. Tuesday, the commander in chief took to Truth Social to demand the remaining Iranian regime
remove any mines from the Gulf:
If Iran has put out any mines in
the Hormuz Strait, and we have no reports of them doing so, we want them
removed, IMMEDIATELY! If for any reason mines were placed, and they are not
removed forthwith, the Military consequences to Iran will be at a level never
seen before. If, on the other hand, they remove what may have been placed, it
will be a giant step in the right direction! Additionally, we are using the
same Technology and Missile capabilities deployed against Drug Traffickers to
permanently eliminate any boat or ship attempting to mine the Hormuz Strait.
They will be dealt with quickly and violently. BEWARE!
Yesterday, Reuters reported, “The U.S. Navy has refused near-daily
requests from the shipping industry for military escorts through the Strait of
Hormuz since the start of the war on Iran, saying the risk of attacks is too
high for now, according to sources familiar with the matter.”
This morning, CNBC reported:
Three vessels off Iran’s coast
have been struck by projectiles, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations
said on Wednesday, the latest in a flurry of incidents reported in or near the
Strait of Hormuz.
One of the ships reported it had
been struck 11 nautical miles north of Oman in the Strait of Hormuz, causing a
fire onboard and forcing the crew to evacuate, the UKMTO said. . . .
Two other incidents were also
reported on Wednesday morning, with one vessel struck by a projectile about 50
nautical miles northwest of Dubai and another sustaining damage off the coast
of the United Arab Emirates.
The maritime news site Windward reported yesterday,
“Commercial activity through the Strait of Hormuz fell again on March 9, with
only a single outbound Iranian-flagged vessel recorded and no inbound movements
observed.”
But, as this newsletter has emphasized this week, one country is getting its flagged ships through the Strait
comparably easily:
Iran has continued to send large
amounts of crude oil via the Strait of Hormuz to China even as the war between
U.S.-Israel and Iran has jeopardized broader supplies through the critical
waterway.
Iran has sent at least 11.7
million barrels of crude oil through the Strait of Hormuz since the war began
on Feb. 28, all of which were headed to China, Samir Madani, co-founder of
TankerTrackers, told CNBC on Tuesday.
The firm monitors vessel
movements with satellite imagery, allowing it to capture vessels that would
otherwise go undetected if their tracking systems are switched off. Many
vessels have “gone dark” after Tehran threatened to attack any vessel
attempting to pass through the waterway.
Among the comments from chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff General Dan Caine in yesterday’s Pentagon briefing:
U.S. Strategic Command bombers
recently dropped dozens of 2,000-pound GPS penetrating weapons on deeply buried
missile launchers across the southern flank. We also have struck several
one-way drone factories to get at the heart of their autonomous capability.
Ballistic missile attacks
continue to trend downward 90 percent from where they’ve started, and one way
attack drones have decreased 83 percent since the beginning of the operation, a
testament to our air defenders and our air defense systems. And as I said, our
partners in the region continue to do great work as well.
Second, we’re making substantial
progress towards destroying the navy in the first ten days of the conflict.
We’re more than 50 Iranian naval ships into the campaign using a combination of
artillery, fighters, bombers and sea launched missiles. As Admiral Cooper noted
last Thursday, we struck and sank an Iranian drone carrier ship, and U.S.
CENTCOM continues today to hunt and strike mine laying vessels and mine storage
facilities. This — this work will continue. . . .
No plan survives first contact
with the enemy or Murphy. They’re adapting, as are we. Of course, we have very
entrepreneurial warfighters out there. I’d rather not, for operational security
reasons, tell them what’s working. So, I’ll — I’m gonna non-answer that
question based on that. But we are watching uh what they’re doing, and we are
adapting faster than they are.
Yesterday, our Thérèse Shaheen noted that while our ideal outcome is a
new regime, a significantly defanged foe would still represent a substantial
improvement in our circumstances:
Eliminating that threat — to
ourselves, and in partnership with Israel, to themselves — is justifiable, even
without having a clear sense of what might come next for the Iranian people.
The military operation is diminishing the ability of the regime to threaten the
U.S. and allies in the region and globally. Curtailing Iran’s ability to do
that, even if a government remains that is otherwise unfriendly, is justified.
Failing to eliminate the regime may not immediately improve the circumstances
of the Iranian people, but the military operation to end the threat to the U.S.
includes significant destruction of the internal security apparatus that is
harming ordinary Iranians. Life under the mullahs has been decades of
repression, torture, and death for many who stayed; exile and separation from
their homeland for those who fled. The theocracy has caused untold death and
suffering for decades, and the risk for more of that was unacceptably high.
ADDENDUM: Our Audrey Fahlberg, the human bombshell
scoop machine, continues her run: “Discussions are underway at the
Department of Homeland Security about reevaluating plans to buy a Boeing 737
MAX luxury jet that had been used by Kristi Noem prior to her ouster as DHS
secretary, National Review has learned. Dubbed the ‘Big Beautiful Jet’
by DHS staffers, the luxury jet and its private cabin have become a major
source of consternation among Republicans at the department and the White
House.”
We all know the true “Big Beautiful Jet” is now
quarterback Geno Smith.
Or safety Minkah Fitzpatrick. Or linebacker Demario
Davis.
Or edges Joseph Ossai and Kingsley Enagbare, or defensive
tackle David Onyemata, or safety Dane Belton, or cornerback Nahshon Wright.
It’s been a busy free agency period.
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