It’s hard to believe no one in the Pentagon anticipated this. It’s even harder to believe the U.S. has ‘few options’ to reopen the Strait, as CNN ...
“I’m dumbfounded,” said one unnamed “former U.S. official” who provided CNN with color commentary for its report alleging that Trump administration officials were shocked by Iran’s efforts to close the Strait of Hormuz to maritime traffic. “Planning around preventing this exact scenario — impossible as it has long seemed — has been a bedrock principle of US national security policy for decades,” the official added.
Indeed, the claim is hard to believe. But CNN is sticking to the story to which no fewer than four of its reporters contributed:
Top Trump officials acknowledged to lawmakers during recent classified briefings that they did not plan for the possibility of Iran closing the strait in response to strikes, according to three sources familiar with the closed-door session.
The reason, multiple sources said, was administration officials believed closing the strait would hurt Iran more than the US — a view that was bolstered by Iran’s empty threats to act in the strait after US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities last summer.
The salacious claim this unidentified “lawmaker” is retailing strains credulity. As the report itself conceded, “multiple current and former” U.S. officials observed that the military “has long maintained and updated plans to address Iranian military action in the critical corridor.” Not only have contingencies for a potential action designed to close the Strait featured prominently in publicly available war games against the Iranian regime for decades, the U.S. has even executed those contingencies in the past.
In 1987, during the Iran-Iraq War, Iran’s armed forces targeted oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, compelling U.S. warships to escort commercial traffic and reopen the Strait — a fraught operation in which one tanker struck an Iranian naval mine. When Iran continued its mining operations in the Strait, damaging an American destroyer in 1988, the Reagan administration launched Operation Praying Mantis, which subsequently destroyed a significant portion of the Iranian Navy and its mine-laying vessels, among other targets.
Were the Trump administration’s war planners unfamiliar with this history? That’s highly unlikely. Even if they were, they got an education last year in the wake of Operation Midnight Hammer, during which U.S. officials told reporters that they had seen indications that the Iranians were loading naval mines onto ships in advance of potential action in the Strait. The administration even acknowledged that threat: “Thanks to the President’s brilliant execution of Operation Midnight Hammer,” the White House’s statement read, “successful campaign against the Houthis, and maximum pressure campaign, the Strait of Hormuz remains open, freedom of navigation has been restored, and Iran has been significantly weakened.”
Had Trump administration officials somehow forgotten about all this in the months after the strikes on Iran’s nuclear program? If so, the Iranian regime provided them with plenty of reminders.
In mid-February, as the Trump administration amassed naval forces in the Persian Gulf, Tehran announced its intention to hold one of its many regular exercises aimed at closing the Strait. The occasion of these exercises amid heightened tensions provided media outlets with ample opportunity to review Iran’s long-known plans for closing the Strait, the history of similar operations, and how an attempt to reprise the tactic might unfold today.
And yet, some public reporting has also indicated that security experts were skeptical that Iran’s armed forces might try to close the Strait again — not because such an operation was no longer consistent with Iranian doctrine but because it would be so hard to pull off.
If Iran made the attempt, it could expect that its capacity for power projection in the Persian Gulf would be pummeled from the air, Forbes contributor Gaurav Sharma wrote last year. Additionally, a serious effort to shut down the Strait would halt Iran’s commercial traffic, too, and Tehran’s oil exports would feel the pain of that initiative more acutely than its Gulf neighbors. The Saudis and the Emirates, in particular, had developed alternative export routes that would render any disruption to their oil export capacity decidedly temporary. Even if Iranian naval forces tried to close the Strait, it would not stay closed for long.
It is possible that the Trump administration did not anticipate how the current Iranian effort to partially close the Strait (its own traffic, as well as China-bound vessels, continue to flow through it) would affect global markets. Surely, the administration’s sudden about-face on the sanctions it imposed on Russian oil exports following a public diplomatic offensive in support of those sanctions last year wasn’t part of any plan. But that is not the same thing as failing to “plan” for the prospect of Iranian hostile action in the Strait.
Administration officials maintain that the operations required to forcibly reopen the Strait — a fraught exercise that will take U.S. ships close to Iranian shores where they could be vulnerable to road-mobile anti-ship missiles and drones, as well as fast boats and even mines — cannot commence until U.S. forces have effectively neutralized Iran’s power-projection capabilities along Iran’s Persian Gulf coast. First things first.
Perhaps the administration did not anticipate the speed with which markets would react to the paralysis of naval traffic in the Gulf — a condition that is due less to the threat of Iranian hostile fire, real though that threat is, than to the fact that commercial traffic through a warzone is not financially underwritten. But it is hard to believe that no one in the Pentagon anticipated this outcome. It’s even harder to believe that the U.S. has “few options” to reopen the Strait, as CNN reported.
CNN’s item concludes by revealing its motive. “Energy executives” seek “an early end to the war,” and Republicans in Congress want Trump to “refocus on domestic issues ahead of the midterms.” Maybe the question this piece asks isn’t whether the Trump administration was prepared to reopen the Strait of Hormuz to commercial traffic but, perhaps, whether it should even bother to try.