US President Donald Trump is pressuring US allies to contribute naval forces to protect shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, but naval experts say such an effort carries significant risks and even if successful, the waterway’s traffic could only recover about 10% of pre-war levels.
Commercial traffic through the maritime chokepoint has been virtually halted since the United States and Israel attacked Iran on February 28, and Iran has vowed to attack ships associated with both countries and their partners.
About 20% of the world’s oil supply, as well as similar or greater quantities of liquefied natural gas and fertilizer products, must pass through the narrow strait to reach global markets. Due to its closure, the price of goods soared.
To ease economic pressure, President Trump and U.S. officials said plans were being made for the U.S. Navy to escort commercial ships passing through the strait. And the US president has asked allies like Japan, South Korea, NATO members, and even rivals like China to provide warships for escort missions.
No offer of help has come yet. And Navy analysts say that reflects the risks involved.
Naval escort operations are complex, requiring close coordination of sea and air assets to protect both tankers and commercial vessels, as well as the naval vessels themselves.
Making it all work together in the Strait of Hormuz, which one analyst called the “Valley of Death,” is a daunting task.
First, there’s the issue of space. The strait is only 16 miles wide at its narrowest point. The navigable space is even smaller for especially large oil tankers, some of which are more than three football fields long.
That leaves little room for maneuver for tankers and the naval vessels that escort them, said Jennifer Parker, adjunct research fellow in naval studies at UNSW Canberra and a former Australian naval officer with experience in the Persian Gulf.
Warships (likely destroyers in the U.S. Navy’s case) need space to maneuver around the massive tankers to properly fire on incoming targets such as drones and missiles in the air and sea, she said.
Essentially, tankers can create a blind spot for warships.
Additionally, Iranian weapons are so close to the Straits coast that reaction time is limited.
“The time between the moment a threat is detected and the moment you have to respond to that threat is very limited,” Parker said.
Analysts point out that escort cannot be provided by escort ships alone.
Iran targets oil tankers and ships near Strait of Hormuz
Karl Schuster, a former U.S. Navy captain and analyst, said helicopters and attack planes would need to fly nearby and be ready to intercept drones in the air or at sea.
He said airborne warning and control (AWACS) aircraft and reconnaissance drones would need to search deeper into Iran’s interior in case of missile launches that could target tankers or warships.
Meanwhile, Iranian forces that could threaten the strait escort mission are scattered and mostly mobile. Experts said drones and missiles mounted on trucks and mines could be deployed from countless small fishing boats, dhows and even pleasure boats.
“Can we destroy all these ships to eradicate the threat?” asked Colin Koh, a research fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Relations.
“To me, that’s not very feasible,” Coe said.
Threats to escort missions could be alleviated by air power or ground invasions to seize territory from the point of departure, but that would create new problems, including high casualties for U.S. ground forces, analysts said.
Then they said there was just a problem with the number of warships.
Parker said U.S. destroyers could potentially escort one or two oil tankers through the strait at a time.
Some believe that multiple naval escorts may be needed for each tanker.
“A basic naval escort operation would require eight to 10 destroyers to protect a convoy of five to 10 merchant vessels on each trip,” editor-in-chief Richard Meade said in a Lloyd’s List Intelligence report last week.
These ratios could mean the Guard could bring Hormuz’s traffic back to 10% of pre-war levels, Meade wrote.
Major shipping companies stop accepting cargo destined for the Persian Gulf
But few believe the U.S. Navy can do it alone.
According to a report by the Congressional Research Service, the United States has 73 Arleigh Burke-class destroyers in active service. But after taking training and maintenance into account, only about 68% of U.S. surface ships are combat-ready at any given time, according to Navy officials.
This is equivalent to about 50 destroyers. And they are distributed all over the world.
So if 10 of them are needed for just one escort mission through the Strait of Hormuz, you can see how much of a burden it would be on the United States alone to maintain a long-term escort mission.
“My question is whether the U.S. Navy is ready for such an intense operation,” Coe said, emphasizing the hardware, logistics and the sailors themselves.
This suggests why President Trump is calling on other countries to participate.
It’s not just destroyers that escort ships. Detecting and destroying sea mines in the Straits is another problem that the United States is ill-prepared to deal with alone.
Last year, the U.S. Navy retired four minesweepers stationed in the Persian Gulf. The ships were returned to the United States on a heavy lift ship in January and eventually dismantled.
The Navy announced that four littoral combat ships (LCS) equipped with mine countermeasures mission modules will take over these missions. However, before the war, there were only three LCS in the Persian Gulf region.
Ideally, one or two minesweepers would clear the strait before the tanker, Schuster said.
He also noted that Iran could deploy a wide variety of mines in the strait. A mine that is moored to the ocean floor and is detonated by acoustic signals or magnetic sensing. Even a mine with a counting device allows it to pass a certain amount of ships and then detonates under another ship.
“Landmine identification is always a challenge,” Schuster said.
Analysts say allies such as Japan and South Korea may provide specialized minesweepers to deal with the mine threat, but neither country has committed to doing so so far.
But Singaporean analyst Koh said even if an offer were made, it would be far from a panacea.
He said minesweepers are lightly armed compared to destroyers and could be vulnerable to Iranian attack on their own.
“Not only do we need to send in mine action units, but we also need to send in protection units,” Mr Koh said. “So that could mean a broader effort.”
Yoo Ji-hoon, a researcher at the Korea Institute for Defense Analysis, said in Seoul’s case that the South Korean navy’s minesweepers were not built for this type of mission.
“Long-term deployment in remote, high-threat areas like the Strait of Hormuz has its limits in terms of resistance, self-defense capabilities, and logistics support,” Yu told CNN.
Despite all the hurdles, Schuster said the mission is achievable. He said the U.S. Navy had previously dealt with this type of Iranian threat in the 1980s and 1990s.
Strait of Hormuz likely to be ‘highest risk point’ for US operations in Iran, national security analyst says
“Iran has been using drones (remotely piloted vehicles from the 1990s), fast attack craft, and suicide boats (the predecessors of today’s unmanned surface ships and surface drones) since the late 1980s,” he said.
“They’ve been doing it in every naval exercise since about 1988 until this century, so their tactics are not surprising,” Schuster said.
Others are less optimistic.
“The depth of countries’ capabilities is not what it was in the 1980s,” said Alessio Patalano, a professor of war and strategy at King’s College London.
“The fleet and its support system are a fraction of what they were 40 years ago,” he said, casting doubt on whether the collective effort in Hormuz would be successful in the short or long term.
Koh points to the problems posed by the Iranian-aligned, Yemen-based Houthi rebels in the Red Sea over the past few years.
The Houthis attacked the commercial ship despite protection from the United States and European Union countries.
And at one point, Houthi missiles arrived within seconds of hitting a U.S. destroyer.
“There was already some difficulty in dealing with the Houthi threat,” Koh said.
“The force will now face a much larger adversary, Iran, which likely has far more drones and missiles,” he said.
Patalano said the United States and its partners simply don’t recognize that shipping is “the lifeblood of the modern economy.”
“For too long, we thought this issue would go uncontested, or that if it did, Western democracies would be able to meet the challenge,” he said.
“That’s not true.”
CNN’s Yoonjong Seo and Zachary Cohen contributed to this report.
