As President Donald Trump looks at ordering US Navy ships to escort oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, for naval analysts and historians, there’s a distinct feeling of “been there, done that.”
Almost 40 years ago, US Navy warships were facing the same enemy they’d be facing now, the navy and the sea forces of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
The so-called Tanker War of the late 1980s saw some of the same weapons and problems a US escort force would face today, and provides lessons on how, in war, things can go wrong quickly in unexpected ways – with deadly consequences.
Here’s a look at how things unfolded.
The seeds for the Tanker War were planted in 1980, when Iraq’s secular leader Saddam Hussein, wary of the theocratic revolutionary government in Iran led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, launched an invasion of his eastern neighbor.
After back-and-forth advances by both sides in the early ‘80s, the situation had reached a stalemated war of attrition by 1984. That’s when Hussein decided to change tactics and attack Iranian oil tankers – to damage Tehran’s economy and hopefully get world powers to intervene to protect access to oil.
Iraq used missile-armed jets to hit Iranian oil infrastructure on Kharg Island (the same place where the US bombed military installations in recent days). Iran responded by attacking neutral merchant ships transporting supplies and arms to Iraq, much of those via Kuwait at the northern end of the Persian Gulf.
“Iraq then began attacking tankers going to and from Kharg Island, and the ‘Tanker War’ was on,” historian Samuel Cox wrote in a 2019 history for the US Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC).
Shipping attacks by both sides ballooned in number over in the next two years, and in November 1986, Kuwait – tired of seeing its flagged ships hit – asked for foreign help to protect them.
The Soviet Union lent aid first, escorting tankers through the Gulf.
Washington, not wanting to lose influence to Moscow, devised a plan to reflag Kuwaiti ships as American, enabling them to get US Navy protection under federal law.
By the summer of 1987, US Navy and Coast Guard ships had moved into the Gulf in numbers to escort the former Kuwaiti tankers.
But even before escort missions commenced, US sailors found themselves in harm’s way.
On the evening of May 17, 1987, the guided-missile frigate USS Stark was on patrol in the central Persian Gulf, just outside a war exclusion zone, when an Iraqi warplane allegedly mistook the US warship for an Iranian target and fired two Exocet anti-ship missiles into it.
“The two missiles killed 29 of Stark’s crew (of around 220) outright and another eight would die of their wounds and burns, with another 21 wounded,” the NHHC’s Cox wrote.
“Stark’s damage-control effort was nothing short of heroic,” he wrote. Despite the casualties and the crew battling fires as hot as 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit (almost 2,000 degrees Celsius) and correcting a severe list from firefighting efforts that could have capsized the ship, the Stark would make it to port in Bahrain under its own power.
Iraq apologized, but the incident showed how in war mistakes can have catastrophic consequences. (In the current war, three US F-15 fighters were shot down by Kuwaiti forces in a similar friendly fire incident, though no US fliers were killed.)
“The hazards to our men and women in uniform in the defense of freedom can never be understated,” President Ronald Reagan said in a statement shortly after the Stark attack.
There would be more hazards to come.
Dubbed Operation Earnest Will by the US Navy, the actual escorting of tankers began in late July 1987.
On July 22, two reflagged tankers left the United Arab Emirates headed for Kuwait under the protection of five US ships, a destroyer, two frigates and two Coast Guard cutters.
But Iran had good intelligence on the convoy and laid mines across a key channel in the Gulf that a massive tanker, the Bridgeton, would have to transit.
“On 24 July, Bridgeton struck an Iranian moored contact mine. The massive ship absorbed the power of the mine, which, despite the size of the hole, did not significantly impact the tanker,” said Cox, who chronicled the result.
“The result, however, was one of the more ignominious photos in the annals of U.S. naval history, which showed Bridgeton arriving in Kuwait with her erstwhile US escorts following in her wake, apparently using the big tanker as a ‘minesweeper’ for their own protection.”
The incident was a huge embarrassment for the US Navy.
The Pentagon suspended escort operations until it could get more minesweeping assets into the Gulf, but it was woefully short on them and had to turn to allies for minesweeping vessels, US Marine Corps 2nd Lt. Quentin Zimmer wrote in an essay last year for the US Naval Institute.
Even with allied help, and with what assets the US scrounged up to rush to the region, “the correlation of forces — mines versus minesweepers — continued to outpace US capabilities,” Zimmer wrote.
The extent of current Iranian mining of the Gulf now is unknown. CNN reported last week that US officials believe Tehran has laid some in the Strait of Hormuz, but there have been no reports of mines damaging ships yet.
Still, US minesweeping ships in the Gulf are few if any. Four dedicated minesweepers stationed there were decommissioned last year. Two of the three littoral combat ships that were to take over their duties were in Malaysia this week for “logistical stops,” the Navy said.
While President Trump called for allies to dispatch minesweepers to help keep the Strait of Hormuz open, none have offered help with hardware so far. In a joint statement Thursday, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Japan and Canada pledged “to contribute to appropriate efforts to ensure safe passage through the Strait,” without specifying what those efforts might be.
In the Tanker War, Belgium, France, Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom answered the US call and participated in escorts and minesweeping. But only US forces engaged in combat with the Iranians, according to a report from the Middle East Research and Information Project.
Below the surface: the threat of Iranian mines in the Strait of Hormuz
The dangers of mines continue to limit what the US Navy can do in the Gulf, said Carl Schuster, a former director of the US Pacific Command’s Joint Intelligence Center.
“Mines have a chilling psychological as well as operational effect on maritime operations,” he said.
Fear of them constrains how US warships can operate in the Gulf, potentially limiting the range and effect of US Navy air and missile strikes into Iran, Schuster said.
After the hit on the Bridgeton, the next 24 escort missions came to no harm, the NHHC’s Cox points out.
But a US ship that had just completed the 25th mission, the frigate USS Samuel B Roberts, saw that luck run out on April 14, 1988.
While heading for resupply before its next escort mission, the frigate encountered a minefield laid by Iran the night before, according to Cox.
After lookouts identified the Roberts as being in a minefield, its captain saw only one way out: go back the way it had come in.
It didn’t work. The warship struck a contact mine, and an estimated 500-pound explosive broke the Roberts’ keel and left a 15-foot hole in its hull.
“The only thing actually holding the ship together was the main deck,” Cox wrote.
Its crew saved it, in part, by using heavy steel cables to tie cracked portions of the ship’s superstructure together. And casualties were held to 10 wounded because the ship’s captain had ordered much of the crew above decks before the mine strike.
The damage to the frigate brought US minesweeping shortcomings to the forefront again.
The mine strike on the Roberts precipitated a retaliatory US strike that saw something unprecedented in US Navy history, and according to one naval historian, one of the most significant battles it has ever fought.
Four days after that Iranian mine almost split the Roberts in two, the US launched Operation Praying Mantis, US attacks on Iranian oil platforms in the Gulf.
One of those was attacked by a group of three US ships, including the frigate USS Simpson. During the fighting, an Iranian patrol boat fired a missile at the US ships.
The Simpson returned fire with four missiles of its own, disabling the Iranian boat, before it was finished off by gunfire from the US flotilla.
It was the first missile-to-missile surface battle in US Navy history.
There were more battles between the US and Iran that day, including one where US Navy A-6 attack jets and a US destroyer sank an Iranian frigate with missile strikes.
In his 2005 book, “Decision at Sea,” naval historian Craig Symonds called Praying Mantis one of the five most important US naval battles ever, ranking alongside, among others, the historic US defeat of the Japanese Navy at Midway Island that changed the tide of World War II.
Symonds said Praying Mantis established the US as the world’s undisputed superpower, with the ability to make real-time battlefield decisions from thousands of miles away, the ability to accurately fire missiles that could hit ships they could only see electronically and the ability to integrate all branches of the military service into a cohesive machine.
The battle showed the US military had amassed the technology to make it “not merely the greatest military power on Earth, but the greatest military power the world had ever seen,” Symonds wrote.
That’s a line Trump uses frequently when talking about the current war in the Gulf.
But analysts and experts note circumstances have changed in 2026.
Technology has advanced. Iran’s arsenal has increased. Cheap drones – deployed in sea and sky – have expanded the threat matrix.
And Iran’s attention is not also distracted by a border war with Iraq this time.
Experts wonder if the US surface warfare success led it to neglect mine countermeasures, something that is slow and meticulous in contrast to missile battles.
“The US Navy has very little mine-clearing capability. It is always the first thing eliminated in budget cuts because traditionally we rely on our allies for that mission,” Schuster, the former US Navy captain, said.
Others question whether the US was ready for Iran to effectively close the Strait of Hormuz again, and why the need for tanker escorts wasn’t planned from the beginning of the war.
“History repeats itself,” said maritime consultant Frank Coles, ex-CEO of Wallem Group, who sailed in Tanker War convoys.
“Anyone who remembers the Iran-Iraq war knows escorts were needed then. It’s disappointing this wasn’t part of the thought process now.”
CNN’s Ivan Watson contributed to this report.
