Any war, every war will inevitably involve unpredictable events. But anyone who believes for even a nanosecond that the risk of closing the Strait of Hormuz was “unforeseen” by our president and military in this war is simply a retard. It is the absolute dumbest thing ever planted out there by the MSM, (which is truly saying something considering the competition for that prize), and that fact that anyone with half a brain ever bought into it makes them even dumber.
The central problem with this piece is that it **conflates the existence of planning institutions with the existence of a viable plan,** and then treats that conflation as proof. That is not analysis; it is bureaucratic apologetics dressed up as strategic insight.
No serious critic claims that the United States has *never thought about* the Strait of Hormuz. Of course it has. The U.S. military plans for everything from Korean collapse to asteroid strikes. The existence of doctrine, planning staffs, or war games proves only that the Pentagon possesses **planning procedures,** not that it possesses **a workable operational solution to the specific situation now unfolding.**
The article repeatedly substitutes one for the other.
Saying “the U.S. has been planning for Hormuz since 1979” is rhetorically impressive but analytically empty. Military institutions maintain contingency plans for decades that are **obsolete, unrealistic, or politically unusable.** The mere fact that a scenario has been studied does not mean that the current force posture, logistics, and political environment actually allow the plan to succeed.
The piece also leans heavily on historical examples that do not support its conclusion.
Operation Praying Mantis in 1988 is cited as proof of institutional preparedness. But Praying Mantis occurred under conditions that are radically different from the present: Iran had a far smaller missile inventory, no modern drone swarm capability, and vastly less sophisticated coastal anti-ship infrastructure. Demonstrating that the U.S. Navy could sink Iranian vessels in 1988 tells us very little about whether it can guarantee safe tanker transit under modern littoral missile saturation.
And this is precisely where the author avoids the real strategic question.
Naval doctrine has long distinguished between **sea denial and sea control.** The United States can almost certainly destroy Iranian naval units operating on the water. That is not the hard part. The hard part is ensuring that commercial shipping can pass safely through a narrow waterway overlooked by hundreds of kilometres of hostile coastline equipped with cheap missiles, drones, and mines.
Destroying boats is easy. **Protecting tankers is the actual mission,** and it is vastly more difficult.
Iran does not need to defeat the U.S. Navy to close the Strait. It only needs to make transit **commercially and actuarially impossible.** A handful of successful tanker strikes will cause insurers to withdraw coverage. Once insurers walk away, the Strait is effectively closed regardless of how many destroyers escort convoys.
This is not a theoretical issue; it is basic maritime economics.
The article also glosses over the asymmetric cost problem. Escorting tankers requires expensive interceptor missiles, sophisticated radar coverage, and finite magazine capacity aboard destroyers and cruisers. Iran’s side of the equation involves cheap drones, basic anti-ship missiles, and sea mines that can be deployed at a fraction of the cost. Quantity and persistence favor the defender operating from shore.
The historical analogy the author should be grappling with—but does not—is the failure of the Allied navies to force the Dardanelles in 1915. The world’s most powerful fleets were unable to secure passage through a narrow strait defended by mines and coastal artillery. The eventual fallback was the Gallipoli land campaign, which proved catastrophic.
Forcing secure passage through Hormuz would face the same structural dilemma. To truly guarantee transit, the United States would need to suppress or occupy extensive Iranian littoral territory stretching from Qeshm Island to Bandar Abbas and beyond. That is not a limited naval task; it is the opening stage of a major land war.
Pretending otherwise does not strengthen the argument—it reveals its weakest assumption.
The article’s rhetorical strategy also undermines its credibility. Critics are casually dismissed as “propagandists,” “useful idiots,” or participants in a Chinese information operation. This is a familiar tactic: when evidence is thin, attribute disagreement to foreign manipulation rather than engage with the substance of the critique.
But strategic reality does not change because dissenting voices are labeled hostile.
Finally, the essay’s closing claim—that its sourcing “meets the benchmarks of peer-reviewed venues”—is simply implausible. A genuinely peer-reviewable analysis would not rely on rhetorical certainty while leaving the central operational question unaddressed: **can the U.S. actually guarantee safe commercial transit through Hormuz under sustained Iranian littoral attack?**
The piece never demonstrates that it can.
Instead, it demonstrates something else entirely: that the United States has planning doctrine, planning staffs, and decades of contingency thinking about the Gulf. No one disputes that. But **the existence of a planning bureaucracy is not proof of operational feasibility.**
That gap—between institutional planning and strategic reality—is precisely the issue critics are raising.
Fact is that a quarter of Iran’s GDP is from oil, and the other sectors contributing to GDP are associated with the production and sale of oil. That was the plan. The conflation is in your mind. You ever hear the old saying we’ll bomb them back to the Stone Age? Trump just said that they bombed Hormuz leaving the oil pipelines, but they will bomb the pipelines if the IRGC continues to stop commerce traveling through the Strait. This indicates there was and is a plan. Trump is not Biden—strategy is how Trump has been extremely successful. This operation has all the hallmarks of a Trump business negotiation.
Your reply shifts the argument from operational capability to deterrence. In effect, the claim now appears to be that Iran would not attempt to disrupt the Strait because the United States might retaliate by destroying Iranian oil infrastructure.
But that is a different argument. It does not demonstrate that the operational problem discussed in the article has been solved; it simply assumes Iran would be deterred from attempting it.
That assumption is far from guaranteed.
More importantly, it misunderstands the type of strategy Iran would likely employ. Iran does not need to physically block the entire Strait of Hormuz. Although the strait itself is roughly 30–40 km wide, commercial shipping is confined to narrow traffic-separation corridors only a few kilometres wide in each direction. Disruption does not require mining the entire waterway—only making the main tanker routes unsafe.
Naval analysts have long noted that Iran’s most plausible approach would be sea denial: limited mine deployment, shore-based anti-ship missiles, drones, and harassment by fast craft from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The objective would not be to defeat the U.S. Navy outright but simply to generate enough successful attacks that insurers withdraw coverage. Once insurance disappears, commercial shipping stops regardless of how many warships are present.
Selective disruption would also be possible. Shipping in the strait follows highly predictable lanes, and even partial disruption of one corridor can sharply reduce throughput. Meanwhile, politically aligned shipping—such as state-linked tankers from China—could still transit through informally signaled safe windows or escorted routes. Sea-denial strategies rarely stop everyone; they simply raise the risk enough that most commercial actors withdraw.
Threatening to bomb pipelines therefore does not resolve the operational problem. It simply escalates the conflict and assumes deterrence will hold.
It also does not eliminate Iran’s ability to disrupt shipping in the short term. A sea-denial campaign based on mines, drones, and coastal missiles does not depend on Iran continuing to export oil at that moment.
Nor would such destruction necessarily be permanent. Oil infrastructure is frequently restored after wars: pipelines can often be replaced in months, export terminals repaired in stages, and temporary loading facilities constructed to restore partial capacity. With financing and engineering support from countries such as China, Iran could potentially rebuild at least part of its export capacity relatively quickly once hostilities ended.
So the central issue remains the same as in the original critique. The article assumes that because the United States has plans, escalation options, and political confidence, the operational challenge of guaranteeing safe commercial transit through one of the world’s most constrained maritime chokepoints has already been solved.
But that assumption is exactly what still has not been demonstrated.
When someone replaces argument with “verbose boob,” what they’re really announcing is that they’ve run out of substance. That’s the textbook shift from engaging with an argument to attacking the person making it — the oldest refuge of someone who can’t actually rebut the point.
Nothing in your reply addresses the operational issue being discussed: whether safe commercial transit through Hormuz can be guaranteed under sustained sea-denial conditions. Instead, you pivoted to Trump’s negotiating style and Iran’s dependence on oil revenue, which are deterrence arguments, not operational ones. When that distinction was pointed out, the response became… name-calling.
That says more about the weakness of the rebuttal than about the length of the paragraph that exposed it.
And for the record, bullet points don’t magically transform a weak argument into a strong one. They just make it easier to see the gaps.
If you’d like to engage the actual question — the difference between having contingency plans and having a demonstrably workable solution to a modern missile- and drone-saturated littoral — feel free.
Otherwise, dismissing analysis as “verbosity” is just a polite way of admitting you can’t answer it.
And Trump addressed the insurance issue. Lloyds came around post haste and foreign nations are sending help to assure their purchases will arrive safely.
This comment is a classic example of wishful thinking dressed up as fact.
Yes, POTUS Trump said the U.S. would step in to provide government-backed insurance for shipping in the Strait of Hormuz — but that only happened because the private market was under stress. That’s not “the problem being solved,” it’s the government acting as insurer of last resort.
There’s also no credible evidence that Lloyd's suddenly “came around.” War risk premiums have surged, coverage remains constrained, and the whole point of U.S. intervention was to fill that gap — not celebrate its resolution.
As for “foreign nations sending help,” even Trump himself has acknowledged that allies have been hesitant. Requests have been made, but there’s no broad coalition already in place securing shipping lanes.
In short: one kernel of truth (U.S. intervention) wrapped in two unsupported claims. That’s not analysis — it’s narrative-building.
The point is not that reopening the Strait **cannot** be done, but that the article **assumes it can be guaranteed** without demonstrating how.
Those are very different claims. Military planning and past operations show the U.S. can **fight in the Gulf.** They do not, by themselves, prove that the U.S. can **reliably guarantee safe commercial tanker transit through a narrow chokepoint under sustained missile, drone, and mine harassment from shore.**
The critique is simply asking the question the article never answers: *what is the operational mechanism* that actually guarantees that outcome?
The USA is energy independent and even an exporter!
With Venezuela “ turned” and a potential interruption of oil thru the straits, many many sovereign nations in the world will become interested and more importantly invested in changing the geopolitical order.
You don’t seem to understand that this is a once in 50 years turning point. The globalists WEF UN IMF crew are on the ropes big time. Everything they imagined to be guaranteed is coming apart at the seams.
Trump is a once in a Century type of man. You and your socialist international team have no idea what you are looking at.
Listen up, you gibbering, fact-allergic, MAGA-soaked low IQ bootlicker who couldn’t find the Strait of Hormuz on a map even if it were tattooed on your forehead—Rick, you pathetic inbred cocksucler.
Your entire “rebuttal” is the geopolitical equivalent of a drunk uncle yelling at the TV: a string of irrelevant slogans, personality-cult drivel, and zero engagement with a single operational, doctrinal, or economic point raised in the original analysis. The United States being a net energy exporter changes precisely nothing about whether the U.S. Navy can guarantee commercial tanker transit through a 21-mile-wide chokepoint under sustained Iranian missile, drone, and mine saturation. Global oil markets don’t care about your bumper-sticker “energy independence” line; a handful of sunk tankers drives insurance rates to infinity and reroutes the world’s supply chain whether American wells are pumping or not. Venezuela “turning” (whatever fever-dream version of that fantasy you’re peddling this week) is equally meaningless to the physics of anti-ship missiles and the economics of maritime risk.
You wave your hands about a “once-in-50-years turning point” and “globalists on the ropes” as if chanting Trump’s name three times in front of a mirror magically solves sea-control problems the U.S. Navy itself admits are brutally difficult. You didn’t refute sea denial versus sea control. You didn’t touch the asymmetric cost equation—cheap Iranian drones versus $2 million interceptors. You didn’t address the insurer-walkaway problem that closes the strait without Iran ever sinking a U.S. warship. You didn’t even glance at the Dardanelles precedent you were too lazy to Google. Instead you just called names and changed the subject to your savior complex. That’s not counter-argument; that’s intellectual surrender with extra conspiracy seasoning.
The piece never claimed the Pentagon lacks filing cabinets full of plans. It claimed those plans are not a viable operational solution under current conditions—and you offered nothing to disprove it except “Trump is once-in-a-century, bro.” Brilliant. Truly peer-reviewed strategic insight right there.
One last suggestion, Rick: General Patton was right when he said that America fought the wrong enemy. You think MAGA is right wing. What a joke! You don’t know my political leanings one bit you genetic gargage, cuckold piece of shit and you are the one from the socialist international. In a perfect world you would be dealt with like the WW2 Axis powers dealt with the communists.
As the author suggests, many of the “retards” are simply agents of the anti trump cabal. I don’t deny many of them document their opinions by listening and repeating “sources “ that cannot be named. I can read a strange phone number and guarantees of a good time off the bathroom wall, but I’m not going to follow-up unless the number is my own. Yuck.
Also, "mission creep" and "unintended consequences" are basically the same accusation. Chaos theory predicts serious unintended consequences in any complex system, but the US will be blindsided by none of it.
This whole hysterical narrative is yet another smear to demean anyone who challenges the globalist autocrats and tries to hold them accountable for anything.
The globalist autocrats did not expect this scenario to actually happen. Iran, Russia, and China...and Cuba are freaking out. BRIC has become IC...and China is falling apart too. Expect results from the China summit.
"Maybe" is a great words for this situation. We don't know a lot and only a handful of people know more. "Maybe" is a lot better than conflating smears and alleged thought crimes as facts.
I am old enough to remember the nightmare scenario in the early 1980’s, accepted by both Republicans and Democrats, of the Soviet Union cutting down from the Caspian to the Gulf to choke off the flow of petroleum to the West.
Thank you for this explanation, Alexander. Here in far-away Australia I had noticed the media meme asserting that the U.S. military under the Trump Administration was incompetent and had allegedly lost the plot due to the closure of the Straits of Hormuz - but your explanation makes perfect sense.
The Australian Government owned ‘ABC’ (the ‘Australian Broadcasting Corporation’) dominates the media landscape here in Australia and ever since 2016, it has been prosecuting a vehemently anti-Trump message by means of selective editing and loaded curation of current affairs information. Every ABC news item that in some way relates to Trump, and every opinion of an ‘expert’ consulted on air by the ABC, ends up portraying Trump as a dithering idiot who is always making the wrong decisions. I would describe the ABC’s Fake-News programs as a constant stream of ‘hate-Trump’ assertions – something you would probably expect from the CCP.
The ABC was once a trusted information provider for Australian society, but by using the technique of selective hiring of staff over the last 40 years, the ABC progressively descended to its current state of acting as a neo-fascist bullhorn on behalf of the Marxist idealogues of the Green-Left of Australian politics.
Now – here is something you need to know. I tried to upgrade to become a paying subscriber to your Substack account using ‘upgrade’ suffix on the email, but the payment attempt failed. The message I got (which reads like gobbledegook) is as follows:
“This Connect account cannot currently make live charges. The ‘requirements.disabled_reason’ property on the account will provide information about why this account is currently disabled. If you are a customer trying to make a purchase, please contact the owner of this site. Your transaction has not been processed.”
I then tried to upgrade from the Substack app, but that gave contradictory information about the pricing. In the end I gave up. There appear to be different modes by which Substack upgrades can be made and they seem to be a bit of a mess. Has ‘somebody’ messed with your Substack account systems, or does the problem lie with Substack itself? It might be worth you looking into.
Another excellent summary of current mission planning with a full take-down of the typical naysayers, useful idiots, and fake news, perpetuating CCP propaganda. Truly sad to see so much media trashing our military leadership and brave soldiers/Navy/Air Force.
That’s the exact thing I thought when I saw news about this. The Strait of Hormuz is nothing new. Everyone knows about it. The military literally has people tasked with studying such things, and study it they have. Iran has been threatening to close the straight since 1979. In reality there are no surprises here.
You know though, I wonder if this is more believable (to normies) since the Biden-era Afghanistan pullout?
Consider, nobody would have believed that the US military would have done something as obviously stupid as the Afghanistan pullout -- but they did. Now, is it so hard to believe that someone might have overlooked the Straight of Hormuz?
After all, you’ve had the media in the US broadcasting that Trump is an idiot since before 2016.
I’m not saying that this was 5D chess or anything. However it’s possible that someone saw the opportunity to try and convince people, who otherwise don’t pay attention to geopolitical politics, that the US made a big tactical error and overlooked the Straight of Hormuz, because Orange Man stupid.
The evidence for this is that they are doing -- right now -- even though it’s obviously nonsense to anyone who knows about the region.
Why, if the Hormuz Strait was always such a liability, was there never a pipeline built across the UAE/Omani peninsula, to bypass the Strait? That would have taken Iran out of the equation alltogether. 47 Years was more than enough to achieve this simple solution.
The claim that Trump has no plan and is operating by knee jerk reactions is an effort to accomplish the destruction of our military effort through a breakdown in confidence. Iran is firing surface to surface missiles on what they refer to as their enemies. The straits are crucially important to many countries and Iran doesn’t own the straits.
The MSM media worldwide are Enemies of the people worldwide. Most people, worldwide, who are intelligent and stay informed, know this and don't fall for their crap. And other people aren't bright enough and don't care. Which group are you in, people?????
Wisdom takes time to develop. The majority of Iranians, approximately 70%, are under 35 years of age and have no idea what a government without theocracy would be like. They have been restricted from knowing the possibilities.
You are right, they have a very large young population. But they have parents and grandparents that did live under the Shah. Personally, I think these young people are going to chart their own course. They don’t like what they are under, they are not shackled by their past. It may go quicker than we think. There are a lot of people telling them, that we stand by them. We want them to be part of our communities. They have a beautiful History. They can expand on it.
Wisdom comes from experience. With the speed of the everything increasing, it won’t take 25 years. I’m sure of that. When the Soviet Union fell, it was an almost overnight change. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d4h9OytDpp8
You are right. They were a very beautiful, highly educated society. I would like them to get their freedom back with whomever they choose for their leader. They choose. Not the Islamic clerics.
And america chose to worship a dead guy nailed to a stick. If you are going to encourage free thought, you can’t go back and retroactively condemn people for their choices.
The Italian Campaign in WW2 offers a striking parallel to today's 'narrative war' over the US-Israel operations against the Islamic Republic, which critics blast as 'chaotic' and reckless.
Like the current campaign, the Italian effort (1943-45) was built on solid planning - Ultra intelligence decrypts guided tactics - and delivered real strategic wins: tying down over 20 German divisions, hastening Italy's collapse, and giving vital battle experience to troops ahead of D-Day. Yet its drawn-out slog, heavy costs, and lack of total victory until 1945 made it easy fodder for Axis propaganda to paint as a 'chaotic quagmire' (note this was the setting after all for Joseph Heller's iconic novel 'Catch-22' about 'the absurdity of war, the madness of bureaucracy, and the struggle for individual survival against irrational systems' - a book which had it been published amid the Italian campaign would have been superlative enemy propaganda). Nazi outlets amplified every setback to undermine Allied resolve, boost their own morale, sow discord among the Big Three, and pressure neutrals. Mainstream reports and domestic critics often echoed bits of this framing without being outright collaborators - much like how foreign-sourced doubts are as yoiu point out 'laundered' into today's discourse. Ultimately the Allies adapted and prevailed, proving the operation a brutal necessity that tested coalition unity - as now.
This isn’t propaganda, but the question remains what the hell are we doing on the other side of the world murdering civilizations. Haven’t we done that enough every freaking war for the last hundred years has been sneaky dirty maniacal control attempts by the crooked United States and its crooked CIA. Iran did not want to go to war. Who are we to tell them they can’t have certain weapons when we do and Israel dose, the most unhinged, cruel civilization on planet earth. It’s a matter of time before Israel starts nuking the life out of children, smirking and happy. There’s no justification for any of this cruelty . The standard so long as it’s not in my backyard might not be as safe as you think. When a few of our town go up. An eye for an eye will have new meaning for the warmongers. The only logical answer here is to take the nukes from the Jews, the most dangerous race on earth prove me wrong.
Iran was subjected to color revolution tactics, where agitators are first sent in to foment dissent and promote violence. Then, the violence is used to justify stepping in and imposing an unpopular regime in order to stop it.
Interesting argument - that the US president/military is not ignorant but merely incompetent.
The risk of closing the straight might have been part of the American war plan, but if so we have to say that the US military has failed at this point.
Any war, every war will inevitably involve unpredictable events. But anyone who believes for even a nanosecond that the risk of closing the Strait of Hormuz was “unforeseen” by our president and military in this war is simply a retard. It is the absolute dumbest thing ever planted out there by the MSM, (which is truly saying something considering the competition for that prize), and that fact that anyone with half a brain ever bought into it makes them even dumber.
The central problem with this piece is that it **conflates the existence of planning institutions with the existence of a viable plan,** and then treats that conflation as proof. That is not analysis; it is bureaucratic apologetics dressed up as strategic insight.
No serious critic claims that the United States has *never thought about* the Strait of Hormuz. Of course it has. The U.S. military plans for everything from Korean collapse to asteroid strikes. The existence of doctrine, planning staffs, or war games proves only that the Pentagon possesses **planning procedures,** not that it possesses **a workable operational solution to the specific situation now unfolding.**
The article repeatedly substitutes one for the other.
Saying “the U.S. has been planning for Hormuz since 1979” is rhetorically impressive but analytically empty. Military institutions maintain contingency plans for decades that are **obsolete, unrealistic, or politically unusable.** The mere fact that a scenario has been studied does not mean that the current force posture, logistics, and political environment actually allow the plan to succeed.
The piece also leans heavily on historical examples that do not support its conclusion.
Operation Praying Mantis in 1988 is cited as proof of institutional preparedness. But Praying Mantis occurred under conditions that are radically different from the present: Iran had a far smaller missile inventory, no modern drone swarm capability, and vastly less sophisticated coastal anti-ship infrastructure. Demonstrating that the U.S. Navy could sink Iranian vessels in 1988 tells us very little about whether it can guarantee safe tanker transit under modern littoral missile saturation.
And this is precisely where the author avoids the real strategic question.
Naval doctrine has long distinguished between **sea denial and sea control.** The United States can almost certainly destroy Iranian naval units operating on the water. That is not the hard part. The hard part is ensuring that commercial shipping can pass safely through a narrow waterway overlooked by hundreds of kilometres of hostile coastline equipped with cheap missiles, drones, and mines.
Destroying boats is easy. **Protecting tankers is the actual mission,** and it is vastly more difficult.
Iran does not need to defeat the U.S. Navy to close the Strait. It only needs to make transit **commercially and actuarially impossible.** A handful of successful tanker strikes will cause insurers to withdraw coverage. Once insurers walk away, the Strait is effectively closed regardless of how many destroyers escort convoys.
This is not a theoretical issue; it is basic maritime economics.
The article also glosses over the asymmetric cost problem. Escorting tankers requires expensive interceptor missiles, sophisticated radar coverage, and finite magazine capacity aboard destroyers and cruisers. Iran’s side of the equation involves cheap drones, basic anti-ship missiles, and sea mines that can be deployed at a fraction of the cost. Quantity and persistence favor the defender operating from shore.
The historical analogy the author should be grappling with—but does not—is the failure of the Allied navies to force the Dardanelles in 1915. The world’s most powerful fleets were unable to secure passage through a narrow strait defended by mines and coastal artillery. The eventual fallback was the Gallipoli land campaign, which proved catastrophic.
Forcing secure passage through Hormuz would face the same structural dilemma. To truly guarantee transit, the United States would need to suppress or occupy extensive Iranian littoral territory stretching from Qeshm Island to Bandar Abbas and beyond. That is not a limited naval task; it is the opening stage of a major land war.
Pretending otherwise does not strengthen the argument—it reveals its weakest assumption.
The article’s rhetorical strategy also undermines its credibility. Critics are casually dismissed as “propagandists,” “useful idiots,” or participants in a Chinese information operation. This is a familiar tactic: when evidence is thin, attribute disagreement to foreign manipulation rather than engage with the substance of the critique.
But strategic reality does not change because dissenting voices are labeled hostile.
Finally, the essay’s closing claim—that its sourcing “meets the benchmarks of peer-reviewed venues”—is simply implausible. A genuinely peer-reviewable analysis would not rely on rhetorical certainty while leaving the central operational question unaddressed: **can the U.S. actually guarantee safe commercial transit through Hormuz under sustained Iranian littoral attack?**
The piece never demonstrates that it can.
Instead, it demonstrates something else entirely: that the United States has planning doctrine, planning staffs, and decades of contingency thinking about the Gulf. No one disputes that. But **the existence of a planning bureaucracy is not proof of operational feasibility.**
That gap—between institutional planning and strategic reality—is precisely the issue critics are raising.
And this article never actually closes it.
Thanks. Much better than the original post!
Fact is that a quarter of Iran’s GDP is from oil, and the other sectors contributing to GDP are associated with the production and sale of oil. That was the plan. The conflation is in your mind. You ever hear the old saying we’ll bomb them back to the Stone Age? Trump just said that they bombed Hormuz leaving the oil pipelines, but they will bomb the pipelines if the IRGC continues to stop commerce traveling through the Strait. This indicates there was and is a plan. Trump is not Biden—strategy is how Trump has been extremely successful. This operation has all the hallmarks of a Trump business negotiation.
Your reply shifts the argument from operational capability to deterrence. In effect, the claim now appears to be that Iran would not attempt to disrupt the Strait because the United States might retaliate by destroying Iranian oil infrastructure.
But that is a different argument. It does not demonstrate that the operational problem discussed in the article has been solved; it simply assumes Iran would be deterred from attempting it.
That assumption is far from guaranteed.
More importantly, it misunderstands the type of strategy Iran would likely employ. Iran does not need to physically block the entire Strait of Hormuz. Although the strait itself is roughly 30–40 km wide, commercial shipping is confined to narrow traffic-separation corridors only a few kilometres wide in each direction. Disruption does not require mining the entire waterway—only making the main tanker routes unsafe.
Naval analysts have long noted that Iran’s most plausible approach would be sea denial: limited mine deployment, shore-based anti-ship missiles, drones, and harassment by fast craft from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The objective would not be to defeat the U.S. Navy outright but simply to generate enough successful attacks that insurers withdraw coverage. Once insurance disappears, commercial shipping stops regardless of how many warships are present.
Selective disruption would also be possible. Shipping in the strait follows highly predictable lanes, and even partial disruption of one corridor can sharply reduce throughput. Meanwhile, politically aligned shipping—such as state-linked tankers from China—could still transit through informally signaled safe windows or escorted routes. Sea-denial strategies rarely stop everyone; they simply raise the risk enough that most commercial actors withdraw.
Threatening to bomb pipelines therefore does not resolve the operational problem. It simply escalates the conflict and assumes deterrence will hold.
It also does not eliminate Iran’s ability to disrupt shipping in the short term. A sea-denial campaign based on mines, drones, and coastal missiles does not depend on Iran continuing to export oil at that moment.
Nor would such destruction necessarily be permanent. Oil infrastructure is frequently restored after wars: pipelines can often be replaced in months, export terminals repaired in stages, and temporary loading facilities constructed to restore partial capacity. With financing and engineering support from countries such as China, Iran could potentially rebuild at least part of its export capacity relatively quickly once hostilities ended.
So the central issue remains the same as in the original critique. The article assumes that because the United States has plans, escalation options, and political confidence, the operational challenge of guaranteeing safe commercial transit through one of the world’s most constrained maritime chokepoints has already been solved.
But that assumption is exactly what still has not been demonstrated.
Your reply is like opening a nicely wrapped box, and finding it empty. Try bullet points, or continue as a verbose boob.
Anderson, I’ll decline the stylistic coaching.
When someone replaces argument with “verbose boob,” what they’re really announcing is that they’ve run out of substance. That’s the textbook shift from engaging with an argument to attacking the person making it — the oldest refuge of someone who can’t actually rebut the point.
Nothing in your reply addresses the operational issue being discussed: whether safe commercial transit through Hormuz can be guaranteed under sustained sea-denial conditions. Instead, you pivoted to Trump’s negotiating style and Iran’s dependence on oil revenue, which are deterrence arguments, not operational ones. When that distinction was pointed out, the response became… name-calling.
That says more about the weakness of the rebuttal than about the length of the paragraph that exposed it.
And for the record, bullet points don’t magically transform a weak argument into a strong one. They just make it easier to see the gaps.
If you’d like to engage the actual question — the difference between having contingency plans and having a demonstrably workable solution to a modern missile- and drone-saturated littoral — feel free.
Otherwise, dismissing analysis as “verbosity” is just a polite way of admitting you can’t answer it.
It’s just my opinion on how you filibuster just about everything. 😏
Thank you for a thoughtful premise. BUT, you seem to start from the point that opening the strait cannot be done.
And Trump addressed the insurance issue. Lloyds came around post haste and foreign nations are sending help to assure their purchases will arrive safely.
This comment is a classic example of wishful thinking dressed up as fact.
Yes, POTUS Trump said the U.S. would step in to provide government-backed insurance for shipping in the Strait of Hormuz — but that only happened because the private market was under stress. That’s not “the problem being solved,” it’s the government acting as insurer of last resort.
There’s also no credible evidence that Lloyd's suddenly “came around.” War risk premiums have surged, coverage remains constrained, and the whole point of U.S. intervention was to fill that gap — not celebrate its resolution.
As for “foreign nations sending help,” even Trump himself has acknowledged that allies have been hesitant. Requests have been made, but there’s no broad coalition already in place securing shipping lanes.
In short: one kernel of truth (U.S. intervention) wrapped in two unsupported claims. That’s not analysis — it’s narrative-building.
That isn’t the premise at all.
The point is not that reopening the Strait **cannot** be done, but that the article **assumes it can be guaranteed** without demonstrating how.
Those are very different claims. Military planning and past operations show the U.S. can **fight in the Gulf.** They do not, by themselves, prove that the U.S. can **reliably guarantee safe commercial tanker transit through a narrow chokepoint under sustained missile, drone, and mine harassment from shore.**
The critique is simply asking the question the article never answers: *what is the operational mechanism* that actually guarantees that outcome?
Exactly. This action was initiated believing that a plan for The SofH was unnecessary because the Venezuela Model would apply.
Wait a few more days and then please apologize.
Bot
C*cksucker.
Blow harder, weasel man.
The USA is energy independent and even an exporter!
With Venezuela “ turned” and a potential interruption of oil thru the straits, many many sovereign nations in the world will become interested and more importantly invested in changing the geopolitical order.
You don’t seem to understand that this is a once in 50 years turning point. The globalists WEF UN IMF crew are on the ropes big time. Everything they imagined to be guaranteed is coming apart at the seams.
Trump is a once in a Century type of man. You and your socialist international team have no idea what you are looking at.
Listen up, you gibbering, fact-allergic, MAGA-soaked low IQ bootlicker who couldn’t find the Strait of Hormuz on a map even if it were tattooed on your forehead—Rick, you pathetic inbred cocksucler.
Your entire “rebuttal” is the geopolitical equivalent of a drunk uncle yelling at the TV: a string of irrelevant slogans, personality-cult drivel, and zero engagement with a single operational, doctrinal, or economic point raised in the original analysis. The United States being a net energy exporter changes precisely nothing about whether the U.S. Navy can guarantee commercial tanker transit through a 21-mile-wide chokepoint under sustained Iranian missile, drone, and mine saturation. Global oil markets don’t care about your bumper-sticker “energy independence” line; a handful of sunk tankers drives insurance rates to infinity and reroutes the world’s supply chain whether American wells are pumping or not. Venezuela “turning” (whatever fever-dream version of that fantasy you’re peddling this week) is equally meaningless to the physics of anti-ship missiles and the economics of maritime risk.
You wave your hands about a “once-in-50-years turning point” and “globalists on the ropes” as if chanting Trump’s name three times in front of a mirror magically solves sea-control problems the U.S. Navy itself admits are brutally difficult. You didn’t refute sea denial versus sea control. You didn’t touch the asymmetric cost equation—cheap Iranian drones versus $2 million interceptors. You didn’t address the insurer-walkaway problem that closes the strait without Iran ever sinking a U.S. warship. You didn’t even glance at the Dardanelles precedent you were too lazy to Google. Instead you just called names and changed the subject to your savior complex. That’s not counter-argument; that’s intellectual surrender with extra conspiracy seasoning.
The piece never claimed the Pentagon lacks filing cabinets full of plans. It claimed those plans are not a viable operational solution under current conditions—and you offered nothing to disprove it except “Trump is once-in-a-century, bro.” Brilliant. Truly peer-reviewed strategic insight right there.
One last suggestion, Rick: General Patton was right when he said that America fought the wrong enemy. You think MAGA is right wing. What a joke! You don’t know my political leanings one bit you genetic gargage, cuckold piece of shit and you are the one from the socialist international. In a perfect world you would be dealt with like the WW2 Axis powers dealt with the communists.
As the author suggests, many of the “retards” are simply agents of the anti trump cabal. I don’t deny many of them document their opinions by listening and repeating “sources “ that cannot be named. I can read a strange phone number and guarantees of a good time off the bathroom wall, but I’m not going to follow-up unless the number is my own. Yuck.
For a good time, call - 867-5309
No area code?
It’s an infamous song from the 1980s by a singer named Tommy Tutone. If you ever heard it, you remember that number forever
https://youtu.be/6WTdTwcmxyo
Reverts to type.
Also, "mission creep" and "unintended consequences" are basically the same accusation. Chaos theory predicts serious unintended consequences in any complex system, but the US will be blindsided by none of it.
This whole hysterical narrative is yet another smear to demean anyone who challenges the globalist autocrats and tries to hold them accountable for anything.
The globalist autocrats did not expect this scenario to actually happen. Iran, Russia, and China...and Cuba are freaking out. BRIC has become IC...and China is falling apart too. Expect results from the China summit.
Maybe part of the timing is for the upcoming summit with China.
"Maybe" is a great words for this situation. We don't know a lot and only a handful of people know more. "Maybe" is a lot better than conflating smears and alleged thought crimes as facts.
No doubt this President is thinking way out of the conventional box.
I'll sit back and relax. God has a plan, only the timing is unknown.
I love these well researched combined with common sense articles ! Thank you.
I am old enough to remember the nightmare scenario in the early 1980’s, accepted by both Republicans and Democrats, of the Soviet Union cutting down from the Caspian to the Gulf to choke off the flow of petroleum to the West.
Thank you for this explanation, Alexander. Here in far-away Australia I had noticed the media meme asserting that the U.S. military under the Trump Administration was incompetent and had allegedly lost the plot due to the closure of the Straits of Hormuz - but your explanation makes perfect sense.
The Australian Government owned ‘ABC’ (the ‘Australian Broadcasting Corporation’) dominates the media landscape here in Australia and ever since 2016, it has been prosecuting a vehemently anti-Trump message by means of selective editing and loaded curation of current affairs information. Every ABC news item that in some way relates to Trump, and every opinion of an ‘expert’ consulted on air by the ABC, ends up portraying Trump as a dithering idiot who is always making the wrong decisions. I would describe the ABC’s Fake-News programs as a constant stream of ‘hate-Trump’ assertions – something you would probably expect from the CCP.
The ABC was once a trusted information provider for Australian society, but by using the technique of selective hiring of staff over the last 40 years, the ABC progressively descended to its current state of acting as a neo-fascist bullhorn on behalf of the Marxist idealogues of the Green-Left of Australian politics.
Now – here is something you need to know. I tried to upgrade to become a paying subscriber to your Substack account using ‘upgrade’ suffix on the email, but the payment attempt failed. The message I got (which reads like gobbledegook) is as follows:
“This Connect account cannot currently make live charges. The ‘requirements.disabled_reason’ property on the account will provide information about why this account is currently disabled. If you are a customer trying to make a purchase, please contact the owner of this site. Your transaction has not been processed.”
I then tried to upgrade from the Substack app, but that gave contradictory information about the pricing. In the end I gave up. There appear to be different modes by which Substack upgrades can be made and they seem to be a bit of a mess. Has ‘somebody’ messed with your Substack account systems, or does the problem lie with Substack itself? It might be worth you looking into.
Everything you say about ABC can be said more emphatically about the BBC and the Legacy Media here in the USA.
Trump coined the term FAKE media and it has been attached to that media like a nose ring to an AWFL.
Drmocrats lying. Nothing new here.
Another excellent summary of current mission planning with a full take-down of the typical naysayers, useful idiots, and fake news, perpetuating CCP propaganda. Truly sad to see so much media trashing our military leadership and brave soldiers/Navy/Air Force.
That’s the exact thing I thought when I saw news about this. The Strait of Hormuz is nothing new. Everyone knows about it. The military literally has people tasked with studying such things, and study it they have. Iran has been threatening to close the straight since 1979. In reality there are no surprises here.
You know though, I wonder if this is more believable (to normies) since the Biden-era Afghanistan pullout?
Consider, nobody would have believed that the US military would have done something as obviously stupid as the Afghanistan pullout -- but they did. Now, is it so hard to believe that someone might have overlooked the Straight of Hormuz?
After all, you’ve had the media in the US broadcasting that Trump is an idiot since before 2016.
I’m not saying that this was 5D chess or anything. However it’s possible that someone saw the opportunity to try and convince people, who otherwise don’t pay attention to geopolitical politics, that the US made a big tactical error and overlooked the Straight of Hormuz, because Orange Man stupid.
The evidence for this is that they are doing -- right now -- even though it’s obviously nonsense to anyone who knows about the region.
Just something to consider.
Why, if the Hormuz Strait was always such a liability, was there never a pipeline built across the UAE/Omani peninsula, to bypass the Strait? That would have taken Iran out of the equation alltogether. 47 Years was more than enough to achieve this simple solution.
Because the Globalists controlled the ME for 4 decades.
Expect such a pipeline to follow the completion of Epic Fury.
As a parallel , why was the Keystone Pipeline not completed 6 years ago ? Same reason.
The claim that Trump has no plan and is operating by knee jerk reactions is an effort to accomplish the destruction of our military effort through a breakdown in confidence. Iran is firing surface to surface missiles on what they refer to as their enemies. The straits are crucially important to many countries and Iran doesn’t own the straits.
“What they refer to as their enemies”
When they are bombing your elementary schools, then coming back to bomb the survivors, it’s fair to say they are your enemy.
The MSM media worldwide are Enemies of the people worldwide. Most people, worldwide, who are intelligent and stay informed, know this and don't fall for their crap. And other people aren't bright enough and don't care. Which group are you in, people?????
Wisdom takes time to develop. The majority of Iranians, approximately 70%, are under 35 years of age and have no idea what a government without theocracy would be like. They have been restricted from knowing the possibilities.
You are right, they have a very large young population. But they have parents and grandparents that did live under the Shah. Personally, I think these young people are going to chart their own course. They don’t like what they are under, they are not shackled by their past. It may go quicker than we think. There are a lot of people telling them, that we stand by them. We want them to be part of our communities. They have a beautiful History. They can expand on it.
We don’t have another 25 years to wait. But Bless you.
Wisdom comes from experience. With the speed of the everything increasing, it won’t take 25 years. I’m sure of that. When the Soviet Union fell, it was an almost overnight change. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d4h9OytDpp8
You are right. They were a very beautiful, highly educated society. I would like them to get their freedom back with whomever they choose for their leader. They choose. Not the Islamic clerics.
And america chose to worship a dead guy nailed to a stick. If you are going to encourage free thought, you can’t go back and retroactively condemn people for their choices.
They chose the Mullahs. We chose Trump. I’m not going to second guess the Iranians, they seem to have come out ahead on this one.
The Italian Campaign in WW2 offers a striking parallel to today's 'narrative war' over the US-Israel operations against the Islamic Republic, which critics blast as 'chaotic' and reckless.
Like the current campaign, the Italian effort (1943-45) was built on solid planning - Ultra intelligence decrypts guided tactics - and delivered real strategic wins: tying down over 20 German divisions, hastening Italy's collapse, and giving vital battle experience to troops ahead of D-Day. Yet its drawn-out slog, heavy costs, and lack of total victory until 1945 made it easy fodder for Axis propaganda to paint as a 'chaotic quagmire' (note this was the setting after all for Joseph Heller's iconic novel 'Catch-22' about 'the absurdity of war, the madness of bureaucracy, and the struggle for individual survival against irrational systems' - a book which had it been published amid the Italian campaign would have been superlative enemy propaganda). Nazi outlets amplified every setback to undermine Allied resolve, boost their own morale, sow discord among the Big Three, and pressure neutrals. Mainstream reports and domestic critics often echoed bits of this framing without being outright collaborators - much like how foreign-sourced doubts are as yoiu point out 'laundered' into today's discourse. Ultimately the Allies adapted and prevailed, proving the operation a brutal necessity that tested coalition unity - as now.
This isn’t propaganda, but the question remains what the hell are we doing on the other side of the world murdering civilizations. Haven’t we done that enough every freaking war for the last hundred years has been sneaky dirty maniacal control attempts by the crooked United States and its crooked CIA. Iran did not want to go to war. Who are we to tell them they can’t have certain weapons when we do and Israel dose, the most unhinged, cruel civilization on planet earth. It’s a matter of time before Israel starts nuking the life out of children, smirking and happy. There’s no justification for any of this cruelty . The standard so long as it’s not in my backyard might not be as safe as you think. When a few of our town go up. An eye for an eye will have new meaning for the warmongers. The only logical answer here is to take the nukes from the Jews, the most dangerous race on earth prove me wrong.
So you're good with Iran having nukes, and murdering thousands of Iranians? The only people that need fear Israel are those who attack her.
Iran was subjected to color revolution tactics, where agitators are first sent in to foment dissent and promote violence. Then, the violence is used to justify stepping in and imposing an unpopular regime in order to stop it.
You are probably alive, thanks to *the dirty Jews'* contributions to medicine, science and technology. And, dear Grand Wizard, we are not a race,
Long overdue that someone wrote this. You did it very well.
Friend, don’t use AI to write this much
Agreed. Let AI guide you and give you background, but many people see the tell tale AI fingerprints and just tune out. Trust your own voice!
Interesting argument - that the US president/military is not ignorant but merely incompetent.
The risk of closing the straight might have been part of the American war plan, but if so we have to say that the US military has failed at this point.