This war initially started with a declaration that it was about stopping Iran from achieving nuclear weapons capability. Once that was debunked Trump quickly pivoted to regime change expecting millions of Iranians to take to the streets while he was devastating their homes factories and infrastructure. Well we all know how poorly that went, and how little the war planners knew. Now the big mission seems to be securing the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranians have been very clever in their tactics and they have caused considerable pain to the world economy and their neighbors. Securing the strait is going to be a very difficult job. In his usual daily bluster, the boviator in chief talked about how easy it was going to be for the US Navy to escort ships through the strait. Well we know that's not going to be the case, it's actually going to be quite difficult. Trump is likely going to choose some sort of off-ramp very soon, without having achieved any of the goals he set forth, having set Iran back decades in terms of infrastructure, and completely failing at anything in the way of democratic progress or regime change for the Iranian people. That will be just another war that the US has lost, and will add to the tally of Zero Wars won since World War II unless you count Grenada or Panama. The US military is huge and they do have the largest defense budget of any nation, but they don't seem to accomplish very much with that trillion dollars a year that's being spent. Just another in the hundreds upon hundreds of failures for big Don. The Western allies trying to negotiate a way to protect the Strait of Hormuz for energy shipping face a stark reality: a similar effort in the Red Sea that started years earlier cost billions of dollars and ultimately failed against Yemen's Houthis. The costly Red Sea experience - four ships sunk, more than $1 billion in weapons expended, and a route that the shipping industry still largely avoids - looms over the more complex Strait of Hormuz, the shipping artery used by roughly a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas supply and now blocked by Iran, a more formidable adversary than the Houthis. Iran's threats to the strait and its attacks on energy infrastructure in nearby Gulf nations have sent oil prices soaring in the worst disruption to oil and gas supplies in history. Absent the strait's reopening, shortages will become more acute, threatening higher costs for energy, food and numerous other products worldwide. "There is no substitute for the Strait of Hormuz," Kuwait Petroleum CEO Sheikh Nawaf Saud Al-Sabah said in a fiery video call streamed to the CERAWeek energy conference in Houston on Tuesday. "It is the world’s strait, under international law and practical reality." Reuters interviewed 19 security and maritime experts who described the myriad challenges facing the U.S. and its allies in protecting the strait. Iran has far more advanced military forces than the Houthis, an arsenal of cheap drones, floating mines, and missiles, and easy access from its steep mountainous coast to the narrow waterway. The U.S. mission to protect Red Sea shipping from the Houthis launched in December 2023, with European nations joining in with their own operation a few months later. The allies shot down hundreds of drones and missiles, but the Houthis still sank four ships between 2024 and 2025. Shippers now largely avoid the passageway, once home to 12% of world trade, opting for a much longer voyage around the Horn of Africa. "It was a strategic draw, if not a strategic defeat," said Joshua Tallis, a naval analyst at research firm CNA. The danger zone around the Strait of Hormuz is up to five times bigger than the Houthis' attack area around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait that flows into the Red Sea. Unlike the Houthis, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is a professional military with its own weapons factories and access to funding. Providing escorts for the strait would require as many as a dozen large warships such as destroyers, backed up by jets, drones and helicopters to account for the limitations created by the lack of space to maneuver, some military experts said. Overhead air cover would be critical to protect against flying drones as well as explosive-laden manned or unmanned vessels that can easily blend into sea traffic. https://share.google/zk7okmke7WqnBwL0N
Create an account or sign in to comment