The Wrong Ships for the Wrong Job

Despite overwhelming military force the US will not win. Sound familiar?

The United States is not winning the Iran war. It is not going to win it. I have been making that argument since the opening strikes in February, and each development since has added a layer to the same underlying case.

The US entered the conflict against an adversary it had consistently misread, committed to a theory of economic coercion that does not match how the Iranian state actually works, betting that the blockade would outlast Iranian endurance, assuming that an economy hardened by two decades of sanctions would crack under pressure it had spent those two decades preparing for, and pursuing military force without a clear theory of what deal it was supposed to produce. The Goodfellas approach – improvisation dressed as strategy – has compounded each of these errors in turn.

This piece addresses the next layer: the military instrument deployed at Hormuz, why the US Navy is not well suited to what it is being asked to do, and what the first days of Project Freedom – which Iran’s Foreign Minister has already renamed “Project Deadlock” – illustrate about the gap between announcement and operational reality.

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Project Freedom launched on Monday 4 May. By Monday evening, US destroyers had sunk six Iranian fast boats, Iranian forces had fired missiles and drones at US and allied vessels in the strait, Iran had struck the UAE’s Fujairah oil storage facility for the first time since the ceasefire – injuring three people and starting a fire at one of the Gulf’s largest fuel depots – and further drone and missile activity was reported over Oman. Two ships had transited the strait, routing through Oman’s territorial waters rather than the main shipping lanes. Iran’s state media denied that any commercial vessels had passed at all. Iran claimed it had forced a US warship to turn back; CENTCOM denied it. Shipping executives said the risk had not materially changed. Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi posted on X: “Project Freedom is Project Deadlock. Events in Hormuz make clear that there’s no military solution to a political crisis.” Targeting Fujairah signals that Iran is prepared to extend the engagement zone well beyond Hormuz’s narrow passage – the conflict is not contained.

By Tuesday evening Trump had paused the operation, citing “great progress” toward a deal. Three ships had made it through in total. Before the war, around 130 transited daily.

Washington is simultaneously attempting to run three distinct naval missions: a port blockade to cut Iranian oil exports, a sea control operation to keep the strait open to non-Iranian shipping, and a close escort mission to move specific vessels through. The US Navy is not well suited to any of them. These are related but different problems, and the geography of Hormuz makes all three harder.

The geography first

The Strait of Hormuz is about 24 miles (39 kilometres) wide at its navigable passage. The two unidirectional shipping lanes are only two miles (3 km) wide and run close to the Omani shore, well within range of everything Iran can deploy from its northern coastline: shore-based anti-ship missiles, drone launch sites, and fast attack craft operating from coves and inlets. The mountainous terrain on the Iranian side runs almost to the water, providing concealment for all of these. A warship in the strait is within range of Iranian weapons from the moment it enters.

The problem runs deeper than the narrow passage. A crescent of Iranian-held islands – Qeshm, Hormuz, Larak, Sirri, Abu Musa, and the Greater and Lesser Tunbs – runs along the shipping lanes as they wind into the Gulf, positioned to monitor all traffic and serve as forward bases for missiles and small-boat attacks. Cordesman’s 2015 CSIS assessment (see reference at end) of the Iranian maritime threat documents this: the threat runs across the full approach, not just the narrow point. Clearing the chokepoint addresses only part of the problem.

The relevant Iranian coastline extends for more than a thousand miles. Admiral Stavridis noted this on CNN’s GPS this week – it is why ships get through despite enforcement. The geography makes sealing the line impossible – you cannot patrol a thousand miles of complex littoral coastline with capital ships, and you cannot stand off from it at safe distance while doing so. One analyst quoted by Al Jazeera illustrated the resource problem: there are only about a dozen US Navy vessels capable of defending shipping in this environment; before the war, more than a hundred ships transited the strait daily. The maths simply does not work.

What a successful blockade actually requires

The economic history of naval blockades identifies three conditions for effectiveness: the target must be economically vulnerable to trade disruption; the blockading power must have the military means to sever sea and land connections; and neutral powers must cooperate rather than supplying the enemy. Iran tests all three, and fails none of them meaningfully in Washington’s favour.

On vulnerability: Iran has spent two decades reducing dependence on external trade, building sanctions evasion infrastructure, and conditioning its economy to operate under maritime pressure. Davis and Engerman’s (see reference at end) comparative economic history of blockades since 1750 establishes that blockades against large land powers with access to neutral neighbours tend to be protracted and porous – the target reorganises internal supply and opens new routes faster than the blockader can close them. Iran has China, Russia, Iraq, and Pakistan as neighbours or willing trading partners. None are cooperating with the US position.

The coastal evasion route is already in operation. TankerTrackers confirmed that a large Iranian tanker named HUGE successfully bypassed the US blockade by hugging the Pakistani and Indian coasts until reaching the Strait of Malacca, invoking innocent passage provisions under UNCLOS to operate in territorial waters where US naval forces face legal limitations on interdiction. At least 34 Iran-linked tankers and gas carriers have transited since the blockade came into effect, according to Vortexa data. The US has extended enforcement into the Indian Ocean – boarding the M/T Tifani between Sri Lanka and Indonesia, more than 2,000 miles from Hormuz – but doing so pulls resources far from the primary theatre, and creates new legal and diplomatic friction with India and Pakistan simultaneously.

On military means: the US has assets for open-ocean power projection. It does not have assets suited to sustained coastal interdiction across a thousand miles of prepared Iranian coastline.

On neutral cooperation: the 49-country coalition forming around post-ceasefire Hormuz governance is working around the US position, not reinforcing it. China and India are both receiving Iran-approved vessels through the strait. Neutral cooperation is not merely absent, it is running against Washington.

The British blockade of Germany in the First World War met all three conditions and still needed four years to produce results. Britain’s geographic advantage was decisive: Admiral Beatty described the British Isles as “a great breakwater across German waters, limiting the passage of vessels to the outer seas to two exits.” The Dover Patrol closed the English Channel at 21 miles wide; the Northern Patrol closed the 155-mile gap between Shetland and Norway, supported by the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow – home waters, not a distant deployment. The 10th Cruiser Squadron grew to forty vessels built or converted specifically for sustained patrol. By 1918, German merchandise imports had fallen to around one-fifth of pre-war levels, but getting there required four years, US entry to close the neutral gap, and purpose-built assets operating from adjacent home waters. None of those conditions exist at Hormuz.

Elleman and Paine’s comparative study (see reference at end) of blockade strategies from 1805 to 2005 draws the same conclusion: sea powers succeed against islands, peninsulas, and isolated coastal states, not against large land powers with overland access to neutral neighbours. Iran is a land power with neighbours willing to help it circumvent any maritime cordon. The evasion strategies already in use – coastal hugging, UNCLOS innocent passage provisions, ship-to-ship transfers in the Strait of Malacca – are exactly what Elleman and Paine identify as the counter-strategies blockaded land powers have historically employed. Iran has had two decades to prepare them.

Not built for blockade

The US Navy is built around carrier strike groups, designed for power projection, fleet air defence, and high-intensity conflict against peer competitors in open water. It is a blue water navy. Its capital ships are large, expensive, and formidable in the environment they were designed for. But an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer displacing nine thousand tons is not the right tool for persistent close-inshore patrol along a thousand miles of contested coastline.

Effective blockade enforcement at this scale requires large numbers of smaller, more agile surface combatants – frigates, offshore patrol vessels, fast inshore patrol craft – that can maintain continuous presence without burning through fuel and crew endurance at the rate capital ships do. The ships currently enforcing the Iranian port blockade were designed to shoot down ballistic missiles and defend carrier groups from air attack. The 26 ships that bypassed the blockade line in the first weeks, and the 34 confirmed transits since, are a predictable result of applying open-ocean assets to a coastal interdiction problem across a thousand miles of prepared terrain.

The deeper point is not simply that the US has the wrong ships. It is that no ships available to Washington could sustain all three missions simultaneously at acceptable cost in this geography. The problem is the geography and the mission, not a procurement failure that a different vessel class would fix.

Not built for escort either

Close escort in a contested strait is a different problem. Operation Earnest Will – the US convoy escort mission through the Gulf in 1987-88 – established what it actually requires: three to four dedicated escort vessels, with a supporting force behind them including a battleship, a carrier with F-14 and F/A-18 aircraft, and AWACS coverage. Mine countermeasure vessels – helicopters and ocean-going minesweepers – were added only after the first incident made that gap obvious. That was the force required to escort shipping through the Gulf when Iran’s navy had been weakened by eight years of war with Iraq and its broader capabilities were a fraction of what they are now.

The very first convoy of Earnest Will saw its lead vessel hit a mine. The Bridgeton, the supertanker being escorted, struck an Iranian contact mine on 24 July 1987 and was immediately used as evidence that the US Navy could not guarantee safe passage – a propaganda victory Iran extracted from the opening move of the most heavily resourced convoy operation the US had run in the Gulf. The mine had been laid by a wooden dhow under cover of darkness, a cheap, deniable tactic Iran has been refining ever since.

Cordesman estimated in 2015 that Iranian mine stocks were between 3,000 and 6,000 mines. The DIA revised that figure to more than 5,000 in 2019, with 2025 estimates around 6,000. Types range from Soviet-era contact mines to the Maham-7, a limpet mine designed to rest on the seabed and attack a vessel’s keel using acoustic and magnetic sensors. Iran’s deployment doctrine uses commercial vessels, small craft, and submarines to lay mines covertly, pre-staged for rapid dispersal along both sides of the strait while maintaining safe passages close to its own shoreline.

Clearing the mines is a major challenge. Four US Avenger-class minesweepers stationed in Bahrain were decommissioned in late 2025, leaving three Littoral Combat Ships as replacements; only one – USS Canberra – appeared to be in the Arabian Sea during Project Freedom’s operation. The Washington Post reported that officials told House Armed Services members clearance could take as long as six months – an assessment the Pentagon subsequently disputed, calling it cherry-picked from a classified briefing. There is a further problem: Iran has reportedly lost track of some of the mines it planted, and is therefore unable to fully open the strait even if it wanted to. A retired naval officer highlighted the psychological dimension: the mined area does not have to be everywhere to be everywhere in the minds of those who must transit it.

The danger at Hormuz comes not from any single capability but from the combination of mines, missiles, swarms, and geography – what Cordesman calls the “stacking problem”. The IRGCN operates a large fleet of fast attack craft capable of hitting larger vessels from multiple directions simultaneously. During the Tanker War, Iran used clusters of Boghammer interceptors to target tankers trailing behind convoys but outside their immediate protection. Iran’s Boghammer fast attack craft, operating in swarms from concealed coastal positions, are perfectly designed for this environment; the strait’s confined space turns a capability mismatch into an equaliser. The tactic worked because it exploited the gap between what a convoy escort can cover and what it cannot. Project Freedom’s zone defence creates the same gap on a larger scale.

Iran learned from the Tanker War that it cannot win a conventional engagement with the US Navy. Every development since – the Khalij Fars anti-ship ballistic missile, the Shahed drone programme, the Ghadir-class midget submarine fleet, the expanded mine stockpile – has been designed to exploit the mismatch between Iran’s asymmetric capabilities and the US Navy’s conventional posture. The passive defence doctrine Iran now emphasises – splitting and camouflaging forces among coastal coves to survive initial strikes before launching asymmetric attacks – was created specifically for the kind of opening campaign the February strikes represented, leaving residual capacity for exactly the kind of operations Project Freedom encountered on day one.

What this means

Washington is attempting to run three simultaneous naval missions – port blockade, sea control, and strait escort – with assets suited to none of them in this geography. The blockade leaks because the coastline is too long and the terrain too complex for capital ships to seal, and because Iran has activated the coastal evasion routes it spent two decades preparing. The escort operation stays at arm’s length because putting those same capital ships inside the strait exposes them to risks the Navy has spent weeks carefully avoiding. The confrontation is now spreading beyond the strait to the Gulf of Oman coast, the Indian Ocean, and Fujairah’s fuel storage terminals.

The British blockade of Germany worked because geography concentrated the problem into two controllable exits, Britain sat between Germany and the ocean, and purpose-built assets ran sustained patrol over years with the political will to match. The 10th Cruiser Squadron had forty vessels running continuous patrol across the Scotland-Norway gap. Project Freedom has guided-missile destroyers providing zone defence from a distance while routing ships around the most dangerous sections of the waterway, against an adversary that has already named the operation correctly.

Iran’s mine stockpile, its island chain, its fast attack craft fleet, and its shore-based missiles did not suddenly appear this week. Cordesman documented them in 2015 and concluded that while Iran cannot sustain full closure against the US Navy indefinitely, it can disrupt shipping and impose costs in the opening phase through the stacked combination of cheap systems and prepared geography. The first days of Project Freedom were consistent with his assessment. So was Araghchi’s response. There is no military solution to a political crisis, and the military instrument Washington has deployed was not designed for the geography it is being asked to control.

Post Script

Project Freedom lasted 36 hours. Three ships transited the strait – against a pre-war daily average of 130. Trump paused the operation on Tuesday evening, citing progress toward a deal that has not materialised. Rubio had declared the combat phase over and Project Freedom as the new mission hours before it was suspended. CENTCOM, asked for comment on the pause, referred questions to the White House, signalling they were not consulted on the pause. The UAE was attacked by Iranian missiles and drones for the second consecutive day. Araghchi called it correctly on day one. The political crisis is no closer to resolution than it was when the operation launched.

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REFERENCES

Cordesman, Anthony H. with Aaron Lin. The Iranian Sea-Air-Missile Threat to Gulf Shipping, CSIS Burke Chair in Strategy, February 2015​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​.

Davis, Lance E. and Engerman, Stanley L. Naval Blockades in Peace and War: An Economic History Since 1750, Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Elleman, Bruce A. and Paine, S.C.M., eds. Naval Blockades and Seapower: Strategies and Counter-Strategies 1805–2005, Routledge, 2006.

El-Shazly, Nadia El-Sayed. The Gulf Tanker War: Iran and Iraq’s Maritime Swordplay, St Martin’s Press, 1998.

Hughes, Wayne P. Jr. and Girrier, Robert P. Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations, Third Edition, Naval Institute Press, 2018.

Speller, Ian. Understanding Naval Warfare, Third Edition, Routledge, 2019.