For decades the ruling belief among some observers was that the Iranians could close up the Strait of Hormuz fairly easily any time they wanted to and it would take concerted military action to reopen the waterway. Oddly enough that hasn't happened this time as it looks like the whole world and heaven too is raining fire on Iran. It makes me wonder what happened so early in the conflict that ruled out this simple and obvious strategic weapon and left it to mere insurance companies to shut down the flow of oil and natural gas to Europe and China.
We used to joke that any ship could be a minesweeper, once. The corollary was that just about any ship could be a mine layer and it doesn't really take all that much in terms of modifications to roll them right off the stern or even pitch them over the side. As a semi-pro mine layer myself I recall that when we were putting out the mine shape we used every day for sonar conditions checks before proceeding into the Mine Danger Area, we made two passes. The first pass was to accurately assess the depth of water and adjust the mine tether so that our shape would float nicely about 20 feet below the surface and the second pass was to drop that whole shebang over the side and then come back around and have a look at it with sonar. On a bad day the great mine shape would be right there floating on the surface floating next to the bright red cherry float that was to mark the spot because somebody screwed something up.
On the other hand the hydro graphic data on the Strait of Hormuz is pretty much nailed down at this point. If the surveys of HMS Beagle in 1789 have not been updated by anyone else I'm pretty sure the Iranians had their own surveyors out getting really accurate charts of the area made for their own purposes. It really isn't all that difficult to to do a bottom survey and gather the data needed to accurately fix the locations for one or two thousand anchored sea mines and it is dead easy to just toss over the mines that lay on the bottom and wait for the right 'influence' to detonate under passing ships. Rocket Rising Mines sounded really delightful when I used to read about their more salient properties.
The best part of mining a Strait that you squat on the rim of, is that you can cover the entire mine field with artillery and use it to take pot shots at any mine clearing activity that doesn't meet with your full approval. It's a sort of Wonsan, Korea on steroids. Dealing with mines, anti-MCM mines and artillery and the usual hazards of navigation (would you believe ignorant merchant ships had to be dodged even while conducting MCM in an active mine field) is straight forward but time consuming.
So what happened to the mines? What happened to the coastal artillery batteries? What happened to the swarms of missile armed speed boats? I mean none of these and not all of these together even slowed down tanker traffic in the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq Tanker War and during Praying Mantis it continued on, undaunted so what happened to make the pussies in Lloyd's scrap the insurance scam this time?
I've said it before and I'll say it again, the Saudis know how to read the future pretty well and saw this coming over 40 years ago and decided to not only build a brand new oil port in Yanbu on the Red Sea, they built pipelines to carry their oil there whenever needed. I don't know if they told the Kuwaitis to pound sand and refused their oil transit across Saudi Arabia or not but it doesn't look like Kuwait can do anything now but shut down. The Qataris managed to piss off just about all the Gulf arab rulers so nobody even thought about letting them build a pipeline out to the Red Sea.
On the gripping hand, nothing easier to blow a hole in then 150 miles of oil pipeline running on the desert's surface smack dab in the middle of a remarkable war zone.
 |
| First USN led tanker convoy and M/V Bridgeton hit a mine and carried on |
14 comments:
What planet are you on. It's closed to everyone but China.
Mines don't discriminate.
Iran is allowing Chinese and Indian merchants through.
However, if things get too wild there's always tomorrow.
How many minesweepers are still active? How would you protect them doing their slow methodical work from a Silkworm (or worse)?
Have you been looking at the open-source images?
Seems MSN reported "Civilian Towers" and such were actually a CIA complex and a radar system for THAAD.
If we survive this mess (channeling Red October here) it's going to be decades to rebuild all that lost infrastructure and burn up munitions.
That is IF we can source a massive supply of rare earths since I doubt China is interested in us rebuilding our radars and missile inventory.
Recent Sonar 21
https://sonar21.com/us-intelligence-community-is-covering-its-ass-what-is-really-going-on-with-the-us-war-on-iran/
My point was that at the height of the Tanker War there was no difficulty getting insured ships into the Gulf. In the era of actual, you know, real Navy ships it is their actual mission to go toe to toe with threats to shipping and if they cannot why did anybody waste their time, money and effort building/operating and maintaining those pathetic relics?
My point was that the US could detail off escorts to furnish protection US SHIPS but:
a. we don't have any.
b. we don't need anything coming out of the Gulf all that badly
c. we really truly finally don't give a damn about our "allies" and they can stuff it.
One of the fun reads at the War College long ago was about the "pirate submarines" off the coast of Spain that were wreaking havoc on the supplies being shipped in to help the Republicans from the communist supporters. Now just how much fun would it be if "pirate submarines" put a torpedo into every Chinese tanker transiting the strait or loading up at Kharg Island? I'd enjoy it.
WRT the whole entire 'rare earths,' they are not all that rare, they are not hard to get and prioritize for given production and like gold, all are easily converted to the purposes defined/set by the Administration if that is what it takes. I don't really think there is all that much 'rare earth' in these radars. I am no longer anything like a fire control guy but Klystron amplifiers, TWT and magnetrons and certainly nothing at all about pulse compression or AEGIS but it's not like radars are made out of pure unobtanium. The material is out there.
I kind of wonder if we are coming to The Next Step. With the drones it is now very clear that mounting any kind of credible defense is just about impossible so it might be made clear to all nation states that we'll nuke anybody who uses drones on us and treat them was WMD are treated. That begs the question, what about terrorists and militias? It also invites some snide commentary from the countless countries and people that we've used drones to attack since Vietnam.
I don't know that we have any functional sweeps left and it would not be fun to sweep the SOH.
A. the damned ships would just run you over while you're running lanes in the fields and
B. as you said, you're well within spit ball range of the coastal defenses.
I wouldn't worry overmuch about the mine threat because the Iranians were particularly despised by making direct attacks on the conning facilities of the ships they attacked at close range. They tried their best to kill the bridge officers and would do so now by flying drones into the bridge. OTGH, can you imagine what they could do in so far as putting up cope cages around the bridges and crew quarters on a VLCC?
The mining and artillery cover could still happen. You don't need a Navy to lay mines. Any boat will do....you just need people willing to risk the wrath of OUR Navy. With total control of the air any artillery risks being kaboomed by loitering air cover. But if there are caves or other cover things would get interesting. Despite Trump's proclamations this isn't over and the mullahs are never going to surrender. 2026 is going to be very interesting. In an unpleasant way.
US Pirate Submarines, eh?
Let's see, if China suffers a torpedo attack, they will assume American Subs.
They might tell the Iranians to mine as well as the Hothi's to mine (again not hard) and they'd just buy more Russian oil.
Maybe some hull mounted for later release and delayed activation mines delivered around various ports we'd prefer not.
Deniable and cheap.
Let's just HOPE they don't think submarine warfare against China is a good idea.
c. we really truly finally don't give a damn about our "allies" and they can stuff it.
And it seems that our well paid for "allies" in the Middle East seem to be figuring that out.
Like screwing the Kurds and pointing out that any leader might become a bag job OH and any discussion might be for TARGETING them.
Yeah, Arabs are that paranoid.
I suspect that the rebuilding of the damaged ports and bases *might* be slow and unwelcome IF our shoot from the hip Trump continues to blast away on twitter (X, whatever).
The much ballyhooed "apology" of Iran Trump made into a surrender, and such made America an Idiot to the Arabs that heard the Islamic Politics and RESPECT IF they STAY out of Epstein Collation War.
BTW in the Mideast Epstein Collation war is trending, might be viral now.
Want links?
WRT the whole entire 'rare earths,' they are not all that rare, they are not hard to get and prioritize for given production and like gold, all are easily converted to the purposes defined/set by the Administration if that is what it takes. I don't really think there is all that much 'rare earth' in these radars. I am no longer anything like a fire control guy but Klystron amplifiers, TWT and magnetrons and certainly nothing at all about pulse compression or AEGIS but it's not like radars are made out of pure unobtanium. The material is out there.
https://tfiglobalnews.com/2025/12/29/china-choked-the-rare-earth-supply-to-the-usa-so-the-forgotten-french-factory-dumped-200-tons-of-samarium-keeping-americas-f-35s-and-tomahawk-missiles-alive-without-plan-b/
Please read this link, Sir. We scavenged an old stockpile. Oh, btw all of that salvage is already used up and mostly fired off at Iran.
Like the "Completed" F150 trucks that were stockpiled during supply chain issues during COVID UNTIL the critical Chips arrived THERE was stockpiled Missiles and such awaiting this rare earth.
That is why F35 fighters were delivered and are in action in Iraq WITHOUT their primary radar. Yes, they can operate linked to a fully equipped F35 but is that optimal?
I could post links about how everything from our computer screens to motors that run our missile guidance fins and so on.
But if you don't care to read, just let me know. I'll stop.
But I hope you can understand that as an INVESTER in Rare Earths I can assure you despite billions tossed at the problem mines take YEARS. Building factories to refine this nasty dirty stuff (EPA total bypass?) and FREAKING Training WORKERS to do it.
Let me guess, we'll use robots to do it. Ah they really demand rare earths for them and guess who is the worlds Robot builders....
I'm just praying for my family members on some of those Navy ships involved. Will not be the first time in US Navy history that they went into battle lacking ammo.
I would suggest a review of scalability. OPEC jammed us because we relied on them for the bulk of our petroleum. Now we don't. We did that by getting our own oil. We learned to undercut their pricing until it was just feasible to bring in our own. With China as the big pole in the rare earths game they know it and they deliberately undercut and destroy any VC that tries to improve our access because they can and they think they know the strategic minerals game. Do you really think they do? I don't. The earths are all over the place and largely untapped due to regulations that can be done away with by the stroke of a pen. All you need at that point is a business plan that sets the price point for viability and a customer that guarantees it will buy your product FOB your mine at a set minimum price and you're in business. Every time it comes to this point the Chinese cut the legs out from under the price point. They can't do that anymore now that we are 'aware' of what they are doing. It's a moot issue.
So a stroke of a penny and factories and productive mines just appears.
Let alone trained workforce for it.
Years friend, years to fix the cluster F we put ourselves in.
Michael
PEN not penny damn autocorrect
The things you regard as foundational are not what they appear. As a for instance, the LA thieves decreed that homeowners of burnt lots in Pacific Palisades could not even return home or start rebuilding until the hazmat issue was resolved in 9 or 15 years and Trump took that as a challenge and ordered the EPA to fix this unsolvable problem. 28 days later it was complete.
Yes, when something needs to be done and the power is behind doing it it will get done. Look at Tesla or SpaceX. We did not used to be a nation of losers who stopped dead when some lawyer said, 'whoa.' This was my world for almost 30 years in the military and industry. Make it happen. Do not accept any excuses. Action this day.
I accept that this attitude is almost dead and buried now but it could come back.
Friend, has the Pacific Pallaside people ACTUALLY been allowed to start building?
Answer as of yesterday's news NO.
Governor Newscum (spelling intentional) isn't allowing it.
Trumps NOT a Dictator but plenty of Judges and Governors and Mayors seem to be.
Wish it wasn't so but I see what is.
Michael
SNIP Yes
Yes, rebuilding has started in Pacific Palisades. Los Angeles has granted the first permits to rebuild homes following the recent wildfires, marking a significant step in the recovery process. One of the first homes to be rebuilt has made major progress, offering hope to the community. Additionally, the mayor has highlighted the beginning of construction at various sites that have received building permits. The cleared lots in the area indicate that rebuilding efforts are underway.
So sorry friend Some rebuilding is occurring.
As of now, less than a dozen homes have been rebuilt in Pacific Palisades since the January 2025 wildfires, indicating a slow recovery process. The overall rebuilding progress is still ongoing, with many homeowners facing challenges in the rebuilding process.
Palisades News
+3
Out of how many homes destroyed but a few rebuilt.
But some rebuilding is occurring so I was wrong.
My bad fo
Post a Comment