As I write, Iran continues its effective blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, through which a quarter to a third of the world's petroleum traffic normally passes. Though opposed by most other countries including the U. S., Iran has succeeded both in surprising the rest of the world with its blockade and in maintaining it in the face of fierce though intermittent opposition. Modern technologies play a not insignificant role in this blockade, and examining that role can tell us something about how technological advances have affected modern warfare.
As an oil-industry newsletter pointed out, Iran has had the capability of blockading the Strait for decades. Their navy includes numerous small attack boats and thousands of mines, both of which would probably be enough to shut off the Strait to commercial traffic. In the early stages of the war, Iran announced the Strait's closure on Mar. 4, and proceeded to make good its decision with numerous attacks on tankers and other ships. Wikipedia lists 40 ships that Iran has attacked, six of which were abandoned with some loss of life.
No commercial insurer is going to let a ship go anywhere near a place where things like that happen. So within a few days, traffic of ships that were not deemed by Iran "friendly" to the regime crashed to zero.
In addition to the traditional means of attack boats and mines, Iran has also used shore-launched missiles, drones, and electronic warfare in the shape of jamming GPS and satellite signals in the Strait. In a crowded sea lane, loss of electronic navigational ability can be just as dangerous as a minefield or a drone attack. So even if GPS spoofing was the only thing Iran was doing, the blockade would be effective in terms of creating hazards that are unacceptable to insurers.
Iran has truck-mounted missiles that can be launched from virtually any location accessible by truck. That makes it very easy for them to attack ships, and very hard for anyone trying to defend the ships. The same goes for drones, which are turning out to be a true game-changer in recent conflicts. As Ukraine has shown with its homegrown drone industry, inexpensive drones costing anywhere from a few thousand dollars up to $50,000 or so (the cost of Iran's most frequently used drones) can be effective countermeasures that work as well in some cases as U. S. stealth missiles costing millions of dollars.
Mines are a particularly nasty thing to deploy in a commercial shipping lane. As the oil-industry newsletter pointed out, after the Persian Gulf War it took the U. S. 51 days to find and disable 907 mines off the coast of Kuwait. So even if Iran was neutralized somehow and agreed to cease hostile activity tomorrow, it would still take more than a month to clear the Strait of mines, assuming the U. S. has retained its former minesweeping ability, which is not clear.
In the long story of technology applied to warfare, progress is measured by victory. And victory doesn't always go to the good guys, while "good" often depends on whose side you are on. One of the unstated assumptions of engineering ethics is a background of peacetime. When such a background is no longer the case, things can get murky quickly.
Judging the ethics of war is way beyond the scope of a single article, and I'm not going to try to do that here. One can question the justice of the way the current conflict started, with pre-emptive strikes by the U. S. and Israel. From Iran's point of view, closing the Strait of Hormuz in response was probably one of the smartest and most effective things they could do. In retaliation, the U. S. has announced a blockade of oil shipments from Iran, which depend largely on ports to the east of the Strait. Whether this retaliatory blockade has the desired effect of making Iran back down from its own blockade is unclear at this point.
One problem to avoid with every advance in military technology is that a country finds itself preparing for the last war, not for the next one. This problem has become obvious for the U. S., whose military procurement process has become hidebound and overly complex, with the result that it mainly served to enrich defense contractors rather than producing the kind of inexpensive but effective weaponry that Ukraine is currently making.
Could the U. S. or allied countries come up with something clever and cheap to end the Strait blockade? I'm sure people a lot smarter than I am are working on that right now. But considering the mixture of traditional and novel technologies that Iran is bringing to bear on the blockade, it's hard to imagine how such technologies would work.
If all restrictions on U. S. military actions were lifted and the President ordered his generals and admirals to open the Strait by any means, I'm sure it could happen. But that would almost certainly involve a land invasion of the regions of Iran closest to the Strait. And that would be opposed by a contingent of the 190,000 or so troops in Iran, leading straight to a bad old-fashioned land war with significant casualties on both sides.
The last time a Middle Eastern country tried to take over an internationally important waterway, the U. S. took the side of the country against the then-global powers that wanted to oppose it. The 1959 Suez crisis found President Eisenhower exerting financial pressure on England to let go of the Suez Canal, when Nasser of Egypt tried to take it over. Eisenhower knew war inside and out, and while he employed lots of diplomacy and jawboning in foreign affairs, he managed to keep the U. S. out of actual fighting wars almost completely during his tenure from 1952 to 1960.
The world was a very different place then, and the current U. S. leader has no personal experience with war. Perhaps the old-fashioned approach of blockading Iran's ports will have the desired effect without leading to further bloodshed. If the U. S. had some undreamed-of technology that would end the crisis, I suspect we would have used it by now. But I might be wrong. It's happened before.
Sources: I referred to the online newsletter https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Why-Military-Force-May-Not-Be-Enough-to-Reopen-the-Strait-of-Hormuz.html and the Wikipedia article "2026 Strait of Hormuz Crisis."
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