The Implications of Iran Mining the Strait of Hormuz Are Many—and Ugly |
The Implications of Iran Mining the Strait of Hormuz Are Many—and Ugly
Laying mines is cheap—and easy. Clearing them is expensive and hard. The potential consequences are terrifying.
And now, Iran has begun mining the Strait of Hormuz. President Trump simultaneously denied this on Truth Social and threatened that “military consequences to Iran will be at a level never seen before” if it did happen to be true. How the United States can escalate beyond 8,000 Israeli and U.S. airstrikes that have killed much of the Iranian government is an open question, but it demonstrates that the administration is genuinely afraid this will happen. They are right to be afraid. Mining the strait would mean a protracted closure of at least a month, because finding and removing mines is a difficult and time-consuming process. This would create a global economic disturbance well beyond what we are already seeing.
Laying mines is comparatively easy and can be done from both modern fishing boats and dhows. In the area of the strait, both of these number in the thousands. Iran used this strategy for conducting the clandestine mining of the Persian Gulf in the 1980s as part of the “tanker wars,” the name for the series of military attacks by Iran and Iraq against merchant vessels in the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz from 1981 to 1988, and later U.S. intervention to protect maritime traffic. Stopping these boats would require constant surveillance of a large area, a difficult task even with the vast array of forces in the area. Indeed, during the Persian Gulf War, Iraq managed to lay 1,300 sea mines right “under the noses” of the coalition.
Iran also has the capability to flood the zone with dozens or hundreds of civilian boats at the same time. It can be difficult or impossible for the U.S. to tell which ones have mines and which don’t. Exacerbating the problem is that the munitions used to sink these boats would likely be more expensive than the boats themselves.
The mines themselves are potentially very cheap and easy to produce, and can be deployed in large numbers. Simple contact mines with a design dating back to World War I can cost as little as $1,500 each. More advanced magnetic influence mines are still remarkably cheap, as low as $25,000 apiece. The relatively shallow waters of the Persian Gulf are an ideal place for using mines against shipping, and this creates many of the same cost-imposing problems as the Iranian Shahed-136........