I am about to write another article for publication tomorrow (I hope), but just wanted to express my dismay about the situation in the Gulf.
We appear to be on a worst case trajectory — American and Israeli leaders unable to find a meaningful way to end the conflict, and Iran closing the gulf to shipping traffic for an extended period. There is no sign of the American leadership having any plans for containing the economic fallout, and they are scrambling for ways of posting their way to victory.
To see why one should be worried, we need only look at what happened in the Black Sea. The Ukrainians have no navy and the Russians largely have control of the air. Nevertheless, the Russian surface navy is largely bottled up due to attrition from naval drones. The Ukrainian sea drones may be more battle-tested, but Iran does have experience with naval drones. Although it is hard to sink large commercial vessels, they have a much smaller crew than military ones, and so have much less effective damage control.
There is no military solution to stop the “irregular” naval interdiction of the Strait of Hormuz other than occupation of the coast. The force requirements for such an invasion appear to be beyond what is available in the theatre. Although the forces could be assembled, that will be far too slow relative to the global recession countdown.
The only bright side is that Iranian tanker traffic is allegedly moving through the Strait. To the extent that their traffic flows and nothing else does, they have no need to spread naval mines. The problem with a mined strait is that de-mining would take weeks after a peace deal is reached, adding to the length of the blockade.
In any event, it appears that we have further empirical evidence of the danger of putting extremely stupid people in leadership positions of a major power, although Kaiser Wilhelm II should have been enough.
