Solving the Hormuz Problem: Imposing Costs Without Incurring Risk
The USS Tripoli is quickly steaming towards the Middle East with its 2,500 embarked Marines. Meanwhile, traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has slowed to a trickle, oil prices are rising worldwide, and countries are hesitant to commit a portion of their navies to provide convoy escort through this 20-mile-wide nautical chokepoint. It’s a bedeviling problem that Iran is using to impose costs on others.
Is there a way to flip the script and impose disproportionate costs back on them? Yes, but not by relying on the symmetric methods that are capturing the headlines.
At last Thursday’s Pentagon press conference, Gen. Dan Caine made two important comments providing an important dose of context. The chairman stated that U.S. forces are ready to engage in a range of options in the Strait “if tasked.” Yet they haven’t been tasked to provide escort duty; why not? His second comment reveals the primary reason: It is “a tactically complex environment” – a clear euphemism acknowledging that the risk is still too high.
In a dazzling performance of military might, U.S. forces are overwhelmingly achieving their narrowly tailored military objectives, destroying Iran’s ability to threaten others. Yet, with the prevalence of small drones that pack a punch, at what point is the risk of attacks on ships in the Strait sufficiently mitigated to thread the needle? Even with exquisite intelligence, it’s tough to know. Meanwhile, U.S. military planners have a recent naval analogy lingering in the backs of their minds and weighing heavily on their risk management calculus. Small and scrappy Ukrainian forces used drones – airborne, surface, and subsurface – to shred Russia’s Black Sea fleet. It happened there, and it could happen here, even with the best convoy protection plan that the U.S. military could construct.
U.S. Marines could be part of the solution by taking operationally significant terrain around the Strait. Yet absent regime change, this never-ending commitment would put them at persistent and prevalent risk from close-range threats while never fully eliminating the risk to nautical transit.
Some suggest that the Marines could be used in another way – seizing Kharg Island and strangling Iran’s economic lifeline. This strategy would indeed impose substantial costs on Iran, but it would also incur significant risk. Those Marines on the USS Tripoli would themselves have to sail through the Strait of Hormuz, transit the entire length of the Arabian Gulf, and invade enemy terrain. Like their colleagues in the previous paragraph, they would be forced to remain in a high-threat situation indefinitely. Each stage would place those forces at significant risk.
Yet Kharg Island does provide promise via a properly tailored cost-imposition strategy.
Ninety percent of Iran’s oil flows through and out of Kharg. Apart from a radical ideology, it is what Iran values most. Without it, they no longer have the funds to support and enforce their ideology, and the economic conditions that led to January’s mass protests would grow even more dire for a regime already on life support. This is the key to imposing costs – threaten what the regime values most in a way that is credible and relatively risk free.
To properly implement this strategy, President Trump need only make a simple statement: Tomorrow commercial ships will start flowing through the Strait. In response to any attack on one of them or any that follow in the days, weeks, months, or years ahead, we will strike facilities on Kharg Island from the air that will destroy 10% of Iran’s export capability. During the next attack on shipping, we will destroy another 10% and so on. Please know that we are locked and loaded, and this commitment never expires. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
This diplomatic strategy, backed by credible military threats, is simple. It’s low risk. It’s precisely calibrated and targeted. It leverages a high-value target set with a low-cost response plan. And it’s sustainable, with no boots on the ground, without a never-ending convoy escort commitment, and – absent the nebulous risk of Iranian threats to the Strait – will outlast the current high-level commitment to the region. It also has the benefit of incentivizing diplomatic leverage against Iran by its customers to discourage the Islamic Republic from violating the terms of an agreement that would be mutually detrimental.
The alternative strategies to open the Strait of Hormuz that are dominating the headlines certainly impose costs on Iran. Yet they also incur significant risk. It’s time to avoid such a balanced equation by imposing the right types of costs on Iran that are credible, effective, sustainable, and risk-minimizing. It is a way to solve the Hormuz problem that favors U.S. interests, meets our objectives, and preserves our resources.