Iran Conflict Brief: What It Will Take to Open Up the Strait of Hormuz

“When it started back in the 80s, and we did the tanker reflagging during the Iran-Iraq War, when Iran was attacking Iraqi and Gulf tankers, we were deploying about 30 surface vessels, we being the US, out of 268 If we deployed the same number of vessels today, we would be deploying them out of only 111 US surface naval vessels. So it's a far heavier lift for today's downsized US Navy than it was back in those days, and the US Navy is facing a much more advanced anti-shipping threat than they were back then.”

“And we really haven't seen any of those things. We've seen some cheap drones and a small number of incidents targeting ships for insurers and shipping companies, who then decided it's unsafe to cross the narrowest S-curve of the waterway. So from the looks of it, from a military standpoint, the IRGC has essentially weaponized commercial risk aversion, rather than actually imposing a blockade.”

“I think an interesting thing to watch in the next 24 hours is going to be the movement of the Ford Battle Group through the Red Sea. You can see that the Ford carrier has come down from the Med through the Suez Canal, and right now it is siking itself up around Jeddah for a run through the Red Sea and through the Babel Mandip Strait to get out into the Indian Ocean to come down to the Gulf. This is, if you think about it, a miniature dry run of what we are about to do in Hormuz potentially, which is to say a bunch of US ships have got to move past the hostile coastline, in this case Yemen's coastline with the Houthis, against a lesser set of capabilities than the Iranians have and they've only got to do it once.”

“The lesson of the Red Sea and the lesson so far in Hormuz is that, you don't have to hit every ship. You don't have to hit even 1 percent of ships. You just have to hit a ship now and then to make people not want to fully return to this environment.”

“Don't worry, oil industry, we're nearly there. You can see that I think he recognizes the easiest way to end the risk to Hormuz might be to simply end the war, rather than to throw the US Navy in there.”

“It's really crunch time for the Houthis. You know, they probably, like the rest of us, can tell that the Iranian regime has a good chance of surviving this. And we're going to see in the next 12 hours whether they take shots at the US carrier group, there's going to be no better chance to hit a US aircraft carrier, you know, in this entire crisis than what's about to happen now with the straight transit down in the Red Sea. If you want to create that iconic image of a US aircraft carrier on fire, now is the time to do it.”

“But we've been talking about how sobering all this is. Everybody, the thing is, everybody knows it's sobering, including the combatants. And as a result, that's why I kind of feel like this thing is going to fizzle within the next six to 10 days. I think the overall cost of this conflict to all involved is going to mean everyone finds a way to off ramp, I think within the next two weeks.”

“I also think at some point, maybe not this time, but in the next couple of iterations of this, we're going to get a change of regime in Iraq. At that point, Hormuz won't just be better, it will be awesome. We won't have a webisode like this ever again. I think it's about getting through, it's darkest before the door. We're probably not going to see a change of regime this exact time, maybe. We could still, but the regime is circling the drain faster than it was before this crisis, I think.”