{"id":35589,"date":"2026-03-25T14:23:21","date_gmt":"2026-03-25T14:23:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/35589\/"},"modified":"2026-03-25T14:23:21","modified_gmt":"2026-03-25T14:23:21","slug":"trumps-military-options-to-secure-hormuz-and-end-the-war-explained-euobserver","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/35589\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s military options to secure Hormuz and end the war, explained \u2013 EUobserver"},"content":{"rendered":"

First published in Den\u00edk N.<\/a><\/p>\n

The last deliveries of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Qatar are arriving in Europe. <\/p>\n

The tankers carrying them went to sea before the war in Iran broke out, and Tehran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz. Since then, Qatar has halted gas production \u2014 its giant liquefaction plant was severely damaged in an Iranian missile strike.<\/p>\n

Europe and other countries now face a sharp increase in prices stemming from the shortage of this strategic commodity. The situation will not improve until the Strait of Hormuz can be reopened to traffic.<\/p>\n

Over the weekend, the US tried to force Iran to unblock the strategically vital transport chokepoint by means of threats: the leadership in Tehran received an ultimatum that if it did not change its position by Monday night, US forces would begin massive bombing of Iranian power plants. <\/p>\n

On Monday, US president Donald Trump extended the ultimatum by another five days, arguing that talks between the two sides had made successful talks aimed at a \u201ccomplete resolution of hostilities in the Middle East\u201d.<\/p>\n

Tehran, however, denied that any direct talks with the US were taking place, and accused the US president of merely trying to push down energy prices with his statement. <\/p>\n

What if the US and Iran fail to reach a deal within five days and the key waterway remains closed? Do the Americans have any options to get the Strait back into operation? What if Iran refuses to back down? What might a military operation to safeguard the functioning of the global economy look like?<\/p>\n

Here are some basic questions and answers.<\/p>\n

Why is it so difficult to keep the Strait of Hormuz open?<\/p>\n

The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow strip of water hemmed in by land. It is just 39km wide, but even that does not fully capture how cramped it is. Because of insufficient depth, giant oil tankers actually pass through in two lanes, each a little over three km wide. The shipping lane runs close to the Iranian coast. These cumbersome, fully-loaded vessels, which move at a snail\u2019s pace of about 25km\/h, cannot manoeuvre in the narrow lane, and their forward movement is completely predictable at every moment.<\/p>\n

\"\"The world\u2019s gateway to Middle Eastern oil (Photo: eutrophication&hypoxia)<\/a><\/p>\n

Everything takes place within sight and within range of Iranian forces. They are positioned not only on the coastline but also on the islands that line it. This is a rugged, rocky terrain riddled with fissures and caves that can serve \u2014 and do serve \u2014 as hiding places for fast boats or launchers.<\/p>\n

Iran has several offensive options at its disposal. It can fire missiles at the tankers (including from inland). It can dispatch fast boats against them. It can use drones in the air over the sea. It can mine the area. And it can attack ships exiting the Strait into the Red Sea from pre-positioned submarines.<\/p>\n

Is it not possible simply to destroy all Iranian positions?<\/p>\n

It turns out to be very difficult. There are many locations along the jagged coastline from which Iranian armed units can launch missiles or send out boats. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe US has flown thousands and thousands of sorties and yet we are not yet confident that all of these capabilities have been destroyed \u2026 That does raise questions about whether they will ever be destroyed,\u201d the Wall Street Journal<\/a> quoted Caitlin Talmadge, an external senior fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.<\/p>\n

Moreover, the Iranians need very little to succeed \u2014 a single drone or a single boat (even without a human crew) that reaches a ship\u2019s hull and attaches a mine. By contrast, the Americans would have to manage to eliminate absolutely all Iranian offensive capabilities (or force the regime to collapse).<\/p>\n

Two completely asymmetrical systems are currently facing each other. <\/p>\n

The Iranian one has a large number of relatively cheap offensive means at its disposal \u2014 for example, the Shahed\u2011136 drone, which the Iranians produce themselves, costs roughly $35,000 and on its own can seriously damage a huge tanker.<\/p>\n

By contrast, a defensive missile from the US Patriot system costs roughly a hundred times more, around $3.5m. The Americans do not have an unlimited supply of them, and their pockets are not bottomless.<\/p>\n

\"\"The Shahed\u2011136 drone, which the Iranians produce themselves (Source: Wikimedia<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Are there military options for the US to reopen the Strait of Hormuz (even without Iranian cooperation)?<\/p>\n

Yes, but they are very complex to carry out and there is no guarantee they would work. Essentially, there are two options: naval convoys that would escort commercial shipping through the strait, and the seizure of the Iranian coast.<\/p>\n

What would the military convoys look like?<\/p>\n

More or less as it sounds: commercial tankers would be accompanied by warships of the navy. Each escort would have to be able to deal with possible Iranian attacks from the air, on the surface and underwater. <\/p>\n

From the air, the Iranians could attack the ships with drones and missiles, on the sea surface they could send their fast attack craft against them (the so\u2011called mosquito fleet, as these small vessels are nicknamed), and underwater they could employ torpedoes, submarines or mines.<\/p>\n

The US military would therefore have to guarantee that it could cope with all three types of threats. The fact that it has so far not resorted to escorting ships suggests that, at this moment, it is either not capable of doing so or the risk of failure is too high.<\/p>\n

The first reason is how overstretched the US Navy is. It is currently busy destroying thousands of targets inside Iran and protecting its own bases in the region and Israel. Systems that could intercept missiles or drones heading for ships are being used elsewhere. The Americans are sending more and more forces into the area, including a third aircraft carrier, the USS George H. W. Bush (which will largely replace the USS Gerald R. Ford, now heading to a port in Crete for repairs after a fire on board).<\/p>\n

\"\"The USS Gerald R. Ford is now heading to a port in Crete for repairs after a fire on board (Source: Wikimedia<\/a>)<\/p>\n

According to experts quoted by the Wall Street Journal<\/a>, escorting the ships would require at least two warships per tanker or around twelve vessels for a convoy of ten tankers. Before the strait was closed, about 100 commercial ships passed through it every day, which would now translate into the low hundreds of warships and thousands of sailors dedicated to escorts.<\/p>\n

An operation of this kind would in effect be unprecedented<\/a>. When, in the 1980s during the Iran\u2011Iraq war, the US Navy escorted Kuwaiti oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, around thirty warships took part in the operation. The volume of traffic was much lower than today, and a smaller escort was sufficient.<\/p>\n

Even a much more recent case, Operation Prosperity Guardian<\/a>, under which the US Navy in 2023 ensured security in the Red Sea against attacks by Houthi rebels, does not provide an easy comparison. The Americans then deployed six to 12 ships, but the Houthis threatened shipping only from the air.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s demands that other states also take part in the protective convoys in Hormuz can therefore be understood in purely pragmatic terms. The US president is not interested in the legal aspects of the operations. He does not aspire to look like the leader of an international coalition that stands united against the Iranian threat and protects free trade in one of the most important straits for the global economy.<\/p>\n

Quite simply, the US Navy does not have enough capacity to handle the situation alone, yet it is increasingly clear that without reopening Hormuz to shipping, Trump can hardly bring the operation to an end.<\/p>\n

What are the main disadvantages of this option?<\/p>\n

First, it is not at all clear that it would work, despite the deployment of an enormous amount of equipment and personnel. It only takes a drone or missile to break through to the convoy a few times \u2014 and it is worth recalling that even the best defence is never 100 percent \u2014 and traders will simply conclude that the risks are too great.<\/p>\n

And even if the convoys did manage, in the end, to provide traders with the level of safety they require, for the US Navy, this would represent a huge and open\u2011ended commitment. It would in effect amount to the exact opposite of what Donald Trump and the experts who supported his foreign policy had promised. <\/p>\n

In this scenario, the United States would certainly not withdraw from the Middle East in order to free its hands for competition with China. On the contrary, it would tie down a large part of its capabilities in the Middle East indefinitely.<\/p>\n

Moreover, US resources are not only finite, but in many cases their current deployment is already at the limit of sustainability. The aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford, which had to sail off for repairs after the fire, has been continuously on operations for nine months. It already arrived in the Caribbean last August, where it took part in operations against Venezuela. From there it was redeployed directly to the Middle East.<\/p>\n

According to some reports (not confirmed by the US military), the USS Gerald R. Ford could be out of action for up to two years due to repairs. <\/p>\n

Sailors were told<\/a> that they were unlikely to return to the US before May, which means the Ford would break the record for the longest deployment of a warship since the Vietnam War. Extremely long operations not only prevent necessary work from being carried out on the ship, but the separation from families also places heavy stress on the crew. <\/p>\n

Across the US armed forces, the number of suicides has been rising for a long time, driven in part by the stress of separation.<\/p>\n

Would the deployment of ground forces solve the situation?<\/p>\n

The Americans could try to push the Iranians out of the area around the coast. This would almost certainly require landing ground troops. Even this option, however, might not be entirely sufficient to protect the tankers, because the Shahed drones mentioned above have a range of more than 2,000 km. At the same time, the most dangerous missiles and drones are those targeting tankers directly from the coast, from immediate proximity, which requires an instant response within at most a few minutes.<\/p>\n

Does that mean the Americans have to occupy the entire Iranian coast of the Strait of Hormuz?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"First published in Den\u00edk N. The last deliveries of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Qatar are arriving in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":35590,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[2756,102,14840,15927,15930,15925,15928,14838,101,15926,15929,14839],"class_list":{"0":"post-35589","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-strait-of-hormuz","8":"tag-typedefinedterm","9":"tag-hormuz","10":"tag-identifier4294","11":"tag-identifier4391","12":"tag-identifier4420","13":"tag-namedefence","14":"tag-nameenergy","15":"tag-namemiddle-east","16":"tag-strait-of-hormuz","17":"tag-termcodedefence","18":"tag-termcodeenergy","19":"tag-termcodemiddle-east"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116290270163938500","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35589\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}