The U.S. Navy has a critical new mission in the Strait of Hormuz: find and destroy any Iranian sea mines before they throw the global economy into further chaos.
The threat is real: Iran’s stockpile of thousands of mines, while depleted by the U.S.-Israeli campaign, has not been completely destroyed. And U.S. military intelligence believes that some of those mines have already been deployed at sea, according to one U.S. official briefed on the matter, granted anonymity to discuss ongoing operations.
The mere threat of Iranian violence against commercial shipping vessels was enough to paralyze the strait, subsequently plunging energy markets into turmoil. If a mine were to damage or destroy a commercial vessel, oil tanker traffic would slow even further — if not cease altogether — exacerbating the global energy crunch.
More than a dozen American warships are already in the region, and more are on the way. They’re primarily tasked with enforcing President Donald Trump’s blockade on Iranian shipping in and around the Persian Gulf.
But they’re also serving as mine-sweepers by marshalling surface ships, helicopters and underwater drones in a dangerous mission aimed at destroying those hard-to-find weapons before they detonate.
Mine hunting “is like picking dandelions in your yard so that you can create a path you can walk across your yard and not step on a dandelion,” said Steven Wills, a retired Navy officer at the United States Navy League Center for Maritime Strategy.
But it’s also akin to mowing a lawn, Willis said, because an area that’s been cleared one day could be re-mined relatively easily by small Iranian boats, making for a time-consuming and never-ending effort.
So far, the Navy hasn’t found any Iranian mines. But waterway traffic has dwindled to almost nothing because commercial operators remain wary, making it all the more critical for the U.S. military to demonstrate clear and safe passage routes.
“Today, we began the process of establishing a new passage and we will share this safe pathway with the maritime industry soon to encourage the free flow of commerce,” said Adm. Brad Cooper, commander of CENTCOM, over the weekend.
A recent war game conducted by Bryan Clark, a retired Navy officer at the Hudson Institute, found that maritime transit lanes could likely be cleared within a few weeks using new technologies deployed by American warships. “And if it’s not mined and you’re just looking to build a safe passage where you’re going to lead ships through, that might only take a few days,” Clark added.
Iran is capable of laying several types of mines, including variants that sit on the sea floor and release a charge when a ship passes overhead. Some are chained to the sea floor while the mine floats just below the surface, and others move with the currents.
American drone technology could be a key advantage in the hunt for these weapons. Launched from Navy ships, Knifefish and Kingfish underwater drones use sonar to identify devices on the ocean floor or floating near the surface.
“CENTCOM has been doing this enough to probably have a pretty good set of bottom survey maps” of the ocean floor, Wills said. “So they can send an unmanned system out there and take a look and say, ‘Okay, this looks different. This obviously suggests that something’s going on.’”
More ships are en route to the region to help with the blockade and anti-mine mission, according to publicly available data and ship trackers.
Two Avenger-class mine countermeasure ships — USS Chief and USS Pioneer — left Singapore on Friday, heading west toward the Middle East. And three Bahrain-based Littoral Combat Ships equipped with mine-hunting mission packages — which were pulled out of the Gulf just before the initial strikes in Iran, could move back to the region soon.
The Boxer Amphibious Ready Group — with 2,200 Marines aboard — is currently in the Pacific and is also headed for the Middle East. When those Marines arrive, the total number at sea in the region will be almost 5,000.
All total, these new arrivals will push the American presence in the Middle East to over 20 ships even though Trump told Fox News Tuesday he considers the war “very close to over.”
