Loading ...Order of Battle
J H KUNSTLER ( an island of reason in a sea of despair )
Don’t lose your shit over mines in the Strait of Hormuz and the oil price shooting up. Iran has many thousands of mines. But something has to lay them out in the water. Iran has no more naval ships. They have small boats. The US can see everything moving on the surface, or sitting at docks. We are blowing them up methodically. The news outlets who want the US to fail in this operation (because: Trump) want you to think that we had no plan for dealing with this problem. That’s not so.
There are very few mines actually laid so far. Tankers are not going through the Strait of Hormuz because their captains are nervous. Their ships and their cargos are worth millions and the insurance costs millions. So, they’re waiting in place, hanging back. The US still has work to do destroying Iran’s shoreline defenses of missile and drone launch sites. Iran is firing all they’ve got left. Whenever they launch something, we see the geo-location on our satellites and radars. The mobile launchers are a little trickier because, obviously, they shoot and move. But they don’t always move fast enough, and there isn’t an endless supply of them.
The US Navy decommissioned its four Avenger-class minesweeper ships in the Persian Gulf in September, 2025, but replaced them with more agile Littoral Combat Ships (LCSs) capable of countering submarines and clearing mines. Two LCS ships — USS Santa Barbara and USS Canberra — quietly deployed in March 2025.