J H KUNSTLER ( an island of reason in a sea of despair )<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t 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\u2019s not so.<\/p>\n
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\u2019re waiting in place, hanging back. The US still has work to do destroying Iran\u2019s shoreline defenses of missile and drone launch sites. Iran is firing all they\u2019ve 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\u2019t always move fast enough, and there isn\u2019t an endless supply of them.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 USS Santa Barbara and USS Canberra \u2014 quietly deployed in March 2025.<\/p>\n
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