Originally Posted by
Grumble
This right here. Iran didn’t shut down the SOH, the insurance companies did.
Yes this has always been a thing. Somebody throwing debris in the AG that even kind of *looks* like a mine could shut it down for a while.
Originally Posted by
Grumble
Bandar Abbas is basically scrap metal, 90% of their brown water Navy is now sunk, they don’t have the capability to genuinely close the straight, but they can harass some stragglers. It’s just about appeasing the insurance companies and things will start moving again.
The wildcard is that they maintained a large, distributed mine inventory and a lot of small boats and non-conventional boats to deliver them. All of that is harder to interdict than say regular surface combatants. Only CENTCOM knows the current status of that, and our prospects and timeline to degrade it all. Also we don't know their intentions (IRGC is probably heavily involved in that kind of asymmetric capability).