Why fully reopening Strait of Hormuz is such a challenge
The Hill · C · trust 62/100
Comments: by Ellen Mitchell - 07/16/26 6:00 AM ET Comments: Link copied by Ellen Mitchell - 07/16/26 6:00 AM ET Comments: Link copied Associated Press Tankers and cargo vessels are seen in the Gulf of Oman, along shipping routes linking the Strait of Hormuz and the Arabian Sea, June 16, 2026. President Trump’s return to a U.S. military blockade on Iranian ports this week marked another dead end in his bid to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
The restart of the blockade — which first began in mid-April and held until last month when a tenuous deal to begin peace negotiations between the U.S. and Iran ended it — underscores the difficult nature of fully restoring shipping traffic in the vital waterway.
Trump, who has tried both diplomatic and violent avenues to open the strait — on Wednesday announcing the U.S. will hit Iran “hard” over the next three days — faces the uncomfortable truth that fully reopening the shipping lane to prewar levels will take far more than a few dozen warships and the current wave of strikes, experts say.
“This insinuation that we’re just a couple more days of strikes away from completely removing Iran’s capability to keep the strait closed is completely a fallacy,” according to Jason Campbell, a former Pentagon official now with the Middle East Institute.
“The reality is that if you wanted to militarily open the Strait of Hormuz such that … the shipping companies — and as important, the insurance companies that cover them … deem this safe for passage, it would take a major ground operation with tens of thousands of forces,” he told The Hill.
Located between Oman and Iran, the Strait of Hormuz connects the Persian Gulf with the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea, through which about a fifth of the world’s oil supply flows in times of peace.
Considered one of the world’s most important choke points in seaborne shipping, Tehran has effectively blocked the waterway since the start of the war in late February with a few brief periods of reopening. The chokehold has sent oil prices surging as ships fearing attack can’t get through, and Iran has shown no sign of backing off its demand to set the terms for any ships hoping to pass.
Trump for the time being appears willing to escalate the conflict to force open the strait, with the U.S. military on Wednesday beginning a new round of strikes on Tehran. That follows a seven-hour attack on dozens of military targets near the strait and Iranian coastal areas late on Tuesday.
And U.S. Central Command (Centcom), the military arm that oversees U.S. forces in the Middle East, on Tuesday announced the renewed blockade of Iranian ports.
“There are currently more than 20 U.S. Navy warships and hundreds of military aircraft operating across the Middle East, American forces remain vigilant, lethal, and ready,” the command wrote in a social media post.
But restoring oil tanker traffic to levels seen before the war and keeping it that way likely will require more ships than the more than 20 Navy boats in the vicinity, as Iran can easily target vessels in the narrow waterway with drones and missiles, said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow with the Hudson Institute think tank.
Clark told The Hill that in a recent simulated wargame done by the Hudson Institute prior to the conflict, analysts found that the U.S. military would need to utilize combat air patrols over the area to shoot down drones and attack drone launcher sites. Forces would also need protection from the sea-based drones and fast attack boats — which aircraft can only quell to some degree — and a significant armada to escort commercial shipping vessels through the strait.
“If the aircraft don’t get either the airborne drone or the sea-based drone, you’ve got to have a destroyer insert itself in there to be able to shoot those things down or shoot them up,” he said.
Clark noted that Iran still has some missiles and will likely roll out the remaining stockpile “and try to deploy those from the various caves and buildings along the straightaways that it has” along the waterway, for which the U.S. will need destroyers.
But with a dozen or more needed surface ships or destroyers going up and down the Strait of Hormuz to provide escorts to convoys of ships, that means others will be needed to enforce the blockade, he said.
The more than 20 ships now in the Centcom region are scattered, but “you would probably have to use all of those ships between the blockade and the shipping protection mission, which means you may not have anybody doing the other missions, like the someone’s got to defend the carriers,” Clark explained.
It remains to be seen whether more ships are coming, though Trump on Tuesday reportedly held a Situation Room meeting to discuss a massive offensive in Iran, far bigger than the current strikes around the Strait of Hormuz.
Ahead of the meeting, Trump suggested to Fox News that U.S. strikes would soon ramp up.
“Next week, it gets really bad for them because next week comes the power plants,” Trump said. “Next week comes the bridges. We’re gonna knock out all their power plants. We’re gonna knock out all their bridges unless they get to the table and negotiate.”
Even with extra ships and ramped up airstrikes, inserting American military vessels into the waters just off the Iranian coast is an exceedingly dangerous mission, as they face direct attack by drones or shore-to-ship ballistic missiles.
Campbell said the Iranians are very skilled at a series of asymmetric tactics that they’ve been preparing to use for decades and have more than 370 miles of coastline to attack from. To cover that, as well as control the terrain roughly 30 miles inland to keep ships safely out of the range of Iran’s antiship missiles, “you’re talking tens of thousands of ground forces having to take and hold significant amounts of terrain for an indeterminate amount of time,” he said.
Orders of that magnitude for an indeterminate amount of time will incur significant U.S.…
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