Real Battle Of Hormuz

Operation Epic Fury may be succeeding in destroying Iran’s ballistic missile stockpiles and its manufacturing facilities, but the Iranian state is now endeavouring to exact a price of sufficient magnitude to deter such attacks in the future.

The crux of the conflict is about to come down to whether the US Navy can prevent Iran from striking ships in the Strait of Hormuz, through which in peacetime a fifth of the world’s oil flows.

Iran’s arsenal for closing the Strait is multilayered, including anti-ship cruise missiles, explosive-laden naval drones, powered flying bombs such as the Shahed-136, naval mines and fast attack craft – all operating from a diverse set of islands and inlets, hills and towns that make them hard to detect until they are en route to target.

Finding and striking Iran’s means of attacking ships was historically extremely difficult. Aircraft could not remain indefinitely on station while reconnaissance required analysis, such that the time between detection and identification was often too long to stop an attack. During the 1991 Gulf War, for instance, Coalition air power struggled to locate and interdict Iraqi ballistic missile launchers in the vastness of Iraq’s western desert.

Today, things are different. Through a combination of satellite, electronic and human intelligence, the US can move to strike any locations associated with enemy stockpiles, command and control, sensors or launch sites. With US air power suppressing Iranian air defences, it becomes possible to establish continuous orbits of drones over areas of interest, streaming back live video of an immense swathe of territory. That imagery can be ingested and analysed in real time with the assistance of artificial intelligence while aircraft remain on standby to interdict the threat. As Israel demonstrated in 2025 and as has been shown again in the targeting of Iranian ballistic missile launchers, this can thin out what Iran can bring to bear.

▲ Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs) are taken from a US Air Force B-1 Lancer bomber at RAF Fairford in south-west England, March 15, 2026

Technological developments, however, also provide Iran with options that were not previously available. Satellite communications can enable Iranian explosive-laden naval drones to be launched a long way from the Strait of Hormuz to harass shipping that has passed through it. Iran’s drones can be launched from far inland and thereafter either fly in a grid across the Strait or be flown in first-person view mode to precisely target moving ships. Russian technological assistance in improving Iranian UAV designs should make them hard to counter with electronic warfare.

If US naval vessels escort convoys of commercial ships through the Strait, they should be able to provide sufficient layered defences to shoot down Iranian drones that threaten the passage. The problem, however, becomes operational tempo and endurance. The US lacks the capacity to escort hundreds of shipments a day, and if Iran pursues commercial shipping beyond the Straits then the challenge becomes harder.

Moreover, the more transits the US Navy must carry out, the more likely it is that there will be collisions, mine strikes or that a threat will slip through. The loss of US Navy vessels is a political risk for the White House. An oil tanker striking a mine could be a major ecological disaster and present a danger to further passage.

▲ Oil tankers and cargo ships line up in the Strait of Hormuz as seen from Khor Fakkan, United Arab Emirates, March 11, 2026

Endurance is also a problem for US attempts to interdict Iranian strikes before they launch. The number of UAV orbits and combat air patrols that must be maintained to reliably interdict time-sensitive targets is immense. Over time, this will lead to losses. More likely, the US sortie rate will fall and Iran’s opportunity to launch attacks will rise.

For the Iranian government, protracting the economic pain it delivers is attractive precisely because, if it forces a negotiated de-escalation, it will have re-established a form of deterrence. So the likelihood is that, while the threat to shipping in the Strait can be reduced, it cannot be eliminated.

In Statecraft: The New Rules of Power in a Divided World, I describe how the growing ability of state or non-state actors to attack shipping at sea creates a paradigmatic challenge to how navies operate, tasked as they are with protecting trade. Many have lamented the dire state of the Royal Navy in the last few weeks, but if Britain wishes to rebuild naval power we should carefully examine what tools a navy needs to exercise its functions under modern conditions.

Faced with this conundrum, the US is likely to explore two paths. One is to continue striking at the Iranian regime and make clear that this will continue until attacks in the Strait cease. This was what the US resorted to in Yemen in 2025 after failing to block the Houthis from striking vessels in the Red Sea.

In this case, however, the US has already hit the vulnerable political targets, and the Iranian regime views the threat to it as existential. Another challenge here is that the Iranians have devolved command and control to multiple subordinate military units such that the regime’s ability to order an end to the attacks is constrained. In the case of mines, they cannot be disabled remotely and will have to be cleared.

▲ A funeral ceremony at the Saleh shrine in Tehran for Ali Shamkhani, a slain senior advisor to the late supreme leader, Mar 14, 2026

The other path is ground operations and raids into Iran. This is a politically fraught option that would see the US take higher casualties. It would also be materially intensive and it is not clear what the end state of such an operation would be.

We should assume that there will be a persistent threat to shipping, even if the Iranians cannot attack every ship that attempts a passage. If the US declares victory on the basis of achieving its limited objectives of destroying Iran’s offensive military capacity, the regime will likely continue to block the Strait just long enough to show that they stopped doing so by choice. The impact of this conflict on the world energy market will not only be severe in the short term, therefore. It will have a long tail.

Jack Watling is Senior Research Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).