Reopening the Strait of Hormuz sounds straightforward in theory - the US Navy is the most powerful maritime force on earth. But keeping the Strait open against an adversary that only needs to create doubt is a different problem entirely, Gen. Stanley McChrystal told the New York Times.
McChrystal compared the Strait to Baghdad after the initial invasion in 2003. "We could bomb Iraq pretty easily; we could even take Baghdad with relative ease," he told columnist David French on the NYT podcast "The Opinions," as "Hvylya" reports. "But once we wanted to change the reality on the ground, who actually controlled things, how things worked, now you're not at 30,000 feet. You're at six feet."
In the Strait, Iran does not need to challenge US warships directly. It has mines, autonomous surface and undersurface vehicles, and other asymmetric threats. But the key insight, McChrystal argued, is that those weapons do not even need to target military vessels. "They only have to shoot a civilian tanker or a cargo vessel once a week, and then people go, 'Well, I don't know what day they're going to strike somebody, so I'm not going to let my ships go now,'" he said.
French added the financial dimension. Insurers would refuse to cover commercial ships transiting the Strait under those conditions. "The financial risk becomes unacceptable, which renders it virtually impossible to transit the Strait because nobody's doing that with total financial exposure," he said. The result: even a low-level Iranian campaign of harassment could effectively close the chokepoint without ever engaging the US military head-on.
"If you like this war, enjoy this first part, because this is the best part. Because everything after this will be harder," McChrystal warned.
Previously, "Hvylya" reported that nearly all of the world's seaborne oil flows through just eight chokepoints, most of which have no viable alternative routes.