Why it’s so difficult for the U.S. to fully reopen the Strait of #Hormuz | PBS News
▻https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/why-its-so-difficult-for-the-u-s-to-fully-reopen-the-strait-of-hormuz
Même les « experts » de l’officine sioniste #WINEP disent que la tâche est titanesque.
[…] restoring oil tanker traffic in the vital Middle East shipping corridor to prewar flows likely will require a much bigger armada of U.S. warships if not tens of thousands of American troops on Iranian soil, experts say. Despite on-and-off fighting, #Iran can still target vessels in the narrow Persian Gulf waterway with drones and missiles that have been hidden in a country a third of the size of the continental United States.
“Iran has been preparing for this type of asymmetric conflict for decades now,” said Jason H. Campbell, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and a former Pentagon official. “I think they’re starting to demonstrate why no other U.S. president since Reagan has elected to engage at this level of conflict with Iran, because they have that ability to completely disrupt the Strait of Hormuz.”
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Standing up that kind of force would take a few months and include “very high costs,” Campbell said.
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Such an effort today would require a substantial number of U.S. warships at a time when the fleet is smaller than it was in the 1980s, said Michael Eisenstadt, a former U.S. military analyst.
“You’d still need a very large chunk of the U.S. fleet being dedicated to this on an open-ended basis,” said Eisenstadt, who now directs the Military and Security Studies Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
He said it is a much more complicated environment today as Iran has amassed advanced capabilities, including its ability to launch drone and missile strikes.
“If we were to do what we need to do in order to make this work, which might involve putting people ashore in order to clear anti-cruise missile and drone launch sites, the losses of U.S. service members can go up, and if you’re going to do an escort operation also, the losses can potentially go up,” Eisenstadt added.
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The southern route hasn’t stopped Iranian attacks on ships, leading the U.S. military to strike Iranian air defense systems, radar sites, missile and drone equipment, and small boats.
But Iran’s threats alone can be enough to halt commerce in the strait, said Noam Raydan, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy focused on energy and maritime risks in the Middle East.
“They don’t need to launch drones and missiles — they can just use the marine radio channel to make some threats,” Raydan said. “And this in itself is enough to scare off a lot of seafarers.”
Clayton Seigle, a nonresident scholar in energy security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the Trump administration has not followed through on promises it made early on in the war to militarily assist shipments that became a liability of the conflict.
“Those naval escorts, U.S. warships, larger commitments like boots on the ground never came because I think that the rhetoric got a little ahead of our risk tolerance,” Seigle said. “And when push came to shove, the United States was not ready to deploy its Navy, to deploy its other military forces in the capacity that would be needed to even have a shot at neutralizing those threats.”
