The Hormuz Reckoning
And how the neglect of one aspect of naval warfare is costing us dear
Wrapped within the optimism bias, miscalculation, and all those dilemmas of matching means to ends that this war has thrown up are judgments made by professionals who really should have known better. Consider, for example, the failure to plan for Iranians mining the Strait of Hormuz.
It was just last week in fact that HMS Middleton, the last of the Royal Navy’s Bahrain-based mine hunting squadron, returned to British waters. It marked the end of a presence that had lasted for decades, with four or five mine countermeasures vessels and a support ship based out in the emirate. What timing.
I have no doubt that there are Panglossian staff officers in the Ministry of Defence who even at this moment, with the trade through the Strait of Hormuz seized up, are arguing that it’s just as well Middleton is back home, because this way they can’t be targeted by the Iranians. But make no mistake the squadron’s withdrawal was a cost-cutting and personnel management measure, at a time when the promised replacement for the mine hunting force (making greater use of robotic craft to do this vital work) is not yet fully ready.
I have over the last few months of this blog charted both the vertiginous decline in Royal Navy ship numbers, and the fact that until our recent cutbacks that naval mine hunting was one of those things on the fairly short list of British capabilities that the American military still valued. The current situation is even more troubling because the US Navy has in recent decades neglected mine warfare and also withdrawn its own fleet of (four) small ships from the Gulf before the current hostilities.
Undoubtedly, the departure of Royal Navy at this point was viewed negatively by Gulf allies. There has been plenty of comment in the UAE in particular about discovering who your real friends are.
To make it all worse we’ve have plenty of recent lessons in the value of those capabilities. The 2003 Iraq invasion involved extensive mine sweeping operations, as did its aftermath, and during the tanker war of the 1980s Iran made much use of such weapons often dropped by small civilian craft or traders’ dhows.
At times in the past the Americans have used minesweeping helicopters dragging sledges across the water to deal with the threat. At others they based special forces with helicopters on floating bases in the Gulf, ready to intercept Revolutionary Guard speedboats and mine layers.
They’ve also announced that they’re striking many craft that could be used for such missions. But as the picture accompanying this blog shows, all manner of civilian boats can be used in such missions, and like the drones damaging hugely expensive oil terminals, it only takes a small number of exploded mines to have a dramatic effect.
In truth though there have been some cultural problems on show here for a long time. CNOs and 1SLs (that’s Chiefs of Naval Operations, ie the US Navy boss or First Sea Lords, the British counterpart in matelot-speak) have a long list of pricier, shiny, items on their priority list; from carrier aviation to hunter killer submarines or air defence destroyers.
When it comes to lobbying the politicians for money, deploying the arguments about jobs saved, or plotting their own career path to advancement, ambitious admirals have long known where this is where it’s at. Mine hunting was a Cinderella branch in the US Navy, which is one reason why they appreciated having British expertise and back up in this.
In recent years however, the Royal Navy has been run by people who have time and again allowed ‘capability gaps’ to emerge as a way of leveraging future funding. When Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft went out of service, there were howls of anguish from many sea power advocates – how could we, as a maritime nation, have allowed our ability to patrol our waters be reduced to a crew member with binoculars looking out of the windows of a Hercules?
The tactics worked, pressuring the MoD to find the money to buy a new fleet of P-8 patrol planes from the USA. Something similar has happened with mine hunting – there is a plan to make use of support ships operating uncrewed submersibles to do this, but so far there’s just one of them and it’s still working up. Capability gaps are all very well then, until someone actually calls upon you to do your duty.
There are those on social media and the airwaves seeking to justify past mistakes by arguing that small mine hunting vessels would be sitting ducks in the Gulf and would require a naval task group to protect them from Iranian attack. There’s something to this, but it speaks to a bigger failure to make effective plans to thwart a closure of the Strait of Hormuz as well as the absence of sufficient investment in some of the means needed to do it.
There is a bigger crisis here of sea power in the way Britain and the United States long defined it.
A major effort would be required, likely using dozens of ships and aircraft, to reopen that vital shipping lane. And even if this effort was made, there are those questions of insurance, whose flags the ships are under, and owners’ risk aversion.
Such an operation would require a readiness to suffer repeated attacks and, in extremis, the loss of warships. What we’ve seen off the shores of Yemen, after Houthi attacks on passing shipping, provides a foretaste: western warships could defend themselves but at high cost in scarce munitions and with merchant ship owners generally reluctant to follow.
The running down of mine hunting, an apparently niche capability, is part then of a much bigger and more momentous picture in the decline of western navies that were key to maintaining trade routes for so long. Off Yemen before, and in the Gulf now, many ships trying to evade attack are identifying themselves as Chinese.
Interesting tho the history is, it's part of a broader picture that is we, in the UK, really aren't an imperial power and really should focus on defence, not international adventures.
Many other similar sizes nations don't think they have a mandate for "keeping shipping lanes open" anywhere in the world. Do we see Sweden or Spain "intervening"?
The truth is, we get our oil from the US and Norway. There is no vital national interest at stake here for the UK. We didn't start this particular war, and nor should we enter it. If we have money to spend in defence, we should do so on actual threats to national security: Russian expansionism in Europe, defence of our critical infrastructure and achieving technological independence on vital energy and communications networks.
I think it only fair to mention the politics of this. The Conservatives inflicted 15 years of austerity in the UK, and quite reasonably people would have been unimpressed with govt spending on minesweeping activities whist children at home went without food or heat.
In that respect, I think little has changed. What should change is what we conceive to be the purpose of our military forces.
Your piece correctly highlights a neglected corner of naval warfare: mine countermeasures. But the Hormuz situation also illustrates something slightly more fundamental — a structural mismatch between the economics of sea denial and the economics of sea control.
Naval mines are among the oldest weapons in maritime warfare, yet they remain one of the most effective. They are cheap, difficult to detect, and strategically asymmetric. A state attempting to deny access to a narrow maritime chokepoint does not need a large navy. It only needs the ability to create uncertainty.
The Strait of Hormuz is uniquely vulnerable to this logic. At its narrowest point the navigable shipping lanes are only a few kilometres wide. Even a small number of mines — real or suspected — can disrupt traffic dramatically. Insurance markets react instantly, shipowners hesitate, and the commercial system that depends on predictable transit begins to freeze.
In other words, the strategic effect of mining is often achieved before a single ship is sunk.
Historically Iran understands this dynamic very well. During the so-called Tanker War in the late 1980s, relatively primitive mines caused disproportionate disruption. The USS Samuel B. Roberts struck a single Iranian mine in 1988 and nearly sank. That incident alone triggered Operation Praying Mantis, the largest U.S. naval combat operation since World War II. The lesson was clear: even limited mining can escalate strategically.
What has changed since then is not the weapon but the Western force structure.
For decades the United States and its allies designed their navies around high-end power projection: carrier strike groups, nuclear submarines, air-defence destroyers. These platforms are extraordinarily capable, but they are optimised for major naval combat — not for the slow, technically demanding work of clearing mines from confined waters.
Mine warfare sits at the opposite end of the prestige hierarchy. It is labour-intensive, risky, and offers little bureaucratic glamour. As you note, it has long been treated as a “Cinderella capability.” The Royal Navy historically maintained one of the few specialised mine countermeasure forces that the U.S. Navy genuinely valued. Its recent drawdown therefore has effects far beyond Britain itself.
But the deeper issue may not simply be the number of mine-hunting vessels. It is that mine warfare is inherently slow. Even with modern robotic systems, clearing a mined waterway can take days or weeks. In a globalised economy that moves roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil through Hormuz, even a temporary interruption can have cascading consequences.
This is why Iran does not need to permanently close the Strait to achieve strategic leverage. Temporary disruption, repeated intermittently, may be enough.
There is also an operational paradox here. Western navies are superb at destroying identifiable military targets. But mine warfare is often conducted using civilian craft — fishing boats, dhows, or small commercial vessels — deploying mines covertly at night. Distinguishing legitimate maritime traffic from hostile activity becomes legally and operationally complex, especially in congested waters.
In that sense, the Hormuz problem resembles the drone war we have seen elsewhere: low-cost systems imposing high-cost defensive responses.
Reopening the Strait after serious mining would indeed require a large multinational effort. Mine countermeasure vessels, helicopters, unmanned underwater vehicles, escort ships, maritime patrol aircraft, and special forces all play a role. But even if such a force were assembled quickly, commercial confidence would not automatically return. Insurance premiums, flag-state politics, and the risk tolerance of shipping companies become decisive factors.
Sea power, in other words, is not only about military capability. It is about maintaining the credibility of safe passage.
What we may be seeing in the Gulf is therefore not just a capability gap in mine hunting, but a broader shift in the balance between naval denial and naval control. The former is getting cheaper and easier. The latter is becoming more complex and expensive.
That dynamic has implications far beyond Hormuz. It affects every maritime chokepoint — from the Bab el-Mandeb to the Taiwan Strait — where relatively modest forces can threaten the arteries of global trade.
If so, the real lesson is uncomfortable: the most strategically disruptive weapons at sea may not be aircraft carriers or hypersonic missiles.
They may still be mines.