re: It's a Smart Move to Not Try to Use US Navy to Open the Strait

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the Strait is within range of conventional land-based artillery. Which cannot be intercepted or shot down at all.

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you sure about that?

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My question is why won't they at least let us use our bases within their countries and/or fly through their air space?

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This should be obvious. If our allies assist in any way, Iran will retaliate not allowing their assets to pass, even with the payola being forced.

But 25 ships/ day, down from 150/day with 2000 waiting, is a stranglehold. There have been a total of 25 ships attacked.

Begging the question ... why allow IRI any communication beyond Iran's border. They shouldn't know ANYTHING. They've cut their own populous from the internet. I wish we could do the same to them.

I know we can't give them a blackout, but I wish it were possible.

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you sure about that?

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Yep. I am. They scored a rare hit on convential artillery testing of the CIWS. It was a controlled test and still didn’t get many actual intercepts on a single artillery at a time.

Fire 10 shells and 9 are getting through. Maybe all 10.

CIWS is great on bigger slower munitions like missiles, rockets, drones, and even mortars. Conventional artillery flies at the speed of a bullet.

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Do you even USS Tripoli bro? I find your ignorance on the matter to be almost amusing.

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Yes we have an amphibious assault ship called the Tripoli. What’s your point?

Are you suggesting the Tripoli has crossed the Straight of Hormuz? Cause it hasn’t.

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Yes we have an amphibious assault ship called the Tripoli. What’s your point?

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That it is a game changer imho.

Why are you dismissing its capabilities and potential (probable?) impact?

Here’s a great piece about it, and well written.

James E. Thorne
@DrJStrategy

Food for thought.

Trump, Hormuz and the End of the Free Ride

For half a century, Western strategists have known that the Strait of Hormuz is the acute point where energy, sea power and political will intersect. That knowledge is not in dispute. What is new in this war with Iran is that the United States, under Donald Trump, has chosen not to rush to “solve” the problem. In Hegelian terms, he is refusing an easy synthesis in order to force the underlying contradiction to the surface.

The old thesis was simple: the US guarantees open sea lanes in the Gulf, and everyone else structures their economies and politics around that free insurance. Europe and the UK embraced ambitious green policies, ran down hard-power capabilities and lectured Washington on multilateral virtue, secure in the assumption that American carriers would always appear off Hormuz. The political class behaved as if the American security guarantee were a law of nature, not a contingent choice. Their conduct today is closer to Chamberlain than Churchill: temporising, issuing statements, hoping the storm will pass without a fundamental reordering of their responsibilities.

Trump’s antithesis is to withhold the automatic guarantee at the moment of maximum stress. Militarily, the US can break Iran’s residual ability to contest the Strait; that is not the binding constraint. The point is to delay that act. By allowing a closure or semi-closure to bite, Trump ensures that the immediate pain is concentrated in exactly the jurisdictions that have most conspicuously free-ridden on US power: the EU and the UK. Their industries, consumers and energy-transition assumptions are exposed.

In that context, his reported blunt message to European and British leaders, you need the oil out of the Strait more than we do; why don’t you go and take it? Is not a throwaway line. It is the verbalisation of the antithesis. It openly reverses the traditional presumption that America will carry the burden while its allies emote from the sidelines.

In this dialectic, the prize is not simply the reopening of a chokepoint. The prize is a reordered system in which the United States effectively arbitrages and controls the global flow of oil. A world in which US-aligned production in the Americas plus a discretionary capability to secure,or not secure, Hormuz places Washington at the centre of the hydrocarbon chessboard. For that strategic end, a rapid restoration of the old status quo would be counterproductive.

A quick, surgical “fix” of Hormuz would short-circuit the dialectic. If Trump rapidly crushed Iran’s remaining coastal capabilities, swept the mines and escorted tankers back through the Strait, Europe and the UK would heave a sigh of relief and return to business as usual: underfunded militaries, maximalist green posturing and performative disdain for US power, all underwritten by that same power. The contradiction between their dependence and their posture would remain latent.

By declining to supply the synthesis on demand, and by explicitly telling London and Brussels to “go and take it” themselves, Trump forces a reckoning. European and British leaders must confront the fact that their energy systems, their industrial bases and their geopolitical sermons all rest on an American hard-power foundation they neither finance nor politically respect. The longer the contradiction is allowed to unfold, the stronger the eventual synthesis can be: a new order in which access to secure flows, Hormuz, Venezuela and beyond, is explicitly conditional on real contributions, not assumed as a right.

In that sense, the delay in “taking” the Strait, and the challenge issued to US allies to do it themselves, is not indecision. It is the negative moment Hegel insisted was necessary for history to move. Only by withholding the old guarantee, and by saying so out loud to those who depended on it, can Trump hope to end the free ride.

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It will get hit and sunk just as easy.

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Why?

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How in the hell is a big slow amphibious assault ship gonna do shite against Iranian artillery coming from 20 directions at once.

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You get specialized Marine Corp Units (2500 of them), and pretty much constant air coverage. What the carrier provides equates to long gaps in air cover…allowing Iranian small boats to put forth sporadic patrols. The Tripoli can be deployed MUCH closer to the Strait. With air cover by the Tripoli (20+ F35’s on board), boat patrols dry up, and minesweepers can do their thing. Helicopter’s (also from the Tripoli) will also be used extensively to assist in removing the mines.

Lastly, once the Iranian islands in the strait are neutered, the U.S. can set up shop on some currently uninhabited islands.
That means the USA would have control of the Strait…not Iran.

Thats my take anyway.

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My point is the risk of losing a large warship is high due to how close they would be to Iran.

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That applies to most of the fleet.

The Tripoli is different though.

The cost (7 billion including 20 F35’s) relative to what it brings tactically make it a game changer imho.

ETA - It (and its two sister ships) was deemed to be a design mistake. Ironically, its capabilities (and VERY low cost compared to carriers…roughly 120 billion) may make its design preferred going forward.