‘US can’t secure Strait of Hormuz without ground troops’: Experts wargame US-Iran war

Despite striking Iran every day, the United States cannot reopen the Strait of Hormuz unless it sends more warships to the Persian Gulf and deploys tens of thousands of soldiers in a ground operation, experts who have wargamed a US-Iran war have concluded.

While US President Donald Trump attacked Iran to dismantle its nuclear programme, overthrow the Islamic Republic, and smash Iran's military to smithereens, the mission has now been reduced to keeping the Strait of Hormuz open. The US military is failing to achieve even that modest objective.

Experts have concluded that the US military will continue to fail because accomplishing the mission would require far more firepower than Trump appears willing to deploy to the region.

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The US Central Command has said that it currently has 20 warships in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea engaged in the war with Iran. Experts have said that the force is nowhere near sufficient to reopen the Strait.

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As Firstpost's Madhur Sharma previously flagged, the stalemate in the Strait is of Trump's own making. The interim deal that he signed effectively granted Iran sovereign rights over the waterway, and once Iran began exercising those sovereign rights, the US military began attacking it on Trump's orders.

Now that Trump has turned the Strait into a stalemate, he can either reach a negotiated settlement or pursue a military solution.

More fighters, more warships, tens of thousands of troops: Experts on what it would take to reopen the Strait

Experts have said that daily strikes may produce spectacular visuals but do little to reopen the Strait.

The suggestion that the United States is just a few more days of strikes away from completely removing Iran's ability to keep the Strait closed is "completely a fallacy", according to Jason Campbell, a former Pentagon official who is currently with the Middle East Institute.

"The reality is that if you wanted to militarily open the Strait of Hormuz such that the shipping companies, and as important, the insurance companies that cover them, deem this safe for passage, it would take a major ground operation with tens of thousands of forces," Campbell told The Hill.

So far, Trump has not been able to demonstrate to shipping and insurance companies that the US military has dominance over the Strait because it does not. Iran retains the capability to strike any ship anywhere in the Persian Gulf at will, as it has demonstrated repeatedly in recent weeks by targeting commercial vessels.

Bryan Clark, a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, told The Hill that restoring traffic to pre-war levels would require more than the 20 ships currently deployed in the region.

Clark said that a wargame conducted by Hudson found that the US military would need to maintain combat air patrols over the area to shoot down drones and strike drone-launch sites. US forces would also need protection from sea-based drones and fast-attack boats.

As aircraft can only mitigate the threat posed by sea-based drones and fast-attack boats to a certain extent, Clark pointed out that a significant armada would be required to escort commercial vessels through the Strait.

"If the aircraft don't get either the airborne drone or the sea-based drone, you've got to have a destroyer insert itself in there to be able to shoot those things down or shoot them up," Clark said.

Flagging Iran's available missile stockpiles and its ability to hide those munitions in caves and buildings along the Strait, Clark said the US military would need destroyers in the region to manage these threats.

According to Clark, while at least a dozen ships would be required to remain stationed in the Strait full-time for protection and escort duties, additional vessels would be needed to enforce the blockade. This means the United States would require far more than the 20 ships currently deployed in the region.

Moreover, Clark noted that more ships would also be needed to protect aircraft carriers deployed farther back.

Separately, Campbell said that Iran has spent decades wargaming the closure of the Strait from its 370-mile coastline. He said that, to nullify threats along such a vast coastline and keep ships safely beyond the range of Iran's anti-ship missiles, "you're talking tens of thousands of ground forces having to take and hold significant amounts of terrain for an indeterminate amount of time".

Campbell warned that such an operation, conducted over an indefinite period, would incur significant casualties and financial costs.

But Trump does not appear to have the appetite either for casualties or for deploying additional firepower to the region. Throughout the war, he has failed to achieve his objectives because he has avoided committing the scale and type of force required. For example, he bombed Iran's nuclear facilities last year but did not drop enough bombs to obliterate those sites. In the ongoing war, he has stopped short of ordering the ground operations needed to dismantle Iran's nuclear programme.