By James Jackson
Operation Epic Fury began on February 28, 2026, with objectives unrelated to commercial shipping: destroy Iran’s ballistic missiles and their manufacturing plants, destroy its navy, sever its proxies, and foreclose a nuclear weapon. The strait was open when the bombs fell. On March 4, Iran closed the strait in response to the strikes. What had been a campaign against Iranian military power became, by consequence, a campaign to reopen a waterway the United States had helped shut. Three months later, the strait is still closed, though not due to any failure of skill at sea. Aegis-equipped American ships have compiled a near-perfect intercept record against Iranian coastal cruise missiles, drones, and small-boat swarms. Iranian launch sites, radars, and command nodes are being struck on schedule. Yet the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ irregular forces – mobile anti-ship missiles, drones, and fast-boat flotillas dispersed along the coast – remain largely intact. The strait is still (at the time of this writing) in dispute.
Iran now runs a permission regime, issuing IRGC transit clearances and waving favored flags through. Under Project Freedom, U.S. escorts briefly pushed individual hulls through the Omani waters along the strait’s southern side, but this effort was terminated in early May. Three months into the campaign, ordinary commercial transit has collapsed to under a tenth of its pre-conflict volume and stayed there.1 Tankers and boxships are still routing around the Cape of Good Hope, war-risk premiums for Western-linked hulls remain prohibitive, and the flow of commerce the United States went to war to restore has not returned. No amount of additional tactical excellence is bringing it back.
Whether the United States was wise to start this war is a separate question, and not the one this essay addresses. The strikes on Iran were in theory a choice to move from one state of affairs to a better one. They produced the opposite. The strait was open when the campaign began; Iran closed it in response to the strikes, and the commerce the United States sought to protect collapsed. But the war was fought, and fighting it taught what the decision (and strategy) missed. One can think the war a mistake and still find the analysis useful.
Destroying Iranian launchers was never going to reopen the strait, no matter how many the Navy hits. Whether the strait stays closed gets decided each morning in the war-risk syndicates of London and the risk committees of the world’s shipping lines, in numbers no destroyer can reach. They hold a veto no warship can override. The Navy does not choose this fight or set its aim; it executes the policy it is handed. So the burden falls where Clausewitz put it: on the policymakers and the President who set the war’s objective. Until they accept that reopening the strait is an economic and political act rather than a targeting problem, the Navy can win every tactical engagement while the nation will remain on track to lose the war.
What Is Actually Being Contested
Planning to win wars must begin with the aim in mind. The United States is not trying to sink the Iranian navy. Rather, it is trying to reestablish the flow of seaborne commerce. That aim defines the object of the contest, and the object is not the water. A strait is closed not when ships cannot pass but when the people who own the cargo and insure the hull decide the cost of passing exceeds the cost of going around. That decision is a financial calculation, and it forms the decisive point of a chokepoint war. Whoever controls the calculation controls the strait.
For Alfred Thayer Mahan and Julian Corbett, the most prominent theorists of modern sea power, command of the sea was a physical condition: the ability to use the sea and deny its use to the enemy. In today’s global economy, where moving goods depends as much on insurance, credit, and confidence as on hulls and engines, that condition is necessary but no longer enough. A destroyer can shield a ship, but it cannot lower that ship’s insurance bill or convince an owner that next week’s voyage will be uneventful. Command of the sea has slipped from the gun line to the insurance ledger, and the Navy did not move with it. Sea control has become an actuarial condition: whether the strait can be used is decided by the price underwriters put on the risk of crossing it – the same arithmetic an actuary applies to any hazard – not by which navy wins the day’s engagement.
The number that decides a chokepoint is the war-risk premium: the surcharge a hull pays to sail through a war zone. It tracks the persistence of a threat, not the odds that any given attack is intercepted. An underwriter is indifferent to the ninety-nine missiles that were stopped. They price the hundredth, the catastrophic loss that bankrupts the voyage, and the standing chance that it recurs tomorrow. A single ship lost undoes the record of a thousand intercepts.
The Red Sea already showed this. From January 2024, U.S. and coalition warships ran the same high-intercept campaign against the Houthis that is now underway against Iran, and ran it well. Yet container traffic through the Suez Canal fell roughly seventy-five percent and stayed down from 2024 onward through the present, with no recovery even during lulls in Houthi activity.2 Carriers kept routing the long way around Africa, adding some 4,000 miles and ten to fourteen days per voyage and absorbing a roughly nine-percent cut in effective global shipping capacity, because the market was not pricing the kill ratio.3 It was pricing the chance that one drone would get through and the certainty that the threat had no announced end. The shooting was excellent. Yet the strait stayed shut.
Hormuz will reproduce this at greater intensity: a narrower, mineable waterway overlooked by mobile coastal missiles along the whole Iranian littoral, carrying roughly a fifth of the world’s oil.4 The premium will not fall simply because Iranian launchers are destroyed. It will fall only when the market believes the threat has durably ended, and belief in an ending is exactly what an open-ended bombing campaign cannot supply.
The Asymmetry of Doubt
The cost-per-intercept problem is by now well documented: multimillion-dollar SM-2 and SM-6 interceptors spent on twenty-thousand-dollar drones, nearly a billion dollars in such rounds burned in the Red Sea alone, and a vertical-launch magazine drawn down faster than industry can replace it, consuming the very interceptors the fleet needs for the Pacific.5 The Vice Chief of Naval Operations has said plainly that a protracted fight will demand more magazine depth than the force possesses.6
But munitions are the lesser asymmetry. The greater one is doubt. The attacker’s product is uncertainty, which is cheap, requires no successful hit, and can be sustained indefinitely from a cave with a launch rail. The defender’s product is confidence, which cannot be manufactured at all. Confidence is earned slowly and lost instantly. You cannot prove a negative to an underwriter. Premiums rise in an afternoon and fall over quarters, because the market has a long memory for danger and a short one for safety. The defender is buying a perishable good with a currency the adversary can debase at will.
None of this leaves the defender powerless. It means the defender’s familiar tools such as more intercepts and strikes are the wrong ones. The moves that actually lower the price of risk lie outside the peacetime paradigm, and a state willing to use them has them: it can shoulder the risk itself through a government guarantee or turn the same economic weapon back on Tehran by choking the oil exports that fund the war. The defender has options. Firepower aimed at launchers just isn’t one of them.
Here the kinetic campaign becomes counterproductive. The fighting created the war zone, and the strikes cannot clear it. Their visible open-endedness sustains the one signal the underwriter cares about. To a risk committee, an ongoing high-intensity bombing campaign is evidence the danger is still live enough to require bombing. The campaign meant to reopen the strait reads, to the people who decide whether it is open, as a daily bulletin that it remains a war zone.
The Stand-In Force, Turned Around
The Marine Corps will recognize what Iran is doing, because Iran is running the Marine Corps’ own playbook. Low-signature, mobile, lethal, and cheap, operating from inside the contested zone to deny freedom of maneuver: this is the Stand-in Forces concept made manifest, except that the stand-in force is Iranian and the maneuver denied is American.7 Coastal launchers and drones have held multi-billion-dollar capital ships at arm’s length and pushed carrier strike groups into recessed defensive boxes, just as the Houthis forced U.S. carriers out of the Bab el-Mandeb and sent the George H.W. Bush carrier strike group the long way around Africa.8
The instinct is to treat this as a targeting problem and answer it with better sensors and more interceptors. That misreads the lesson. What a stand-in force generates is doubt, the steady pressure it keeps on an adversary’s economic lifelines. The IRGC Navy has sunk little and priced a great deal. That should change how the Marine Corps measures and resources the concept. A force designed to destroy enemy hardware fights where the United States is wealthiest and most vulnerable to cost-imposition; redesign it to manufacture uncertainty in an adversary’s commercial flows and it fights where great powers are thinnest-skinned and least able to hit back. The right yardstick is cost and uncertainty imposed per dollar spent, and by that measure Iran is winning at a rate no munitions budget can match.
The Free-Rider Tell
The clearest proof that the contested good is confidence rather than control is sitting in the strait right now, transiting unmolested. Chinese-flagged and Russian-flagged vessels move through it under bilateral understandings with Tehran, using the friction the U.S. Navy generates as a shield for their own commerce.
This would be impossible if the good in dispute were physical control of water, which is indivisible. You cannot grant one ship partial control of a strait. But you can grant selective confidence, a promise not to target a particular flag, because confidence is divisible and assignable. That safe passage can be parceled out flag by flag shows what Tehran actually commands: the risk of passage. It is in the indemnity business, not the sea-lane business. The United States, sustaining a high-risk environment from which it has exempted its two principal competitors, is paying the full premium to buy Beijing and Moscow a discount.
1987: The Flag, Not the Gun
None of this is unprecedented. The United States solved the same problem in these waters thirty-nine years ago. During the Tanker War, Iran imposed doubt on Gulf shipping with mines and IRGC small boats, the 1980s edition of today’s drones and coastal missiles, and Kuwait’s tankers became uninsurable in practice. What reopened commerce was not the destruction of Iran’s navy. The largest kinetic action, Operation Praying Mantis, lasted a day and came late.9 It was Operation Earnest Will, and at its core Earnest Will was a flag, not a gun. By reflagging eleven Kuwaiti tankers as American, the United States moved the risk of those hulls onto the U.S. government and its implicit guarantee, collapsing the war-risk burden that had priced them off the water.10 The escort made the guarantee credible. What the cargo owners paid for was the promise behind it.
Two further features of 1987 matter for 2026. The commitment was tied to a war-termination framework, UN Security Council Resolution 598, so the market could see an ending rather than an open-ended campaign. And it was bounded precisely because it was a guarantee rather than a war. Critics attacked it as an open-ended commitment, which forced it to define its limits.11 The decisive maritime weapon of the Tanker War was a credible, bounded, state-backed promise. The Navy made the promise believable. It did not make the promise, and no amount of bombing could have.
Redesigning the Campaign Around the Premium
If sea control is an actuarial condition, the campaign must drive down the price of risk directly rather than chase the launchers that are only its distant cause. Four moves follow.
First, re-create the guarantee. Let Washington itself cover the war risk that private insurers now refuse. The same thing occurred in 1987 when it put the American flag on Kuwaiti tankers, except today the tool is the U.S. Treasury’s guarantee rather than the flag. This is the single most powerful move available, and the one thing the Navy can support but cannot do on its own. Driving down the price of passage is the goal. Every strike exists only to make that guarantee believable.
Second, sell predictability, because predictability is what the market prices. A scheduled, published, escorted transit window, a convoy that reliably sails Tuesday, is worth more to an underwriter than an unannounced ninety-nine-percent intercept rate, because it converts an open-ended threat into a bounded and plannable one. What the market is buying is a schedule it can plan around.
Third, set a military goal the Navy can actually reach. Wiping out Iran’s coastal forces is not it. They are cheap, scattered, and replaced faster than the Navy can replace the missiles it spends shooting them down. But making it unlikely enough that any single attacker gets through, unlikely enough for an insurer to live with, is reachable. Pursue it with layered, cost-sustainable defenses, including the directed-energy systems the Navy is now fielding, and the fleet stops burning through magazines better preserved for a Pacific fight on an Middle Eastern attrition contest it is positioned to lose.12
Fourth, signal the ending. Because the price of risk depends on how open-ended the danger looks, a credible, stated path to ending the war is itself a force that brings that price down. Escalating does the opposite: it stretches out the very uncertainty the campaign seeks to end. A limited objective is not restraint for its own sake. Rather, it is a way to move the market. All of this means keeping a different scoreboard. In a chokepoint like this one, the numbers that matter are the price of insuring a voyage and the count of ships actually sailing . Those two figures tell you who holds the strait today, the way a fleet on station and an enemy kept away once did. They are the numbers this campaign is not moving.
Misassigned, Not Defeated
The Navy’s problem in the Strait of Hormuz is that it has been handed the wrong job. It is winning, with discipline and skill, every kinetic engagement in which it participates. But the war’s objectives cannot be achieved by destroying targets and killing the enemy. The war is over the price of doubt, and doubt cannot be killed. The strait will reopen when the underwriter’s veto is lifted, and lifting it is an economic and political act: a credible guarantee, a predictable corridor, and a visible ending. With the approach laid out above, the Navy can make that act credible. But it cannot bombard credibility it into being.
The warning runs past Iran and past the merits of this particular war. Consider what this war has shown. A regional power armed with cheap drones, mobile launchers, and the patience to keep the outcome in doubt has held a global chokepoint closed against the world’s premier fleet, and sold safe passage through it to that fleet’s competitors while doing so. Whether the U.S. Navy can still secure the sea lanes it exists to protect was answered once in the Red Sea, and is being answered again off Hormuz. That lesson holds whatever one thinks of the decision to intervene. The instrument that secures the modern chokepoint is the credible guarantee, and the metric that scores it is the premium. A nation that grasps this can choose its chokepoint fights on terms it can win or decline them, clear-eyed about what victory would cost. A force that keeps counting intercepts will do neither: it will go on winning every engagement and losing every strait.
LtCol James Jackson is a career logistician in the U.S. Marines, and an operational and strategic planner currently assigned to US Cyber Command. He is a graduate of the Maritime Advanced Warfighting School at the U.S. Naval War College.
Endnotes
1. As of late May 2026, roughly day 89 of the campaign, commercial transit through the strait had collapsed to under ten percent of the pre-conflict baseline and had not normalized. Iran shifted in April from continuous closure to a permission-based regime, issuing IRGC transit clearances while continuing to fire on shipping; the tanker SANMAR HERALD was attacked on April 18 despite holding a valid clearance. See Windward, “Three Months Into Operation Epic Fury: How Iran Restructured Hormuz Instead of Closing It” (May 27, 2026); USNI News, “Strait of Hormuz Commercial Transits at Lowest Level Since Operation Epic Fury Start” (May 1, 2026), citing Lloyd’s List; and GlobalSecurity.org, “Project Freedom: Strait of Hormuz, May 2026.” A roughly 70 percent drop reported by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Congressional Research Service reflects the opening weeks of the campaign rather than the sustained collapse measured three months in.
2. Container-vessel transits through the Suez Canal fell roughly 75 percent in 2024 against 2023 and had not recovered through mid-2025, persisting even through pauses in Houthi activity. See project44, “The Red Sea Crisis: Ceasefire Collapse Leaves Red Sea in Tumultuous State” (Aug. 21, 2025); and Coface, “Houthi Attacks in the Red Sea: Why Maritime Trade Is Still Not Smooth Sailing” (Dec. 29, 2025), which records container flows through Suez down by roughly 90 percent at the trough.
3. The Cape of Good Hope diversion adds approximately 4,000 nautical miles and 10–14 days to an Asia–Europe voyage. J.P. Morgan estimated the rerouting amounted to roughly a 30 percent increase in transit times and an approximately 9 percent reduction in effective global container shipping capacity. See J.P. Morgan Research, “The Impacts of the Red Sea Shipping Crisis”; and World Atlas, “How the Red Sea Shipping Crisis Affects Global Trade” (Apr. 2026).
4. On the share of seaborne oil transiting Hormuz and the waterway’s chokepoint geometry, see U.S. Energy Information Administration data as summarized in the CIMSEC call and contemporary reporting on Operation Epic Fury; for the operational character of the 2026 conflict, see Defense.info, “From Red Sea Defense to Epic Fury: How the U.S. Flipped the Drone Cost Equation” (Mar. 13, 2026).
5. On interceptor unit costs and the cost-exchange asymmetry, see Khyati Singh, “Navies Can’t Afford Expensive Solutions to Cheap Problems,” The Strategist / ASPI (Oct. 21, 2025); CSIS, “Cost and Value in Air and Missile Defense Intercepts” (Oct. 11, 2024); and “The Hidden Cost of a Missile: Why the Headlines Get Cost Wrong,” War on the Rocks (Nov. 18, 2025), which estimates roughly $1 billion in munitions expended defending Red Sea shipping since late 2023.
6. Adm. James Kilby, then acting Chief of Naval Operations, on the need for greater magazine depth in a protracted conflict, as reported in Fox News, “Navy’s Kilby on Houthi Missiles and Red Sea Costs” (2025).
7. Headquarters Marine Corps, A Concept for Stand-in Forces, (Washington, D.C.: Headquarters Marine Corps, 2021), 4.
8. On the deterrence of U.S. carrier strike groups from the Bab el-Mandeb and the resulting circuitous routing, see the CIMSEC call for articles, “War with Iran” (2026); and reporting on carrier strike group dispositions during the Red Sea campaign.
9. Operation Praying Mantis (Apr. 18, 1988) was a single-day action launched after USS Samuel B. Roberts struck an Iranian mine. See “Operation Praying Mantis,” and David B. Crist, “Joint Special Operations in Support of Earnest Will,” Joint Force Quarterly (Autumn/Winter 2001–02).
10. On the reflagging of eleven Kuwaiti tankers as U.S.-flagged vessels and the transfer of risk to the U.S. government, see “Operation Earnest Will”; Richard A. Mobley, “Intelligence Support During Operation Earnest Will, 1987–88,” Central Intelligence Agency; and Veterans Breakfast Club, “Before Today’s War with Iran, There Was the Tanker War” (Mar. 16, 2026).
11. On UNSCR 598 as a termination framework and the domestic controversy over the open-ended nature of the commitment, see “Renewed Tensions in the Persian Gulf: Further War Powers Lessons from the Tanker War,” Just Security (2023).
12. On the Navy’s pivot toward directed-energy defenses (e.g., HELIOS aboard USS Preble) as a response to the cost-exchange and magazine-depth problems, see “How to Save the U.S. Navy from Becoming a Bunch of Old ‘Battleships,'” 19FortyFive (Feb. 14, 2026).
Works Cited
Coface. “Houthi Attacks in the Red Sea: Why Maritime Trade Is Still Not Smooth Sailing.” December 29, 2025. https://www.coface.com/news-economy-and-insights/houthi-attacks-in-the-red-sea-why-maritime-trade-is-still-not-smooth-sailing
Crist, David B. “Joint Special Operations in Support of Earnest Will.” Joint Force Quarterly, Autumn/Winter 2001–02. https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA403506.pdf
Center for International Maritime Security. “Call for Articles: War with Iran.” 2026. https://cimsec.org/call-for-articles-war-with-iran/
Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Cost and Value in Air and Missile Defense Intercepts.” October 11, 2024. https://www.csis.org/analysis/cost-and-value-air-and-missile-defense-intercepts
Congressional Research Service. “Iran Conflict and the Strait of Hormuz: Impacts on Oil, Gas, and Other Commodities.” March 11, 2026. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45281
Council on Foreign Relations. “The Strait of Hormuz: A U.S.-Iran Maritime Flash Point.” 2026. https://www.cfr.org/articles/strait-hormuz-us-iran-maritime-flash-point
Defense.info. “From Red Sea Defense to Epic Fury: How the U.S. Flipped the Drone Cost Equation.” March 13, 2026. https://defense.info/featured-story/2026/03/from-red-sea-defense-to-epic-fury-how-the-u-s-flipped-the-drone-cost-equation/
GlobalSecurity.org. “Project Freedom: Strait of Hormuz, May 2026.” https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/project-freedom.htm
J.P. Morgan Research. “The Impacts of the Red Sea Shipping Crisis.” https://www.jpmorgan.com/insights/global-research/supply-chain/red-sea-shipping
Just Security. “Renewed Tensions in the Persian Gulf: Further War Powers Lessons from the Tanker War.” 2023. https://www.justsecurity.org/87650/renewed-tensions-in-the-persian-gulf-further-war-powers-lessons-from-the-tanker-war/
Mobley, Richard A. “Intelligence Support During Operation Earnest Will, 1987–88.” Central Intelligence Agency. https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/Fighting-Iran.pdf
19FortyFive. “How to Save the U.S. Navy from Becoming a Bunch of Old ‘Battleships.'” February 14, 2026. https://www.19fortyfive.com/2026/02/how-to-save-the-u-s-navy-from-becoming-a-bunch-of-old-battleships/
project44. “The Red Sea Crisis: Ceasefire Collapse Leaves Red Sea in Tumultuous State.” August 21, 2025. https://www.project44.com/supply-chain-insights/the-red-sea-crisis-ceasefire-collapse-leaves-red-sea-in-tumultuous-state/
Singh, Khyati. “Navies Can’t Afford Expensive Solutions to Cheap Problems.” The Strategist (Australian Strategic Policy Institute), October 21, 2025. https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/navies-cant-afford-expensive-solutions-to-cheap-problems/
Featured Image: The Thailand-flagged cargo ship Mayuree Naree engulfed in black smoke in the Strait of Hormuz. (Royal Thai Navy photo)
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