By Ehud Eiran
The joint military campaign launched by the United States and Israel against Iran on February 28, 2026, was initially conceived and executed primarily as an air campaign. The opening phase of the war centered on aerial strikes against Iran’s political and military leadership and other command-and-control networks, missile infrastructure, air defenses, and military-industrial targets. In contrast, the maritime domain played only a secondary role in the initial stages of the conflict. The maritime aspects initially included the fact that many of the American attacks were conducted from planes and missiles launched from warships, as well as attacks on naval assets such as the sinking of an Iranian frigate in international waters off the coast of Sri Lanka.
This situation changed dramatically once Iran moved to exploit its most significant geostrategic asset – the Strait of Hormuz. By disrupting maritime traffic through the strait, Tehran transformed the conflict from a regional military confrontation into a challenge to the global economy. As energy markets reacted and commercial shipping began to reroute, the maritime domain rapidly became a central theater of the war. The United States subsequently shifted substantial military resources toward restoring freedom of navigation and reopening the waterway to international commerce. The maritime dimension expanded further on April 13, 2026, when Washington transitioned from trying to reopen the strait to actively interdicting and restricting Iranian-related maritime traffic. What had begun as a campaign against Iran’s nuclear and military capabilities increasingly evolved into a contest over maritime access, sea control, and economic warfare.
This transition exposed a structural asymmetry within the U.S.-Israeli war effort. Although the campaign was politically and strategically joint, and the U.S. had described Israel as a “model ally,” the maritime theater was overwhelmingly an American responsibility. Israel possesses capable naval forces and extensive experience in maritime security operations in the Eastern Mediterranean and Red Sea. However, it lacks the expeditionary naval capabilities necessary to sustain large-scale operations in the Persian Gulf and the wider Indian Ocean. Only the United States possessed the carrier strike groups, amphibious forces, logistics networks, intelligence architecture, and maritime command structures necessary to contest Iranian actions in the Persian Gulf and guarantee the flow of international commerce. As the war’s center of gravity shifted from air to sea, the operational burden increasingly fell on Washington.
This operational asymmetry reflected a deeper divergence in strategic perspectives. The United States and Israel shared an immediate concern regarding Iran’s nuclear program and regional military posture. Yet the United States, as a global power, approached the conflict through a much broader strategic lens. Beyond degrading Iranian military capabilities, Washington had to consider the stability of global energy markets, the security of international shipping lanes, the interests of allies in Europe and Asia, and the credibility of the United States as the principal guarantor of freedom of navigation. A prolonged closure of Hormuz threatened not only military objectives but also the functioning of the global economy and the wider international order that successive American administrations had sought to preserve.
Israel’s perspective was different. Israeli strategic culture has historically been shaped by the country’s geography, threat environment, and military experience. Since Israel gained independence in 1948, its security establishment has focused overwhelmingly on land and air power. The country’s major wars were fought on land, and its most celebrated military achievements were achieved through armored maneuver, intelligence superiority, and air power. Although maritime issues had become more important in recent years because of a new dependence on offshore energy and desalinated water, as well as the threat of Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, maritime strategy remains a relatively recent addition to Israeli strategic thinking. Consequently, Israeli policymakers tended to view the maritime domain primarily through the prism of its contribution to the campaign against Iran rather than as an arena whose stability carried intrinsic strategic value.
The American perspective was almost the reverse. Since the earliest years of the Republic, the protection of maritime commerce has occupied a central place in U.S. grand strategy. From the Barbary Wars through the two World Wars, the Cold War, and the post-Cold War era, American policymakers have consistently regarded open sea lanes as a vital national interest. The U.S. Navy was built not merely to defeat adversaries at sea but to secure a maritime order that facilitates global trade and economic stability. Although President Trump was less clear on the issue compared to many of his predecessors, American decision-makers were inclined to evaluate military actions in Hormuz not only according to their impact on Iran, but also according to their consequences for shipping, insurance markets, energy prices, and the broader international system.
As the war increasingly revolved around the maritime domain, these differing strategic traditions generated subtle but important tensions. For Israel, continued military pressure on Iran appeared consistent with the broader objective of degrading Iranian power. For the United States, however, the restoration of maritime order gradually became an objective in its own right. This did not produce an open alliance dispute, but it did create different hierarchies of priorities. Israel viewed the sea primarily as another theater through which Iran could be weakened. The United States viewed the sea as both a theater of war and a strategic system whose disruption could undermine wider political and economic interests. In this sense, the struggle over Hormuz revealed that even in a highly coordinated coalition campaign, allies may share enemies while possessing different conceptions of what constitutes strategic success. These differences are perhaps inevitable when the de-facto alliance is between a land-oriented regional power, and a maritime-oriented global power.
Israel tried to close this gap by contributing directly to the maritime aspects of the war by using its air power against Iranian naval assets. On March 18, 2026 a day before the U.S. launched its operation to open the Strait, the Israeli air force attacked an Iranian naval base in the Caspian sea. This was seen as directed at interrupting a supply route from Russia, but was also a reminder that Israel can contribute to the maritime aspects of the war. On March 26, 2026, the Israeli air force killed the head of the IRGC’s navy, and Israel made a point in stressing that he led the blockade over the Hormuz strait. By April 2026, the Israeli Navy was proud to report that its intelligence efforts were used, presumably by the air force, to attack 95 targets in Iran.
The divergence between American and Israeli strategic priorities in the maritime domain points to a broader challenge that will likely define coalition warfare in the coming decades – the mismatch between politically unified alliances and operationally asymmetric partners. The U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran offers a rare real-world test case for what happens when a land-oriented regional power and a maritime-oriented global power fight side by side. The structural tensions that emerged are instructive precisely because they arose not from disagreement over ends, but from deeply ingrained differences in strategic culture, capability, and institutional memory.
Israel’s attempts to compensate for its maritime limitations through air power, such striking Iranian naval bases in the Caspian, eliminating the IRGC Navy commander, and providing targeting intelligence for dozens of strikes, reveal an important adaptation: a land-air power seeking maritime relevance through the tools it knows best. This is not merely a tactical improvisation but a doctrinal signal. As maritime competition grows in strategic importance globally, regional powers that lack blue-water navies may increasingly pursue sea control objectives through land-based and air-delivered means. Israel’s performance in this conflict may well accelerate that trend, offering a template for other states navigating similar capability gaps.
Yet this approach has inherent ceilings. Air power can attrite naval assets and kill commanders, but it cannot patrol chokepoints, escort convoys, or sustain the persistent presence required to restore the confidence of commercial shippers and insurance underwriters. Sea control, in the end, requires forces that live at sea. The Hormuz crisis made this distinction painfully clear: degrading Iran’s navy from the air reduced Iranian capacity to threaten. But it was the physical presence of American surface combatants and carrier aviation that ultimately played a crucial role in determining whether tankers moved, including as guarantors to the maritime aspects of the U.S.-Iran agreement.
The lesson for regional powers is that they might need to rethink traditional strengths (land/air) and develop maritime capacity. Another lesson is how chokepoints like Hormuz magnify global-local dynamics: a regional conflict can force even a land-focused state to pivot toward sea lanes and naval strategy. In Israel’s case, this would be less about building a blue-water navy capable of global dominance and more about expanding regional maritime capabilities. This could mean greater investment in securing sea lines closer to home, like in the Eastern Mediterranean, where Israel already has energy assets and strategic interests. It might also mean enhanced cooperation with navies like the U.S., more focus on protecting ports, undersea infrastructure, or even regional maritime diplomacy, ensuring that, even if not a global maritime power, it is still a player in regional maritime security.
Israel does not depend on Hormuz for its own oil supply. But the closure revealed how global maritime chokepoints can escalate a conflict far beyond the immediate actors. For Israel, the lesson is not about reopening Hormuz. It is about realizing that future conflicts could affect maritime routes closer to home, like the Suez Canal or Eastern Mediterranean energy corridors. This could push Israel to integrate maritime resilience into its strategy and work on ensuring it is not just a junior partner if a future maritime crisis unfolds in its own region.
Ehud Eiran, PhD, is the Chair, Department of international Relations, University of Haifa, Israel and a research fellow at the Haifa-based, Institute for Maritime Policy and Strategy (MPS).
Featured Image: Eight Israeli Air Force F-15I Ra’am strike fighter jets of 69 Squadron “Hammers” Israel on their way to attack Iran in June 2025. (IDF photo)
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