By Matt Bracken - April 10, 2025

In the event of a kinetic war against Iran, all petroleum tankers will be blocked from leaving the Persian Gulf, not only Iranian ships. Iran has hundreds of mobile truck-mounted anti-ship cruise missiles hidden in rugged mountainous terrain on a wide arc north of Oman and controlling the Strait of Hormuz. This arc is 300 miles wide and 100 miles deep. Iranian missile forces may well act under standing orders to attack all shipping once an American attack on Iran begins. Even a total decapitation strike against Iranian communications will not prevent these standing orders from being carried out. Iran will be determined to share their pain across the region and around the world.

Iranian anti-ship missile forces will not fire all their rockets at the beginning of this conflict. Instead, missile teams will have separate standing orders. Teams will be instructed to scout for shipping and fire at anything in the strait on different timelines after the war begins. Their goal will be to prevent the resumption of shipping for weeks or even months. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards in charge of these missiles will not care about the pain being inflicted upon civilians in Teheran. They will follow their orders with the dedication of Japanese holdouts in the Pacific.

Air power alone will not be able to discover and destroy hundreds of missile trucks hidden in thousands of locations in this mountainous terrain. On the very last days of Operation Desert Storm in 1991, Iraq was still firing Scud missiles at Saudi Arabia and Israel. The giant Scuds had to raised to vertical and loaded with liquid fuel before they could be fired. We had entire air armadas out searching the Iraqi desert for them. And still the Iraqis were able to launch and fire Scuds up to the last days of the conflict.

So forget about American air power alone finding and destroying hundreds of hidden solid-fuel mobile anti-ship missiles that can roll out of a cave and fire in just minutes.



To root out hundreds of these mobile anti-ship missiles “the hard way” using infantry troops would require a land invasion greater than Normandy and Okinawa combined.

The Battle of Okinawa holds some lessons. Okinawa is only 463 square miles is size, a small fraction of the land area controlling the Strait of Hormuz. Yet it took . . .

[SNIP]