James Holmes
Subject: Opening the Strait of Hormuz
Bio: Professor of Maritime Strategy at the US Naval War College and Author of Red Star over the Pacific
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and history. Today’s topic is Opening the Strait of Hormuz.
Our speaker is James Holmes who is a Professor of Maritime Strategy at the US Naval War College. He is also the author of the book Red Star over the Pacific.
I want to learn from James about what strategies the US Navy has to open up the Strait of Hormuz including the use of convoys, area defense, tactical offense, and arming the tankers to beat back the influx of drones.
James can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
James Holmes:
Unobstructed shipping lanes are the major concern for anybody who depends on oil and gas, which is to say everyone. You need to be able to move materials across the sea. That is how freedom of the sea is supposed to work.
There are three ways to defend the system of global trade and commerce against Iran. The first is convoys. Ships travel in large groups and warships escort to defend them. That is what President Trump talked about. Warships escort mercantile shipping through hazardous water such as the Strait of Hormuz, fending off subsurface as well as surface and air and missile attack. They do not go chasing attackers around the sea. They stick close to the merchant ships. If you have not watched Greyhound starring Tom Hanks, I implore you to watch it or read the C.S. Forester novel based on the Good Shepherd.
Second, there’s area defense as another passive approach. This is what the U.S. and European warships did in the Red Sea in 2023 and 2024 in the aftermath of the October 7th attacks on Israel. In this case, defenders spread out across wide areas. Ships remain relatively stationary to perform picket duty. This worked to a considerable degree against the Houthis, though not perfectly. Coalition warships took no hits, although there were some close calls, and a few merchantmen were hit. The Red Sea campaign underlined a basic fact of naval warfare. Lloyds of London and insurance companies are strategic actors. If shippers confront prohibitive insurance rates, they will hold their vessels back or reroute them to more roundabout courses. That is what happened in the Red Sea, and that is what’s happening in the Strait of Hormuz today, except that the strait is the only gateway to the Persian Gulf, whereas there are alternatives to the Red Sea routes. Merchant shipping tankers are largely idle in the Gulf.
Third, strategic defenders can go on tactical offense, much as the boxing legend Jack Dempsey claimed the best defense is a good offense. You defend yourself by hitting your opponent first and preemptively. A naval flotilla can go against shore sites that are trying to interdict shipping either by lofting land attack missiles or by calling in air support. We did this in the campaign against the Houthis and we are doing it against Iran today.
These approaches are not mutually exclusive. These are all joint operations, meaning that multiple services, the United States Navy, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, and potentially even the Army help shape events at sea. If the joint force can reduce the threat emanating from land by conducting air and missile strikes, convoys might be able to eke their way through the Strait of Hormuz.
Larry Bernstein:
I would like to start with convoys. You referenced the movie Greyhound starring Tom Hanks. We did a podcast on that movie a few months ago called You Sank My U-Boat. The WW2 convoys were attacked by U-boats using a wolf pack with more than one U-boat causing absolute chaos, loss of life and Merchant Marine.
The Iranians don’t have a submarine force. Instead, they have to use missiles and other above-surface devices. Tell us about what the opponent looks like in this war.
James Holmes:
Iran does have a submarine force. They have submarines that came from Russia after the Cold War. It does appear that the submarine force is not operational because we have hit them like the rest of the Iranian Navy. The threat is primarily drones and missiles. We have seen from the Ukraine war that drones, even though they are low-tech and inexpensive are highly effective against high tech and expensive defenses.
Drones that cost about $35,000, which is a good when surface to air missile costs about $4 million. Iran pioneered this. So that is a huge concern. You could shoot most of them down, but antagonists can afford to flood the zone. They can bank on some of them getting through.
The ballistic missile threat is recurring. The Trump administration has made that a major focus of U.S. military. A lot of these missile facilities are buried deep. They are hardened as we say in military circles. Trying to get at those, it’s difficult, although our bombers are probably targeting the entrances and the exits to those facilities to seal them up and achieve what you could call a mission kill.
Larry Bernstein:
Going back to Greyhound and the World War II convoys, these would be like a hundred merchant marine ships and maybe as much as a dozen destroyers surrounding it. The convoy would move slowly at the speed of the slowest boat in the convoy.
These drones are seeking out various ships and the destroyers are going to have to destroy these drones near all the relevant ships in the convoy. Tell us about how that would work in practice.
James Holmes:
That is a problem. One thing we found in the Houthi war was that we were expending a lot of expensive interceptor missiles on very inexpensive drones that were being launched at the merchant fleet and at European and coalition warships. We are starting to get that cost equation, where you try to fight more cheaply than your adversary, but at least increase the financial pressure on them.
Interestingly, the Ukrainians, who have a lot of experience of this after the last four years, have come to the United States to provide advice and drone technology.
We have two carrier strike groups in the region, each one of those is going to have escorts. It would be propaganda gold for Iran to hit the Abraham Lincoln. There is no way that U.S. commanders are going to draw off destroyers from that duty to escort tankers for that reason.
We are at that phase when thinking about convoys because Navies hate convoys. It’s not sexy. You do not get a lot of decorations, but it’s very important because commerce is king. It’s about keeping the world economy afloat.
Larry Bernstein:
You mentioned that insurance markets help price risks. You mentioned Lloyds of London would charge exorbitant amounts if the risk got to be high. And that is what happened in the events with the Houthis and the Red Sea. The same logic applies to oil tankers coming out of the Strait of Hormuz. It will be awfully expensive and therefore uneconomic to risk moving those tankers at this time in the middle of the war. There are many alternative oil options, including tapping the American oil reserves.
James Holmes:
The Trump administration has tried providing subsidies to defer in the cost of insurance for shipping firms that dare the transit through the Strait of Hormuz.
Larry Bernstein:
In lieu of putting oil in the tankers, you could put them on trucks to an area away from Iran to get on a tanker there. You could put oil in a pipeline, and you could store oil waiting when the war hostilities have declined.
James Holmes:
There is a good reason why like 80% to 90% of world trade travels by sea. It’s because it’s inexpensive relative to aircraft and the shore base conveyances.
Larry Bernstein:
In normal times, shipping by water is by far the cheapest. But if insurance rates surge, then it will not be. And so, you take some other path.
James Holmes:
The main concern there is capacity. Can you pass all that oil and gas through a pipeline?
Larry Bernstein:
Ukraine was effective in destroying Russian naval ships in the Black Sea using drones, putting bombs on jet skis. Should we expect to see low tech have massive disruption for the Iranians?
James Holmes:
Ukraine essentially has no Navy, and yet it’s driven off the Russian Navy, the Black Sea fleet from its shores simply by using cost-effective modes like jet ski bombs. We had Ukrainians here in Newport give us lessons that you can do this inexpensively and inflict heavy damage on a serious adversary.
Larry Bernstein:
I want to talk about environmental problems associated with sinking a tanker. If the Iranians are successful in blowing up a tanker or two in the Strait of Hormuz this would be a massive oil spill. Tell us about what that will look like and the ramifications.
James Holmes:
We have nuclear powered warships, and nobody seems to worry too much about what happens if you sink a nuclear-powered submarine or aircraft carrier. What does that look like at the bottom of the sea when you have a reactor exposed to the elements. That we have overlooked. Working back towards the oil spillage problem, look at the scale of some of these tankers. Some of the tankers displace 600,000 tons.
Think how much oil they are carrying. And the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz is not a large place. That is a serious question that I have not seen anybody ask, how do you clean up given that you’re an open war against the adversary that caused this spill to happen?
Larry Bernstein:
These tankers are bigger than the one at Valdez.
James Holmes:
Oh, hell yeah. They displace five or six times as much as a US aircraft carrier, which is about a hundred thousand tons. It is amazing.
Larry Bernstein:
In World War II, the British, Americans, and Canadians armed their merchant ships directly during these convoys. Do you think it makes sense to arm the tankers to prevent them from being attacked by either the missile or the drones? Because the destroyers are far away in a convoy, and you need to cover a lot of ground and the ground most specific we need to cover is the tanker itself. You could put the defense systems directly on top of the tanker, you could put little PT boats and surround the tanker with the various necessary arms to knock down those drones or missiles. How do you think about defending a tanker?
James Holmes:
It’s a great question. It points to a serious issue. In 2009, when Somali piracy off the Somali Coast was a thing, I was invited to take charge of the Somali counterpiracy effort. And that’s what I said why not arm merchant crews to defend themselves rather than have U.S. Navy and European warships running all over the place trying to counter every blow before it lands.
In the Persian Gulf, the answer is nuanced. If the tankers could defend themselves against the drone threat, they have established a division of labor between themselves and the Navy to fend off the high-end threats. A tanker’s not going to shoot down an anti-ship ballistic missile or an anti-ship cruise missile. But if they could fend off all the Kamikaze drones that lets the naval fleet concentrate on what matters most.
Larry Bernstein:
It does not appear ground troops are landing in Iran. We may have some special forces, but how do you think about the role of the Navy to support the effort?
James Holmes:
President Trump and his advisors have refused to rule out ground troops. I would do the same thing if I were in their place, simply because you don’t want to publicly rule out any option. I have a hard time seeing there being a ground component against a country made up of 90 million people. I’ve flown over Iran back in 2016, there was fighting in Iraq and Syria, and I was in Jaipur in Western India.
And I was like, “I would never want to invade this place.” So, I have a hard time seeing there being a ground component. I could see some indigenous uprising, but I have a hard time seeing U.S. Army or Marine Corps components on the ground, unless it’s like a Caracas where you have special forces going in.
Larry Bernstein:
We have been at war for a couple of weeks. How is it playing out? What are you surprised by?
James Holmes:
I am surprised that it happened. I’ve always assumed that Iran is going to go nuclear. Even if Iran becomes a liberal democracy like Germany or the United States, I think it’s still going to happen. And the reason for that is national pride. You are with the permanent five members of the UN Security Council, you’re in the company of India and Pakistan; there’s honor.
Larry Bernstein:
There were some war games that were tried a couple of years ago. And during the war games, the Americans did quite poorly against Iran.
James Holmes:
2002 Millennium Challenge.
Larry Bernstein:
In the war games, the decentralized command structure in Iran played to their benefit and that they were able to cause havoc around the Middle East and undermined the American’s ability to take advantage of the sky and use its naval forces to its maximum. That was my takeaway from those war games. But it does not appear that that’s working out on the battlefield. Their command and control have been severely limited. The decentralized control has not shown to be a big positive. The Navy got destroyed in a day. They’ve lost control of the air and they’re getting pummeled day in and day out. What are your thoughts from the war games versus reality on the ground?
James Holmes:
That’s another great question. In the Gulf War, we were told that 100,000 of us were coming home in body bags, and we ended up losing 100 to 200 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. I guess the good news is things are working out better. We are strategically fatalistic.
Where we get into trouble is when we start getting into protracted engagements trying to remake a society and its government. We talk about regime change but think about how Aristotle defines the regime. It’s not just the government. It’s the way of life for a city, state or whatever political polity you’re talking about. It’s hard to do that with a cruise muscle, bomb or torpedo. It’s hard to do it from outside.
Larry Bernstein:
How do you think this war will end up?
James Holmes:
We are going to take down Iran’s military capabilities, which is good. I am very skeptical about our ability to remove the regime, which is entrenched for 47 years and has set itself up to endure. You will never hear me predicting the fall of the North Korean regime or the Chinese regime or anybody like that. And that’s where I am with Iran as well.
Larry Bernstein:
What are you optimistic about as it relates to the battle?
James Holmes:
We have taken a lot of capabilities away from the Iranians. That is a good thing, taking away the Iranian Navy and their ballistic missile force. If we have ended their nuclear program, that’s a cool thing as well, because this is a regime you could imagine using nuclear weapons. So as far as the capabilities side, that is the optimistic view.
Larry Bernstein:
You are a China naval scholar. A lot of the weapons that Iran has was acquired from the Chinese. The Americans and Israelis had great success outwitting those weapon systems. What have the Americans and Chinese learned from this proxy war?
James Holmes:
What people in Beijing and Moscow are thinking when they see their sensors and weaponry fail repeatedly is they may be having second thoughts that are a huge part of deterrence? If they do not know their stuff is going to work on behalf of Iran, are they going to invade Taiwan?
People in Washington think next year is the critical year as far as China being willing to invade Taiwan. If they think they’re going to lose, think about the consequences for the Chinese Communist Party. That could mean that the Party’s downfall.
I hope the reporting on the failures of Russia and the Chinese weaponry are as true as it sounds like from reading the press because if you look at the People’s Liberation Army, Navy, Air Force, and rocket force, they look impressive.
I am an old coal warrior. The Soviet Navy, Army, and missile forces looked impressive too. And yet we saw what happened to them during the end the Cold War. So that is the very optimistic view that they might hold their fire.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to James for joining us.
If you missed the previous podcast, the topic was Fine Tuning the OODA Loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act Loop to Win the War in Iran.
Our speaker was Brig. Gen. (Res.) Eran Ortal who is a former Israeli Defense Forces officer who previously served as the Commander of the Dado Center for Interdisciplinary Military Thinking in the IDF. He is the author of the book “The Battle Before the War.”
Eran explained how the American and Israeli military have moved their command center to the battlefield so that the target can be destroyed before the Iranians have time to react.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website
whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, Fine Tuning the OODA Loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act Loop to Win the War in Iran, here.
