Escorting Through a Minefield: The Reality of Iran’s Strait of Hormuz Strategy
Iran's sea mines are in the water. We revisit the IRGC's February signaling that telegraphed this exact scenario as a deterrent.
When CNN reported yesterday that Iran had begun laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz, my first thought was that we had already written about this. In the February 12 Axis Weekly, covering the reporting period of Feb 7-13, we documented an entire month's worth of IRGC signaling that laid out exactly this scenario as told in the Iranian media. What caught my attention in February was the register. This wasn't the usual saber-rattling. The operational detail was new. And it wasn't confined to one format.
CBS puts the stockpile at somewhere between 2,000 and 6,000 naval mines, and 90% of Tehran’s mine-laying capacity is reportedly still intact. The coverage describes “small boats,” a “gauntlet,” and a general capability to shut down the world’s most important energy chokepoint. It names no specific weapons systems despite the fact that Iran named them on state media a month ago.
What Iran Published
In early February, an IRGC-affiliated outlet published a clip from “Apocalypse War,” a high-production anime series set in “The Middle East 2026.” The animation is not vague. It shows what Iran calls Ghadir-class midget submarines and sea mines deployed to trap a U.S. carrier strike group in the Persian Gulf before a wave of Fattah hypersonic missiles and Shahed drone swarms hits the fleet. Real U.S. bases appear on screen as targets: Incirlik, Prince Sultan, Camp Arifjan, Al-Asad, Al-Dhafra, each labeled with the host country’s flag. The commander who gives the final launch order is modeled on Qassem Soleimani.
When we first reported this clip in February, what stood out was the manner in which it was published, because an anime is not a serious war plan. It’s a fantasy. But it was still concerning given that it was meant as a deterrence signal and a showcase of capacity, even if that capacity is exaggerated. Look at the target list. Incirlik is on there, which means Turkey is on there. Turkey spent the last year signaling diplomatic independence, hosting backchannels, positioning itself as a mediator, and none of that mattered because it hosts a U.S. air base. That’s what earned it a spot on Iran’s targeting map. The animation shows ballistic missiles hitting Turkish territory, and in March 2026, real ones flew.
How the Islamic Republic Infuses Ideology into Its Arsenal
The names of these systems deserve attention. The Ghadir-class submarines in the animation are named for Ghadir Khumm, the event where Shia believe the Prophet Muhammad designated Ali as his successor, and it is foundational to Shia identity. Iran’s three Kilo-class submarines are named Tariq, after a Quranic surah meaning “The Night Star”; Yunus, the Prophet Jonah; and Noah. The Zulfaqar torpedo boat is named for the legendary sword of Imam Ali. The Fattah hypersonic missile shown striking the U.S. fleet means “the opener” or “the conqueror,” one of the 99 names of God in Islam. When the IRGC attaches sacred theology to a weapons system, it is making its use not just strategically justified but spiritually ordained. This is not branding. This is ideological infrastructure built into the hardware, and none of it is accidental, because these groups have had years to think about this, to organize every layer of meaning, and to ensure that the faith narrative and the military doctrine are inseparable.
The IRGC’s “Smart Control of the Strait of Hormuz” Exercise, February 16-17
The anime was not an isolated media product. On February 16-17, the IRGC Navy ran a full-scale exercise called “Smart Control of the Strait of Hormuz.” AP reported it. CNBC covered it. The National wrote it up. The War Zone analyzed it. Iran temporarily closed parts of the strait during the drill, fired live missiles from deep inside the country, and tested the new Sayyad-3G naval air defense missile for the first time. IRGC Navy Commander Rear Admiral Tangsiri said Tehran exercises “complete command” over the strait “whether above the surface, sub-surface, or in the air.” He added that the IRGC was ready to close the strait if ordered by the leadership. The National quoted him saying “the weapon that reaches the battlefield on the day of war is different from what is shown in the exercise.”
The next day, Khamenei himself weighed in: “a warship is a dangerous apparatus, but more dangerous than the warship is the weapon that can sink the warship into the depths of the sea.”
Why Publish the Doctrine at All
There’s a question worth asking here: why publish any of this? Why would the IRGC put its operational concepts on Fars News for anyone to read? The answer is that deterrence only works if the adversary knows what you can do. A mine on the seafloor that nobody knows about sinks one ship. A mine-laying capability that your adversary knows about changes the behavior of every ship. Once the US Navy has to assume that Ghadir subs might be sitting on the bottom of the strait at any given moment, that assumption alone forces a different posture, different routing, different risk calculus, whether or not a single submarine is actually there. The deterrence begins the moment the article goes live, not when the mine enters the water.
The IRGC understood something that Western analysts still resist: in an ideological system, the media product and the military operation are not separate categories. The broadcast doesn’t describe the campaign. It is the campaign.
Why Sea Mines Matter More Than the Coverage Suggests
The broader historical record is not ambiguous. In 1988, a single Iranian mine nearly sank the USS Samuel B. Roberts in the Persian Gulf. Naval mines have caused 77% of all U.S. ship casualties since 1950. The Strait of Hormuz carries roughly 20% of the world’s crude oil. And the U.S. Navy’s mine countermeasure fleet remains one of the smallest and oldest in its inventory. A few dozen mines in the water doesn’t sound like much until you consider that marine insurers suspend coverage the moment a strait is declared mined, which means tankers stop moving regardless of whether a single one is hit. That is how you shut down a fifth of the global energy supply without sinking a ship.
Trump has said the U.S. is considering escorting tankers through the strait. But escorting ships through a mined strait is a fundamentally different problem than escorting them past missiles and drones. You can shoot down a missile. You cannot shoot a mine already sitting on the seafloor. An escort means a warship is now also at risk. The Roberts that nearly sank in 1988 was itself a warship on escort duty. The USS Princeton, an Aegis cruiser, was severely damaged by Iraqi mines during the Gulf War while providing cover for minesweeping operations. During that same war, Iraq laid roughly 1,270 mines around the Kuwaiti coast, and a multinational coalition needed months to clear them. So when the administration says “we’ll escort ships,” the question nobody is asking publicly is: through what? An unswept minefield? The insurance companies won’t care about the escort. They care about the mines.
As of Wednesday, the administration’s public position was that it did not believe Iran had laid mines, even as CENTCOM was destroying mine-laying vessels.
How the IRGC Tested This Through Its Proxies
This is not new. In 2016, after Houthi forces attacked U.S. warships in the Red Sea, the Obama administration struck Houthi coastal radar installations. By 2017, the Houthis were scattering Iranian-made Sadaf mines along Yemen’s Red Sea coast, and the Saudi-led coalition eventually found and destroyed over 170 of them. What the Houthis demonstrated was that even a non-state actor with limited naval capacity could use mines to create sustained disruption in one of the world’s most critical waterways.
The willingness to impose environmental and economic catastrophe is part of the pattern. For years, the Houthis held hostage the FSO Safer, a decaying supertanker off Yemen’s coast carrying 1.14 million barrels of oil, four times the Exxon Valdez. They blocked salvage operations while the international community spent $144 million to prevent a spill that would have devastated Red Sea ecosystems and shut down ports that millions of Yemenis depend on for food. After the oil was finally transferred in 2023, the Houthis continued to escalate. In May 2025, the United States brokered a ceasefire with the Houthis specifically to protect Red Sea shipping. Two months later, the Houthis boarded the Magic Seas, planted explosives across the ship, and detonated it on camera. The next day, they attacked the Eternity C, killing four crew members. Human Rights Watch called both attacks war crimes. The Rubymar, sunk by Houthi missiles the year before, had already leaked oil across 18 miles of the Red Sea and sent 22,000 tons of fertilizer to the seafloor. None of this was met with lasting accountability, and the IRGC watched every step of it.
In our publication of that reporting period, it was clear that the clip wasn’t an isolated media product. That same week, Kayhan ran that one week of closing Hormuz would be enough for the world to recognize Iran’s power. Maj. Gen. Mousavi warned that any adventurism against Iran carries a heavy price. IRNA ran three new space-industry achievements in the same news cycle. And all of it landed during the window that Iran was negotiating with Washington through the Muscat channel. The deterrence messaging and the diplomacy were running simultaneously, in full view, on state outlets.
Read the full Axis Weekly issue here.
In most analytical frameworks, what Iran published would be called a threat. In Iran’s media system, it was Tuesday.
I don’t assume the administration was unaware of Iran’s mine-laying capability. I have to assume they were tracking it. But the question the public deserves an answer to is what was done with that awareness, because 90% of Iran’s capacity is reportedly still intact and the mines are now in the water. The signaling wasn’t directed only at Washington. It was directed at global audiences, at markets, at the countries whose bases appeared on that anime target list, and at the publics who would bear the economic costs of a Hormuz closure. Deterrence works on populations, not just governments.
We continue to treat these outputs as domestic propaganda, noise intended to pacify a local population. They are, in fact, signaling architectures. They publish capability and intent in real time, often with more transparency than official diplomatic channels. When a state broadcasts its war plan as an anime and captions it on social media, the instinct in Washington is to treat it as performance. But performance and planning are not opposites in these systems. They are the same act, aimed at different audiences simultaneously. The content is useful. The broadcast is the warning. The problem isn’t a lack of intelligence. It’s a refusal to take it seriously.
The mines are in the water. The strait is effectively closed. Iran has expanded its campaign to Oman’s oil infrastructure, the country that mediated its nuclear talks with Washington. And if the Red Sea’s southern chokepoint were compromised at the same time by Houthi sea mines, there would be no alternative route for Gulf oil exports at all.
The signals were always there.
Very informative. So what is your best answer to the question you posed “the question the public deserves an answer to is what was done with that awareness, because 90% of Iran’s capacity is reportedly still intact and the mines are now in the water.” ?