Why can't the United States protect the Strait of Hormuz?

The situation in the Strait of Hormuz has suddenly become tense, with oil prices fluctuating and shipping costs soaring, causing global markets to quickly enter "shock mode." As a key corridor responsible for about 20% of oil transportation, any disturbance here will be magnified.

^{Satellite imagery of the Strait of Hormuz}

The market's intuitive judgment is: if the U.S. intervenes to provide escort, shipping can resume.

But the reality is the opposite. Although the U.S. holds overwhelming superiority in air strikes in the Middle East, it is clearly cautious about the issue of escorting; the Red Sea experience has already proven that even with massive resource投入, escorting cannot truly ensure shipping safety.

This reveals an underestimated fact: The issue is not just whether to escort or not, but that even escorting itself is hard to achieve.

The Red Sea has already exposed an expectation gap—non-symmetric attacks can continually disrupt shipping, while escorting faces natural bottlenecks in scale and cost. Even if escorts are deployed in the future, the restored capacity may be extremely limited.

Put another way: Escorting does not equal supply restoration.

The deeper issue is that the challenges in Hormuz are no longer about "whether navy ships are present," but are a structural problem that a navy alone is hard to solve.

The Red Sea has failed—why is "escort" itself so difficult?

The Red Sea's developments over the past year have provided the market with an extremely valuable reference sample.

Against the backdrop of drones and missile attacks by Houthis, the U.S. and its allies deployed a multi-layered defense system including destroyers and air defense systems, and organized escort actions to try to keep the channel operational. In terms of resource投入, this operation has reached the level of "high-intensity military intervention."

But the results were less than ideal.

Even amid ongoing escort and interception, merchant ships continued to face frequent attacks, with even cases of ships being sunk; meanwhile, many shipping companies chose to bypass the Cape of Good Hope, causing a sharp decline in traffic on the Red Sea–Suez route, with significant disruption to global trade, at one point affecting about 12% of global trade volume.

This reality reveals a key issue: escorting is not a "deploy and immediately effective" tool, but a complex system engineering. It depends not only on military strength, but also on the nature of threats, frequency of attacks, and the ability to sustain投入 of defensive resources.

It is clear that the essence of escorting is to lower risk, not to eliminate it.

And as long as risk remains in the "unacceptable range," market participants will not return, which is the fundamental reason for the persistent inability of Red Sea shipping to recover.

Hormuz is harder: from Houthis to Iran’s formal system

If the Red Sea is already complex enough, the difficulty in Hormuz comes from a "qualitative change" in the opponent’s capability.

Firstly, the nature of the opponent is completely different. The main threat in the Red Sea comes from the Houthi forces, which have some technical capability but are essentially a non-state actor. In Hormuz, the potential opponent is Iran—a country with a complete military system, whose operational capability and resource mobilization far exceed the Houthis.

Iran’s available means are more varied and systematic, including anti-ship missiles, various drones, naval mines, and swarms of fast boats, which can be combined to form a sustained, multidirectional strike network, keeping the defender in a passive response state.

Secondly, the geographic structure is extremely unfavorable. The narrowest part of the Strait of Hormuz is only about 34 km, and the main channel is close to Iran’s coast. This means all passing ships are almost always within the effective coverage range of shore-based firepower.

From a military perspective, this environment is extremely challenging. As former U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis described it, it’s almost equivalent to sailing within the range of coastal artillery. Under these conditions, the difficulty of escort operations rises significantly, as the threat is not from a distance but from continuous, close-range suppression.

A deeper structural issue is that in modern warfare, the advantage of "land-based attacks on navy" is being amplified. Land platforms can hide, disperse, and sustain resupply, while naval vessels are exposed in open spaces and can hardly achieve equivalent protection.

In a word: Do not use a fleet to confront a land fortress.

The real challenge: escorting is an “exponential consumption” task

Beyond opponent capability and geographic conditions, the resource attributes of escorting are the real key to its feasibility.

First, escorting's resource demand shows a characteristic of "linear demand × area expansion." The safe passage of each merchant ship usually requires surface vessels to provide air defense and anti-missile protection, coordinated with airborne reconnaissance and early warning forces, and even support from mine-sweeping and anti-submarine resources.

This means as the number of ships increases, the resources needed do not simply grow, but rapidly balloon. Hormuz, as one of the world’s most important energy corridors, with throughput far exceeding Red Sea, requires extremely high numbers of ships and air assets for escorting at a high safety standard.

^{AI illustration: U.S. military escorting in the Strait of Hormuz}

Second, mine-sweeping is one of the core bottlenecks. Iran has the capability to deploy floating and underwater mines, and once mines exist, the entire channel's safety comes into question. Compared with missiles and drones, mines are harder to detect, clearing is slow and risky, and cannot be scaled up quickly.

So, the pace of shipping recovery is determined not by carriers, but by mine-sweeping capability.

Furthermore, the imbalance brought by asymmetric attacks makes escorting economically unsustainable as well. Attackers can continually pressure with ultra-low-cost drones or missiles, while defenders must mobilize high-value ships and complex systems for interception and protection. In this structure, escorting is a “long-term high-cost vs. low-cost consumption.”

Finally, even in ideal conditions, escort efficiency is very limited. Some analyses point out that even with large-scale escorting, the restored throughput may be only a small fraction of pre-conflict levels. This means escorting can only maintain minimum operations and cannot support normal shipping volumes.

Even successful escorts cannot solve the problem

Further, even if an escort system can be established and partially operated, resuming shipping faces a series of non-military restrictions.

First is insurance and shipping behavior. As conflict escalates, the area is generally regarded as a "war zone," war-risk insurance costs soar, and sometimes adequate coverage is hard to secure. At the same time, crew may refuse to sail for safety reasons.

This means, even with escorting, as long as risk premiums remain too high, shipping companies may still choose to bypass or suspend operations. In other words, escorting does not mean ships are willing to transit.

Second, alternative capacity is extremely limited. Currently, Middle Eastern oil exports heavily depend on the Strait of Hormuz; although some countries have pipelines as alternative routes, total capacity is only about 3.5–5.5 million barrels/day, while the normal sea channel flow is close to 20 million barrels/day, so the gap is hard to fill.

Lastly—and most crucially—from a strategic perspective, Iran's goal is not necessarily to completely block the strait, but to continuously disrupt and raise risk and uncertainty.

So, the essence of this strategy can be summed up in one sentence: Iran does not need to blockade the strait—just make it unusable.

Once risks are raised to a certain level, the market mechanism itself will drive shipping contraction and cost increases, achieving an effect similar to a "blockade."

The core of the Hormuz issue, therefore, is not whether there is a powerful enough navy, but that under modern warfare conditions, the security of key corridors is no longer determined by a single force.

When drones, mines, and missiles—low-cost methods—can continually threaten high-value targets, traditional “escort capabilities” are facing structural challenges.

This means for global energy markets, geopolitical risks are no longer just temporary shock variables, but may gradually become a long-term pricing factor.

Risk Warning and DisclaimerThe market has risks; investment must be prudent. This article does not constitute personal investment advice, nor does it take into account specific investment targets, financial conditions, or needs of individual users. Users should consider whether any opinions, views, or conclusions in this article are suitable for their particular situation. Investments made accordingly are at the user’s own risk.