planefag@planefag
It's incredible to me that this hasn't been more widely talked about.
With US forces having thrashed Iran's conventional military capabilities threatening the strait - especially shore to sea cruise missile batteries and their Navy - there were two options for transiting the strait. The first was joint convoy ops, which are expensive, hated by both the civilian shipping companies and the national Navies that run them, but undeniably effective. The second was to simply run the gauntlet while under the umbrella of US airpower and/or light forces (the Gulf States have a vested interest in seeing oil transit the strait and have no shortage of light patrol craft well-suited to fending off various kinds of drones.) Since no civilian shipping company is going to run that kind of risk - especially in the modern age, when the innate risks of sea travel have been mostly mitigated and margins are often cut razor-thin - this means standing up their merchant marine. Every nation implements their merchant marine differently, both practically and legally, but it boils down to government-owned cargo ships with government-employed crews on board, moving cargo at state orders for national security rather than for some private company's bottom-line.
Europe, notably, has refused to do either of these things, even as they face down diesel and jet fuel shortages; to say nothing of increased pressure on LNG prices.
Unsurprisingly, the US wasn't interested in running its fleet ragged with regular convoy ops to benefit the Europeans as their own navies sat snug in harbor. What we did instead was stand up a kind of erstaz merchant marine - a small fleet of ships that transit the strait under US air cover, fill up, exfiltrate, then offload to other empty tankers via ship-to-ship transfers in open water. This isn't supposition - it's the exact same method that Iran and others' "shadow fleets" use to bypass sanctions, and OSINT groups have watched them doing it for years (it's not hard to see two supertankers cozying up side-by-side on commercial satellite imagery, which just underlines how cowardly decades of refusal to actually enforce sanctions by seizing these ships has really been.) And those groups have observed non-Iranian, non-sanctioned ships doing exactly this for a few weeks now. Now we know why.
As Sal notes, using a designated fleet of ships allows them all to be kept under American-provided emergency war insurance without the hurdle of doing paperwork for the whole world. But there's other benefits. For starters, the crews; the owner can pull off the normal crew and turn the ships over to American-supplied crews; merchant mariners, active-duty navy, or just civilians that leaped at a very generous contract. Then there's up-armoring and crew protection. It's not unusual for ships transiting piracy-prone waters to have a "citadel," like a panic-room that's equipped so the crew can still steer and control the ship from within. A steel-armored citadel (or multiple across the ship) is an obvious upgrade; as well as hiring additional crew trained in damage control and the extra equipment for them to use. All of this is quite expensive for any normal civilian line to pay for out of pocket; less so for the US government who only has to equip a finite, dedicated fleet in this way.
As I've said before, big tankers are really robust ships against the kind of light warheads most drones deliver. The only exception is unmanned surface vessels that target the engine room/propeller shafts, but since they approach at 40 knots rather than 400 knots like a flying drone it's a problem you can solve with Contractor Carl in a RIB with 200 rounds of belted 7.62... or a Hellfire from a Reaper overhead. These are risks that a nation - and suitably compensated government employees who volunteered - can run that a civilian company would still shy away from. For national governments, a few welders with a truckload of RHA and a company's worth of Marines with belt-feds is cheap, compared to an air campaign over Iran to destroy ballistic and cruise missile launchers.
But Europe couldn't even do that - so we did it for them.
