Over the past week, President Donald Trump has offered different justifications for starting a war of convenience against Iran without consulting Congress or the American people. There is never a convenient time to go to war, but this was a particularly inopportune time to go to war against this enemy.
As a result of inadequate funding combined with vague strategic guidance from both the executive and legislative branches of the federal government, the U.S. Navy recently decommissioned all but four of its Avenger-class mine countermeasures ships. The four minesweepers still in service are based in Japan and would take at least two weeks to transit to the Persian Gulf. Additionally, those ships have minimal defensive armament and can only operate in permissive environments, rendering them highly vulnerable in the present conflict.
The lack of U.S. Navy minesweeping force structure is a welcome development for the leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) in Iran, which has threatened to mine the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway that connects the Persian Gulf to global markets. In response to that threat, every maritime insurer has now either canceled or severely restricted war insurance coverage for commercial ships. Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is currently running at less than 10% of average, as ship creditors, owners, operators, crewmen and customers are unwilling to incur the risk of hitting a mine. Keep in mind, 90% of the traffic stopped just on the threat of mining; if the IRGC deploys mines, commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz may cease entirely.
One of the first lessons I learned as a military planner was that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. You have to assume the enemy will react in an unpredictable manner. But the IRGC mining the Strait of Hormuz is not an unexpected development; this is both the most predictable response and the most difficult to counter. Of the many questions Trump should have asked prior to bombing Iran, this ought to have been the first. With the U.S. Navy having fewer minesweepers in service than at any point since before World War II, and the minesweepers the U.S. Navy does have being incapable of operating in a high-threat environment, how exactly did he and his incurious Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, plan to keep the Strait of Hormuz open?
In a textbook case of making a dire situation worse, Trump decided to respond to the near-total halt of commerce through the Strait of Hormuz by directing the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) to begin offering maritime insurance, including war coverage, to shippers in the Persian Gulf.
Commercial maritime insurance is an extraordinarily complex financial product. It is not uncommon for a modern commercial ship to be owned by a company in one country, registered in a second country, leased to an operator in a third country and crewed by a service provider located in a fourth country, all while a financial institution in a fifth country holds the loan on the ship.
The rules, regulations and processes for assessing risk, pricing coverage and resolving maritime insurance claims are convoluted, covering dozens of international jurisdictions. That is why the companies that provide this coverage have deep subject matter expertise and experience. Fortunately for the U.S. taxpayers who would assume the risk of the U.S. government acting as a sovereign backstop, nobody at DFC knows anything about maritime insurance. This sounds bad but is actually good — that lack of expertise means the U.S. taxpayers are not yet on the hook to underwrite Trump’s promise of providing maritime insurance in the Persian Gulf.
Having bypassed Congress in his haste to go to war, Trump is now completely out of his depth in prosecuting it. I doubt any of the Republicans in Congress who declined to fulfill their constitutional obligation to authorize and fund this war of convenience against Iran expected that Trump was going to casually commit the U.S. taxpayer to providing maritime insurance to shippers in the Persian Gulf. If they want to avoid any further unpleasant surprises, they should immediately hold public hearings and assert their constitutional responsibilities to provide oversight and accountability.