It is not clear, therefore, how seizing Abu Musa and Larak would substantively aid in reopening the strait, unless it formed part of a broader campaign.
Without also seizing Qeshm—where satellite imagery suggests Iran has deployed a significant number of antiship cruise missiles—U.S. forces would fail to eliminate the threat Iran poses in the strait.
More fundamentally, the primary threat to international shipping does not emanate from an Iranian military capability deployed on the islands, but from the entire stretch of Iran’s southern coastline, from which it can launch ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones. Though Iran historically has deployed radar and antiship cruise missiles on the islands, there are numerous areas elsewhere it may deploy those assets. Indeed, while the strait is the waterway’s narrowest point, ships must transit the Persian Gulf as well. A tiny sliver of the Gulf lies outside the reach of Iran’s shortest-range ballistic missiles, but all of it is well within range of its other assets, including the 1,000-mile-capable Shahed-136 drone.
As the war has demonstrated thus far, Iran’s missile and drone threat cannot be eliminated from the air. The Shahed drone, for example, requires only a pickup truck as a launch platform and is highly mobile and easy to conceal. The terrain of Iran’s southern coast—dominated by the Zagros mountains—makes locating and destroying Iranian fires from the air difficult. Iran has the added advantage of having spent decades preparing defensive countermeasures to evade targeting. Iran’s southern coastline is 1,520 miles, approximately the distance from Washington, D.C., to the eastern border of Colorado; the United States would require a substantially larger ground force, including assault forces and logistical support, to meaningfully suppress Iranian missile and drone fire over that amount of territory.
The scale of this threat is one reason the Navy has not conducted escort operations in the Gulf; the risk is too high. If traveling at supersonic speeds, an antiship cruise missile takes only 47 seconds to reach a ship 30 nautical miles offshore. Moreover, U.S. escort operations, which the Navy has told shippers it does not have the available resources to conduct, would enable the transit of only 10 percent of normal traffic in a best-case scenario.