Mark Gagnon

This is the largest American naval battle since World War II.

After the U.S.

ship, the USS Samuel B. Roberts, struck an Iranian mine, the United States launched a coordinated attack against Iranian naval and oil platform targets.

Basically, in a single day, the U.S.

Navy sank or damaged, sank or damaged,

six Iranian warships and destroyed two oil platforms.

I mean, once again, billions of dollars of destruction for the Iranians.

Iran's Navy was devastated, but Iran learned a lesson from this operation.

And it wasn't the lesson that Washington hoped they would learn.

Iran didn't conclude that threatening the Strait was, you know, useless or a bad move.

Instead, it concluded that it needed a different strategy, one that didn't involve trying to match the U.S.

pound for pound in military power, but instead leveraged the geography of the Strait itself.

A strategy based on asymmetric warfare, mines, small, fast attack boats, shore based anti ship missiles and basically the ever present threat of simply making the strait too dangerous for commercial shipping.

If they know that America needs a strait to be open, just creating instability is a weapon in and of itself.

And that strategic shift would basically define the next four decades.

So after the Iran-Iraq war ended in 1988, the Strait of Hormuz settled into a tense but mostly stable equilibrium.

The U.S.

Navy's Fifth Fleet, headquartered in Bahrain, maintained a permanent presence in the Gulf.

Iran rebuilt its military not to match the United States conventionally, but to develop what strategists call the anti-access area denial capability.

Basically,