Mark Gagnon

is distinct from Iran's regular navy.

It basically deploys hundreds of small, fast-attack boats armed with rockets or missiles throughout the island and along the coastline around Hormuz.

Analysts estimate Iran stockpiled thousands of naval mines, basically cheap, devastatingly effective ships

that they just float into the water.

And Iran developed an arsenal of anti-ship cruise missiles and ballistic missiles capable of targeting any vessel in the strait from shore-based launchers that could be hidden and rapidly relocated.

And as a result, they were building up

a cheap way to control the entire strait because they knew that in their shores was kind of the main corridor that controlled the global economy.

The idea was elegant in its simplicity.

Iran couldn't win a battle against the United States, but it didn't have to.

All it has to do is make the strait dangerous enough that commercial insurers would refuse to cover tankers going through the waterway.

If you're an insurance company,

Why would you tell a boat like, yeah, you guys can go through it, but we might lose billions of dollars of oil because you guys hit a mine.

No one's going to go for that.

And if the boats don't have insurance, who's going to ship their products thinking that, oh, it could just get destroyed at any moment.

So the people shipping it don't want to do it.

The private companies, that is.

The insurers don't want to insure it.

So with just creating instability, the entire thing is useless.

So in a world of maritime commerce, you don't have to close the waterway physically, just make it turbulent enough, put enough pressure and strain that you force them to come to your needs and make a deal or leave you alone.

And this threat became explicit during the 2011-2012 tensions over Iran's nuclear program.