The Iran War and the Chokepoint Reckoning: What CIMSEC’s Series Confirms About the Coming Naval Order
The Center for International Maritime Security has just closed out a two-week series on the U.S.-Iran maritime war, and the collective weight of that series deserves more attention than any single essay in it. Read individually, the contributions from James Jackson, Admiral Massimo Vianello and Master Chief Giovanni Giorguli, Bruce Randolph Tizes, Ludovico Domini, Rear Admiral Roberto Domini, Paul Viscovich, Ehud Eiran, and the mine-warfare team of Ronald Swart and Scott Truver each make a discrete argument about insurance markets, chokepoint theory, mine countermeasures, or alliance friction. Read together, they describe something larger: a war that has confirmed, in real time and at high cost, arguments I have been making for several years about kill webs, mesh fleets, and the vulnerability of exquisite platforms operating without distributed, autonomous mass behind them.
This is not a coincidence of timing. It is what happens when a chokepoint war finally arrives after decades of being treated as a scenario rather than a possibility. The Strait of Hormuz has been the subject of naval planning exercises for more than forty years. Now it has been the subject of an actual campaign, and the campaign has validated a set of arguments that were previously theoretical.
The Chokepoint Was Never About the Water
Kenneth Maxwell wrote about the Portuguese origins of chokepoint strategy — how a nation of perhaps a million and a half people built a fortified maritime network across the Indian Ocean not through numerical superiority but through the disciplined seizure of a handful of narrow passages: Hormuz, Malacca, and the approaches to the Red Sea. Dom Francisco de Almeida’s insight, articulated to King Manuel five centuries ago, was that control of the sea lane mattered more than control of the surrounding land. The CIMSEC series confirms that this insight has outlived every naval technology invented since.
What the series adds, and what the Portuguese could not have anticipated, is that the modern chokepoint is contested as much in the insurance ledger as in the water itself. Bruce Randolph Tizes’s essay on war-risk pricing is the single most important contribution to the series, because it identifies the actual terrain on which the Hormuz war has been fought. Iran did not need to sink the U.S. Navy. It needed only to make the Joint War Committee’s listed-area mechanics work against Western shippers, driving war-risk premiums high enough that owners and underwriters made the routing decision the Navy could not force them to reverse. James Jackson’s companion essay makes the same point in different language: sea control has become an actuarial condition, decided in London and Bermuda syndicates rather than at the point of intercept.
I have argued for years, going back to the work Ed Timperlake and I did on kill webs versus kill chains, that the value of naval power lies less in the platform than in what the platform contributes to the wider network of sensing, decision, and effect. The Hormuz war extends that argument into a domain neither of us had fully worked through: the financial and legal network that determines whether a chokepoint is functionally open or closed. Ludovico Domini’s essay on archipelagic-reticular power and nodal control makes the theoretical case explicitly, arguing that Mahan’s battle fleet and Mackinder’s Heartland were built for a world where power was measured in tonnage and territory. That world, as Domini rightly notes, no longer fully exists. Sovereignty is increasingly measured in connectivity or in the capacity to control the compulsory crossroads through which global flows must pass and the U.S. Navy’s difficulty in this war has been that it was built, sized, and doctrinally trained for the older measure.
Domini’s synthesis draws on three thinkers worth pausing on, because each anticipates a different piece of what the mesh fleet argument requires. Francois Gipouloux’s model of archipelagic power, developed from the history of port-city networks stretching from Vladivostok to Singapore, treats flexibility and connection to trade networks as more durable sources of power than territorial rigidity, a description that maps almost exactly onto a distributed sensor mesh rather than a battle fleet. Giuseppe Fioravanzo’s wartime theory of the world’s enclosed seas as strategic hinges, developed for the Italian Navy in 1943 and treating the Persian Gulf as an extension of a wider Mediterranean system, anticipated the very framing Rear Admiral Domini uses to argue for an Italian role in postwar Hormuz mine clearance. And Parag Khanna’s more recent concept of nodal power, in which what matters is not how much territory a state controls but whether it governs the pipelines, cables, and chokepoints through which the world’s flows pass, is the closest existing theoretical language for what a kill web is actually meant to secure. None of these three thinkers used the vocabulary of unmanned systems or mesh sensing. All three were describing, decades or centuries in advance, the strategic logic that a mesh fleet is built to exploit.
Admiral Cooper’s Digital Ocean Meets Its Test
This is where the CIMSEC series intersects most directly with work I have done on Admiral Brad Cooper. Cooper spent his 5th Fleet tour building Task Force 59, a persistent, AI-enabled sensing grid of unmanned surface vessels across the Arabian Gulf that participants came to call a digital ocean. The concept was never about the vessels themselves. It was about establishing a mesh of maritime domain awareness dense enough that Iranian small-boat and drone activity could not move undetected, and about doing so through a contractor-owned, contractor-operated model that let the Navy field new capability in months rather than the years a traditional acquisition cycle requires. As CENTCOM commander, Cooper carried that same operational philosophy that the value of any platform is what it contributes to the combat network, not what it can do alone into Operation Epic Fury.
The CIMSEC series is, in effect, a report card on whether that philosophy was applied at the scale the Hormuz crisis demanded, and the honest answer is mixed. Admiral Vianello and Master Chief Giorguli’s essay on sea mines and unmanned systems documents an Iranian threat architecture, naval mines, coastal defense cruise missiles, fast inshore attack craft, and an expanding inventory of unmanned underwater vehicles including the Nazir-1 extra-large UUV, that is precisely the kind of distributed, low-signature threat set that a mesh sensing architecture like Task Force 59 was designed to detect and dilute.
Yet the same essay, and Swart and Truver’s companion piece on American naval mines, both point to a mine countermeasures capacity that has atrophied even as the threat it exists to counter has proliferated. The decommissioning of the Bahrain-based Avenger-class MCM ships, completed just weeks before Iran began mining the Strait, left the Navy dependent on Littoral Combat Ship mine packages with documented reliability problems and on destroyers not designed for the mission. Tizes’s essay makes the same point from the insurance side: Chubb cannot price voyage risk into a corridor whose mine geometry is undefined, and that geometry will not be defined without purpose-built assets in theater.
This is the gap between having a kill web concept and having a kill web fully resourced. Task Force 59 proved that persistent, distributed, low-cost sensing works in the Gulf. What the Hormuz war has proven is that sensing without a matching investment in the unglamorous, unsexy hardware of mine countermeasures and munitions replenishment still leaves a war-winning insight sitting on the shelf.
Intelligent Mass Against Exquisite Scarcity
The cost-exchange arithmetic running through this series is the clearest empirical validation yet of an argument I have made in the maritime autonomous systems work I have done following the MARTAC T38 endurance trials and the broader mesh fleet analysis: that intelligent mass beats exquisite scarcity in a chokepoint fight, because exquisite scarcity is what an adversary with a modest drone inventory can afford to exhaust.
Jackson’s essay puts a number on it that should be read alongside every future shipbuilding and munitions budget: a Shahed drone costing between twenty and fifty thousand dollars has repeatedly drawn a four-million-dollar PAC-3 interceptor in response, an exchange ratio above one hundred to one. Domini’s essay, drawing on CSIS munitions accounting, estimates the Pentagon burned through twenty-eight to thirty-five billion dollars in weapons and ammunition in the first forty days of the campaign. Replenishment at current production rates will take years.
This is not a new observation in the abstract. Ed Timperlake and I have written about the danger of a force structure optimized for a small number of extremely capable, extremely expensive platforms operating against an adversary who has correctly calculated that mass, even unsophisticated mass, degrades that structure faster than it can be replaced. What the Hormuz war supplies is the receipt. The lesson is not that the Navy should abandon its high-end magazine-depth interceptors, any more than the Marine Corps should abandon its expeditionary strike capability. The lesson, consistent with what Task Force 59 demonstrated and what the MARTAC endurance trials have since reinforced, is that a mesh of inexpensive, attritable, autonomous surface and subsurface systems has to sit in front of the exquisite platforms, absorbing the mass so the interceptors are reserved for the threats that actually require them.
Paul Viscovich’s essay reaches the same conclusion from the Marine Corps side. Iran’s coastal missile and drone forces have made the Marine Corps’s own Stand-in Forces concept manifest, except that in this war the stand-in force doing the denying is Iranian and the maneuver being denied is American. Viscovich’s call for an aggressive program of inexpensive, expendable, but genuinely capable offensive platforms to challenge adversary A2/AD networks is the mirror image of the mesh fleet argument on the maritime autonomous systems side: build the attritable layer first and let the high-value platforms fight from behind it rather than into it.
Converting the Merchant Fleet into the Mesh
The most forward-looking essay in the series, and the one that connects most directly to the maritime autonomous systems work I have pursued since the T38 Devil Ray’s 192-hour endurance trial off the California coast, is the piece by Alexander Lott, Kristjan Tabri, and Angela Sooba on converting merchant vessels into temporary unmanned transits through the Strait. Their proposal is straightforward: disembark crews before the high-risk passage, run the vessel through the mined and drone-contested waters under remote control or limited autonomy, and re-board crews on the far side. The reasoning is not sentimental. It is the same risk-calculus argument that runs through the insurance essays. Remove the seafarer from the chokepoint and the single greatest deterrent to transit, the danger to human life, is removed with them, even though the risk to hull and cargo remains.
What Lott, Tabri, and Sooba describe as a Degree Three or Degree Four Maritime Autonomous Surface Ship under the IMO’s new MASS Code is functionally identical to the argument I have made about the mesh fleet’s open-architecture autonomy stacks: the ship does not need to be exquisite, it needs to be resilient to degraded communications and capable of a pre-approved, reduced-speed transit corridor when the link to shore is jammed or spoofed. Their description of the Self-Adaptive Artificial Captain concept, in which a control system observes ordinary crewed voyages and learns the vessel’s own handling characteristics well enough to reproduce them autonomously, is precisely the kind of behavioral-model approach to autonomy that shortens the integration timeline standing between today’s commercial fleet and tomorrow’s mesh-compatible one. The obstacle they identify that COLREGs still assume a human being on the bridge making decisions and bearing responsibility is a legal lag behind a technical reality, and it is the same legal lag that has slowed weaponized maritime autonomy generally.
This matters beyond Hormuz. A merchant fleet capable of temporary unmanned conversion is not just a way to keep trade moving through a single contested strait. It is a demonstration that the intelligent-mass logic I have argued should govern naval force design — cheap, distributed, autonomous platforms absorbing risk so that exquisite, expensive assets are reserved for what only they can do — applies with equal force to the commercial fleet that a war like this one is fought to protect. The instinct across most of the CIMSEC series is to ask what the Navy should do differently. Lott, Tabri, and Sooba ask what the shipping industry should do differently, and the answer they arrive at independently converges on the same mesh logic Task Force 59 pioneered a decade ago in the same waters.
The Alliance Dimension the Series Surfaces
Two essays in the series extend the argument into terrain I have written about at length in the European and Indo-Pacific alliance context: the mismatch between political unity and operational capacity inside a coalition. Ehud Eiran’s account of the U.S.-Israeli division of labor in the Hormuz war, an air-and-land power contributing intelligence and strike support to a maritime theater it cannot itself sustain, is structurally identical to the burden-sharing problem that runs through the Williams Foundation seminars I have covered on Australian defense and through the European allied-architecture work Murielle Delaporte and I have pursued for years. A coalition can share an enemy and a set of political objectives while its members hold entirely different theories of what victory in the maritime domain requires. Rear Admiral Roberto Domini’s essay on Italy’s mine countermeasures capability makes the positive case for the same dynamic: Italy’s Gaeta-class minehunters and its neutral diplomatic standing with Tehran, Moscow, and Beijing give Rome a plausible claim to lead or co-lead a post-conflict clearance mission that Washington cannot credibly lead alone. The allied security web I have described for the Indo-Pacific, hub-and-spoke evolving into something closer to an actual mesh of distributed national contributions, has a Gulf and Mediterranean analogue sitting in this series, largely unremarked upon by the American commentary that dominates most coverage of the war.
What the Series Gets Right That Washington Has Not Yet Absorbed
The most important single sentence in the entire CIMSEC series may be Jackson’s observation that the Navy has been handed the wrong job: it is winning every kinetic engagement does not restored the confidence of the people who own the cargo and price the hull and this is not a targeting problem. That is precisely the argument that underlies the shift from kill chains to kill webs that Ed Timperlake and I have spent more than a decade developing. A kill chain is built to service a targeting problem. A kill web is built to service an entire operational environment, including the parts of that environment, like insurance markets and allied burden-sharing, that no destroyer’s fire control system will ever touch. Admiral Cooper understood this when he built Task Force 59 as a sensing architecture rather than a strike architecture. The unfinished business this war has exposed is that the United States built the sensing layer in the Gulf and then failed to build the mine countermeasures, munitions, and alliance-integration layers that a sensing architecture is supposed to feed.
None of this argues that the war was wise to fight, a question outside the scope of any of these essays and outside the scope of this one. It argues that the war has produced an unusually clean natural experiment in what happens when chokepoint theory, insurance-market coercion, mesh sensing, and cost-exchange asymmetry all operate simultaneously against a single navy in a single strait.
The CIMSEC series has done the defense community a service by assembling that experiment’s results in one place. The task now is to stop treating each finding as a discrete lesson about mines, or insurance, or alliance friction, and to recognize what the Portuguese understood five centuries ago and what Task Force 59 was quietly rebuilding a decade before this war began: that a chokepoint is held by whoever controls the network around it, not by whoever has the largest fleet sailing through it.
There is a procurement and posture argument buried in every essay in this series, whether or not the authors intended to make it. It is that the fleet the United States needs for the next chokepoint war is not simply a larger version of the fleet it sent to this one.
It is a fleet built around a persistent mesh of unmanned sensing and attritable strike assets, backed by a mine countermeasures force sized for the threat rather than for the peacetime budget cycle, integrated with an insurance and finance architecture that Washington treats as seriously as it treats munitions production, and coordinated with allies whose contributions, Italian minehunters, Israeli strike intelligence, Gulf basing access, and eventually a converted commercial fleet capable of running its own mesh-compatible transits, are folded into the network rather than bolted onto it as an afterthought.
Task Force 59 proved the sensing half of that fleet works. Operation Epic Fury has now supplied the receipts for what happens when the rest of it is left unbuilt. The next chokepoint crisis, wherever it occurs, will not be forgiving of the same gap twice.
Note: For the CIMSEC series, see the following:
And for my most recent book on maritime autonomous systems, see the following: