CRITICS of United States President Donald Trump have blamed the closure of the Strait of Hormuz that has been so damaging to the economies of countries and the lives of people around the world on Trump’s waging war on the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The discovery of more than 30 missile cities buried deep under the mountainous coastline of mainland Hormuz and the islands on the strait and the realization of what they are really for prove these critics wrong.
As a matter of fact, these subterranean labyrinths are geological and engineering marvels. They could not have been planned and built just a few months ago. Actually, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) started work on these underground missile cities 20 years ago as a means to control and disrupt navigation on the Strait of Hormuz. Amid current events, it can only be conjectured that using these underground structures for blackmail or holding the world hostage was not far from the minds of the IRGC from the beginning.
As if to deter adversaries with their technological prowess the IRGC did not make building these underground labyrinths a secret. They’re on record as announcing their project publicly, but they did not make clear their reason for launching it. It was mistaken for a project to boost tourism in the area.
It appears to be a matter of hiding something in plain sight. In normal times, Hormuz attracts tourists. There is a bird sanctuary in the area luring bird watchers from around the world. Unesco made a part of it a natural heritage site.
The island of Qeshm is on the surface a beautiful place. The IRGC has turned the area underneath it into an underground fortress and hub of the Hormuz complex of underground fortresses. The island physically dominates the entrance to the strait. It has been compared to a cork covering a bottle that is the Strait of Hormuz.
Today, those subterranean labyrinths serve to hide, protect, rapidly deploy anti-ship missiles, kamikaze drones and explosives-laden fast boats.
One can’t help being reminded of those James Bond movies where underneath a beach paradise an evil genius manufactures a bomb and threatens the world’s richest nations with annihilation unless they pay up. Does reality follow the movies? Alas, reality’s ending hangs in the balance, It’s not clear yet whether the hero will sail on with a pretty girl in tow into the sunset.
It has taken time for the US armed forces to determine what to do with those missile cities. Buried under hundreds of meters of rock, they are impregnable by current issues of bombs. The strategy chosen is to strike and cover with debris entrances, exits and ventilation shafts, thus entombing the forces working underground and rendering the weapons kept there inaccessible inventories. Finding those egresses has been slow work; the underground fortresses were filled by the IRGC with false entrances and exits.
The underground fortresses do not all remain veritable tombs however. The IRGC has taken advantage of the ceasefire to bring out bulldozers to clear the stuck egresses of debris. An expert has estimated the missiles kept in the Hormuz underground fortresses to be around 1,000. There may be more as it is impossible to make an accurate count from outside. The Islamic Republic of Iran does not seem to be running out of missiles to strike Israel, neighbors in the Persian Gulf and US military bases in the Gulf and beyond in the Middle East.
There is a need for a better US strategy to deal with those underground fortresses. Ceasefires are not an effective element of a better strategy. They merely drag hostilities into attrition.
A better strategy lies in action, whether in offense or defense. The brightest part of the Hormuz story so far is how the US joint forces dealt with the swarm of missile-firing fast boats emerging from those underground fortresses. The US Navy showed itself the strongest in the world not because it has the most ships but because it is supported by the most advanced yet relatively inexpensive technologies and by the coordinated support of other branches of the armed forces. Laser weapons on the destroyers blinded the sensors fired by the swarm and on the second layer of the operation fighter helicopters fired upon and annihilated the swarm with advanced and relatively inexpensive precision missiles. (The trend in modern warfare is toward effective yet inexpensive technologies and away from those costing millions of dollars that forces can own them only in limited quantities and hesitate to use them).
It is strange that a war that affects nearly the entirety of the planet and involves the violation of international law is sought to be settled by war or diplomacy between the two protagonists as if the war merely arose from conflicting interests of the protagonists. Ideally, violators of the law should go to prison. In the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s premeditated violation of international law in the Strait of Hormuz, regime change is the next best thing.
