Iran has been threatening to mine the Strait of Hormuz for forty years – and America has spent forty years insisting it was ready.
Now the mines are in the water.
What the Pentagon quietly did six weeks before the shooting started is something every American needs to know.
Biden Decommissioned America's Minesweepers Months Before the Iran War
Iran didn't improvise this. The mullahs have been stockpiling naval mines for decades, with estimates putting their current inventory at roughly 6,000 mines – a number that grew quietly while Washington looked the other way.
The mines are cheap, anonymous, and brutally effective.
Contact mines detonate on impact with a hull.
Moored mines float just beneath the surface, invisible from the deck of a tanker.
Bottom mines sit on the seafloor and detonate when sensors detect a ship passing overhead.
"These mines are a tool of really psychological warfare," retired Col. Joe Buccino, former CENTCOM Communications Director, said Saturday on Fox & Friends Weekend. "We don't know how many are out there. We don't know where they are. And that creates fear and shuts down flow through the Strait of Hormuz."
Iran began laying mines in the strait as early as March 10, according to U.S. intelligence reporting, deploying them from small craft carrying two or three at a time.
Here's what former President Joe Biden did while Iran was preparing.
His Pentagon set in motion the retirement of four mine sweepers based in the Middle East.
The USS Devastator, USS Dextrous, USS Gladiator, and USS Sentry – America's four battle-tested minesweepers stationed in Bahrain – were decommissioned in September 2025.
The last hulls were shipped back to the United States in January 2026 – six weeks before the war started after Biden got the ball rolling.
Biden's Pentagon replaced them with Littoral Combat Ships equipped with new mine countermeasures packages – technology that had never been tested in combat.
The replacement system's own operational availability rating sat at 29 percent, well below the Navy's minimum threshold, according to a pre-war analysis from the Center for Maritime Strategy.
That's the equipment America is now counting on to clear a minefield in a shooting war.
Buccino confirmed what the Navy's own data already showed: the United States "decommissioned" most of its mine-clearing ships and Iran "is exploiting a gap" in naval assets.
Joe Biden's Pentagon made that decision.
Strait of Hormuz Oil Prices Are Spiking and the Navy Has No Easy Answer
Twenty percent of the world's daily oil supply – roughly 20 million barrels – moves through the Strait of Hormuz.
Oil prices surged past $100 a barrel this week as Iran's new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei vowed the strait would remain closed until U.S. military bases leave the region.
California gasoline already exceeded $5 a gallon.
Iran's IRGC threatened $200 oil.
Trump struck Kharg Island – Iran's crown jewel oil hub in the Persian Gulf – on Friday as a warning shot, deliberately sparing the oil infrastructure while destroying every military target on the island.
"Moments ago, at my direction, the United States Central Command executed one of the most powerful bombing raids in the history of the Middle East," Trump wrote on Truth Social.
He warned the oil infrastructure is next if Iran doesn't stand down.
Reagan faced this exact crisis in 1988, launched Operation Praying Mantis, and destroyed half of Iran's operational navy in 24 hours.
Iran backed down.
Every president since Reagan knew Iran could do this again.
The intelligence warnings were there.
The 2019 Defense Intelligence Agency report put Iran's mine stockpile at over 5,000 weapons.
Congressional Research Service analysts spent years flagging the threat.
Naval experts published white papers with titles like "Don't Sweep Minesweepers Under the Rug."
Obama ignored it.
Biden finished the job – decommissioning the last four dedicated minesweepers in Bahrain and signing off on unproven replacement technology rated at 29 percent operational availabilityIran mined the strait six weeks later.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright confirmed Navy escorts are coming – "relatively soon," he told CNBC Thursday.
Trump is now cleaning up the mess three presidents left him.
Sources:
- Madison Colombo, "Iran holds world energy hostage with 'nightmare' Strait of Hormuz sea mines, former CENTCOM official warns," Fox News, March 14, 2026.
- Riley Ceder, "The US Navy decommissioned Middle East minesweepers last year. Here's what they did," Military Times, March 12, 2026.
- "Iran conflict and the Strait of Hormuz: Impacts on Oil, Gas, and Other Commodities," Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress.
- Ethan Connell and Jonathan Walberg, "Don't Sweep Minesweepers Under the Rug: America's Critical Naval Vulnerability," Center for Maritime Strategy, May 2025.
- "2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis," Wikipedia, updated March 14, 2026.
- "Iranian oil squeeze tests Trump's war plans," Axios, March 12, 2026.
- "The Strait of Hormuz: A Timeline of Tensions," History.com, updated March 2026.