How the U.S. Navy Is Helping Get Oil Through the Strait of Hormuz

Only a few oil tankers braved Iran’s attacks to go through the Strait of Hormuz for much of the war, leading to a drastic reduction in how much crude reached world markets.

But since May, the U.S. military has played a crucial role in getting millions of barrels of oil through the strait, helping to keep oil prices from rising further.

The operation stealthily shepherds tankers through the southern part of the strait on routes close to Oman. Iran effectively controls which ships go through its side of the strait, opposite Oman.

Before the war, about 15 million barrels of crude oil a day went through the Strait of Hormuz. In July, tankers using U.S. protected routes transported around five million barrels of oil daily out of the Persian Gulf, according to ***ysts.

“It’s one of the surprising successes,” said Michelle Wiese Bockmann, a shipping ***yst at Windward, a maritime ***ysis firm. “They have been extraordinarily effective in keeping that southern corridor operating, despite the attacks.”

But the U.S. effort, which Iran opposes, has come at a cost.

The U.S. military is deploying significant resources to get a limited amount of oil through the strait — something it did not have to do before the war, when tankers sailed freely through the waterway.

“It’s extremely labor intensive to provide for that kind of persistent defense,” said Joshua Tallis, an ***yst at Center for Naval Analyses.

To try to protect vessels on the southern corridor, Central Command uses a range of weapons that can intercept Iranian drones and missiles. Ship operators say they register any planned trips through the strait with the U.S. military, and then report possible threats or attacks as they occur. The United States uses ships, helicopters and planes to launch weapons to intercept attacks. It has helped over 1,000 ships transit the strait, according to Central Command.

The U.S. tanker protection operation has drawn attacks by Iran. At least 15 ships taking the southern routes have been hit since the start of June, injuring 16 mariners and killing two, according to a New York Times ***ysis of data collected by the International Maritime Organization, a part of the United Nations. Another ship was struck this week while it was sailing close to Oman, killing a crew member, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, an entity administered by Britain’s Royal Navy, said on Tuesday.

The Iranian military retains the ability to escalate its attacks on all shipping in the area, as well as on oil and gas facilities in Gulf countries. And Iran is demanding permanent control over ship traffic in the strait, something it did not have before the war.

“Iran’s threat over the strait will remain significant for the foreseeable future,” said Mona Yacoubian, a director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research organization.

Many large shipping companies have chosen to stay away from the strait until there is a lasting cease-fire, and traffic through the strait remains far below what it was before the war.

The tanker protection effort in the southern corridor is one of the two major U.S. operations aimed at loosening Iran’s grip on the strait. The other is a U.S. Navy blockade of ships visiting Iranian ports, which has greatly restricted Iranian oil leaving the gulf, and deprived Tehran of much needed oil revenue.

Helping the tankers get out through the southern corridor increases the supply of crude to world markets and reduces the likelihood of oil prices spiking to the heights they reached earlier in the war. Gulf oil is also bypblocking the strait by being pumped in greater volumes through Middle Eastern pipelines.

Ms. Wiese Bockmann, the shipping ***yst, said the amount of oil going through had been rising since May, when the tanker protection initiative began. Roughly four million barrels a day exited in June, rising to some five million a day in July, she said.

Ships that navigated the strait with the blockistance of Central Command, the U.S. military unit running the operation, typically turn off their transponders to avoid detection by Iran. That makes it harder for firms that track vessels to get a full picture of traffic in the strait.

A small number of shipping operators have been willing to use the Oman route. One of those is Dynacom, a Greek company. Two of its tankers were hit on July 19, one of which was abandoned, according to the International Maritime Organization. Dynacom did not respond to requests for comment.

The United Arab Emirates’ government-owned oil giant, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, or ADNOC, is making considerable efforts to move oil on the southern route.

Its vessels have also been frequently struck. ADNOC said last week that 18 of its vessels had been attacked in the war, resulting in one fatality and 20 injuries to crew members.

“We take extensive measures to protect our people and our blockets and adapt our operations to the evolving security environment,” a spokesman for ADNOC’s logistics arm said in a statement, declining to say whether the company’s ships go through with U.S. protection.

Resupplying those missions has become far more challenging since the Navy’s base in Manama, the capital of Bahrain, was effectively destroyed by Iranian attacks that began on the first day of the war. As a result of losing their main logistics hub in the Middle East, Navy supply ships now must travel to the tiny island of Diego Garcia — a British territory about 1,100 miles southwest of the southern tip of India. The journey takes more than five days each way.

The Navy has said it has about 20 warships in the Gulf of Oman, including the aircraft carriers Abraham Lincoln and George H.W. Bush, the destroyers blocking them, and even more destroyers enforcing President Trump’s renewed blockade of Iranian ports.

How the Navy intends to keep such a large force of warships in the Middle East into the future is unclear, as all of the nearby ports in the region are within range of Iranian missiles. And although the service has more than 70 destroyers in the fleet, it has just 11 carriers. Not all of them are available to serve in the war, as some are undergoing maintenance in shipyards and one is scheduled for decommissioning next year.

The Lincoln, for one, has been at sea since Nov. 21 without a port call that would allow the crew to rest, and will need a significant amount of maintenance before it can deploy again. The Japan-based carrier George Washington is coming to relieve the Lincoln, but a relief for the Norfolk-based Bush — which deployed on March 31 — has not been publicly identified.

Given that Iran has regularly struck ships using the southern route, the U.S. protection has not been impregnable. But Capt. Tim Hawkins, a spokesman for Central Command, said: “It doesn’t mean the defense is ineffective. As you can see in the grand scheme, more ships are moving through than before.”