The US and allies including Britain face a daunting mission to find and destroy deadly mines that could be deployed off the Iranian coast after Tehran began destroying foreign ships.
Oil tankers have already been hit by explosive-laden drone boats and missiles in the Gulf after Iran threatened to target any vessel attempting to traverse the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump has vowed to keep the Strait open, but it is now effectively closed to ships.
However, sea mines have long been among the regime’s weapons of choice to disrupt shipping.
Iran is thought to have an inventory of thousands of sea mines of varying types, including “influence mines” that are triggered by signals from an approaching vessel, as well as remote-controlled mines that can be guided to a target.
The Defence Secretary John Healey claimed on Thursday that “reports have become clearer and clearer,” and Iran “may have started mining in the strait”, while the New York Times reported that the Iranian military had “begun laying mines”, citing US officials.
Scott Bessent, the US Treasury Secretary, threw that into doubt on Friday, saying: “We know that they have not mined the straits, an assessment echoed by both Donald Trump and US War Secretary Pete Hegseth.
A senior maritime official at Nato told The i Paper that reports of mine laying in the region were “false”.
The Thai bulk carrier ‘Mayuree Naree’ near the Strait of Hormuz after an Iranian attack on 11 March (Photo: Royal Thai Navy/AFP/Getty)The US assessment, this paper understands, was based on intelligence from US naval units based out of Bahrain. Communications sent from senior US military figures to Nato on Wednesday informed the alliance that while there were concerns, there were “no indications” mine-laying was actually happening.
However, that is not to say that Iran will not try to do everything it can to disrupt shipping and destablisie the world economy, including laying mines. Crude oil prices have risen by about 50 per cent during the war, hovering around $100 (£75.30) on Friday afternoon.
On 10 March Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the US “continues today to hunt and strike mine-laying vessels and mine storage”.
The cutting-edge robots that can hunt down mines
Emerging technologies could help to detect Iran’s mines. The Canadian firm Kraken Robotics supplies cutting-edge mine detection equipment to several Nato navies, and this week signed a deal to supply uncrewed vessels to the Royal Navy.
The firm’s flagship Katfish, a 300-metre, 20–kilogram device maps the seabed and sends a high-resolution feed over a fibreoptic tow cable to a vessel on the surface.
“It’s an intelligent underwater vehicle that’s actively controlled,” said its Chief Technology Officer, David Shea. The system uses an automated target recognition system to detect mines that are increasingly well disguised.
The Katfish device from Kraken Robotics being lowered from a boat (Photo: Kraken Robotics)“Most people, when they hear about sea mines, get a vision of spikes and chains that we saw in World War Two,” he said.
“Modern mines are much more sophisticated. Generally, they are lying on the seabed. They are disguised. They look like rocks. And they have a very low [radar] signature to make them difficult to detect.”
The ship’s captain can then dispatch divers or unmanned vessels to investigate.
He said there were an estimated 500,000 mines in various inventories around the world, not only modern mines, but historical ordinance. “Sea mines have always been that asymmetrical threat, and that $1,000 [£755] mine or a $2,000 [£1,510] mine can take out a billion dollar warship,” he said.
“Historically, you would have had to put a crude mine-hunting vessel into the threat area…In the past 15-20 years, there’s been a big push into uncrewed and be able to build technology that can go in there without actually putting any human lives at risk.”
The demands and applications for the company’s technologies have expanded in recent years, says Shea. Kraken supplies equipment to the Danish navy as it was investigating the Nord Stream pipeline explosion in 2022, and for suspected Russian sabotage of undersea internet cables.
The company also works with US and UK navy programmes that are not yet public. Shea does not comment on if its equipment could be used in Hormuz. But they are producing machinery with modern warfare in mind.
“There is a lot of GPS denial and jamming that happens during these conflicts,” said Shea. “Some of the systems we build use navigation systems independent of GPS. That’s one example of the technological challenges we anticipate in this type of conflict.”
How militaries destroy mines
But Iran enjoys significant advantages should it wish to deploy mines and efforts to clear them will be long and dangerous, according to naval experts.
Steve Horell, a former US Naval intelligence officer at Center for European Policy Analysis, described marine mine clearance as a slow trawl.
“You take the water mile by mile, on an east-to-west line, then move a few yards north and go west-to-east,” he said. “It’s very slow because you’re trying to avoid blowing anything up. It’s largely a sonar search, looking for a sonar return from the water. And then you have a remotely operated vehicle or diver go and investigate.”
The process can be thwarted in many ways, said Horrell. Mines can drift back into the passageways that have been cleared. Iran can deploy mines from almost any boat at its disposal, including non-descript fishing boats, he added.
During Operation Desert Storm in the first Gulf War of 1991, a multinational force of ships took five months destroy about 500 sea mines off the coast of Kuwait, he said.
A US military strike on an Iranian boat during attacks targeting mine-laying vessels (Photo: Centcom/Reuters)Clearance under fire
The talk would be challenging in peacetime, and far more so in an active warzone.
Any mine clearance force would require protection and pre-emptive moves to suppress enemy fire, which could come from anywhere along the coastlines of the Strait, said Nick Childs, Naval Forces and Maritime Security specialist at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
A mine clearance operation would require “extensive air cover, to guard against attacks including from missiles, drones and fast attack boats,” he said. “The US will likely hope that it can damage Iranian capabilities enough to deter such threats.”
But the US and allies may lack the capabilities for such an operation, Childs added, noting that the US has both withdrawn several specialist mine-clearing ships from the Gulf region.
“The US has three littoral combat ships in the region with mine countermeasures gear aboard, but this is unproven in combat,” he said.
Western navies may also lack intelligence on local conditions that would allow them to operate more safely.
“What both the British and the Americans were doing for years with their mine counter-measures was building up pictures of what the normal seabed looks like, so that it makes mines easier to spot,” said Childs. “Whether that record and corporate knowledge still exists is another open question.”
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