The Dead Man's Switch

The loss of a valuable equilibrium...

I transited the Straits of Hormuz for the first time in the summer of 2001. I was a brand new LTjg onboard a guided missile destroyer. As we made the passage the Iranian Navy hailed us on the radio. They told us to turn around and leave. They told us we were entering sovereign waters. They lit us up with their surface targeting radar. They buzzed down our starboard side with an old P-3 Orion we’d sold them 25 years earlier. They sent out a few patrol boats to hang out as we drove past. They threatened immediate action if we didn’t turn around.

We didn’t. This, apparently, was what happened most of the time a U.S. ship transited the straits. We were, after all, joining an entire carrier battlegroup already in the Gulf conducting Operation Southern Watch to enforce sanctions on Iraq. The only way they got there was by transiting the same strait. And being challenged by the same script.

We’d transit a half dozen times that deployment. The last few as we zipped back and forth trying to figure out where and at whom we were supposed to shoot our Tomahawks after 9/11. Each time, the theater of resistance played out. Each time we transited safely.

This is the dance that’s been going on in some form since 1979. The Iranians, with their reasonably capable military well funded and resourced by some version of Russian or Soviet support, wanted to let us know that they could partially or totally shut down the Arabian Gulf if they really wanted to. And in doing so, cut off the supply of the largest single source of the world’s oil. And we were there to let them know that if they did, they were going to pay an unspeakable price.

In that there was an extremely valuable equilibrium. Over the last half century about 300 billion barrels of oil made it through that strait. That’s 20 trillion dollars of fuel. 15 years of total global oil consumption. One out of every 4.5 barrels of oil on earth. It’s the most expensive 21-mile-wide corridor on the planet. It’s been mostly closed to all traffic since March 1st. The global energy-driven economy is feeling it already.

I’m not in the prediction business. So I won’t tell you what I think is going to happen. I’ll just tell you a few things that are true.

Iran’s military, even greatly reduced, has the reach to take down nearly any part of the oil infrastructure in the Gulf. Not because they’re strong. Because they’re close. And shipping infrastructure is extremely easy to stop if you get to do it from land and your enemy has to try to stop you while floating on the water. Since the dawn of low-cost, highly scalable drones, that capability has increased, not decreased. The reason Iran never tried to shut down the Gulf is because, first, it was economically harmful to them. Second, they understood what would come after it in response.

Six days ago the fear of the second threat was taken away by preemptive execution. And with it went the fear of the first.

Bombing a Middle Eastern country into surrender and regime change, without an occupying force on the ground, has never happened. My first deployment may have been on a ship. My last was fighting the raging insurgency in al-Anbar. It was six years after Saddam Hussein was hanged and his Baath party was locked out of government. That ruling group never went away. They melted into the desert and killed Americans for years.

Political power in that region doesn’t come from the same place it comes from in Western countries. What’s true in Venezuela is not true of Iran or Iraq. Political power in Iran comes from the ability to focus anger and hatred toward the United States and Israel. And while it is very true that there are many, even a large majority, of Iranians who hate the regime and would welcome change, believing that there aren’t enough people to stop them from achieving that ignores the reality of how authoritarian Middle Eastern governments work. That mistake cost us 10 years of war and thousands of my fellow service members’ lives.

As it was with Saddam, so it is with the Ayatollah. They both held a deadman’s switch. And once flipped, the security of one of the most consequential regions on the planet becomes a burden that someone else has to secure. Now, the equilibrium is lost. And the only question left is who is going to fill the vacuum of power. We don’t have a great track record with that.