U.S. Forces Clear Hormuz Mines, Then Hit Minelayers Again

U.S. Central Command said Friday that American forces had cleared Iranian sea mines from the Strait of Hormuz shipping lanes after months of quiet work. Admiral Brad Cooper, the CENTCOM commander, spoke in a video a little over three minutes long. He said Navy divers, SEALs, and aircraft from the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps had swept the Traffic Separation Scheme, the pair of opposite-direction lanes cargo ships have long used between Iran and Oman.

Within days, those same forces struck Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps minelayers trying to put new mines in the water. The sweep was real. The strait was not finished.

A Three-and-a-Half-Minute All-Clear

Cooper’s video, posted as Thursday night turned into Friday, was CENTCOM’s operational confirmation of a claim President Donald Trump had already made on August 25. Trump said all mines in the international waters of the strait had been removed or detonated, and that any boat laying new ones would be destroyed. Cooper narrowed the boast to the marked lanes and put names on the units that did the work.

The circumstances were challenging and dangerous to say the least, but we got the job done. Bottom line, today, international shipping lanes are open and momentum is building.

Adm. Brad Cooper, commander, U.S. Central Command, operational video

He said the mines had been laid months earlier by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. He did not say how many were found, how they were built, or how each one was killed. A defense official later said the military would not discuss those details for security reasons.

The Traffic Separation Scheme is a bookkeeping idea with steel consequences. Inbound and outbound lanes are each about two miles wide, with a two-mile buffer between them, inside a strait that narrows to about 21 nautical miles. Cooper said those historic lanes, and not every inlet and anchorage around them, were the ground his forces had cleared.

The Sweep Covered the Traffic Lanes

That distinction is the gap between a video and a sailing schedule. Allies had already told Washington, in private, that they were not sure every mine was gone. Earlier industry and International Maritime Organization talk had put about 80 mines in the historic lanes, with some counts higher. Currents can walk a mine out of a swept box. Residual risk can sit outside the monitored tracks.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The claim: Cooper said internationally recognized transit routes in the strait are free of Iranian sea mines after months of quiet work.
• The ground: The cleared box is the Traffic Separation Scheme, not every mile of water between Iran and Oman.
• The method: Navy divers and SEALs worked with air power from four U.S. services, while the Navy was already shifting off older minesweepers toward unmanned systems.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• The haul: CENTCOM has not published a mine count. U.S. officials, speaking after the video, said forces swept more than 200 mine-like objects from the main lane, of which 11 were actual mines, and that only a few had been properly deployed.
• The leftovers: Allied officials have said some mines may remain, and that drifting or uncharted devices can still appear near the lanes.
• The model: A waterway is declared clear after enough sweeps to drive detection probability near certainty in the Navy’s math, which is not the same thing as a physical guarantee.

Retired Vice Adm. Kevin Donegan, who once commanded the Navy’s 5th Fleet and was not part of this operation, described that math in plain terms. Forces hunt with surface and subsurface craft, including unmanned systems that map the seabed, then send divers and SEALs to destroy what the sensors flag. Different stretches of water can be at different stages at the same time.

In simplest terms, they have to conduct enough sweeps of the lanes to drive the probability of detection of mines to virtually 100% in the model.

Kevin Donegan, retired vice admiral, former commander of the U.S. 5th Fleet

Defense analyst Bryan Clark said in April the Navy was at a nadir in mine-sweeping capacity after retiring its four Bahrain-based mine-countermeasure ships the previous year, with newer unmanned gear still arriving. Cooper’s account now shows the work was done with a mixed force, not a dedicated sweeper flotilla. Months of diving for a handful of live mines is slow, expensive labor. Laying the next field is not.

Why Cheap Mines Keep Beating Expensive Sweeps

Iran has run this play before. In the late 1980s, during the Tanker War phase of the Iran-Iraq War, Revolutionary Guard boats and converted landing craft seeded the Gulf while the United States escorted reflagged Kuwaiti tankers. The first escorted supertanker, Bridgeton, hit a mine. Thin-skinned warships then hid in her wake. Washington had almost no mine-warfare gear in the Gulf at the start and had to fly in helicopters and pull minesweepers from home waters.

THE LAST TIME IRAN MINED THE GULF

1. July 24, 1987: The United States starts Operation Earnest Will to escort reflagged Kuwaiti tankers through the Gulf.
2. Late July 1987: Bridgeton, on the first escorted run, strikes a mine; further convoys pause while minesweeping helicopters and ships deploy.
3. September 21, 1987: U.S. forces catch the Iranian landing craft Iran Ajr laying mines; SEALs board her and find mines on deck plus a log of earlier drops.
4. April 14, 1988: USS Samuel B. Roberts, backing out of a field, hits a mine that snaps her keel, blows a hole in the hull, and injures 10 sailors; the crew keeps her afloat.
5. April 18, 1988: The United States answers with Operation Praying Mantis, hitting Iranian oil platforms and sinking or damaging Iranian warships.
6. September 26, 1988: Earnest Will ends after more than a year of convoys, secret barge bases, and a running fight with small boats and mines.

A Navy historical account of that afternoon on Roberts is still the cleanest picture of what one cheap weapon does to a modern hull. Lookouts spotted black spheres in the water. The ship stopped, then crept astern, and an Iranian mine broke the frigate’s keel with a blast that curled HY-80 steel and punched a truck-size hole. Divers later matched serial numbers on unexploded mines to the batch taken off Iran Ajr. Since World War II, naval mines have sunk more U.S. warships than missiles, guns, and bombs combined.

The 2026 sweep used newer sensors and the same human work at the end of the chain. A mine that takes months to hunt can still be rolled off a small boat in a night. That is why Cooper’s past-tense victory and Trump’s zero-tolerance warning arrived as a pair. The first describes a finished search. The second admits the search can be undone.

20 Million Barrels Used to Pass Each Day

Hormuz is not a symbolic ditch. It is the only sea door out of the Persian Gulf for most of the oil that leaves Saudi, Iraqi, Kuwaiti, Qatari, and Iranian terminals. In the first half of 2025, before this war wrecked the timetable, the U.S. Energy Information Administration counted 20.9 million barrels a day of oil through the strait, about 20 percent of world petroleum liquids use and about a quarter of seaborne oil trade.

HORMUZ AGAINST OTHER OIL GATES

Crude and condensate made up 14.7 million barrels a day of that Hormuz total, with 6.1 million barrels of products. LNG added 11.4 billion cubic feet a day, more than 20 percent of world LNG trade, much of it from Qatar. About 89 percent of the crude and condensate went to Asia. China, India, Japan, and South Korea took 74 percent. The United States imported about 0.4 million barrels a day through the strait, 7 percent of U.S. crude imports and 2 percent of U.S. liquids use.

Asian Buyers Take Most of the Barrels

That destination mix is why a Hormuz halt hits Seoul and Mumbai before it hits Houston. Saudi Arabia is still the largest single crude exporter through the strait. Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain have almost no detour around the strait. Iran’s Goreh-Jask line on the Gulf of Oman has an effective capacity around 0.3 million barrels a day. The UAE has talked about another 1.5 million barrels a day of pipe to Fujairah by 2027. None of that replaces 20 million.

Bypass Pipelines Cover Only a Slice

So the political meaning of Cooper’s video is a promise that the old door is usable again. The shipping meaning is narrower. Early tanker-tracking after the war put oil flows near 5 million barrels a day, against more than 20 million before the fighting. Commodity-vessel counts on some days after the video sat in the single digits to low teens, against a 10-day average near 15 and a 2025 baseline around 138 vessels a day.

U.S. military and AIS tallies of American-helped Hormuz transits show the same gap. In the 48 hours covering August 25 and 26, those facilitated transits totaled 37. In the 72 hours covering August 27 through 29, the window that includes Cooper’s video, they totaled 65, still about 22 a day against that 138-ship baseline. Lanes can be declared open while the queue stays short.

Two Missions Share the Same Narrow Water

Cooper was not only selling a minesweep. He was describing a strait that is open for some ships and closed for others. About 50,000 U.S. troops in the region, in CENTCOM’s telling of the wider campaign, are enforcing a naval blockade of Iran while helping lawful cargo through the same ditch. The two jobs collide in the same traffic scheme.

THE BLOCKADE RUNNING WITH THE SWEEP

• Escorted traffic: U.S. forces have given coordinated protection to nearly 1,500 commercial vessels in recent months.
• The oil: Those ships carried nearly 750 million barrels of crude toward world markets.
• Iran’s exports: Cooper said Iran has exported zero oil from its shores since the blockade resumed in mid-July.
• The gate: No ship has entered or left an Iranian port without U.S. permission, he said, except on humanitarian grounds.
• The stops: U.S. forces have turned back about 75 vessels trying to run the blockade and disabled three that did not comply.

That is a wartime strait with a swept centerline, not a return to 2025. A tanker that wants the old rhythm still needs an escort, a war-risk desk, and a belief that the next night will not put a new mine in the lane. Iran’s export number at zero is the other half of the same policy. The United States is trying to starve one fleet while waving another through.

The Joint Advisory Still Says Severe

Mariners did not reset their charts on Cooper’s say-so. The Joint Maritime Information Center, through the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations office, issued an advisory on August 25 that kept the strait at a SEVERE threat level and said deliberate hostile action remained highly likely. It said mine-danger areas were still active and warned of drifting or uncharted mines in and near the Traffic Separation Scheme. It also said clearance and survey work were continuing and that commercial traffic was expected to stay below prewar levels.

That note predates Cooper’s video. No public downgrade of the warning had been issued in the days after he spoke. UKMTO also reported that tankers near Oman were hit by unknown projectiles on August 24 and August 25, starting fires that crews put out. All crew members were said to be safe. The public alerts did not name the ships or the shooters.

Iran and Oman said the same week they were talking about a temporary joint navigation corridor and a joint mine-clearance project. Their statements did not say whether that work would cover the same lanes CENTCOM had just declared clean. Shipowners still face the war-risk rates that have barely moved, which is the market’s way of saying a speech is not a survey.

Days Later, IRGC Minelayers Drew U.S. Fire

The test of Cooper’s past tense arrived before the week was out. On August 31, CENTCOM said U.S. forces had taken “limited, precise action” against IRGC minelaying forces “posing an imminent threat” in the strait. The command was answering an IRGC statement that called those strikes an act of aggression. CENTCOM called that claim false and said Iran had created the threat and the U.S. military had eliminated it to protect civilian mariners and cargo.

🚫CLAIM: Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claimed in a recent statement that strikes by U.S. forces to prevent the IRGC from placing mines in the Strait of Hormuz were an “act of aggression.” This claim is absolutely FALSE.

✅FACT: U.S. forces took limited,… pic.twitter.com/XLx8xNTHto

— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) August 31, 2026

The same day, CENTCOM knocked down a separate IRGC claim that a supertanker on the southern route had struck two mines and stopped. “No ships have hit mines in the Strait of Hormuz,” the command said, calling the story an attempt to intimidate commercial shipping. That sentence can be true and still leave the larger problem in place. If no hull has hit a mine, the sweep in the lanes did its job. If IRGC teams were again in position to lay mines days after the all-clear, the job Cooper described is a cycle, not a finish line.

Donegan has said drifting mines in the Gulf have historically been a low danger to ships in the lane because of local currents, which is a cold comfort if the next devices are laid on purpose. Trump’s August 25 warning, that new mine-layers would be destroyed, is the policy that the August 31 strikes put into practice. Cooper can say the old field is gone. He cannot say Iran has lost the ability to plant a new one. The lanes are open in the sense that U.S. forces will try to keep them that way, one sweep and one strike at a time.