“It would be like shooting fish in a barrel.”
The Iranians don’t have to win a naval duel. They just have to block the passage, a task which could be made easier by provoking the US Navy to sink a lot of vessels in the strait. For a nation that used child-wave attacks against Saddam’s military in their Mesopotamian replay of WWI trench warfare, sacrificing their limited naval assets to block the strait would not be unthinkable.
If the net effect is to block the passage of oil tankers through the strait, whether by sunk vessels which have to be removed, or laying down mine fields which produce sunk vessels which have to be removed, or land-to-sea missile attacks which sink vessels that have to be removed, then ‘mission accomplished’ from the Iranian perspective.
Oil is fungible and both supply and demand are closely balanced and inelastic in the short run, so that spiking prices in Europe, where much of the Iranian oil currently ships, would translate immediately to spiking prices globally. The Iranian economy would be wacked too because of their low refining capacity, but if sanctions are already crippling their economy, they have less to lose than Europe and the rest of the developed world.
Yeah.,...so when its all bottled up....just drop a nuke in the center and unblock it