Earlier this week, days after President Donald Trump agreed to extend the ceasefire with Iran, the U.S. military seized another tanker linked to smuggling Iranian oil, escalating tensions with Tehran over the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of the world’s traded crude oil and natural gas passes.
"I have ordered the United States Navy to shoot and kill any boat ... that is putting mines in the waters of the Strait of Hormuz," the president posted on Truth Social Thursday. "There is to be no hesitation. Additionally, our mine 'sweepers' are clearing the Strait right now. I am hereby ordering that activity to continue, but at a tripled up level!"
The military is intensifying mine clearing operations in the critical waterway, and Commander Kirk Lippold, USN (Ret.), a national defense analyst and adjunct professor at the United States Naval Academy, tells AFN, "It's absolutely the right thing to do."
"We have to try and figure out if we have enough forces to … have the persistent surveillance to detect any boats being launched off of Iran," he relays. "Once those boats come out, it is now to be declared hostile and taken under fire."
He says that has a secondary benefit for the U.S.
"If we know where it launched from, chances are there are more boats there," Lippold reasons. "If there are more boats there, then we take out that facility."
"We are just taking preemptive measures to ensure that they don't do it anymore," he explains. "If they continue to put those boats out there to interdict shipping, then we go to the source, and we eliminate it, port by port."
The War Department announced that the U.S. military had seized a Guyana-flagged tanker transporting Iranian oil in the Indian Ocean just after the deputy speaker of Iran's parliament, claimed that Iran, not the United States, was making demands after the first revenues for newly implemented tolls on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz were deposited into the state's central bank.
