The convoy idea is so dumb that I can’t believe anyone said it out loud. Effective strategy against commerce raiders, which Iran explicitly does not have. Might as well offer to mount a CIWS on tankers and hope your insurance premiums will see it as a wash (they won’t). Makes as much sense as suggesting you counter drones with cavalry.
After a decade of trump you still can’t believe he would say something like this out loud?
The math on the convoy doesn’t make sense to me.
The larger the convoy becomes a more attractive target, as a single salvo of missiles has greater chance of bypassing missile defences and hitting any target.
Plus they have drones or missile boats, which would be harder to defend against. You can do missile defence in a radius around a ship, but now there’s obstacles and small fast moving targets that only need to land 1 hit and can use blind spots.
So I guess you need 3+ navy ships to form a perimeter and guard a few tankers at once.
But now there’s mines, so your perimeter becomes another vulnerability, you’ve increased the surface area where mines can be.
So now you can add more navy ships to get better geometry but it’s a much higher cost.
Also, the US lies about what it is going to do all the time.
In fact, there is a big fat lie right in this article in which the US claimed to have already escorted a ship through despite the fact that they simply did nothing of the sort.
Would you be willing to stake the economic future of your company, the lives of your staff, and millions of dollars of equipment and product on the promise and competence of these guys?
If I was one of those oil companies, I’d say sure. You staff the tanker with your people and you insure us for any losses incurred. Also, put an upfront amount of insurance money in escrow.
But we’re not risking lives, merchandise, and equipment. You want the oil that badly. You move it. We’re just going to raise oil prices to cover our losses in the meantime, so we’re fine.
It’s not just normal insurance cost either. These ships take years to replace. They also have to insure against the multiple years worth of profits and loss of market share.
Exactly. It’s the ship, the goods, the lost earning over many years, severance for staff that won’t be used, etc. It would be mess.
I also wonder how clean up for a spill would be handled. Currently that’s managed by Iran and the vessel that spilled pays.
Also, if they sink in a bad spot, they’ll physically block the strait. It’s a narrow corridor that’s navigable.
Insurance companies won’t touch it.
Of course. The US government would have to insure it. No private company is touching that with a 10 foot pole.
No company is going to trust insurance from this administration though. That’s the problem with having a Trump who famously never pays his debts.
Which is why I said insurance in escrow.
Trump is famous for stiffing people. I’d want that money paid upfront and held in escrow by an independent financial firm in a neutral nation.
If a ship gets hit, escrow pays out for the oil, the ship, and the loss of future earnings. If the ships never sink, the money goes back to the US.
Which couldn’t happen since the gvt is scrambling to get the money to prepare for tariff refunds
Oh they tried this, admin offered to pay oil companies for damages and move it themselves. Little catch there is tanker ships take half a decade or longer to build. The companies cannot afford to roll the dice on losing one, even if they’ll get reimbursed for the ship. They lose capacity ($$$) waiting for the replacement.
And USA doesn’t build those ships.
Who does build those ships?
China and South Korea, but mostly China.
Yeah, losses would wouldn’t just be the cargo and the ship, it would be a decade long hit to earnings. And I’d want to see money for all of that, in escrow, before I moved an inch. Trump is famous for not paying his debts. I’d want all that money secured upfront.
Makes as much sense as suggesting you counter drones with cavalry.
Not drones exactly but this is a sound straregy in the early civilization games
The Shahed-136 uses a MD550 engine, spec sheet says that’s 50 horsepower. An actual horse has a peak output somewhere between 10 and 15 horsepower[1] so it should only take 4 or 5 horses to match/exceed the Shahed’s strength. Seems reasonable enough to me, it’s simple math.
Stevenson, Robert & Wassersug, Richard. (1993). Horsepower from a horse. Nature. 364. 195. 10.1038/364195a0. ↩︎
IF the mines they’re deploying are THAT stupid/primitive, THEN simply shooting the things with a high-powered-rifle, using explosive bullets, ought clear them out?
I’d had the impression that modern mines are underwater things, unseen until one hits them.
Those should be a joke/mere-inconvenience ( if shot/detonated before they hit ), if they all float like that, & have visible/orange rust on 'em.
_ /\ _
It helps to read the caption (not even the article, but that too).
“A drifting sea mine discovered in the Black Sea on March 28, 2022. (Photo via Romanian Navy)”
That’s why you’re a Rear Admiral and the rest of us are just seamen.
Have you seen any World War II movies? The mines are changed the ground as per usual, that one’s obviously come loose. So yeah, that single mine is not much of a threat but it’s invisible brethren still are.
Still slows you down and makes an easier target for a $50k drone of which they make 500 a day.
Trump, the climate change denialist, doing his best to speed up the green energy transition.
Just a chaos cultist trying to heat up the world.
If this is true, China is soooooooooo fucked.
I’m talking mass starvation.
How so? I’m not challenging you, I honestly just don’t know what relationship you’re talking about.
Well as other’s already mentioned China get’s roughly ~20% of their oil from this region. All of that oil has to go through the Strait of Hormuz.
The most interesting part about why this is bad for food security in any country is that our agriculture systems runs on oil (you could say we eat the oil). You need to run your farming equipment & all the processing that is needed to make the food edible. Transporting food from the countryside to cities where most people live is also very “Oil”/Gasoline intensive. At the same time you need to cool/freeze the food (needs electricity which is mostly fossil fuels still). So if your Oil supply runs dry your just fucked. Modern society will just not be able to function with it’s City focused infrastructure.
Oh and the most relevant part is that fertilizers use a lot of oil to be produced. Well it’s not directly involved but still relevant. The Haber-Bosch ammonia production needs Natural Gas (by product from Oil extraction) to function or you can substitute it with Petroleum Coke (Petcoke) which is a byproduct of oil refining. Having less fertilizer is a HUGE problem for the next harvest season because your yields will be much lower which in turn reduces food availability.
So yea everything that you eat & is grown by a farm needs a fuck ton of oil.
you could even say that a globalised food supply chain is not the ideal arrangement and that localised food production should be every country’s priority with surplus going to market. National and global corporations don’t do this because the local markets are too small to deliver industrial scale profit, but the most efficient approach to food production is least amount of travel and processing as possible. It’s not for profit, it’s for efficient food supplies.
Well it’s a major shipping corridor isn’t it and mines tend to be sort of a detriment to that that’s kind of the whole point really.
Add on to the fact that China isn’t all that industrialised and tends to import a lot of its food and you’ve got a problem. The Chinese government are more competent than most (not really a shining endorsement of capitalism is it) so they might have pivoted to India but I don’t know how much time they would require.
The amazing thing about all of this is it probably isn’t going to increase the price of RAM, so that’s the first for 2026.
I guess they’re referring to China getting 11% of it’s crude from Iran and nearly 50% from Arab countries that use the hermouz straight. They also have a huge reserve that should last them 3-4 months (or 6-8 months assuming they only lose 50%).
Or… they’ll import more from Russia and reduce consumption to last much longer.
It’s a national emergency, but I don’t think they’re facing mass starvation because of it… Would love for them to expand on what they mean.
Edit: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/11/iran-ships-oil-china-strait-hormuz-closure-.html
“Iran has sent at least 11.7 million barrels of crude oil through the Strait of Hormuz since the war began”
I’ve heard this before from people - that this is some kind of 3D chess attack on China, but that doesn’t hold water.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/09/china-oil-shock-iran-war-hormuz-energy-transition.html
I’m not cheering for China to come out rosy, but look, they have huge strategic reserves, a much bigger penetration of electrification, and the ability to ramp that up quickly. Overall, China is probably one of the BEST positioned countries to weather this - the impacts on other countries, including US allies, will be FAR worse. This is cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Trump and Hegseth aren’t playing 3D anything.
Bubsy 3D.
You think China would just throw in the towel and do nothing about it? They’re sitting on the second most funded military in the world. They’ll put the soldiers to good use and they’ll fight their way to whatever they need. This isn’t the 30’s anymore.
The People’s Liberation Army’s Navy is designed to reach Taiwan. They have no ability to defend ships all the way from the Persian Gulf.
India and every country on the way also NEEDS oil and will go out and take it to prevent disaster in their own countries.
China is at the wrong end of straw.
That would have been true like 20 years ago, but the PLAN is absolutely a bluewater navy capable of projecting power. Their focus is on their backyard, but they have 3 aircraft carriers, 64 destroyers (with two more of the advanced type 55 commissioned a couple days ago), and 69 submarines.
Didn’t get chinese and idian ships get an exception from the closure.
No, but at least one Chinese ship ran the strait yesterday. And a Greek one I think.
Nice to see the US government still supporting EVs these days.
I still think that EV rebates and tax credits would be more cost efficient and much less jarring than provoking Iran into destroying 20% of the world’s oil supply… but I guess that I am too simple-minded for politics.
No joke, electricity is getting so expensive that I was just about break even on running my PHEV on gas vs. electric… Then this happens to make the choice easy again
Well funding for those data centers are getting blown up… literally in the case of Amazon’s data center. So we might get to see that AI bubble pop that we have all been hearing so much about. That should help a little bit. Too bad Trump is offsetting that by cancelling all renewable projects though.
thats probably due to the AI slop datacenters hogging all the juice.
Gas is $5 near me. EVs are gonna start flying off dealer’s lots subsidy or not
Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please. Machiavelli
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
- George Orwell
Gas prices go brrrrrrr
And diesel prices (which underpin essentially all industry and production) have gone even more brrrrrrrrrr. Which means just about everything else will be shooting up in price soon if the strait remains closed…
Right its crazy.
We have diesel for Aud$2.42 a litre where I am.
A week ago it was $1.84
I repair the machines that unload boats at the port, some of those hold 12000 litres of diesel and use 3/4 of it unloading a container ship.
Just that volume alone will effect the cost of shit
Fuck that sounds like a cool job.
It’s not bad, rough on the body though. It’s pretty clean in comparison to mine site work in the dirt though
Reminds me of the first episode of Smiling Friends when one of the main character’s father starts complaining about working in the ‘bloody mines all day’.
In Australia you can make a great living from it if you can handle the sacrifices you make.
Away from home for 3 to 4 weeks at a time 12 hour shifts with half hour travel each way to and from camp ontop.
Most places you do your own laundry but meals are provided.
Most of the jobs are also in the hottest most remote parts of Australia too where temperatures routinely reach the high 40s.
But you do that and can earn over 200k a year with just an apprenticeship behind you
Not a bad wage for that kind of work. Kinda like working as a merchant marine.
And much of the world’s fertilizer is shipped out of the strait of hormuz,and it’s currently spring, when fields would be getting fertilized right now. So food prices will jump too, and crop yields will be Lower
This is so sad 20 years from now we are going to hear about a boat in the strait of Hormuz getting hit by a lost mine
And the profits soar
So the Strait is closed? There were conflicting reports a few days ago.
Not really, just the US Admin lying about shit as usual.
Depends on how much you believe the reports about mines.
Who knows. You can’t really “close” a body of water, just deter people from going through it. It’s been essentially closed for the last few days, a few boats friendly to Iran took the risk and crossed though. Couple that with Trump admin lying about escorting a boat and its easy to see why people might think it’s open. Also GPS info is being spoofed, so anything on those maritime tracking website is mostly garbage for that area.
Unfortunately the truth has been heavily weaponized in this war, so it’s hard to know anything accurate and also up to date. What the department of war puts out is a mix of half truths and lies. There isn’t a lot of stuff coming out of Iran, but what they have released seems to be accurate if maybe exaggerated although it’s too early to tell really. Just today the US said there are now 140 US injured I think from the initial attacks. That is actually not far off from what Iran had estimated of 500, at least not as far off as the initial like handful of casualties US admitted to.
Nice work Iran. I hope one sinks a US navy ship.
at least hesgeth spent 93bn on EXPENSIVE bougie food and designer items.
Shits getting expensive…
A used EV for around town driving is making more and more sense
If US politicians ever imposed consequences on rich elites we might have avoided having had to learn the lesson of consequences from Iran.
Markets going up in response.
Lolz. Lmao, even.
How much sense it makes depends on which markets went up. If, for example, you are an Alberta oil producer, this situation is wonder for the bottom line.
Its because European countries announced they are going to release strategic reserves.
I still don’t get it though because that only covers 2 weeks and Iran has already taken down some permanent capacity in the region and a bunch of places had to stop pumping (meaning well mineralization and reopening times of months). I would expect oil to be at $100 even with the strategic reserves announcement.
In the next couple weeks, demand is going to go down as the weather warms up. After that, they have all summer to to work on shifting production to renewables as much as possible and shifting fossil fuel suppliers to ones that don’t need to use that strait.
Summer somewhat affects natural gas. Demand for petrol and fertilizer doesn’t go down in the summer. There’s no way renewables are going to have an effect on the demand for those commodities in the next 12 months.
Ah, but you see that’s a problem for future people.
Fuck future me. I got mine!
Trump said it’s almost over, so uhh, I guess mission accomplished?
We certainly didn’t hear about Epstein the past couple of weeks so yeah, mission accomplished
We certainly didn’t hear about Epstein
Yes we did.
I hear things. Operation Epstein’s Fury and all.
