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US Navy Costs for Hormuz Missions Rise With Strait Blocked
Commercial Traffic Through Waterway Is Still at Standstill
As long as the Strait of Hormuz remains unsettled, the U.S. Navy faces millions of dollars in extra costs each time it sends a destroyer through the waterway, and such passages on their own are unlikely to reopen it.
The Navy voyages remain fraught, and the ships are accompanied by fighter jets and helicopters overhead, along with extra surveillance measures.
If the vessels need to defend themselves against Iranian attack — as three warships did during a transit on May 7 — the price tag could be even higher, involving missiles that cost up to $6 million each.
Although many of the operating costs are already covered by this year’s defense appropriations, the total for repeatedly escorting commercial shipping in and out of the Gulf would add billions to the price of a conflict the Pentagon says has already rung up $25 billion in expenses — a number others claim is too low.
And Navy transits alone won’t open the strait for the more than 1,500 commercial vessels stuck in the Persian Gulf, said Thane Clare, a retired U.S. Navy captain and a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
“I don’t think the two transits make the strait materially safer,” Clare said. “Indeed, the fact that the U.S. warships had to repel Iranian attacks indicates that unescorted ships will continue to be subject to persistent threats.”
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(maps4media/Bloomberg)
More on Strait of Hormuz
He noted that dealing with those threats depletes U.S. stockpiles of high-end air and missile defense weapons designed for more advanced adversaries like China or Russia.
Navy air defense missiles cost about $1 million to $6 million, depending on the threat and range. RTX Corp. SM-3 Block IIA interceptors, which cost more than $25 million each, are designed to defeat ballistic missiles and are unlikely to be fired during a strait transit.
The Navy spent more than $1 billion in air defense interceptors during its maritime mission in the Red Sea defending commercial ships from Houthi attacks.
A run through the strait last week, as part of what the U.S. dubbed “Project Freedom,” involved two destroyers, about 100 aircraft, 15,000 service members and a variety of drones, according to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Dan Caine, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.
On May 7, three U.S. destroyers transited the strait and came under attack, according to U.S. Central Command.
The destroyers cost about $600,000 per day to operate. Aircraft cost thousands of dollars per flight hour, and although the Pentagon doesn’t publish its own costs, budget documents show what it charges other agencies for use, ranging from about $4,500 per hour for a C-130J utility aircraft to about $85,000 per hour for a B-1B bomber. An eight-hour mix of 100 fighters, surveillance aircraft, bombers and helicopters would cost about $10 million.
Alongside the risk of an Iranian missile slipping through and hitting a ship, the cost of hundreds of such missions in and out of the Persian Gulf quickly stretches into the billions of dollars, said Becca Wasser, defense lead at Bloomberg Economics.
“The more transits the U.S. Navy do, the more likely it is that a hit will happen if Iran keep firing on them,” said Emma Salisbury of the Foreign Policy Research Institute and the Royal Navy Strategic Studies Centre. “As long as Iran can keep up the risk of transit, whether through fires or mining, the strait won’t get back to being ‘open’ like it was prior to the war.”
The USS Truxtun, USS Rafael Peralta, and USS Mason reached the Gulf of Oman on May 7 without any U.S. assets being struck, Central Command said in a statement. None of the ships involved in the Monday transit were hit.
US officials haven’t said what weapons Iran fired at any of the vessels. US strikes on May 8 targeted missile and drone launch sites and other military assets in Iran that Central Command said attacked the three warships on May 7.
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Commercial traffic through the strait remains at a standstill. Repeated warship passages on their own will not change that, said Caitlin Talmadge of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Controlling the areas from which Iran can attack transiting vessels or negotiating a resolution to the conflict are the only real means of restoring traffic. Both have costs, either militarily or in concessions.
“There are not great options for reopening the strait through a brute-force military campaign. If there were, the U.S. would already have done it,” Talmadge said. “The only thing that will really reassure commercial traffic in the strait is an end to the conflict. But that is a political outcome rather than a military one.”
