US Navy hunts for Iranian mines in Strait of Hormuz using drones and legacy ships as reopening timeline stretches to months

President Donald Trump announced on social media Thursday that the Navy's minesweepers are "clearing the Strait right now" and ordered operations to continue "at a tripled up level." Trump also said he has ordered the Navy to attack any boat laying mines in the strait. The U.S. has simultaneously imposed a naval blockade on Iranian ports, seized ships tied to Tehran, and planned a second round of ceasefire talks in Pakistan.

The mine-clearing operation is unfolding at a moment of reduced Navy capacity for that specific mission. The service retired its four Bahrain-based minesweepers last year, ending a decades-long dedicated presence of mine-hunting ships in the Middle East. Bryan Clark, a defense analyst at the Hudson Institute, described the current moment to Fox News Digital as "a nadir of the Navy's mine sweeping capacity." Retired Vice Adm. Kevin Donegan, former commander of the Navy's 5th Fleet, said the retirement of the minesweepers was never a major concern to him because newer unmanned technology had been developed to replace them, though Clark noted the Navy still has a limited number of those newer systems available for large-scale operations.

The operation begins with waves of unmanned underwater vehicles — some torpedo-shaped — deployed in grid patterns to map the ocean floor using high-resolution sonar. Surface drones tow sonar systems through narrow lanes while helicopters scan closer to the surface. Once a mine is located, remotely operated systems are used to detonate or neutralize it, after which explosive ordnance disposal personnel must retrieve remaining debris. "The mine neutralization part is really the long leg of the process," Clark said. Clark said war-gaming suggests the finding phase could be completed within weeks, but full clearance of shipping lanes could extend operations into months.

It remains unclear whether Iran has deployed a single mine. Iran has referenced only the "likelihood" of mines in prewar transit routes, and Donegan noted that U.S. forces must first confirm whether mines are actually present in areas Iran has indicated. Multiple outlets cited intelligence assessments suggesting Iran has laid at least a dozen mines, though some estimates are higher. Analyst Emma Salisbury of the Foreign Policy Research Institute told the Associated Press that Iran's mine stockpile is estimated in the low thousands, mostly older Soviet models, and that "minelaying is a lot easier than minesweeping — you can literally push these things off the back of a speedboat."

A separate challenge may persist even after physical clearance is complete. Salisbury noted that Iran could undermine confidence in any U.S. clearance effort simply by asserting that not all mines have been found. Insurance broker Dylan Mortimer, U.K. marine war leader at Marsh, described this as the "specter of threat" — the psychological effect of mine uncertainty on commercial shipping decisions regardless of actual mine presence. Scott Savitz, a researcher at the RAND Corporation, said shipping companies will eventually be willing to accept some risk to transit the strait "particularly given how lucrative it is," but that restoring full confidence could take longer than the physical clearing operation itself.