Subject: Re: Is NATO figuring it out?
In other words, they've gamed out a lot of what you're saying.

I think you misunderstand my point. Of course they've gamed all of this out. There's an untold number of an analyses and studies of what a war in the Persian Gulf would involve. As David Frum noted today:

Trump’s inability to comprehend the relevance of Persian Gulf supplies to American motorists may explain how he stumbled into his Iran war in the first place. A threat to the Strait of Hormuz may be the most war-gamed problem in the whole U.S. military inventory. It’s thorny enough to have deterred American presidents from attacking Iran for nearly 50 years, no matter how provocatively Iran behaved.

https://archive.ph/Gpsip#selec...

That doesn't mean that this Administration was prepared for it, though. Of course the military knew of the likelihood of Iran closing the Gulf and what the various options were to respond to that closure. For the Administration to be prepared for it, they would have had to have the resources in place to counter that threat - either our own resources or to have invested the appropriate diplomatic resources to get the resources of other nations available - and they would have had to be in a position to use those resources. That would require the public, and Congress, being adequately prepared to accept some degree of ship losses and casualties, because you can't open the Gulf without getting many more ships much much closer to drone and missile range than we have now. And the Administration having chosen which of the various options would be necessary to re-open the Gulf and being prepared to implement it.

Instead, we have Trump tonight basically declaring "Mission Accom...." Sorry - wrong war. I mean "Objectives Completed" in Iran. No preparing the nation for further escalation, no laying the groundwork for support for a new phase in the war. So it sure looks like we're going to solve Iran's seizure of the strait of Hormuz by the rather unorthodox (and probably not wargamed) strategy of....simply ignoring it and declaring it to be someone else's problem. Seems like we'll just claim that "straits don't count" since they weren't on our list of objectives, therefore we won and quit the battlefield, leaving Iran in charge of the strait. Which seems like a pretty poor tradeoff for simply getting new younger mullahs in charge of the same radical Islamic authoritarian regime and taking out their air force and navy, along with using up a lot of our inventory of interceptors and tomahawks in order to reduce their inventory of ballistic missiles.