U.S. Strikes May Have Targeted a New Type of Iranian Naval Mine
The U.S. military said its attacks against Iran were in response to a threat to the Strait of Hormuz.
The U.S. airstrikes against Iran overnight Monday targeted two Iranian rocket launchers that the military said could have dispensed small naval mines.
But such a weapon — an
artillery rocket that releases a mine into the water — would be unusual and could mean that Iran has created yet another way to potentially cause chaos in the Strait of Hormuz.
“Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps forces were observed preparing to launch rockets with sea mines into Strait of Hormuz,” said Capt. Tim Hawkins, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, which directs military operations in the Middle East.
After the strikes, the first acknowledged attacks on Iran
since July 29, Iran fired a barrage of
medium-range ballistic missiles at bases in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates that host U.S. troops. There were
no reports of damage or casualties from the Iranian counterattack.
The Strait of Hormuz, through which a significant portion of the world’s oil flows to the marketplace via tankers, has been
under constant threat since the United States and Israel launched a combined assault against Iran on Feb. 28.
The war has forced many shipping companies to bypass the strait. Saudi Arabia, the region’s biggest oil producer, has shifted to export more crude via the Red Sea.
Iran has long been known to maintain
a robust arsenal of naval mines of various types, from small limpet mines that are attached to a ship’s hull by swimmers, to far larger weapons deployed by boats or ships that can potentially sink a targeted vessel. But little is publicly known about Iran’s land-based rocket-delivered mines.
It was not possible to confirm the military’s report independently, but it would mean that Iran has added a new type of mine to its arsenal — though probably not a very powerful one.
In March, U.S. intelligence officials
reported that Iran had laid a number of mines in the strait. On Aug. 25, President Trump said in
a social media post that all naval mines in the strait had been cleared from “International Waters” — probably a reference to the traditional route through the strait that commercial ships have had access to for decades under international law.
The Maritime Executive, a shipping and maritime industry news outlet,
reported in January 2025 that during military exercises at sea, Iran had demonstrated a variant of its
Fajr-5 rocket that could dispense “a single free-floating mine” into the water.
Such a weapon would not cause much damage to merchant ships in the region, many of which are double-hulled tankers that are designed to sustain punctures without leaking their payload of oil.
It could, however, pose a more substantial threat to small fishing boats operating in the Persian Gulf.
The Fajr-5 would be able to carry a mine that is no wider than the rocket’s 333-millimeter diameter and contains perhaps just dozens of pounds of explosives. By comparison, the mines of greatest concern contain many hundreds of pounds of explosives. Those mines are anchored in place and float just beneath the water, or lie on the seafloor.
The small mines described by Central Command could make a small hole in the hull of a warship and cause flooding in perhaps a single watertight compartment within the vessel.
These rocket-delivered munitions, or “drifting mines,” are pushed by winds and currents as soon as they land in the water. Each would eventually make its way into the open ocean or possibly wash up on shore, where it could harm anyone who picked one up.
In 2019, Iranian forces attached
limpet mines to the hulls of oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman, some of which exploded and caused minor damage, according to the U.S. military. But since the war began in February, Central Command has not provided details about which kinds of mines it has cleared from the Strait of Hormuz, nor how many.
