Claiming Victory, Whilst Admitting Defeat: There is No Easy Way to Open Hormuz

Alastair Crooke, 2 April 2026

Bloomberg: “It is arguably Iran that has secured the most significant strategic victory … There is every sign that Tehran’s ability to control the Strait is increasing”

The defeats which the West keeps on having “[are] above all … intellectual”. And “not being able to understand what they are seeing – means that it’s impossible to respond effectively to it”. So Aurelien has argued. But “the problem goes beyond the fighting on the battlefield, to seeing and understanding the nature of asymmetric wars and their economic and political dimensions”.

“This is particularly the case for Iran, where … Washington appears to be incapable of understanding that the ‘other side’ does have a strategy with economic and political components — and is implementing it”.

“[In line with the western obsession with trivia], all the media concentration recently has been on the movement of US troops to the region and their possible uses, as though that, in itself, was going to decide something. Yet in fact, the real issue is the development and deployment by the Iranians of a new concept of warfare, based on missiles, drones and defensive preparations, and the inability of the West, with its platform-centric mentality, to understand and process these developments [i.e., fully assimilate the strategy behind asymmetrical warfare]”.

Iran’s security concept and model was planned more than 20 years ago. The trigger for the move to an asymmetric paradigm came from the US’ utter destruction of Iraq’s centralised military command in 2003, as a result of a 3-week massive air assault on Baghdad.

The issue for Iran that arose in its wake was how the country might build a deterrent military structure when it did not have (and could not have) anything resembling peer air capability. And when too, the US could look down upon the extent of Iran’s military infrastructure from its high-resolution satellite cameras.

Well, the first answer simply was to have as little of its military structure out in the open to be observed from above. Its components had to be buried — and buried deeply (beyond the reach of most bombs). The second answer was that deeply buried missiles could indeed, in effect, become Iran’s ‘air force’ — i.e. a substitute for a conventional air force. Iran thus has been constructing and stockpiling missiles for more than twenty years. The third response was to divide Iran’s military infrastructure into autonomous provincial commands — to decentralise command centres, with each having separate stockpiled munitions, separate missile silos, and where appropriate, their own naval forces and militia.

In short, Iran’s military machine — in the event of a decapitation strike — was designed to operate as an automated, decentralised retaliation machine that cannot be easily stopped or controlled.