Iran, China, and Russia continue to invest in naval mines because they are effective. The U.S. Navy needs a dedicated flag officer to ensure these threats are countered.
When tensions rise in the Strait of Hormuz, Washington considers familiar threats: potential Iranian anti-ship missile launches, drone attacks, or small boat swarms targeting tankers. Oil traders and insurance markets assess these risks accordingly.
The most frequently overlooked threat in the Strait is also the oldest: naval mines. In late February, Iran reportedly began deployingmines in the channel. By spring, U.S. forces had destroyed Iranian minelayers and targeted mine depots ashore, while the Pentagon continued to assure tanker operators that some safe passage remained. Although the campaign reduced Iran’s stockpile, it did not eliminate the threat. Mines are effective not only by sinking ships but also by deterring underwriters from insuring passage, as seen in the current Strait of Hormuz crisis.
The situation in Hormuz highlights a warning the U.S. Navy has been slow to address. Over the past decade, Iran, China, and Russia The Navy has allowed mine countermeasures to decline and has dispersed responsibility across multiple offices. The Navy should reestablish a Mine Warfare Command focused on unmanned systems and Indo-Pacific operations, led by a single flag officer dedicated to mine warfare.
The adversary case for mines
Iran began this latest crisis with roughly six thousand naval mines in its inventory, a mix of World War I-style contact mines and modern bottom- and rising-influence designs. American strikes have reduced the stockpile, but Iran retains the boats, helicopters, and submarines to lay hundreds more. Tehran also remembers the cost its 1987–1988 mining campaign inflicted on the United States. The frigate Samuel B. Roberts came within an hour of sinking after striking an Iranian M-08 in the Persian Gulf. Tankers stopped moving, premiums spiked, and the Navy had to borrow MCM helicopters and ships from allies.
China has studied that episode, along with many others. The Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute has described PLA Navy mine warfare as an “assassin’s mace,” a low-cost asymmetric weapon designed to complicate U.S. and allied operations inside the first island chain. The PLA can deliver mines from submarines, surface combatants, civil aircraft, and the maritime militia’s fishing fleet. A Taiwan contingency would inevitably see those weapons deployed across the approaches to Kaohsiung and Keelung, around amphibious landing beaches, and along the resupply lanes any U.S.-led coalition would need to keep open.
Russia has shown the same logic in the Black Sea. Since 2022, allied navies have spotted more than a hundred drifting mines and assessed that Moscow has laid more than five hundred. Several commercial vessels have struck them. Grain shippers reroute, premiums climb, and Turkey, Romania, and Bulgaria stood up a joint MCM task force in 2024 because no single navy could clear the water alone.
The common thread of inflicting disproportionate costs is straightforward. A mine that costs a few thousand dollars can hold up a billion-dollar warship, close a port for weeks, or shut a strait that carries a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil. For an ambitious yet poorer adversary, that math is irresistible.
How the Navy walked away
The United States once treated mine warfare as a distinct discipline with a dedicated commander. The Navy stood up MINEWARCOM in Charleston in 1975 and revitalized it in 1992 after Iraqi mines disabled USS Tripoli and USS Princeton during Desert Storm. COMINEWARCOM moved to Corpus Christi, took operational and administrative control of the surface MCM force and the EOD detachments that supported it, and gave the mission a single advocate inside the Navy bureaucracy.
That structure went away in 2006. The service merged COMINEWARCOM with the Fleet Anti-Submarine Warfare Command into Naval Mine and Anti-Submarine Warfare Command. In 2015, what remained was folded into the Naval Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center. The Avenger-class MCM ships forward deployed to Bahrain held the line for another decade.
Neither consolidation was a judgment that the threat of mine warfare had faded. The 2006 merger executed as part of the 2005 base-closure round, which shut Ingleside and moved the force towards coastal fleet concentrations on the theory that collocation with the fleet, and eventually modular LCS mission packages that could make any hull a minehunter, rendered a dedicated command redundant — a theory which was doubted in Proceedings at the time. The 2015 fold-in came when the surface fleet copied naval aviation’s tactics-instructor model, with mine warfare one mission area among six.
Meanwhile, the Avengers simply ran out of time. The Navy decommissioned the last four in September 2025. The MH-53E Sea Dragon, the Navy’s only airborne sweep platform, departed the Gulf the month before and is now retiring fleetwide.
The replacement is the Littoral Combat Ship MCM mission package, which the Navy declared operational and deployed in March 2025 aboard USS Santa Barbara and USS Canberra. The Director of Operational Test and Evaluation has flagged reliability problems with the airborne portion of the package and judged the unmanned surface vehicle “not operationally suitable.” Crews and program managers are working hard. The institutional ground beneath them, however, is thin.
Why the current setup falls short
Mine warfare today is divided across multiple commands, communities, and program offices rather than owned by a single operational center of gravity. Surface warfare carries much of the LCS-based MCM mission package. Naval aviation remains tied to legacy airborne MCM and MH-60S-based capabilities. Expeditionary forces provide EOD divers and undersea specialists. Uncrewed surface and underwater systems are managed through separate acquisition and operational pipelines. Fifth Fleet oversees day-to-day MCM operations in the Gulf, while the Naval Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center contributes doctrine, training, and tactical development. Each part matters, but the structure leaves mine warfare without a single commander clearly accountable for fleetwide readiness, modernization, and operational integration.
This dispersal is the predictable result of treating MIW as collateral duty. Mines demand specialized intelligence on adversary stockpiles, specialized planning for clearance operations, and specialized training pipelines for the sailors who hunt them. A Navy that puts mine warfare under a surface type commander will rank it below cruiser modernization and destroyer maintenance, because surface type commanders are graded on cruisers and destroyers.
The mission also needs sustained advocacy in Washington. Mine warfare is unglamorous. It does not show up in carrier strike group photo ops or press releases. Without a flag officer whose career rises and falls on MCM readiness, the program gets squeezed in every budget cycle. That is what has happened since 2006.
A modern MINEWARCOM
The Navy should reestablish a Mine Warfare Command, or a functionally equivalent two- or three-star command, with operational and administrative control of MCM forces and a clear charter that covers readiness, doctrine, training, experimentation, and allied interoperability.
This is not nostalgia for a 1975 headquarters in Charleston. A modern MINEWARCOM should be organized around unmanned surface and underwater vehicles, autonomous mine hunting and neutralization, seabed warfare, and expeditionary clearance teams that can deploy from Marine Littoral Regiments and Expeditionary Advanced Base sites. It should own the experimentation pipeline that pushes new autonomy software to deployed units in months, not years. It should run combined exercises with the United Kingdom, France, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the Black Sea task force, because no future clearance operation will be unilateral. A reestablished command would also give teeth to the Freedom of Navigation Program every administration since 1979 has maintained: a minefield restricts free passage more effectively than any excessive maritime claim, and only mine countermeasures can answer it.
Give it a platform program of its own. The Navy should field vehicles that fuse manned and unmanned systems in a single hull and borrow from proven allied design lines like Japan’s Awaji-class mine sweeper and South Korea’s MCM unmanned surface vessel. Italy is buying five new mine sweepers for €1.6 billion. NATO partners still treat dedicated MCM hulls as a worthwhile investment. The United States should stop treating them as optional.
Its planners should sit inside Indo-Pacific Command’s Taiwan contingency cells and inside Fifth Fleet’s Hormuz planning, with authority to demand the intelligence, logistics, and command attention the mission needs. Its commander should brief the CNO on MCM readiness on the same cadence that surface and air warfare commanders brief on theirs.
Mine warfare is both a deterrence issue and a clearance challenge. If adversaries such as the PLA or IRGC believe the United States cannot clear mined chokepoints promptly, they are more likely to employ this tactic. A visible and well-resourced MINEWARCOM conducting exercises in the Gulf, South China Sea, and Baltic demonstrates U.S. capability and signals to adversaries that mining operations will not achieve prolonged disruption.
Don’t wait for the water to fill up
The Strait of Hormuz crisis continues to develop. Future incidents could occur in the Taiwan Strait, Bashi Channel, Baltic approaches, or the entrances to Odesa and Constanța. In each scenario, the United States and its allies will require ships, helicopters, drones, divers, and planners with extensive expertise in mine detection and neutralization.
You cannot conjure mine warfare expertise in a crisis. It is built over decades, in a dedicated command, by sailors who do nothing else. The Navy used to have that institution. It should rebuild it now before the next choke point closes, not after.
Ethan Connell is an Assistant Director at Taiwan Security Monitor and a graduate student at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. His research focuses on maritime security and cross-Strait military affairs, with particular attention to mine countermeasures and the use of PRC state media organs to promote narratives about Taiwan. Professionally, Ethan has previous experience performing maritime risk analysis for the Department of the Navy’s National Maritime Intelligence-Integration Office. His work can be found in the Taipei Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Diplomat, the Center for Maritime Strategy, and the Financial Times.
Jonathan Walberg is Associate Director of the Taiwan Security Monitor and a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Virginia, where he researches disinformation, narrative warfare, cognitive security, and Indo-Pacific security. He is a Fellow at the Center for Security Policy Studies and the Center for Advancing Human-Machine Partnership. He holds master’s degrees from George Mason University and the University of Virginia.
The views expressed in this piece are the sole opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Center for Maritime Strategy or other institutions listed.
Center for Maritime Strategy
By Ethan Connell, Jonathan Walberg
Iran, China, and Russia continue to invest in naval mines because they are effective. The U.S. Navy needs a dedicated flag officer to ensure these threats are countered.
When tensions rise in the Strait of Hormuz, Washington considers familiar threats: potential Iranian anti-ship missile launches, drone attacks, or small boat swarms targeting tankers. Oil traders and insurance markets assess these risks accordingly.
The most frequently overlooked threat in the Strait is also the oldest: naval mines. In late February, Iran reportedly began deploying mines in the channel. By spring, U.S. forces had destroyed Iranian minelayers and targeted mine depots ashore, while the Pentagon continued to assure tanker operators that some safe passage remained. Although the campaign reduced Iran’s stockpile, it did not eliminate the threat. Mines are effective not only by sinking ships but also by deterring underwriters from insuring passage, as seen in the current Strait of Hormuz crisis.
The situation in Hormuz highlights a warning the U.S. Navy has been slow to address. Over the past decade, Iran, China, and Russia The Navy has allowed mine countermeasures to decline and has dispersed responsibility across multiple offices. The Navy should reestablish a Mine Warfare Command focused on unmanned systems and Indo-Pacific operations, led by a single flag officer dedicated to mine warfare.
The adversary case for mines
Iran began this latest crisis with roughly six thousand naval mines in its inventory, a mix of World War I-style contact mines and modern bottom- and rising-influence designs. American strikes have reduced the stockpile, but Iran retains the boats, helicopters, and submarines to lay hundreds more. Tehran also remembers the cost its 1987–1988 mining campaign inflicted on the United States. The frigate Samuel B. Roberts came within an hour of sinking after striking an Iranian M-08 in the Persian Gulf. Tankers stopped moving, premiums spiked, and the Navy had to borrow MCM helicopters and ships from allies.
China has studied that episode, along with many others. The Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute has described PLA Navy mine warfare as an “assassin’s mace,” a low-cost asymmetric weapon designed to complicate U.S. and allied operations inside the first island chain. The PLA can deliver mines from submarines, surface combatants, civil aircraft, and the maritime militia’s fishing fleet. A Taiwan contingency would inevitably see those weapons deployed across the approaches to Kaohsiung and Keelung, around amphibious landing beaches, and along the resupply lanes any U.S.-led coalition would need to keep open.
Russia has shown the same logic in the Black Sea. Since 2022, allied navies have spotted more than a hundred drifting mines and assessed that Moscow has laid more than five hundred. Several commercial vessels have struck them. Grain shippers reroute, premiums climb, and Turkey, Romania, and Bulgaria stood up a joint MCM task force in 2024 because no single navy could clear the water alone.
The common thread of inflicting disproportionate costs is straightforward. A mine that costs a few thousand dollars can hold up a billion-dollar warship, close a port for weeks, or shut a strait that carries a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil. For an ambitious yet poorer adversary, that math is irresistible.
How the Navy walked away
The United States once treated mine warfare as a distinct discipline with a dedicated commander. The Navy stood up MINEWARCOM in Charleston in 1975 and revitalized it in 1992 after Iraqi mines disabled USS Tripoli and USS Princeton during Desert Storm. COMINEWARCOM moved to Corpus Christi, took operational and administrative control of the surface MCM force and the EOD detachments that supported it, and gave the mission a single advocate inside the Navy bureaucracy.
That structure went away in 2006. The service merged COMINEWARCOM with the Fleet Anti-Submarine Warfare Command into Naval Mine and Anti-Submarine Warfare Command. In 2015, what remained was folded into the Naval Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center. The Avenger-class MCM ships forward deployed to Bahrain held the line for another decade.
Neither consolidation was a judgment that the threat of mine warfare had faded. The 2006 merger executed as part of the 2005 base-closure round, which shut Ingleside and moved the force towards coastal fleet concentrations on the theory that collocation with the fleet, and eventually modular LCS mission packages that could make any hull a minehunter, rendered a dedicated command redundant — a theory which was doubted in Proceedings at the time. The 2015 fold-in came when the surface fleet copied naval aviation’s tactics-instructor model, with mine warfare one mission area among six.
Meanwhile, the Avengers simply ran out of time. The Navy decommissioned the last four in September 2025. The MH-53E Sea Dragon, the Navy’s only airborne sweep platform, departed the Gulf the month before and is now retiring fleetwide.
The replacement is the Littoral Combat Ship MCM mission package, which the Navy declared operational and deployed in March 2025 aboard USS Santa Barbara and USS Canberra. The Director of Operational Test and Evaluation has flagged reliability problems with the airborne portion of the package and judged the unmanned surface vehicle “not operationally suitable.” Crews and program managers are working hard. The institutional ground beneath them, however, is thin.
Why the current setup falls short
Mine warfare today is divided across multiple commands, communities, and program offices rather than owned by a single operational center of gravity. Surface warfare carries much of the LCS-based MCM mission package. Naval aviation remains tied to legacy airborne MCM and MH-60S-based capabilities. Expeditionary forces provide EOD divers and undersea specialists. Uncrewed surface and underwater systems are managed through separate acquisition and operational pipelines. Fifth Fleet oversees day-to-day MCM operations in the Gulf, while the Naval Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center contributes doctrine, training, and tactical development. Each part matters, but the structure leaves mine warfare without a single commander clearly accountable for fleetwide readiness, modernization, and operational integration.
This dispersal is the predictable result of treating MIW as collateral duty. Mines demand specialized intelligence on adversary stockpiles, specialized planning for clearance operations, and specialized training pipelines for the sailors who hunt them. A Navy that puts mine warfare under a surface type commander will rank it below cruiser modernization and destroyer maintenance, because surface type commanders are graded on cruisers and destroyers.
The mission also needs sustained advocacy in Washington. Mine warfare is unglamorous. It does not show up in carrier strike group photo ops or press releases. Without a flag officer whose career rises and falls on MCM readiness, the program gets squeezed in every budget cycle. That is what has happened since 2006.
A modern MINEWARCOM
The Navy should reestablish a Mine Warfare Command, or a functionally equivalent two- or three-star command, with operational and administrative control of MCM forces and a clear charter that covers readiness, doctrine, training, experimentation, and allied interoperability.
This is not nostalgia for a 1975 headquarters in Charleston. A modern MINEWARCOM should be organized around unmanned surface and underwater vehicles, autonomous mine hunting and neutralization, seabed warfare, and expeditionary clearance teams that can deploy from Marine Littoral Regiments and Expeditionary Advanced Base sites. It should own the experimentation pipeline that pushes new autonomy software to deployed units in months, not years. It should run combined exercises with the United Kingdom, France, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the Black Sea task force, because no future clearance operation will be unilateral. A reestablished command would also give teeth to the Freedom of Navigation Program every administration since 1979 has maintained: a minefield restricts free passage more effectively than any excessive maritime claim, and only mine countermeasures can answer it.
Give it a platform program of its own. The Navy should field vehicles that fuse manned and unmanned systems in a single hull and borrow from proven allied design lines like Japan’s Awaji-class mine sweeper and South Korea’s MCM unmanned surface vessel. Italy is buying five new mine sweepers for €1.6 billion. NATO partners still treat dedicated MCM hulls as a worthwhile investment. The United States should stop treating them as optional.
Its planners should sit inside Indo-Pacific Command’s Taiwan contingency cells and inside Fifth Fleet’s Hormuz planning, with authority to demand the intelligence, logistics, and command attention the mission needs. Its commander should brief the CNO on MCM readiness on the same cadence that surface and air warfare commanders brief on theirs.
Mine warfare is both a deterrence issue and a clearance challenge. If adversaries such as the PLA or IRGC believe the United States cannot clear mined chokepoints promptly, they are more likely to employ this tactic. A visible and well-resourced MINEWARCOM conducting exercises in the Gulf, South China Sea, and Baltic demonstrates U.S. capability and signals to adversaries that mining operations will not achieve prolonged disruption.
Don’t wait for the water to fill up
The Strait of Hormuz crisis continues to develop. Future incidents could occur in the Taiwan Strait, Bashi Channel, Baltic approaches, or the entrances to Odesa and Constanța. In each scenario, the United States and its allies will require ships, helicopters, drones, divers, and planners with extensive expertise in mine detection and neutralization.
You cannot conjure mine warfare expertise in a crisis. It is built over decades, in a dedicated command, by sailors who do nothing else. The Navy used to have that institution. It should rebuild it now before the next choke point closes, not after.
Ethan Connell is an Assistant Director at Taiwan Security Monitor and a graduate student at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. His research focuses on maritime security and cross-Strait military affairs, with particular attention to mine countermeasures and the use of PRC state media organs to promote narratives about Taiwan. Professionally, Ethan has previous experience performing maritime risk analysis for the Department of the Navy’s National Maritime Intelligence-Integration Office. His work can be found in the Taipei Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Diplomat, the Center for Maritime Strategy, and the Financial Times.
Jonathan Walberg is Associate Director of the Taiwan Security Monitor and a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Virginia, where he researches disinformation, narrative warfare, cognitive security, and Indo-Pacific security. He is a Fellow at the Center for Security Policy Studies and the Center for Advancing Human-Machine Partnership. He holds master’s degrees from George Mason University and the University of Virginia.
The views expressed in this piece are the sole opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Center for Maritime Strategy or other institutions listed.