Iran Loses Grip on Hormuz as U S Takes Massive Action to Reopen It

Iran thought it owned the straight of Hormuz.

It does not anymore.

For weeks, the Islamic Republic had been strangling one of the most important waterways on the face of this planet.

Fast boats, drones, mines, anti-ship missiles buried so deep underground that conventional weapons could not even touch them.

Thran looked at all of that and felt untouchable.

It felt like it held all the cards.

Then the United States dropped a bomb that changed everything.

Literally.

5,000 all LBD deep penetrating munitions rained down on Iran’s hardened coastal missile sites along the straight of Hormuz.

And not just any bombs.

A weapon so new, so classified, so devastatingly powerful that some military analysts are still debating whether it had ever been used in combat before this moment.

The strait has been cracked open.

The world’s most critical energy corridor is being forced back online.

And Iran is now staring at the smoldering ruins of an underground missile network it spent years building and believed was untouchable.

So what exactly happened? What is this mystery weapon? And what does all of this mean for what comes next? Stay with us because this is one of the most significant military developments of the entire conflict.

and we are going to break down every single piece of it.

Let’s start with what we know for certain because the facts alone are extraordinary.

On March 17th, US Central Command, known as SentCom, went public on social media to confirm what had just taken place.

American forces had successfully deployed multiple $5,000 LB deep penetrator munitions against hardened Iranian missile installations positioned along Iran’s coastline near the straight of Hormuz.

The reason given was direct and unambiguous.

Those installations housed anti-ship cruise missiles that were being used to actively endanger international commercial shipping attempting to transit the strait.

Read that again.

The United States just openly confirmed that it dropped some of its most powerful and most advanced bombs on Iranian soil.

Not on a proxy, not on a third party on Iran directly on its coastline.

That is not a small thing.

That is a statement.

And the weapon used to make that statement is the most interesting part of this entire story.

But before we get there, we need to understand why the strait matters so much and why Iran thought it could get away with what it has been doing there for the past several weeks.

The Strait of Hormuz is not just a body of water.

It is the jugular vein of the global energy economy.

Roughly 27% of the world’s entire seaborn energy supply passes through that one narrow corridor every single year.

Oil tankers, liqufied natural gas carriers, container ships, all of them funnel through a waterway that at its narrowest point is only about 21 miles wide.

It is the definition of a choke point.

Control it.

And you do not just control a shipping lane.

You control the global energy market.

Iran knows this.

And since Operation Epic Fury began on February 28th, Thran has been exploiting that knowledge to the absolute maximum.

Here is what Iran’s blockade strategy actually looked like in practice.

Speedboats armed with sea skimming missiles and other weapons were darting in and out of the straight, targeting merchant vessels at every opportunity.

Naval mines were being scattered across shipping lanes to make every transit a gamble with life and cargo.

Drone swarms were being launched to harass, intimidate, and in some cases strike ships that dared to attempt the journey.

And sitting behind all of that, like the ultimate deterrent, was a sophisticated network of land-based anti-hship missiles positioned along the Iranian coastline.

The results were catastrophic for global commerce.

Before this conflict began, the strait was seeing more than 100 vessels per day making the transit without incident.

By the time of the GBU72 strikes, that number had collapsed to just three or four ships per day.

three or four out of over 100.

The price of oil had already spiked above $100 per barrel multiple times in response to the disruption.

At least 20 ships had been attacked in or near the strait since operations began.

Iran’s strategy was working and tan knew it.

The thinking inside the regime was straightforward.

Keep the pressure on.

Keep the straight closed.

make the economic pain loud enough and prolonged enough that Washington would eventually blink, back down, and call off Operation Epic Fury entirely.

The Strait of Hormuz was Iran’s leverage, its bargaining chip, its trump card.

But here is where Iran miscalculated badly.

Not all threats in the Strait are created equal.

Iran’s fast boats are dangerous, no question, but they are manageable.

The United States deployed A-10 Warthog attack aircraft specifically to hunt those boats in real time.

The Warthog is one of the most fearsome close air support platforms ever built.

And it is extraordinarily effective at finding and destroying small surface targets.

As long as American air power maintains a presence over the strait, the fastbo threat can be contained.

But the anti-ship cruise missiles, those are a completely different problem.

Iran’s coastal missile arsenal is extensive, mobile, and deeply hidden.

Weapons like the Gadier and the Cotter are mounted on truck-based launchers, meaning they can move, relocate, and reposition.

They are not sitting ducks.

Their range varies from around 12 miles on the lower end to 186 miles on the higher end, which means Iranian forces can threaten vessels at virtually any point within the strait and well beyond its immediate approaches.

And then there is the Abu Mahi cruise missile.

This weapon has a reported range of more than 600 miles.

600 miles that extends Iran’s threat envelope far beyond the straight of Hormuz and into a much wider region of the Arabian Sea and Persian Gulf.

You are no longer talking about a local waterway problem.

You are talking about a regional denial of access threat.

Add in the Hormuz 2 and Gulf anti-ship ballistic missiles, both of which use satellite assisted guidance systems to track and strike moving ships at ranges exceeding 180 miles.

And the picture becomes very clear.

Iran was not just harassing shipping.

It had built a layered, sophisticated, long range system designed to make the entire straight of Hormuz and its surrounding waters a no-go zone for any vessel it chose to target.

The only way to truly solve this problem is not to intercept the missiles after they are launched.

It is to destroy the launchers before they can ever fire.

Eliminate the source.

Remove the threat permanently.

That is what the United States set out to do.

And that is where things get complicated because Iran did not make it easy.

Here is the dirty secret about Iran’s missile network that most people do not fully appreciate.

Iran does not park its anti-hship missile launchers out in the open.

They are not sitting on hilltops where satellites can photograph them and precisiong guided munitions can take them out on demand.

Iran is smarter than that.

Far smarter.

Those launchers are hidden.

Many of them are stored inside tunnels bored directly into the sides of mountains or concealed inside underground bunkers constructed specifically to withstand air strikes.

The entrances are camouflaged, the facilities are hardened, and the depth at which many of these installations are buried puts them completely beyond the reach of conventional bombs and cruise missiles.

This is not a new Iranian tactic.

Thrron has been building and expanding its underground military network for decades.

precisely because it understands that air superiority will belong to its adversaries in any future conflict.

If you cannot hide your assets above ground, you go below ground.

Simple, effective, and until recently, largely successful.

The problem for the United States is that you cannot take out a launcher buried 50 or 100ft underground with a standard bomb.

The physics simply do not work.

Even many of America’s existing bunker busting munitions, while impressive by conventional standards, lack the penetrating power to defeat the deepest and most heavily reinforced of Iran’s coastal installations.

So what do you do? You build something better, something specifically engineered for exactly this problem.

something that can punch through reinforced concrete and compacted earth at depths that no previous weapon in America’s arsenal could reach.

You build the GBU72.

The GBU72 advanced penetrator is 5,000lb of purpose-built destruction, and it has just made what may be its combat debut.

Let’s put this weapon in context because the history here matters.

The GBU72 was developed to replace America’s GBU28 bunker buster, a weapon that first entered service in 1991 during the Gulf War and has been a reliable part of the American arsenal ever since.

The GBU28 is not a bad weapon by any means.

It can punch through approximately 15 ft of reinforced concrete and roughly 150 ft of compacted earth, which is nothing to dismiss.

But the GBU28 is over 30 years old.

The underground facilities that America’s adversaries have been constructing over those three decades have grown deeper, more reinforced, and more sophisticated.

The old bunker buster has not necessarily kept pace.

The GBU72 is the answer to that problem.

The US Air Force publicly unveiled it in 2021, announcing that the weapon had been successfully released from an F-15E Strike Eagle during testing.

That public reveal was notable for two reasons.

First, it confirmed that the program had advanced to a point where the Air Force was comfortable acknowledging it.

Second, it gave the first clue about the aircraft that would eventually deliver this weapon in combat.

What is known about the GBU72’s design is impressive on multiple levels.

The bomb combines a BLU138B penetrating warhead with a guidance package based on the joint direct attack munition system known as JDAM.

That guidance suite pairs GPS positioning with inertial navigation, allowing the bomb to be released from standoff distances rather than requiring the delivery aircraft to fly directly over the target.

The practical implication of that capability is significant.

Pilots can stay well outside the effective range of Iran’s remaining air defense systems while still placing their weapons precisely where they need to go.

The explosive fill inside the warhead is equally noteworthy.

The GBU72 appears to use a combination of AFX757 and PBXN 109 explosive compounds, which happens to be the exact same combination used inside the United States.

30,000lb massive ordinance penetrator commonly known as the MOP.

The MOP is the largest bunker busting bomb in the American arsenal, capable of penetrating approximately 60 FFT of reinforced concrete before detonating.

The fact that engineers chose to replicate that proven explosive formula inside the GBU72 strongly suggests these specific compounds have demonstrated superior performance against hardened underground structures.

Now, here’s the part that really matters.

If the GBU72 was specifically designed to outperform the GBU28 it replaces, and that is literally the point of developing a replacement weapon, then its penetration capability almost certainly exceeds the 15ft of reinforced concrete and 150ft ft of earth that the GBU28 can achieve.

Exactly how much deeper the GBU72 can go remains classified.

But given its design, its explosive combination, and its developmental history, Iran’s underground missile installations along the Hormuz coast were facing a weapon they were not built to withstand.

And there is something else here that makes the GBU72 especially devious in how it is being used.

You do not actually need to destroy an underground bunker to render it useless.

Think about it for a moment.

An underground facility, no matter how deep and no matter how reinforced, still needs ways in and ways out.

It needs tunnels connecting it to the surface.

It needs access points through which equipment, personnel, and in this case, missile launchers can enter and exit, block those entrances, collapse those tunnels, seal those access points, and whatever is inside the bunker becomes completely irrelevant.

It does not matter how well protected the launcher is if it can never get out to fire its weapon.

The bunker becomes a tomb instead of a fortress.

That is precisely the strategy the United States has been executing along the straight of Hormuz coast.

It does not necessarily need to reach the deepest point of every underground facility.

It needs to destroy the infrastructure that makes those facilities functional.

And the GBU72 with its combination of penetrating power and precision guidance is exceptionally well suited to that task.

Concrete cannot stop it.

Soil cannot stop it.

Mountain sides cannot stop it.

And Iran is learning that the hard way.

Now, here is where the story gets an interesting twist.

Is the straight of Hormuz operation actually the first time the GBU72 has been used in combat? Retired Marine intelligence officer and national security analyst Hal Kemper speaking publicly about the strikes stated plainly that as far as he was aware this represented the first ever operational deployment of the GBU72 military aviation publication.

The aviationist reached the same conclusion independently but another highly respected defense outlet the war zone raised a complicating data point.

It referenced a report from May 2024 in which three unnamed US officials told a major news network that the GBU72 had already been deployed against Houthy targets in Yemen.

The context there is worth noting carefully.

The Houthis had been running their own campaign against commercial shipping in the Red Sea, targeting vessels in a key global waterway in an attempt to create economic disruption.

Sound familiar? It should because the Houthis are not just any group.

They are widely understood to be a proxy force backed and armed by Thrron.

They are in a very real sense an extension of Iranian power.

If the 2024 reports are accurate, what that means is that Iran has already had indirect exposure to the GBU72.

Its proxy forces were on the receiving end of this weapon nearly two years before Iranian soil was struck directly.

And they could not stop it then.

They definitely could not stop it now.

Whether this mission over the Straight of Hormuz marks the GBU72’s true debut or its second documented use in combat, the result is the same.

A weapon built to defeat hardened underground targets has just been used against hardened underground targets.

and the targets lost.

So, how did the United States actually deliver these weapons? This is where the scale of the operation becomes genuinely remarkable.

The most likely primary delivery platform was the B1 Lancer bomber currently forward deployed to RAF Fairford in the United Kingdom.

Here is the reason that conclusion makes sense.

Each B1 Lancer is capable of carrying up to 12 GBU72s on external pylons.

By contrast, an F-15E Strike Eagle can carry just a single GBU72 per aircraft.

Current estimates suggest the United States may have deployed close to 50 of these bombs during the strikes.

If that number is accurate, you simply cannot achieve that volume of firepower efficiently with F-15.

You need the B1s.

The math is straightforward.

Four B1 Lancers carrying 12 GBU72s each.

That accounts for 48 bombs, four aircraft, 48 earthshattering munitions, devastating payload, minimal number of airframes exposed to any residual Iranian air defenses.

And about those air defenses, Iran’s ability to threaten American aircraft has been drastically degraded.

According to research from the Almar Research and Education Center, the combined effects of Operation Epic Fury and Israel’s parallel Operation Roaring Lion have eliminated roughly 85% of Iran’s integrated air defense network.

What remains are fragmented, isolated pockets of capability that pose a significantly reduced threat to high-performance modern aircraft operating at standoff ranges.

F-15Es may well have participated in the operation in a supporting capacity, perhaps delivering initial strikes ahead of the main wave or conducting follow-up attacks once the primary installations were already degraded.

The two platforms working in combination would maximize both the speed and the lethality of the overall strike package.

What is not in dispute is the outcome.

Multiple hardened Iranian missile launch sites along the straight of Hormuz’s coast were struck and they were struck with a weapon specifically engineered to destroy exactly that kind of target.

Now, let’s address the question that is probably on your mind.

Why did the United States choose this particular moment to escalate? The answer comes down to how effective Iran’s blockade had actually become.

Iran’s theory was that economic pain would eventually force Washington to negotiate.

And for a while, that theory appeared to be working.

The combination of mines, fast boats, drones, and anti-ship missiles had reduced daily vessel transits through the strait from over 100 per day to barely three or four.

At least 20 ships had been attacked.

Oil prices were repeatedly spiking above $100 per barrel.

The disruption to global energy markets was real, measurable, and growing.

Before the conflict began, many analysts, including some of the most respected voices in energy market research, had long held the position that the Strait of Hormuz was simply too important to ever be truly closed.

The assumption was that Western and Allied naval power would prevent a comprehensive shutdown.

That assumption turned out to be wrong.

Iran called what it believed was a bluff.

It shut the straight down as comprehensively as it could and the economic shock waves were felt globally.

The GBU72 strikes were the United States answer to that escalation, not a diplomatic note, not a warning, not a sanction.

A 5,000 lb deep penetrating bomb dropped on the infrastructure that made the blockade possible multiple times from aircraft that flew over 8,000 kilometers to deliver them.

Sentcom commander Admiral Brad Cooper made the American position unmistakably clear in public statements following the strikes.

American forces remain focused on eliminating every element of Iran’s threat to free navigation in the straight.

Pilots are actively hunting targets in real time and the operation will not stop until those threats are gone.

President Trump added an explicit ultimatum on top of that operational posture.

Iran had 48 hours to reopen the strait to all international shipping or face strikes against the domestic power infrastructure that keeps electricity flowing throughout the country.

The implication was obvious.

comply or face consequences that go far beyond military installations.

Iran’s response has been fascinating to watch because it reveals a regime caught between its desire to project defiance and its growing awareness that the situation is deteriorating rapidly.

On one hand, Iran’s government speaker issued a fiery public threat.

any strikes on Iranian power plants would trigger retaliatory attacks against energy infrastructure across the entire region.

Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and the UAE were explicitly in the crosshairs of that warning.

The message was designed to tell Washington that escalation would not be contained.

On the other hand, Iran simultaneously announced that it would allow all ships except those deemed enemy linked to pass through the strait.

That is a significant departure from the near total interdiction posture it had been maintaining.

Whether it amounts to genuine deescalation or is simply a tactical retreat designed to relieve pressure while Iran regroups remains unclear.

The definition of enemy linked is also doing a lot of work in that announcement.

American vessels will obviously fall into that category.

But what about ships from NATO allied nations? What about vessels owned by companies that do business in the United States? The ambiguity is deliberate and it leaves considerable room for Iran to continue selective targeting while claiming it has partially complied with international demands.

The next several days of shipping data through the strait will reveal far more than any official statement from either side.

Here is where things stand right now and what the coming days and weeks are likely to bring.

B1 Lancer bombers remain on standby at RAF Fairford.

American intelligence assets are almost certainly cataloging additional missile launch sites and hardened facilities along the Hormuz coast that survived the initial wave of strikes.

The infrastructure for follow-on operations is fully in place and clearly being maintained.

Internationally, coalition building is quietly accelerating.

NATO Secretary General Mark Ruta has publicly indicated that alliance members are actively working to determine how they can contribute to stabilizing the strait situation.

A separate grouping of seven US allies has reportedly signaled willingness to join a straight of Hormuz patrol mission though firm commitments have not yet materialized and the timeline remains unclear.

There is also an unexpected development worth watching.

Ukrainian interceptor drone technology is reportedly being made available to support American and Gulf state forces encountering Iran’s remaining aerial threats in the region.

That is a collaboration that would have been difficult to predict when this conflict began and it reflects how rapidly the strategic landscape is shifting.

Meanwhile, Israel has been watching the GBU72’s performance very closely.

There is a reason Israel has been seeking to acquire this particular weapon from the United States.

Iran’s underground nuclear and military facilities have long been a central concern in Israeli strategic planning.

The GBU72’s demonstrated ability to defeat hardened underground targets will factor heavily into calculations in Tel Aviv.

Let’s bring this home with the big picture because that is ultimately what matters most.

Iran spent years building an underground missile network along the straight of Hormuz.

It invested enormous resources into burying its launchers deep enough that no adversary could reach them.

It developed a multi-layered maritime harassment capability that successfully reduced shipping through the world’s most important energy corridor to a trickle.

It watched oil prices spike past $100 per barrel and believed it had found the leverage it needed to force the United States to back down.

Every part of that calculation has now been challenged by a single weapon that Iran’s engineers apparently did not fully account for when they designed their underground facilities.

The GBU72 does not care about reinforced concrete.

It does not care about compressed earth.

It does not care about mountain sides or tunnel depth or how long it took to build the facility it is aimed at.

It simply penetrates, reaches the target and detonates.

The tunnels collapse.

The access points are sealed.

The launchers inside become irrelevant.

That is what has just happened along the straight of Hormuz.

And the United States has made abundantly clear that it is prepared to do it again.

The B1s are still on the runway.

The intelligence picture is still being built.

The operation is not over.

Whether Iran chooses to genuinely deescalate and reopen the straight to international shipping or whether it doubles down and invites another wave of strikes will determine the next chapter of this conflict.

Thran now knows that its underground missile network is not the sanctuary it believed it was.

It knows that the United States has a weapon specifically built to defeat it.

and it knows that more of those weapons are ready to be delivered at a moment’s notice.

The Straight of Hormuz is not fully open yet, but the era of Iran believing it can close it without consequence is over.

Stay with us as Operation Epic Fury continues to develop.

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Because based on everything we have just walked through together, it is very clear that we are nowhere near the end of this