US Military Hits Iran’s Hormuz Missile Sites With 5,000lb Bunker-Buster Bombs

US Military Hits Iran’s Hormuz Missile Sites With 5,000lb Bunker-Buster Bombs

20 tankers reduced to towers of fire in a single night.

The narrow corridor connecting the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Omen, a waterway barely 21 miles across at its tightest point, transformed into the most dangerous stretch of ocean on the planet.

And with it, roughly 20% of the world’s entire oil supply simply stopped flowing.

That was the moment the Iranian regime believed it had played its ultimate card.

The card that no nation dares challenge.

the card that holds the global economy hostage.

But what the tan regime could not have anticipated was the scale, the precision, and the absolute technological brutality of the American response.

A response that didn’t just push back, it reached deep underground into tunnels buried beneath meters of reinforced concrete and turned them to dust.

Welcome back to World Brief Daily.

What you are about to hear is not speculation.

It is the story of a military operation that has permanently changed the strategic calculus in the Middle East and possibly the future of Iran itself.

Stay with us because the details of what happened along the coastline of the Strait of Hormuz are more extraordinary than anything being reported in your daily headlines.

And before we go any further, if you haven’t already subscribed to World Brief Daily, now is the perfect time.

Hit the subscribe button and enable notifications.

We cover this conflict in depth every day because what happens in the straight of Hormuz does not stay there.

It reaches your fuel pump, your grocery store, your economy.

You need to know this.

Let’s go back to the beginning, not February 28th, though.

That is the day Operation Epic Fury officially began when the United States and Israel launched coordinated air strikes on Iran, culminating in the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Kam.

No.

To understand what happened along the Straight of Hormuz, you need to understand what Iran believed it had built there.

For years, silently and methodically, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps constructed what they considered an impenetrable asymmetric fortress along Iran’s southern coastline.

Tunnels boarded 30 to 40 meters deep into rock.

Anti-ship missile batteries concealed behind natural terrain.

Drone launch platforms hidden in coastal inlets.

communications networks buried beneath the earth.

All of it designed for one purpose, to hold the straight of Hormuz as a loaded gun pressed against the throat of the world’s energy supply.

According to analysis from the Institute for the Study of War, Iran’s coastal defense architecture along the strait was one of the most elaborate access denial systems ever constructed by a regional power.

The NOR, Cotter, and Kosar families of anti-hship cruise missiles were the centerpieces.

weapons specifically engineered to threaten large naval assets, aircraft carriers, destroyers, tankers, anything trying to pass through a narrow strategic waterway.

These were the cornerstones of what military strategists call Iran’s A2A doctrine, anti-access, area denial, block the enemy from operating near you.

And for years, the strategy worked.

It deterred, it intimidated, it gave Tyrron enormous leverage in every diplomatic conversation about the Strait.

Then came the night of March 17th, 2026, and everything changed.

But here is something the headlines missed entirely.

The operation that unfolded that night was not born in a single decision room.

It was built over days of meticulous, invisible preparation.

Between roughly March 13th and 17th, US and Israeli intelligence networks wo what can only be described as a digital net around the strait’s entire coastline.

Satellite imagery, high alitude reconnaissance overflights, signals, intelligence intercepting IRGC communications in real time.

According to reporting by the war zone and confirmed by Sentcom’s own public statements, by the time the first aircraft took off, the coordinates of every relevant underground facility had been mapped with what military planners call millimeter precision.

The targets weren’t guessed.

They were known.

And then came the weapon no one had ever seen used in actual combat.

The GBU72 advanced 5,000lb penetrator.

Let that weight settle in.

5,000 lbs.

That is the equivalent of more than two metric tons of precisiong guided destruction.

As reported by the aviationist and confirmed by Air Force Times, this was the weapon’s combat debut.

A bunker buster designed to replace the GBU28 that has been in service since 1991.

The GBU72 uses GPS guidance combined with a high explosive warhead optimized specifically for post penetration detonation.

In simpler terms, it goes in first, travels through layers of rock and reinforced concrete, and only then explodes.

According to reporting by the war zone, the weapon is believed capable of penetrating in excess of 150 ft of earth.

The underground tunnels Iran’s engineers had spent years constructing 30, 40 m deep, were not a challenge.

They were a target.

US Central Command confirmed the strikes in a post on the evening of March 17th, writing that forces had successfully employed multiple 5,000 pound deep penetrator munitions on hardened Iranian missile sites along Iran’s coastline near the Strait of Hormuz, adding that the Iranian anti-ship cruise missiles in
these sites posed a risk to international shipping in the strait.

The primary delivery platform was the F-15E Strike Eagle, the jet on which the GBU72 was first tested and operationally cleared back in 2021.

Multiple Strike Eagles are permanently deployed within Sentcom’s area of responsibility, meaning their flight paths were far harder to track than those of heavy bombers flying from the continental United States or the UK.

The result was clinical.

Reinforced anti-hship missile launchers built into Iran’s coastal strip gone.

Underground missile and drone depots constructed beneath layers of concrete and rock rendered inoperable.

The Nor Carter and Kosar anti-hship missiles that formed the backbone of Iran’s asymmetric maritime strategy were, in the words of Sentcom’s assessment, no longer capable of locking onto any commercial vessel.

An entire doctrine, years in the construction, neutralized in a matter of hours.

But the US did not act alone.

And this is the part of the story that deserves far more attention than it receives.

Behind the GBU72s, behind the strike eagles, behind the satellite imagery, was a crucial and largely invisible partner, Israeli military intelligence.

According to multiple open- source reports corroborated by regional analysts, Israel shared its advanced signals intelligence network with the Pentagon in real time during the target identification phase.

More critically, Israeli electronic warfare assets were used to blind Iranian radar installations and sever communications networks in the critical windows before and during the strikes.

The combination ensured the operation was completed without the loss of a single aircraft during the Hormuz strike package itself.

Two forces acting in perfect synchronization.

Two intelligence architectures merging into a single operational picture.

The underground network Iran had spent years building in secrecy was rendered inoperable not in weeks, not in days, but in a single night.

This is a good moment to remind you that if you want to stay ahead of developments like these, the kind that reshape the global order before most people even realize what is happening, subscribe to World Brief Daily and turn on your notifications.

We are covering every dimension of this conflict from the weapon systems to the geopolitics to the economic consequences landing on ordinary people around the world.

Now, what does the destruction of those coastal missile systems actually mean? The straight of Hormuz at its narrowest is just 21 miles wide, channeled into two unidirectional shipping lanes.

Through this corridor flows roughly 20 million barrels of oil every single day.

According to data cited by the Wall Street Journal, that represents approximately 20% of all global seaborn oil trade.

Before the war began on February 28th, between 100 and 135 vessels transited the straight each day.

After Iran officially confirmed the closure of the straight on March the 2nd and began attacking merchant ships with at least 20 confirmed attacks by mid-March, according to Fox News, that number collapsed.

Crude oil prices, which were below $70 a barrel before Operation Epic Fury began, surged above $100, a jump of more than 40% as reported by CNN.

American drivers saw pump prices climb roughly 25%.

The economic damage radiated outward, striking shipping insurers, Asian manufacturers dependent on Gulf oil, European LG consumers, and Gulf states that suddenly had no viable export route.

That is the scale of what the Iranian regime imposed on the world.

And that is precisely why Sentcom defined the primary objective of the Hormuz strike operation as ensuring permanent international maritime security.

This was not about military prestige.

It was about reopening an artery the global economy depends on to survive.

And yet in the shadow of this extraordinary military success, something else was happening in Washington.

something that revealed a fracture in the Western Alliance that no one in the diplomatic establishment quite wanted to acknowledge openly.

Just days before the Hormuz strikes were ordered, President Trump reached out to his European and Asian partners with an urgent and historic request.

He called for the formation of a multinational naval force operating under the NATO umbrella to keep the straight open.

ships from multiple allied nations working together to protect a waterway that their own economies desperately need.

The response was, to put it diplomatically, devastating.

Germany’s Ministry of Defense declared the conflict was not their war.

Spain flatly rejected Washington’s request, closing diplomatic doors entirely.

France while maintaining the largest European naval presence in the region a force led by the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle with more than 10 ships forming a defensive shield across the eastern Mediterranean and Red Sea announced those assets would be used exclusively for defensive purposes.

The Macron administration made clear it would not redirect a single additional ship to Hormuz operations.

As Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on March 17th, according to Fox News, “I think NATO is making a very foolish mistake, and I’ve long said that I wonder whether or not NATO would ever be there for us.

” Trump also turned to Beijing.

He pointed explicitly to China’s near total dependence on Gulf oil.

In 2024, China received roughly a third of its petroleum through the Strait of Hormuz, as documented by Wikipedia’s crisis timeline.

He hinted he might cancel a meeting with Xiinping.

Beijing remained unmoved, sheltering behind a mask of calculated neutrality and refusing to redirect its naval assets from the Gulf of Aiden.

Russia, for its part, watched the entire crisis with remarkable composure.

Every dollar added to the price of crude fills Moscow’s war chest.

Its incentives to see the strait reopen quickly were, to say the least, limited.

Only India acted differently.

As reported by Bloomberg, citing informed sources, New Delhi deployed more than half a dozen warships to escort its tankers amid the escalating tensions.

A pragmatic, self-interested, but consequential decision that broke ranks with the broader Asian silence.

Faced with this diplomatic vacuum, Washington resolved the problem the only way available to it, alone and with overwhelming force.

But let us be precise about something that is often obscured in the coverage of this conflict.

The GBU72 strikes on March 17th were not the whole picture.

They were not even the beginning.

Operation Epic Fury began on February 28th, and in the weeks that followed, US forces struck over 7,000 Iranian military targets.

Naval vessels were destroyed, command infrastructure was degraded, and the strikes extended far beyond the straits coastline.

According to reporting by the World Socialist website citing open- source data, more than 100 Iranian naval vessels were destroyed in the first weeks of the operation.

Car Island itself, the strategic hub that handles roughly 90% of Iran’s daily oil exports, was struck by US Air Force assets on March 14th with Sentcom confirming more than 90 Iranian military targets hit on the island while deliberately leaving its oil infrastructure intact.

That restraint was a signal, a signal about what Washington had not yet done and therefore what it still could do.

One of the most profound developments in the command dimension of this conflict came from the Israeli side of the operation.

According to statements from the Israel Defense Forces, the Revolutionary Guard’s naval headquarters in Thran, the primary command center for planning operations against maritime traffic in the Strait of Hormuz was successfully targeted.

With that central command structure degraded, Iranian naval forces in the strait began operating without coordination, described by military analysts covering the conflict as increasingly fragmented and reactive rather than strategic.

The IDF also claimed the elimination of Ali Larijani, a member of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and one of the most consequential political figures in the Iranian system.

As the World Socialist website noted, Larajani had in fact become Iran’s deacto leader following KA’s death, announcing the formation of an interim leadership council on March 1st.

His removal, according to Israeli military intelligence, created what regional analysts described as a political earthquake inside the already fractured corridors of power in Thran.

At the same time, the IDF claimed it had eliminated senior IRGC security figures, including those involved in planning responses to civilian unrest, part of a broader systematic effort by US and Israeli intelligence to dismantle the architecture of regime security, not just its military hardware.

The consequence of all this, as documented by the Institute for the Study of War, was visible in Iran’s proxy network beyond its borders.

Iranbacked militias in Iraq, cut off from the central command that had directed them for years, began operating in what observers described as a helpless, aimless manner, resorting to first-person view drone attacks on the US embassy using fiber optic cables rather than the coordinated, sophisticated operations of previous years.

The Houthies attempted to escalate tanker harassment in the Red Sea.

Hezbollah fired rockets across the Lebanese border, but none of it altered the fundamental picture.

The axis of resistance without its commander and without its central guidance was fragmenting.

And yet the situation in the strait remained far from resolved because military power, no matter how overwhelming, could not simply reopen a waterway that Iran was still contesting with mines, suicide drones, fast attack boats, and coastal missile systems, some of which survived the initial strikes or
were repositioned after them.

Iran remained defiant.

A senior Iranian official declared the strait would not reopen until the country was fully compensated for war damages.

And on April 3rd came a moment that underscored the genuine danger still present in this theater.

A US Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle from the 494th Fighter Squadron based at RAF Lackenhe in England was shot down over Iran by a shoulder fired missile.

The crew ejected over hostile Iranian territory.

What followed was one of the most complex combat search and rescue operations in American military history, involving hundreds of special operations personnel, including Delta Force and SEAL Team 6 and ultimately more than 150 supporting aircraft.

According to CNN, the pilot was rescued within hours.

The weapon systems officer, a colonel, survived days of evasion in the Zagros mountains before being recovered.

Senior officials described the mission as among the most challenging ever conducted by US forces.

That single incident carried an important message.

Iran, degraded as it was, retain the capacity to inflict real losses.

It had not been rendered helpless.

And in the waters of the strait itself, the threat was evolving rather than disappearing.

Which brings us to the force now approaching the theater that every military analyst in Washington, Riad, and Tel Aviv is watching with extraordinary attention.

The USS Tripoli, an America ship 844 ft long, displacing more than 45,000 tons.

On March 28th, US Central Command officially confirmed the Tripoli had entered its area of responsibility, accompanied by the USS New Orleans and USS San Diego, two San Antonio class amphibious transport docks capable of moving large volumes of Marines, vehicles, and equipment.

Aboard this fleet, the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, carrying approximately 3,500 sailors and marines.

The triple E also carries F-35B Lightning 2 stealth fighters.

the short takeoff and vertical landing variant of the most advanced fifth generation combat jet in the American arsenal along with MV22 Osprey Tiltrotor aircraft AH1Z Viper Attack helicopters and CH53 Sea Stallion heavy lift helicopters as Newsweek reported citing satellite imagery from the European Space Agency.

The vessel had been tracked transiting the South China Sea at unusually high speeds.

Its escorts leaving larger than normal wakes, the kind of signature that open source analysts describe simply as moving with purpose.

And the Tripoli is not alone.

The war zone confirmed that a second amphibious assault group centered on the USS Boxer carrying the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit with roughly 2,500 additional personnel was accelerated from the US West Coast to join the theater.

Together, as noted by the US Naval Institute’s proceedings journal, these two Marine forces represent the largest American amphibious capability assembled in the Middle East in years.

Their combined firepower, their helicopter assault capability, their shipto-shore landing systems, all of it points in one direction, not defensive escort, not tanker protection, something more decisive, something the Pentagon has not officially stated, but that every serious military analyst has concluded is now at least under active consideration.

Car Island, 30 kilometers
off the coast of Iran in the Persian Gulf.

Small, roughly 8 kilometers long.

And yet, according to analysts at the National Newspaper and Zona Militar, it manages roughly 90% of Iran’s oil exports.

The pipelines running to its terminals are Iran’s economic spine.

Capturing Carg or even blockading it would not merely be a military blow.

It would be an economic strangulation.

Trump himself told the Financial Times at the end of March that Washington could take control of Iran’s oil by occupying the island.

And on Truth Social, he threatened its obliteration.

The Pentagon has already confirmed that A-10 Warthog ground attack aircraft and Apache helicopters are flying strike missions in and around Kar, softening Iranian defensive positions ahead of any potential landing.

According to the National LCAC hovercraft carried aboard the Tripoli can deliver Marines and armored vehicles directly to hostile shores at speed.

The 82nd Airborne Division’s immediate response force, some 2,000 paratroopers capable of deploying within 18 hours, has also been moved to the region as reported by Zona Militar, adding an airborne assault dimension to the operational picture.

The US Naval Institute’s proceedings put the strategic dilemma starkly.

He can accept $100 per barrel oil and its political consequences, hoping international pressure eventually forces a negotiated settlement.

He can attempt to reopen the strait through force, accepting the real risk of US casualties and escalation.

He can attempt to pressure Beijing to push Thrron to the negotiating table.

China receives nearly half its oil through Hormuz and has the most to lose from a prolonged closure.

None of those options is clean.

All of them carry costs.

What is not in question is the economic reality bearing down on every nation connected to global trade.

As documented by the 2026 straight of Hormuz crisis Wikipedia timeline, roughly 84% of crude oil shipments through the strait in 2024 were destined for Asian markets.

Europe received 12 to 14% of its LNG from Qatar.

through the straight.

The Persian Gulf is also a global hub for fertilizer production.

The closure is not simply about oil prices.

It is about the cascading disruption of supply chains that the world has spent decades building on the assumption that this waterway would always be open.

Gulf states like Iraq and Kuwait began curtailing oil production as storage filled up with nowhere to export.

Insurance premiums for ships attempting to transit had risen from 0.

125% of vessel value per trip to between 0.

2 and 0.

4%.

4% and in practice by early March no major insurer would cover the passage at any price.

On April the 2nd Bahrain called on the United Nations Security Council to authorize military force to reopen the strait.

Russia and China vetoed the resolution on April 7th as reported by the Strait of Hormuz crisis timeline, effectively blocking any UN mandate for the operation Washington is already conducting.

That veto was in strategic terms irrelevant to the US military campaign, but it was deeply relevant as a signal.

This conflict now has the shape of a broader great power confrontation with Moscow and Beijing on one side and Washington on the other fought through proxies and vetos rather than direct engagement.

And Trump is not patient.

On the morning of April 6th, he posted to Truth Social, “Tuesday will be power plant day and bridge day all wrapped up in one in Iran.

There will be nothing like it.

Open the straight or you’ll be living in hell.

Just watch.

” He set a specific deadline, Tuesday, 8way p.

m.

Eastern time.

Iran’s senior officials responded derisively.

One demanding that the strait would not reopen until Iran was fully compensated for war damages and warning that the US was pushing toward a living hell.

Trump has declared and modified deadlines multiple times in recent weeks.

Iran has called every bluff and the straight remains at this writing effectively closed to normal commercial traffic.

But here is the deeper reality that this conflict has exposed.

Iran’s asymmetric power rested not merely on missiles and drones.

It rested on the belief sustained for decades that closing the straight of Hormuz was the ultimate deterrent.

The card no opponent would dare force.

That belief is now being systematically dismantled.

The underground facilities are destroyed.

The command structure is degraded.

The naval headquarters is gone.

Key leadership has been eliminated.

The proxy network is fragmented.

And the most capable amphibious assault force the United States has assembled in the region in a generation is now positioned for what comes next.

Whether that next step is a blockade of Car Island, a marine amphibious assault on its shores, continued air strikes, or a negotiated settlement reached before the pressure becomes unbearable for Thran.

That is the question on which the coming days turn.

Former Defense Secretary James Mattis has said he does not believe regime change is likely.

Iranian opposition figure Raza Palavi has called on Trump and Netanyahu to continue targeting the regime while sparing civilian infrastructure.

Pakistan’s foreign minister has been on the phone with his Iranian counterpart, urging dialogue.

Trump’s special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are reported by Axios to be in active, if fragile, negotiations with Iranian representatives.

The diplomatic and the military are running in parallel, each shaping the other’s calculus in real time.

What is certain is this.

The straight of Hormuz is no longer the inviable trump card Iran believed it to be.

The GBU72, a weapon that the world had never seen used in combat before March 17th, 2026, has fundamentally changed what is possible underground.

The F-35Bs aboard the USS Tripoli have extended American precision air power to within striking distance of any target on Iran’s western coastline.

And the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit represents a land and amphibious option that Washington has never before deployed to this theater.

The Iranian regime built its deterrence on the assumption that the cost of challenging it was too high.

What Operation Epic Fury has demonstrated in methodical and devastating fashion is that the cost of not challenging it was higher.

90% of a nation’s oil exports flowing through a single island.

A straight through which the global economy breathes, a regime that gambled everything on the world blinking first.

It did not.

And the boxer amphibious ready group still racing across the Pacific has not yet arrived.

The next chapter of this conflict is being written right now, measured in nautical miles and negotiating deadlines and the speed of ships crossing an ocean.

This is World Brief Daily, and we will be with you every step of the way.

If this analysis was useful, if it gave you a clearer picture of what is actually happening in one of the most consequential crises of this decade, please subscribe, hit the notification bell, and share this video with someone who needs to understand what is happening in the Straight of Hormuz.

Because the decisions made in the next few days will shape not just the Middle East, but the price of energy, the stability of global trade, and the limits of American military power for years to come.

Stay with us.