The Navy's Mine Warfare Gamble at Hormuz
The U.S. Navy bet its mine countermeasures future on unmanned platforms. The Strait of Hormuz is now the first real-world test of that wager—and the early returns are sobering.
Bottom Line Up Front
The U.S. Navy's mine countermeasures force facing Iran's mined Strait of Hormuz in April 2026 is built almost entirely around unmanned platforms that have never been validated in a contested operational environment. The service retired its last purpose-built Avenger-class minesweepers from the Persian Gulf in September 2025 and shut down its MH-53E Sea Dragon airborne MCM detachment in August 2025, replacing both with an LCS-based mission package whose unmanned surface vehicles, unmanned underwater vehicles, and helicopter-borne sensors have been documented by the Navy's own training assessments as suffering from unreliable sonar recording, excessive pre-mission maintenance timelines, critical single-point mechanical failures, and inadequate sensor performance in turbid or deep water. Two legacy Avengers are being surged from Japan, but the force structure now confronting Iranian Maham-3 moored influence mines and Maham-7 bottom mines consists principally of three Independence-class LCS, 16 Expeditionary MCM companies operating Mk 18 Mod 2 Kingfish UUVs, a handful of Knifefish medium-class UUVs that have never operated outside controlled test environments, and Raytheon's Barracuda mine neutralizer—which completed its first untethered autonomous demonstration only nine months ago. The gap between the Navy's unmanned MCM ambitions and the reality of clearing a 100-nautical-mile strait against a dynamic, sensor-fused mine threat represents the most consequential mine warfare test since the 1991 Kuwait clearance operation.
The Operational Problem
On 11 April 2026, USS Frank E. Petersen Jr. (DDG-121) and USS Michael Murphy (DDG-112) became the first U.S. warships to transit the Strait of Hormuz since Operation Epic Fury began on 28 February, opening what U.S. Central Command described as the first phase of mine clearance operations. CENTCOM Commander Admiral Brad Cooper announced that forces would establish “a new passage” and share a verified safe corridor with commercial shipping. Additional forces, explicitly including underwater drones, would join the clearance effort within days.
The scope of the problem is staggering. The strait’s traffic separation scheme stretches roughly 100 nautical miles. As Captain Kevin Eyer, USN (Ret.), detailed in the April 2026 Proceedings, supporting both inbound and outbound oil and LNG traffic would require two Q-routes, each 2,000 yards wide, covering approximately 200 square miles of seabed that must be surveyed, classified, and declared safe. Before the war, the strait handled roughly 130 ships per day—approximately 20 percent of global seaborne oil and a comparable share of liquefied natural gas. In the first week of the blockade, fewer than a dozen ships transited without IRGC authorization.
U.S. intelligence, as reported by CBS News on 23 March 2026, estimated that Iran had deployed at least a dozen naval mines in the strait. These were identified as two types: the Maham-3, a moored influence mine weighing approximately 300 kilograms equipped with magnetic and acoustic sensors capable of engaging targets within about 10 feet; and the Maham-7, a 220-kilogram seabed bottom mine whose hull geometry was engineered to scatter incoming sonar waves, significantly complicating detection. According to the CAT-UXO (Collective Awareness to Unexploded Ordnance) database, the Maham-7 can be deployed by small craft or helicopters in water as shallow as 10 feet or as deep as 300 feet. The Defense Intelligence Agency estimated Iran’s total mine stockpile at more than 5,000 as of 2019, and CENTCOM assessments indicate Iran retains 80 to 90 percent of its small-boat and minelayer capacity.
Critically, reporting from multiple intelligence sources indicates that Iran itself may not have systematically tracked every mine placement—a product of IRGC Navy units operating fast attack boats capable of carrying two or three mines per sortie under combat conditions. This creates a problem qualitatively different from the 1991 Kuwait precedent: the minefield is not static. The IRGC Navy declared on 5 April that the strait would “never return to its previous status,” and evidence indicates mining may have continued even during the ceasefire.
What the Navy Retired
To understand the current MCM force structure, one must first understand what the Navy gave up. On 25 September 2025, the service held a final decommissioning ceremony in Bahrain for the last four forward-deployed Avenger-class MCM ships: USS Devastator (MCM-6), USS Sentry (MCM-3), USS Dextrous (MCM-13), and USS Gladiator (MCM-11). In January 2026—five weeks before Iran reportedly began mining the strait—those hulls were loaded aboard the heavy-lift vessel M/V Seaway Hawk and transported to Philadelphia for disposal.
The Avenger class represented 40 years of purpose-built mine warfare engineering. Their fiberglass-sheathed wooden hulls were specifically designed for minimal magnetic signature, enabling them to operate inside minefields where steel-hulled ships cannot safely go. They carried the AN/SQQ-32 mine-hunting sonar and the AN/SLQ-48 Mine Neutralization System, and their crews trained exclusively for mine warfare. The Navy has stated it has no plans to recommission any Avenger-class vessels.
Concurrently, the Navy’s MH-53E Sea Dragon detachment in the Arabian Gulf—the backbone of airborne MCM operations in the Fifth Fleet area for decades—was shut down in August 2025 as the platform was phased out. The service no longer maintains a dedicated heavy-lift airborne mine countermeasures capability in the region.
Four Avenger-class ships remain in Navy inventory, all forward-deployed to Sasebo, Japan. Two of those—USS Pioneer (MCM-9) and USS Chief (MCM-14)—were spotted departing Singapore westbound on 10–11 April, transiting the Strait of Malacca en route to CENTCOM. Their transit time to the Persian Gulf will be measured in weeks, not days.
The Unmanned Architecture
The replacement force structure rests on three pillars, each relying heavily on unmanned systems: the LCS MCM Mission Package, the Expeditionary MCM companies, and a developmental pipeline of next-generation unmanned vehicles. Each warrants detailed examination.
Pillar 1: The LCS MCM Mission Package
Three Independence-class LCS currently constitute the Navy’s primary MCM surface force in the region: USS Canberra (LCS-30), USS Tulsa (LCS-16), and USS Santa Barbara (LCS-32). Each carries the MCM Mission Package (MCM MP), which achieved Initial Operational Capability on 31 March 2023 aboard USS Cincinnati (LCS-20). The first operational packages deployed from San Diego in March 2025 aboard Canberra and Santa Barbara.
The MCM MP is a layered system designed to keep the manned ship outside the mine danger area while unmanned and airborne systems operate forward. Its principal components and vendors are:
The concept is elegant in theory: the ALMDS-equipped MH-60S sweeps the near-surface volume with laser imaging; the USV-towed AN/AQS-20C sonar hunts mines in the water column and on the bottom; the Knifefish UUV autonomously searches for buried mines in high-clutter environments; the UISS triggers influence mines; and the Barracuda neutralizes confirmed contacts. The LCS itself never enters the minefield.
The problem lies in execution. A Navy MCM Advanced Tactical Training brief—the final pre-deployment mine warfare assessment for LCS crews—documented systemic deficiencies that were reported by Hunterbrook Media in March 2026. Each Fleet-class USV mission required more than four hours of pre-mission maintenance followed by one and a half hours of GPS and sonar calibration. Multiple hunt missions were conducted where the AN/AQS-20 sonar failed to record data, a failure discoverable only during post-mission analysis. The USV exhibited a recurring tendency to “run away” beyond operator control, and its communications range required the LCS mothership to operate dangerously close to, or inside, the minefield—precisely the scenario the standoff architecture was designed to prevent.
Single points of failure compound the reliability issues. The platform lift moving equipment from the LCS mission bay to the flight deck is a critical node; its failure renders the helicopter combat-ineffective. If the USV tow hook breaks, the vehicle must be recovered by other means. If the Twin Boom Extensible Frame used to launch and recover USVs from the mission bay fails, the entire MCM platform is inoperable. Captain Scott B. Hattaway, Director of the SMWDC Mine Countermeasures Technical Division, acknowledged at the Combined Naval Event 2024 in the UK that the 11-meter USV’s form factor limits both the endurance and the towed sonar depth achievable by the AN/AQS-20C.
Navy doctrine further requires visual identification of mines before neutralization. The camera system on the USV reportedly fails even in relatively clear water, a significant limitation in the turbid conditions common in the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz.
Pillar 2: Expeditionary MCM Companies
The Navy’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal community maintains 16 Expeditionary MCM (ExMCM) companies—27-person units composed of a command element, an unmanned systems platoon, an EOD MCM platoon, and a post-mission analysis cell. These companies have deployed extensively in the Middle East, with two continuously forward-deployed to Bahrain since 2014, and represent arguably the Navy’s most operationally proven MCM capability.
Each unmanned systems platoon operates 12 UUVs: six Mk 18 Mod 1 Swordfish (based on the Hydroid REMUS 100, approximately 80 pounds, 6–8 hour endurance, 100-meter max depth) and six Mk 18 Mod 2 Kingfish (based on the REMUS 600, approximately 800 pounds, 20–24 hour endurance, 600-meter max depth). Production of the Mk 18 Mod 2 was completed in 2023 after Hydroid, now a Huntington Ingalls Industries subsidiary acquired for $350 million in 2020, delivered more than 90 vehicles to the fleet.
The Kingfish uses side-scan sonar for search and discovery, Iridium satellite communications for over-the-horizon connectivity, and an autonomous navigation suite combining acoustic Doppler current profiler, inertial navigation, and P-code GPS. Crews launch and recover the UUVs from 11-meter rigid-hull inflatable boats or, in a field innovation developed by ExMCM operators in Bahrain, from a purpose-engineered rubber raft called the “Mallard” towed behind a Zodiac combat rubber raiding craft. The system can also deploy from a containerized “Stinger” launcher fitting a standard MilVan, enabling operation from virtually any vessel of opportunity.
The ExMCM companies are the Navy’s most flexible MCM asset—deployable by C-130 transport aircraft, operable from any port or platform, and staffed by EOD technicians who can visually identify and manually neutralize mines when unmanned systems reach their limits. Their principal limitation is throughput: clearing 200 square miles of seabed with RHIB-launched UUVs is a fundamentally slower process than operating from dedicated MCM ships.
Pillar 3: The Developmental Pipeline
Two significant unmanned systems are in development but are not yet fielded at scale for the Hormuz mission:
Knifefish Block 1 (General Dynamics Mission Systems). The Knifefish is the MCM MP’s dedicated subsurface mine-hunting UUV, purpose-built to detect buried and bottom mines in high-clutter environments using a low-frequency broadband synthetic aperture sonar with automated target-recognition software. Built on the Bluefin-21 platform, it is 21 inches in diameter, approximately 16 feet long, and weighs roughly 1,650 pounds. NAVSEA awarded General Dynamics a $44.6 million LRIP contract in 2019 after Milestone C approval, followed by a $72.8 million retrofit contract to upgrade five Block 0 systems to Block 1 configuration for deeper-depth operation and improved sensor performance. The Navy plans to procure 30 Knifefish systems (48 UUVs total)—24 for LCS and six for other vessels. However, as one analysis of the Hormuz deployment noted, the Knifefish’s April 2026 employment would represent its first use in a contested operational environment; whether its sonar can reliably classify a Maham-7 bottom mine against the acoustic clutter of the Hormuz seabed has not been validated outside controlled test settings.
Viperfish / Medium UUV (Leidos). The Viperfish is the designated successor to the Mk 18 Mod 2 Kingfish for ExMCM operations. In July 2022, the Navy awarded Leidos a $12 million design contract for the Medium Unmanned Undersea Vehicle, with options potentially reaching $358.5 million through 2032. In July 2023, Leidos received a $36.3 million contract modification to fabricate four engineering development models. Based on the L3Harris Iver4 900 UUV, Viperfish will combine mine countermeasures and submarine-based oceanographic sensing in a single modular platform, merging the requirements of the EOD community’s Kingfish replacement and the submarine community’s Razorback program. Leidos has described Viperfish as potentially “one of the most densely packed and technologically advanced underwater vehicles ever built,” but it remains in development and is not available for the current Hormuz operation.
Barracuda (Raytheon / RTX). The AN/WSQ-46 Barracuda mine neutralization vehicle represents the endgame of the unmanned MCM kill chain—an expendable, semi-autonomous UUV roughly the size of a sonobuoy that autonomously navigates to a mine contact, identifies it with onboard sensors, and detonates its warhead to destroy it. Raytheon won the initial $83.3 million design contract in April 2018, with options to $362.7 million. In July 2025, Raytheon successfully demonstrated Barracuda in its first untethered, semi-autonomous open-water operation in Narragansett Bay. The updated Barracuda will operate without a tether—a critical improvement over the original tethered concept. Its integration into the MCM MP is ongoing, with the system designed to be deployed from the Fleet-class USV.
The Force Protection Problem
Mine clearance is not merely a technical task; it is a combined-arms problem. MCM forces are inherently vulnerable because they must move slowly and methodically, focused on the water column and seabed, while exposed to aviation, drone, missile, and small-boat threats. The Strait of Hormuz places every MCM asset within range of Iran’s surviving arsenal of antiship cruise missiles, Shahed one-way attack drones, fast-attack boats, and shore-based launchers.
Admiral Daryl Caudle, the Chief of Naval Operations, addressed this directly in the April 2026 Proceedings: mine search and destruction is slow, deliberate work, and none of the Navy’s current MCM options performs well in a non-permissive environment. This reality explains CENTCOM’s decision to send two Arleigh Burke-class destroyers through the strait as the opening move—not to hunt mines, for which they carry no specialized equipment, but to establish local sea control and provide air and missile defense coverage for the MCM forces that will follow.
The USS George H.W. Bush (CVN-77) Carrier Strike Group, diverted around the Cape of Good Hope rather than risk the Red Sea Houthi threat, is transiting toward the theater. A-10 Warthogs have been conducting close air support operations over the strait, a choice that suggests CENTCOM judges the airspace sufficiently permissive for slow, non-stealthy aircraft—a prerequisite for MH-60S mine warfare helicopter operations.
Historical Context and the Scale of the Challenge
The 1991 Kuwait mine clearance operation is the closest historical benchmark. U.S. and coalition forces swept approximately 200 square miles of shallow water in 51 days—with a full squadron of Avenger-class ships, uncontested airspace, an enemy that had stopped mining weeks earlier, and precisely mapped mine locations. None of those conditions apply to Hormuz in April 2026.
The 1987–88 Tanker War offers a more cautionary parallel. During the first Earnest Will convoy on 24 July 1987, the reflagged tanker Bridgeton struck an Iranian M-08 moored mine immediately after transiting the Strait of Hormuz. No pre-cleared Q-routes existed; escort ships followed in Bridgeton’s wake, using the tanker itself as an improvised minesweeper. Nine months later, USS Samuel B. Roberts (FFG-58) struck another Iranian mine on 14 April 1988, suffering a 15-foot hull breach that broke the ship’s keel—triggering Operation Praying Mantis, the largest U.S. naval surface engagement since World War II.
The Washington Institute has estimated that clearing the Strait of Hormuz could require up to 16 MCM vessels. The Navy has seven—three LCS with MCM packages of unproven reliability and four Avengers, two of which are weeks away from the theater.
The Coverage-Rate Arithmetic
The mismatch between the area to be cleared and the available clearance capacity is the central quantitative fact of this operation. Captain Eyer’s Proceedings analysis established the requirement: supporting two-way oil and LNG traffic through the strait’s 100-nautical-mile traffic separation scheme demands two Q-routes, each 2,000 yards wide, totaling approximately 200 square nautical miles of seabed that must be surveyed, classified, and verified mine-free. CENTCOM’s initial objective is narrower—a single safe corridor—but even a minimum-width lane through the full length of the strait represents an enormous survey task.
The coverage rates of the available systems are sobering. A dedicated mine countermeasures vessel sweeps approximately 0.5 square nautical miles per day under favorable conditions. The Knifefish UUV can operate autonomously for approximately 16 hours, but after subtracting transit time to and from the search area, practical search time per sortie is roughly 10 to 12 hours—and each LCS carries only two Knifefish. The vehicle does not cover large minefields efficiently; Wikipedia’s sourced assessment of the program notes that the Knifefish lacks the endurance to handle large-area search missions, and the Navy has acknowledged this as a limitation relative to the earlier (and canceled) Remote Multi-Mission Vehicle. The Fleet-class USV towing the AN/AQS-20C sonar requires approximately six hours of pre-mission preparation per sortie, and the Navy’s own training data shows sonar data-recording failures that are not discoverable until post-mission analysis—meaning entire sorties can yield zero usable data. The mine clearance rate for the full detect-classify-identify-neutralize kill chain has been estimated at approximately one mine per hour or less in training conditions.
The ALMDS on the MH-60S is the fastest asset in the package—its untethered, forward-motion laser imaging can achieve high area search rates for near-surface moored mines, day or night. But the ALMDS cannot detect bottom mines, and the Maham-7 is specifically a seabed weapon engineered to scatter incoming sonar returns. In the turbid waters common in the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz, ALMDS effectiveness degrades further. The aerial component is also limited to shallow waters no greater than approximately 40 feet, per the Stimson Center’s analysis.
Paul Heslop of the UN Mine Action Service framed the operational reality in an April 2026 interview: mine clearance in the strait would likely require forming convoys behind active sweep operations through a corridor only a few kilometers wide, with continuous re-sweeping required because currents, tidal shifts, and—critically—potential re-mining can re-contaminate previously cleared areas. This is not a one-pass operation.
For context: the 1991 Kuwait clearance of roughly 200 square miles, with a full Avenger squadron, uncontested airspace, a static minefield, and known mine locations, took 51 days. With three LCS of documented unreliability, ExMCM companies operating Mk 18 UUVs from RHIBs, and two Avengers still weeks from theater, clearing 200 square miles is a multi-month proposition under best-case assumptions. Even CENTCOM’s more modest objective of a single verified safe corridor likely requires weeks of sustained operations—assuming the threat environment permits uninterrupted work and no additional mines are laid.
Has Iran’s Mining Capability Been Destroyed?
The answer is: partially degraded, but not eliminated—and the claims emanating from Washington diverge sharply from the available evidence.
On 10 March, CENTCOM announced the destruction of multiple Iranian naval vessels including 16 minelayers in a single day’s strikes near the strait. CENTCOM Commander Admiral Brad Cooper’s update confirmed strikes on more than 5,500 targets in Iran, including over 60 ships and all four Soleimani-class warships. President Trump subsequently claimed on Truth Social that “all 28” of Iran’s mine-laying boats had been sunk. A White House spokesperson stated the Department of War had destroyed over 40 minelaying vessels. Trump later told reporters on 12 April that all of Iran’s mine-laying ships had been destroyed and that only “a couple of mines” remained in the water.
These claims are difficult to reconcile with reporting from multiple credible sources. CNN reported in early March—after the initial wave of CENTCOM strikes—that Iran still retained 80 to 90 percent of its small boats and minelayers, and could feasibly lay hundreds of additional mines. The Stimson Center’s April 2026 analysis emphasized that Iran’s mine warfare doctrine deliberately disperses capability across numerous fast attack boats (each carrying two to three mines per sortie), frogmen who place mines manually from small craft, helicopters, midget submarines, and shore-based rocket artillery capable of delivering mines. This layered architecture was designed precisely to survive attempts to destroy the minelaying force in a single stroke. Destroying dedicated minelayer hulls, while necessary, does not eliminate the capability.
The operational evidence supports the more cautious assessment. The New York Times reported on 10 April—a full month after the claimed destruction of Iranian minelayers—that Iran cannot locate all the mines it has already placed and lacks the capability to remove them. Mining may have continued during the ceasefire itself; the IRGC Navy declared on 5 April that the strait would “never return to its previous status,” a direct contradiction of ceasefire terms that required the strait to reopen. Al Jazeera noted that while CENTCOM confirmed striking 16 vessels in the initial wave, the destruction of the entire mine-laying fleet remains unverified by independent sources.
Iran’s total mine stockpile was estimated by the Defense Intelligence Agency at more than 5,000 as of 2019. Even if CENTCOM destroyed every dedicated minelayer hull afloat, the mines themselves—stored in shore depots, aboard surviving small craft, and available for deployment by frogmen operating from civilian dhows or fishing boats—represent an enduring threat. Admiral Caudle’s observation in Proceedings that none of the Navy’s MCM options performs well in a non-permissive environment takes on particular weight here: clearing mines while the adversary retains even a diminished capacity to lay new ones converts the operation from a clearance problem into an attrition problem. If the IRGC can seed new mines overnight faster than the Navy can find and neutralize them during the day, the operation reaches stalemate regardless of the technology employed.
The Vendor Landscape
The Recurring Institutional Failure
The pattern is over a century old, and its repetition borders on institutional pathology. Western navies consistently allow mine warfare capability to atrophy in peacetime, then face catastrophic consequences when mines appear in combat.
The archetype is the Dardanelles, March 1915. The Royal Navy attempted to force the strait with a combined Anglo-French fleet of 18 capital ships. This despite a prewar study indicating just how hard this would likely be. The Turks had laid 393 mines in ten rows; a line of 20 mines laid secretly by the minelayer Nusret on 8 March, parallel to the Asian shore batteries, went undetected by British minesweeping forces. On 18 March, those mines sank three battleships—HMS Irresistible, HMS Ocean, and the French Bouvet—and crippled three more. The minesweeping force consisted of civilian-manned North Sea trawlers operating at one to four knots under fire, wholly inadequate for the task. The naval failure compelled the Gallipoli land campaign, which cost over 250,000 Allied casualties and achieved nothing. As the Australian Naval Institute noted in March 2026, the entire amphibious campaign on the Gallipoli Peninsula was the unintended consequence of the inability of western navies to clear mines.
Thirty-five years later, the lesson repeated at Wonsan. In October 1950, North Korea—a nation without a navy—used Soviet-supplied mines, loaded onto wooden barges and sampans at the direction of Soviet technical advisors, to lay approximately 3,000 contact and influence mines across 400 square miles of Wonsan’s approaches. The Pacific Fleet no longer had a mine warfare-type commander on its staff. Six minesweepers were assigned to a task that had employed over 100 at Okinawa and 300 at Normandy. On 12 October, the minesweepers USS Pirate (AM-275) and USS Pledge (AM-277) were sunk by mines, with 12 killed. The planned five-day clearance became a 15-day ordeal, delaying D-Day by ten days, during which 50,000 Marines sat aboard transports while South Korean forces captured Wonsan overland, rendering the amphibious assault moot. Rear Admiral Allen “Hoke” Smith sent the Chief of Naval Operations a message that reverberates to this day: “The U.S. Navy has lost control of the seas in Korean waters to a nation without a Navy, using pre–World War I weapons, laid by vessels that were utilized at the time of the birth of Christ.”
The 1991 Gulf War added another verse. USS Tripoli (LPH-10) and USS Princeton (CG-59) both struck Iraqi mines within hours of each other on 18 February, and the planned 17,000-Marine amphibious assault on the Kuwaiti coast was canceled because the mine threat could not be resolved in time. After the war, the Navy accelerated MCM investment—then allowed it to erode once more as the Global War on Terror consumed attention and budget.
The institutional dynamic is well understood. Mine warfare is defensive, unglamorous, and technically demanding. Few admirals come from the MCM community. The platforms are small, the budgets modest, and the mission invisible until it is suddenly the only thing that matters. A Proceedings article in January 2022 drew the Dardanelles parallel explicitly to the Taiwan scenario, noting that China’s PLAN inventory includes an estimated 100,000 naval mines. The lesson is stark: mine warfare capability cannot be built after the mines are in the water.
The Commercial Unmanned Fleet: An Untapped Reserve
If the Navy’s organic MCM capacity is insufficient for the Hormuz mission—and the arithmetic strongly suggests it is—then the question becomes whether the commercial offshore industry possesses unmanned platforms that could supplement the fleet. The answer is yes, emphatically, though the integration challenges are nontrivial. This can't be left to unprepared and unprotected fishermen as it was at the Dardanelles.
The global offshore oil and gas, subsea cable, and offshore wind industries operate thousands of remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) for pipeline inspection, seabed survey, and subsea infrastructure maintenance. These vehicles carry the same classes of sensors—side-scan sonar, synthetic aperture sonar, multibeam echo sounders, magnetometers, sub-bottom profilers, and high-definition cameras—that the Navy uses for mine hunting. The key difference is scale: the commercial fleet is vastly larger than the military one, and its operational tempo is measured in thousands of survey-days per year.
Several commercial platforms and operators warrant specific attention:
Kongsberg HUGIN AUV Family (Kongsberg Discovery, Horten, Norway). The HUGIN is the most commercially successful AUV in the world. The HUGIN Superior variant carries the HISAS 1032 dual-receiver synthetic aperture sonar—the same sonar technology class that the Belgian-Dutch rMCM program uses for mine detection—alongside a multibeam echosounder, sub-bottom profiler, magnetometer, and camera system. It operates to 6,000 meters depth, navigates via Kongsberg’s Sunstone aided inertial navigation system with DPCA micro-navigated SAS, and communicates via Iridium satellite. The HUGIN Endurance variant, 11 meters long and weighing approximately 8,000 kilograms, is designed for unsupervised shore-to-shore operations with a 15-day mission time and 1,200-nautical-mile range. Its sensor suite is directly applicable to mine detection: the HISAS synthetic aperture sonar produces centimeter-resolution imagery of the seabed, and its magnetometer can detect ferrous objects buried in sediment. Kongsberg has explicitly marketed HUGIN for both commercial survey and defense MCM applications, and the vehicle is used by the Royal Norwegian Navy for mine reconnaissance.
Ocean Infinity (Austin, Texas / Southampton, UK). Ocean Infinity operates the Armada fleet—14 robotics-equipped survey vessels ranging from 78 to 86 meters, completed in December 2025, plus 14 Kongsberg HUGIN AUVs, eight unmanned surface vehicles, and six work-class ROVs. The Armada vessels are designed for remote operation from shore-based control centers via satellite, with minimal or zero crew aboard. They carry permanently mounted multibeam echosounders, sub-bottom profilers, USBL positioning systems, and can deploy multiple AUVs simultaneously from moonpools. During the 2018 search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, Ocean Infinity’s multi-AUV fleet covered 125,000 square kilometers in 138 days—a coverage rate that dwarfs anything the Navy’s organic MCM force can achieve. The company’s capacity to deploy multiple AUVs from a single vessel, operating in coordinated search patterns with overlapping sonar coverage, represents precisely the throughput multiplier that the Hormuz clearance operation lacks.
Exail UMIS (formerly ECA Group, La Garde, France). While Exail’s UMIS is a military system, its architecture demonstrates how commercial robotic technology translates to mine warfare. The Belgian-Dutch rMCM program—12 purpose-built MCM motherships, approximately 100 drones, and containerized C2 systems, under a €2 billion contract awarded in 2019—uses Exail’s Inspector 125 unmanned surface vehicle to deploy and recover A18-M AUVs equipped with UMISAS interferometric synthetic aperture sonar, T18-M towed sonars, Seascan mine identification ROVs, and K-Ster expendable mine disposal vehicles. The first vessel, M940 Oostende, was delivered to the Belgian Navy in November 2025, and the first MCM toolbox was delivered to Zeebrugge in March 2026. NATO’s NSPA has separately ordered K-Ster mine neutralization vehicles for European navies. This is the system architecture the U.S. Navy should have emulated: purpose-built MCM motherships operating organic drone swarms, with the unmanned systems designed as a system-of-systems from inception rather than bolted onto a multi-mission hull.
Other Applicable Platforms. Forum Energy Technologies’ XLX EVO III work-class ROVs, widely used in Nigerian and North Sea offshore operations, carry manipulator arms and high-definition cameras suitable for mine identification and could be adapted for mine neutralization with explosive charges. Saab’s AUV62-MR, currently being fitted with Klein Marine Systems synthetic aperture sonar for the Swedish Navy, bridges the defense-commercial divide directly. Teledyne Marine’s Gavia and Slocum AUV families are used by both commercial survey operators and allied navies for mine-like object detection. VideoRay, recently acquired by BlueHalo, manufactures small ROVs used for mine identification by multiple navies.
Assessment
The Navy’s transition to an unmanned-centric mine warfare force was conceptually sound. Keeping sailors out of minefields, extending sensor reach through autonomous platforms, and building a modular, deployable kill chain from detection through neutralization all represent genuine advances in mine warfare doctrine. The problem is not the vision but the execution timeline. The service retired proven, purpose-built platforms before their unmanned replacements had been validated in operationally relevant conditions.
The Knifefish has never operated against real mines in a contested environment. The Fleet-class USV’s reliability problems were documented by the Navy’s own training command. The Barracuda completed its first autonomous test nine months ago. The ALMDS excels in clear water against near-surface moored mines but cannot see bottom mines in turbid conditions. The AN/AQS-20C sonar, towed by a USV that requires six hours of preparation per mission, has exhibited data-recording failures that go undetected until post-mission analysis—meaning an entire sortie can be rendered useless without the crew knowing it.
Meanwhile, the ExMCM companies with their Mk 18 UUVs represent a proven, deployable capability—but one designed for expeditionary operations at harbor scale, not for clearing a 100-nautical-mile strait against a dynamic mine threat while under potential fire.
CENTCOM has structured the clearance effort in three phases: area securing, detailed survey with unmanned systems, and creation of a verified safe corridor for commercial shipping. The approach is doctrinally sound. Whether the unmanned systems are operationally ready to execute Phase 2 at the speed, scale, and reliability the mission demands is the question the Navy is about to answer under the most unforgiving conditions possible.
The Foreign Policy Research Institute and the April 2026 Proceedings have both noted that Belgium and the Netherlands jointly developed an advanced MCM capability—the rMCM program—centered on dedicated MCM vessels operating autonomous underwater and surface vehicles with high-definition synthetic aperture sonar. Neither nation has committed those assets to the strait. The broader lesson is clear: unmanned mine warfare is a coalition-wide gap, not merely an American one.
For the Navy, the Strait of Hormuz is now a live-fire examination of a force structure built on unmanned platforms. The systems will either prove their worth or expose a generational miscalculation in mine warfare investment. The 130 ships per day that once transited this chokepoint—carrying one-fifth of the world’s oil—are waiting for the answer.
Sources
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- Johnston, Carter. “Unproven Littoral Combat Ships are replacing retired MCM ships in Bahrain.” Naval News, 26 September 2025. navalnews.com
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