The United States was not unprepared for Tehran's attempt to shut the Strait of Hormuz, retired Adm. Kevin Donegan told ABC's "This Week" on Sunday.
Donegan, who commanded the Navy's Fifth Fleet in the Middle East during President Donald Trump's first term, said "we knew if we went into conflict, that de facto traffic flow would stop through the straits," adding that "in conflict, when missiles are flying overhead back and forth, the traffic through the Straits of Hormuz is going to come to a stop because there are tankers, liquid natural gas carriers, container ships, et cetera, they're going to slow down. And so, we understood that."
He said "if you look at the campaign CENTCOM initiated, this was built into it from the beginning. Think about it in terms of the things that the chairman said and the things that Admiral Cooper said his mission was, one of the things in there was to, just to, go after the Navy. And what they really meant was, Iran's capability to control the straits when this is over."
The retired admiral emphasized that the U.S. does not want Iran "to have power projection capability. We also don't want them to have this leverage over such an important choke hold. So, this effort that – that's being done and being waged by CENTCOM is specifically to get at their cruise missile threat, their ability to launch drones at boats, put mines in the water, all those things that when this is over, you want them not to have."
He stressed that "I'm not surprised by what's happened," pointing out that "we've been looking at this problem set for a long time, decades, to be honest. And so, we knew that if we were going to be involved in something in Iran from an offensive state – capability, that the Iranians would, at some point, leverage or try to attempt in some way to control the straits and put the pressure on the global community."
Donegan explained that "every year we do an exercise with 30-plus other nations in that same region. The last one is in February, just to rehearse, not just with ourselves, but with international partners on how we would do escorting and how we would keep the strait open if Iran actually followed through on trying to either control it or close it."
He admitted, however, that "it's not going to be easy to escort convoys."
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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