“Unknown projectile” Loses Its Punch
October was the busiest month of the tanker war. Lloyd's List counted 28 attacks on shipping, the most of any month since February. Tankers burning off Qatar, off the UAE, off Khasab. A container ship sank.
Unlike March, however, this time the oil kept coming. Because this is oil we are talking about here, not Christmas toys from China.
In the week through October 18, about 14 million barrels a day moved through Hormuz. That's roughly 60% - 80% of prewar levels, depending on the accountant. Either number would have been unthinkable in May. Meanwhile about 40% of Gulf crude now goes around the Strait by pipeline, against 17% before the war. Total Gulf exports actually topped prewar levels.
Iran has never tried harder to close Hormuz. It has never mattered less. And that is why I said in my last post that Iran is starting to lose the war strategically.
On July 31 I wrote that Hormuz wouldn't open as long as the IRGC kept hitting oil tankers. I was wrong. They kept hitting tankers. The tankers kept moving. The attacks were never deadly enough or frequent enough to stop an industry that moves the planet's oil. Crews now watch for drones and fast boats out of the corner of their eyes and keep going. "Unknown projectile" used to describe a threat. Now it describes an insurance claim.
In that same post I described the IRGC's worst case. A Strait made "boring, procedural, and governable by someone else." Regular successful tanker escorts. That has happened. In fact it has more than happened. The world just got used to it and went back to moving oil.
So the Guards changed tactics. The missiles and drones haven't stopped, but the weapon of the moment is the mine, specifically the mine on what the IRGC calls the "unauthorized southern route." That's the lane along the Omani coast, the one ships use when they don't want to ask Tehran's permission. The IRGC claims four tankers hit mines there on October 29, ships it says had "switched off all their radar and navigation systems" and ignored its warnings. Two more on Monday. On Wednesday the Guards said four more were "destroyed" and are "still burning." By the IRGC's own count, 11 tankers caught fire in the nine days through November 2. The only hit independently confirmed this week was a tanker struck by two unidentified projectiles off Limah, Oman, on November 3.
On October 29, a small boat pulled alongside a tanker 25 nautical miles northeast of Khasab, Oman, and attached two limpet mines to its hull. The engine room caught fire. The crew put it out and the ship sailed on to its next port. It was the first successful limpet attack in the Strait since the war began. The ship was the Louise 1, a Russian shadow fleet tanker that Ukrainian naval drones already hit in the Black Sea in July. Nobody has claimed this one.
Then there's the war of words. On October 25, Admiral Brad Cooper, commander of US Central Command (CENTCOM), flew over the Strait in an Army Chinook and declared the primary transit routes "free and clear of Iranian sea mines." CENTCOM says more than 95% of ships have made it through safely. The IRGC answered with a string of mine announcements and demanded proof. The hardline Tehran daily Kayhan ran the headline "Six Tanker Blasts in Hormuz Expose CENTCOM's Falsehood." Then Trump topped them both. He accused Iran of fabricating the attacks to push up oil prices before the midterms.
Everybody may be telling the truth. Cooper said "primary transit routes." The IRGC says "unauthorized southern route." The lanes are clear. The ships trying to dodge Iran's permission system are the ones blowing up. Each side controls the space it defines. Not every individual ship. Episodic control, now with a map.
And every time someone declares control, they get further from having it. Trump's "100%." Rubio's "lost complete control." CENTCOM's "free and clear." The IRGC calling Iran "a superpower." Armed forces chief Ali Abdollahi claiming American warships can't even approach the Strait. An IRGC spokesman announcing Hormuz is closed while 14 million barrels a day pass through it. The IRGC now claims its 56th Reaper drone. It even predicted an American defeat on November 4, the anniversary of the 1979 embassy seizure. These guys are becoming bobble-heads with their shallow duplicity.
Yeah, I want a bobble-head of an Iranian diplomat in my study. Just what I need right now.
It took me a while to see it, but the IRGC has their own little marine arm. Trump obliterated Iran's regular navy. He was right about that. The IRGC coastal vessels survived because they were built to survive. Small boats, dispersed, cheap, never designed to win a sea battle. Designed to hit one oil tanker with something or to provide radar out in the water for guiding precise hits.
Monday night, the US hit Qeshm Island, in the Strait itself. Iranian state media reported five explosions in rapid succession. US officials called the strike defensive, aimed at surface-to-air missiles that had fired on American aircraft. Israel says it wasn't involved. The IRGC claims it shot down an MQ-9 Reaper drone and two smaller Lucas drones near the Strait. Unconfirmed. Trump went on Fox & Friends the next morning: "They built an anti-aircraft facility … As soon as it was completed, we hit it last night very nicely." Well, it was an effective mission, I’ll give him that.
The European Union put the IRGC on its terrorist list in January, over the slaughter of protesters. The United States did it in 2019. Canada and Australia too. Now, the war has caught up with them and they are suddenly running a whole country. The IRGC in Iran is now basically what the Taliban was in Afghanistan in terms of governing things.
Watch what the Guards actually do now. Small boats plant charges on civilian tankers. Mines go down on a route the IRGC itself declared illegal, and then the IRGC announces the explosions. Since September the missile and drone hits mostly go unclaimed. Unknown projectile.
The IRGC is a two-headed monster. A conventional military with missiles, a small navy and air defenses. And a covert machine with the Quds Force, the sabotage and the assassination plots, the proxies in Yemen, Lebanon and Iraq. Epic Fury and everything since took out most of the first head. What's left is the second. So, I guess it is more accurate to say the IRGC is a two-headed monster with one head dead. That’s different.
Still, the IRGC wants to be the harbor master of Hormuz. Tolls. Approved routes. A Persian Gulf Strait Authority. It enforces the claim the way a saboteur would. It has become a high-level terrorist organization with a state's arsenal. Ballistic missile terrorism. Iran is losing strategically without the war actually being lost. This is what a force does when it can no longer win and refuses to lose.
Iranian officials have threatened undersea cables, data centers, power grids, Israel's reactor at Dimona, and the desalination plants that keep Gulf cities alive. Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, still unseen since February 28, told his commanders the response must be immediate and without "geographic limits," and ordered them to expand the list. Abdollahi says they're updating it.
Cables and grids are economic warfare. Militaries run on both, and Tehran would call them fair game. A desalination plant is something else. Water. In a desert. There is no military reason to hit one except to make civilians suffer until their governments bend. That would be an act of war carried out as terrorism, and a war crime. Iran has already attacked every country on that list in this war, so the act of war part is old news. The terrorism part would be new.
So, despite the big talk by Trump about after the mid-terms, and with Democrats now holding both chambers of Congress, we might not hit them hard after all. There’s nothing to gain from it really. As of today, with everything that’s happened, Iran is the aggressor now. Netanyahu did not exactly receive the support he needed in the recent Israeli elections. He needs to build a coalition. Suddenly, elections have delayed Round Two of the war.
But the war continues anyway. Yusuf al-Madani took the Yemeni coast in September. In October he took the war to Saudi Arabia itself. On October 10 a Houthi missile hit the passenger terminals at Riyadh's King Khalid International Airport. Thirteen dead, hundreds wounded. The airport stayed closed for two weeks. On October 13, Aramco's headquarters in Dhahran caught fire. On October 21, Dammam's airport. On October 27, Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia's largest refinery, 550,000 barrels a day, roughly 800 miles from Yemen.
Riyadh hasn't confirmed the damage at Ras Tanura. Commercial satellite imagery shows a hit on what appears to be a cracking unit, and open-source analysts say the refinery stopped flaring, a sign it shut down or cut back. A single shot down the exhaust port from 800 miles out. Somewhere in a Sanaa bunker, someone is humming the John Williams score.
Last Thursday the Houthis claimed strikes on Ras Tanura again, plus the Rabigh refinery and a production facility at Abqaiq. Unconfirmed. Abqaiq is the complex knocked offline in 2019, roughly half of Saudi output gone for a few days. The Houthis claimed that one too. Washington blamed Iran. The Houthis know which names make oil traders sweat. On Tuesday they claimed the airport at Abha and the air base at Khamis Mushait.
Twice now the Saudi-led coalition has said it shot down a Houthi drone over the Mecca region, most recently on Tuesday. Both times the Houthis denied it within hours, the second time calling it "a slanderous and recycled lie." Their spokesman said they only target oil facilities and military bases. Even the Houthis, a Muslim clan, don't want Mecca on their résumé.
Washington ordered non-emergency government employees and their families to leave Saudi Arabia. The Saudis are hitting back, and the targeting has shifted. For weeks it was launchers and positions. Now it's the plumbing. The coalition announced a "precision military operation" against the "vital resources" the Houthis use to attack the kingdom and Red Sea shipping.
Strikes hit the Ras Isa oil port and a fuel facility in Hodeidah province, and a telecom site near Saada. The Houthis now count 109 coalition strikes in a single 24 hours and say 17 civilians died over two days. Egypt's parliament has authorized military support.
What Riyadh hasn't done is hit Iran. Iranian missiles struck the kingdom early in the war. Iranian-designed missiles, fired by Iran's partners, strike it now. Saudi Arabia absorbs it, repairs it, and calls for international help securing Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb together, as one problem.
I think the main reason is money. Saudi Arabia has so much of it that fixing a refinery is cheaper than starting a war with Iran. That math has limits. Money can't buy interceptors faster than factories make them. It can't buy back investor confidence in Vision 2030. And it can't rebuild a desalination plant overnight if the IRGC ever goes there.
In October I asked whether the Houthi hit on Riyadh's airport was precision or luck. There's a third answer. Somebody else's eyes.
The Associated Press worked with a Geneva-based firm called AURORAH Geosignal Intelligence, which examined 40 missile and drone attacks on Saudi Arabia by the Houthis and Iraqi militias between July 1 and October 19. In every one, Russian government and military satellites orbited over the target area for days before and after. Beginning in July, eleven of Russia's Cosmos 2600 series satellites concentrated on three sections of the East-West Pipeline. Those are the sections the militias in Iraq hit on September 10. Around that strike and the one on King Fahd Air Base in Taif, Russian satellite activity over the targets rose about 50%.
At Taif the Houthis hit an Italian Eurofighter in its hangar and left the Saudi jets at the same base alone. AURORAH's founder, Nawaf Obaid, says neither the Houthis nor Iran can generate intelligence that fine on their own. His line: "the intelligence system behind the weapon is becoming as important as the weapon itself."
It goes back further. A Saudi official told the AP that Russian satellite intelligence also helped Iran's March strikes on Prince Sultan Air Base, where an American E-3 Sentry radar plane was badly damaged and 12 Americans were wounded, and on the CIA station inside the US Embassy compound in Riyadh. A senior Houthi official says Iranian advisers in Yemen hand them targeting data derived from Russian satellites. Rayed Krimly, Saudi Arabia's deputy foreign minister for public diplomacy, says Iran and the Houthis get intelligence from "elements in Russia and China, even commercial elements sometimes." Hmmm. Maybe this is a World War and we just don’t see it yet.
In May the State Department sanctioned three Chinese firms, Chang Guang Satellite Technology, MizarVision and The Earth Eye, for supplying satellite imagery of American and allied bases to Iran. Chang Guang had already supplied imagery to the Houthis. I can find no comparable American action against Russia.
The caveat, stated once. AURORAH never intercepted an actual transmission. What it has is a pattern, with officials on both sides of the war confirming it. An orbital tracking executive told the AP that satellite massing is exactly what intelligence collection looks like, and also that Russia can deny it. The Houthi official said he didn't know whether Moscow knew where its data ended up. Russia is the eyes. That part is well supported. Is Russia picking the targets?
And Washington? In March, Special Envoy Steve Witkoff said Putin denied sharing intelligence and "we can take them at their word." CIA Director John Ratcliffe told the Senate, "No, I don't take Vladimir Putin at his word." Rubio said nothing Russia was doing was impeding American operations. Trump calls any help "very low level" and calls Russia's restraint "a very positive thing." Meanwhile the administration eased sanctions on Russian oil and paused them on Russian diesel.
Something I have neglected in this series to this point is Taiz, a large city in southwestern Yemen. It is surrounded by the Houthis but that’s nothing new really. Taiz has been under siege in one form or another since 2015. Human Rights Watch calls it a 12-year siege. What changed in October is the road.
In 2016 government forces broke through south of the city and opened a lifeline to Aden. For about ten years that road is what made the old siege survivable. A partial deal in 2024 opened another. Last month, after taking Mocha and the coast, the Houthis cut the southern road. By October 12 all four exits from the city were under Houthi control.
The city itself is still in government hands. The Houthis hold everything around it. The roads, the checkpoints, the hillsides, where snipers make leaving the city a gamble. Human Rights Watch reports Houthi checkpoints turning back water trucks.
About a million people live inside. The UN's humanitarian office says more than 290,000 people have fled their homes in the region since fighting escalated in August, nearly 6,100 pregnant women among them. The World Health Organization warned in October that 12 hospitals in the city could run out of fuel within a few days. Taiz province is among the worst hit in Yemen's cholera outbreak. A first shipment of medical aid reached the city from Marib this past weekend. More is stuck behind closed roads. A local planning official says this siege is "more comprehensive and its impact more severe than in 2015."
Saudi bombs fall in Taiz province too. The Houthis say coalition strikes on homes killed nine people one day and twelve another. On Monday they accused the coalition of killing eight people at a market in al-Aqroud, southeast of the city. Those are Houthi numbers and I can't verify them. Civilians are dying from both directions.
Taiz sits on the old line between north and south Yemen. A Yemeni deputy minister put it plainly. If Taiz falls, Aden loses its strategic depth and the road south opens.
In September I gave al-Madani credit for the best ground campaign of this war. He earned it. The breakthrough at Hays, the drive to Mocha, Perim. Taiz is the same competence pointed at a city. Hold the roads, close the water, wait. The front around the city moves both ways. Government forces claim three villages back on the al-Aqroud front. The Houthis keep pushing through the mountains toward Tur al-Bahah, on the roads to Aden.
Of everything in this war, control of Hormuz has been Iran's only real leverage. If traffic is topping 80% and the US is striking any attempt to militarize the coast or the islands of the Strait, Iran faces the worst thing any nation can face. Their projection of strength has become irrelevant. There's really no need to even have a Round Two. But I don't think it's cancelled yet.
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