On a Sunday morning in late July 2026, American warplanes struck Larak Island — a sliver of Iranian territory sitting astride the Strait of Hormuz — targeting what the US military described as rocket launchers being readied to fire sea mines into one of the world's most critical shipping lanes. The attack ended a month-long pause in hostilities, and its stated rationale immediately drew scrutiny from security analysts on both sides of the Atlantic. The US military's core claim is that Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had developed a way to use land-based rockets as delivery vehicles for naval mines, scattering the explosives across the strait without exposing the small, fast boats that Tehran has traditionally relied upon. Sea mines have long been one of Iran's most effective asymmetric tools: positioned on the seabed, moored just below the surface, or left to drift, they are extraordinarily difficult to locate and neutralise, and their presence alone is enough to deter commercial traffic.

Roughly a fifth of the world's seaborne oil passes through the strait, which makes even a partial closure economically catastrophic. Yet the claimed method remains deeply contested. Dirk Siebels, a maritime security specialist at Risk Intelligence, acknowledged that rocket-launched sea mines would, to his knowledge, represent "a novel method." Harlan Ullman, a former US Naval officer speaking to Al Jazeera, went further, calling it "unlikely" that such an approach would work, on the grounds that mines would be "highly likely to be damaged upon impact with the water.

" Iranian state media, meanwhile, had aired footage of the Fajr-5 rocket system months earlier, hinting at exactly this capability.