As the post stated, the Navy just decommissioned and sent to the scrap yard the last 4 mine sweeping Avenger class ships with wooden hulls at the end of last year - just months before they were needed. The Navy built these specialized ships right after the Iranians mined the Gulf in '87 when we had one of our ships heavily damaged, the USS Samuel B. Roberts. With a wooden hull the Avenger class had little to no magnetic signature and were proven in 2 wars. The Navy also disbanded the unit dedicated to mine sweeping and hunting along with the decades of accumulated institutional knowledge that was then distributed out among other units.

Instead, the Navy developed newer $475 million aluminum hulled Littoral Combat ships with a mine hunting system that failed its own detection trials. Just in March of this year a report from the Pentagon's DOT&E found that the Navy could not determine the operational effectiveness or reliability of the system. Unfortunately none of it was fully ready for game time before they decided to moth ball what actually worked last year. I guess the PowerPoints looked convincing. The mines that the Iranians use can detect the magnetic signature of an aluminum hull meters away. So, I am not sure what they were thinking. The Pentagon's report doesn't inspire confidence. The mission's package couldn't effectively find mines in the clear waters near CA so it is doubtful how much better they will be trying to find them in the murky waters of the Gulf.

Japan has agreed to help us mine sweep once the area is more secure. Japan has a constitutional prohibition that doesn't allow their defense forces to operate in a foreign active combat area. Their dedicated mine sweepers and hunters have fiberglass - reinforced plastic hulls that don't have a magnetic signature. Anyway, we will see how effective these newer LCS ships and their mission packages will be under real world situations. It's all we have at the moment. So far, its questionable.

It would have been nice to have a space method of finding those mines. I could be wrong, but I don't believe that SAR would be able to identify something as small as a mine from any other anomalous signal in the water or on the sea floor in that area. It is a high shipping traffic corridor and has a lot of junk in the water that makes it hard to identify a target from all the signal noise. I believe that has been one of the biggest issues with the LCS missions package is target identification. Even using AI, they may not have the real world data library for the AI to be useful.

I can believe that the overzealous Iranians would just randomly dump mines out there without leaving a detailed map. The US screwed up by scrapping the ships we needed for the job before we actually had something that worked to replace them. They tried to retire the A-10 more than once that has shown itself indispensable in this conflict. New tech is great given the constantly changing battlefield. But there are times when just the simpler older proven tech fits the job better than anything else.