By Robbin Laird
No strategy to structurally constrain Iran’s military options is complete without the maritime dimension.
For decades, Tehran has treated the Strait of Hormuz, the northern Gulf, the Bab al-Mandab, and the Red Sea as chronic pressure points, instruments of coercion against adversaries and leverage over the global economy.
The IRGC Navy and affiliated forces have harassed commercial shipping, seized tankers, mined waters, and used drones and missiles to threaten or strike vessels linked to the United States, Israel, and Gulf states.
This is not incidental harassment.
It is a deliberate coercive tool, and it has worked precisely because the response has been episodic rather than structural.
Recent events underscore how central this maritime threat remains. Iran can make transit expensive and dangerous whenever it chooses.
From Reactive Escort to Persistent Domain Awareness
The U.S. response has evolved from reactive escort operations toward something more ambitious, even before the current military operation. U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, headquartered in Bahrain, has been building a maritime corollary to regional missile defense: integrated maritime domain awareness combined with collective presence.
Manned-unmanned teaming, integrating unmanned surface and aerial platforms with traditional ships and aircraft, provides persistent surveillance over critical chokepoints, making it substantially harder for Iran to conduct deniable or surprise actions at sea.
The operational concept is no longer “respond when Iran acts” but “maintain continuous awareness and presence that changes Iran’s calculus before it acts.”
The Abraham Accords have extended this maritime cooperation in ways that would have been inconceivable five years ago. The first publicly acknowledged joint naval drill among Abraham signatories, U.S. Naval Forces Central Command with Israel, the UAE, and Bahrain in the Red Sea, has been followed by exercises that have measurably enhanced interoperability in surface warfare, boarding operations, and air-maritime coordination.
These are not relationship-building exercises. They are operational rehearsals for a standing maritime regime.
Maritime Autonomous Systems as the Enforcement Backbone
The most significant operational development in this maritime architecture is the emergence of maritime autonomous systems, unmanned surface vessels (USVs) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) operating in coordinated teams, as the persistent enforcement backbone of the regime.
Where manned platforms are expensive, politically sensitive to deploy forward, and limited in their ability to maintain continuous presence across vast stretches of open water, autonomous systems offer a fundamentally different calculus.
A networked grid of USVs and maritime UAVs can maintain continuous ISR coverage of the Strait of Hormuz, the northern Gulf, and the southern Red Sea simultaneously, at a fraction of the cost of continuous manned patrols and without the political sensitivity that attends a permanent manned naval presence in every partner nation’s waters. Their sensor data feeds in real time into the common operational picture shared by Fifth Fleet, GCC navies, and Israeli maritime forces. Any IRGC vessel that departs its home port, any suspicious small-boat cluster forming near a tanker lane, any suspicious underwater signature in a chokepoint. all of it becomes immediately visible to the coalition.
The deterrent logic is straightforward.
Iran’s maritime coercive options have historically depended on elements of surprise and deniability: fast-boat swarms appearing out of nowhere, mines laid at night, tanker seizures conducted before any manned response could arrive.
A persistent autonomous ISR grid eliminates surprise and strips deniability.
If every IRGC maritime movement is tracked from departure, the coercive options that depend on the fog of the sea disappear.
What remains is only what Iran is willing to do in full view of a coalition capable of responding.
This is the meaning of a security, deterrence and interactive kill web capability to enable enforcing a maritime transit zone without an Iranian threat being acceptable to the coalition.
The Fifth Fleet Allied Component as Regime Operator
The institutional home for this maritime enforcement regime is already visible: the allied component of US Naval Forces Central Command, operating out of Bahrain. Fifth Fleet has been the operational hub for maritime security cooperation in the Gulf, the Red Sea, and the Arabian Sea for decades. What is new is the density of allied participation and the integration of autonomous systems into standing operations.
The allied component of Fifth Fleet, incorporating GCC navies, the Israeli Navy, and in the Red Sea dimension, additional European and Asian partners with equities in the free flow of commerce—provides both the political legitimacy and the operational depth for a standing maritime enforcement regime. It is not a US unilateral operation. It is a coalition standing task force with the U.S. providing command architecture, ISR integration, and high-end response capability, while regional partners provide persistent presence and routine enforcement.
The regime’s mandate would cover three core functions.
- First, continuous ISR of Iranian naval and IRGC maritime forces, with shared data feeding coalition partners in real time.
- Second, standing authority to interdict Iranian attempts to transit weapons, components, or personnel by sea in violation of agreed constraints on Iranian military rebuild—a maritime analogue to the air and land interdiction missions that characterized the post-war Iraqi containment.
- Third, immediate response authority for any Iranian attempt to threaten commercial shipping or close transit chokepoints, with pre-delegated rules of engagement that reduce the political hesitance Tehran has historically exploited.
The Integrated Architecture: Sea, Air, Land
Viewed together, the three articles in this series describe an integrated regional security architecture with interlocking components.
The GCC-Israel kill web provides air and missile defense coverage and enforces demilitarization in the land and air domains.
The maritime regime, operated through the Fifth Fleet allied component and enforced by autonomous systems, closes the maritime flank and denies Iran its historical leverage over global trade arteries.
The political framework, the militarized Abraham Accords operating under the Riyadh logic, provides the coalition legitimacy and the burden-sharing arrangement that makes the architecture sustainable without permanent large-scale U.S. operational presence.
This is not a utopian design.
It rests on components already in development, on coalitions already forming, and on political shifts already underway.
The war with Iran has been a catalyst, the shock that converted tacit convergence into visible commitment. What remains is to consolidate that commitment into durable architecture before the political moment passes and old habits of episodic crisis management reassert themselves.
The measure of success will not be whether the Islamic Republic falls.
It will be whether, a decade from now, the regional security environment has been so fundamentally restructured that Iran’s options for coercive military power projection, in the air, on the land, and at sea, have been permanently and verifiably constrained.
That is the long game Trump sketched in Riyadh.
It is now, for the first time, within reach of execution.
Note: The Combined Maritime Forces (CMF) is headquartered in Bahrain, under U.S. Naval Forces Central Command / Fifth Fleet.
The Combined Maritime Forces (CMF) is a standing partnership headquartered in Manama, Bahrain, and closely integrated with U.S. 5th Fleet/NAVCENT.
CMF operates through several subordinate Combined Task Forces (e.g., CTF 150, 151, 152, 153), which cover the Gulf, Red Sea, Arabian Sea, and adjacent waters, and are the vehicles for the “maritime enforcement regime” you describe.
CMF today is a 47‑nation coalition; membership shifts slightly over time but currently includes a broad mix of GCC, European, Asian, African, and Australasian partners.
Key groupings:
GCC and regional navies (providing routine presence in Gulf and Red Sea): Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Oman, plus other regional states such as Jordan and Pakistan.
Israel: The Israeli Navy participates within the U.S.-led regional maritime security architecture, including CTF 153 and related Red Sea security initiatives, though some contributions are not always detailed publicly.
European partners (especially in the Red Sea/Bab el‑Mandeb dimension): United Kingdom, France, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, plus other European CMF members such as Denmark and Greece.
Non‑European extra‑regional partners: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Republic of Korea, Singapore, Seychelles, Mauritius and other Indo‑Pacific and African contributors.
The fourth and final article in this series summarizes the argument and then discusses how such a strategic result could enable the phased expansion of non-Hormuz export routes, hardened against disruption.
For more on maritime autonomous systems and how they can effectively play the interactive roles I have laid out in this article, see my latest book:
Lessons From the Drone Wars: Maritime Autonomous Systems and Maritime Operations
For the first two articles in the series:
Building the Kill Web: GCC-Israel Security and Deterrence Architecture