President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that the U.S. Navy would begin escorting oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz if necessary — a declaration that positions American warships directly against Iran’s most consequential remaining threat: its ability to strangle global energy supplies.

The announcement came after Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps declared the strait under their “complete control,” threatening any vessel attempting to transit without authorization. The IRGC’s naval forces, operating from fortified positions along the Iranian coast, have mined sections of the waterway and deployed fast-attack craft, even as the bulk of Iran’s conventional navy has reportedly been neutralized by U.S.-Israeli strikes.

U.S. Central Command confirmed Wednesday that no Iranian naval vessels remained operationally active in the Persian Gulf. Yet the threat to maritime traffic persists through asymmetric means — mines, shore-based anti-ship missiles, and IRGC fast boats operating in shallow coastal waters where American surface ships have limited maneuverability.

QatarEnergy, the world’s largest LNG producer, halted operations earlier in the week as the conflict escalated, contributing to a crude oil price surge of approximately 5% and sending shock waves through global energy markets. European and Asian stock indexes fell sharply, with some dropping more than 10% from pre-war levels. The average U.S. gasoline price stood at $3.11 per gallon as of Wednesday, though analysts warn that a sustained Hormuz closure could push pump prices dramatically higher within weeks.

The Navy’s escort mission, if activated, would mark the most direct American military commitment to keeping the strait open since Operation Earnest Will in the late 1980s, when U.S. warships re-flagged and escorted Kuwaiti tankers during the Iran-Iraq War. That operation lasted more than two years and involved direct naval skirmishes with Iranian forces. Military historians have noted the strategic parallels — but also the dramatically altered balance of power in Washington’s favor.

Trump has also reached out to Gulf allies, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE, to coordinate tanker protection protocols. Both nations have significant exposure to Hormuz disruption as their primary petroleum export route. Meanwhile, the U.S. Fifth Fleet, headquartered in Bahrain, has been placed on heightened combat readiness.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was emphatic at Monday’s Pentagon briefing: “No boots on the ground.” Yet in nearly the same breath, he refused to rule out any future use of ground forces — calling it “foolishness” to publicly constrain military options. That carefully hedged answer has become the defining ambiguity of Operation Epic Fury’s next phase.

The air campaign has achieved extraordinary results by any historical standard. U.S. Central Command and Israeli Defense Forces claim near-total air superiority over Iran, destruction of the Iranian navy, heavy degradation of its ballistic missile forces, and the elimination of top leadership including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. By military metrics, it has progressed faster than even Israel’s initial two-week planning timeline.

But air power has limits. Deeply buried hardened facilities — some constructed to withstand even bunker-busting munitions — may require ground-level verification or seizure. The collapse of Iran’s central command has created a power vacuum, but dozens of IRGC regional commanders remain in the field with mobile missile launchers, dispersed weapons caches, and the ability to wage protracted guerrilla-style resistance. Some military planners argue that achieving the administration’s stated objective of “no nukes” with full certainty requires eyes and boots on the ground at key nuclear sites.

On Capitol Hill, the ground troops question has merged with a broader war powers confrontation. Senior Democrats scheduled a war powers vote after administration officials privately told congressional staff that U.S. intelligence did not indicate Iran was preparing an imminent strike on the United States — a disclosure that appeared to undercut the White House’s public justification for the campaign. Republicans have largely rallied behind the president, though a handful of libertarian-leaning members have raised constitutional concerns about the absence of a congressional authorization for the use of military force.

General Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, struck a cautiously optimistic tone Wednesday, saying operations were proceeding faster than expected and that Iran’s ability to conduct “sustained combat operations” had been severely degraded. But he also acknowledged the military expected further American casualties — a sobering reminder that the conflict, even without a ground invasion, carries mortal costs. Six U.S. service members have already been killed in action.

For now, the White House appears determined to resolve the conflict through air power, cyber operations, and the hope that Iran’s political structures will collapse or reconfigure without requiring a land campaign. Trump has urged Iranian security forces to accept immunity and align with what he calls “Iranian patriots.” Whether that gambit succeeds — or whether the logic of the campaign eventually demands ground forces — may be the defining question of the weeks ahead.

When President Trump gave the go-ahead for Operation Epic Fury at 3:38 p.m. EST on February 28 — while aboard Air Force One en route to Texas — the most consequential aircraft in the American arsenal had already been airborne for hours. B-2 Spirit stealth bombers, flying from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, were executing a mission that would not conclude until they touched down 37 hours after takeoff — a round trip measured in continents and history.

General Dan Caine confirmed the deployment at Monday’s Pentagon briefing, describing the B-2s as a central component of the operation’s opening salvo. The aircraft — each capable of carrying up to 40,000 pounds of precision munitions and virtually invisible to radar — were tasked with striking Iran’s most hardened targets: the deeply buried nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, as well as reinforced command bunkers beneath Tehran that conventional strike aircraft could not penetrate.

The 37-hour round trip is not unprecedented in B-2 operations — the aircraft flew similar ultra-long missions during strikes on Libya in 2011 and Afghanistan in 2001 — but the density of targets, the integration with Israeli strike packages, and the sophistication of Iran’s remaining air defenses made this mission uniquely complex. Multiple in-flight refueling events were required, conducted in contested airspace approaching Iranian territory.

The B-2s carried the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), a 30,000-pound bunker-busting bomb developed specifically to destroy deeply hardened underground facilities. No other aircraft in the world — American or allied — can carry the MOP. Its deployment against Fordow, which is buried under approximately 90 meters of rock, was the decisive factor in destroying a facility that analysts had long considered impervious to conventional air attack.

By March 3, Israeli Air Force sorties exceeded 1,000 in a single day — the highest operational tempo in the campaign. The IDF focused on conventional targets while American B-2s and other stealth platforms handled the hardest-to-reach facilities. The division of labor reflected months of detailed joint planning between U.S. Air Force and IDF targeting cells, with each nation’s assets optimized for the threat sets they were best equipped to handle.

Officials described the campaign as delivering results “spectacular” in scale and speed. The combination of B-2 stealth penetration, carrier-based strike aircraft, submarine-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles, and Israeli F-35Is operating in Iranian airspace produced a simultaneous, multi-axis assault that overwhelmed Iran’s ability to prioritize and respond. Within 48 hours, air superiority over Tehran was secured — a milestone that opened the door for every subsequent phase of the operation.

The bombs came second. The digital assault came first.

In the hours before Operation Epic Fury’s kinetic phase began on February 28, U.S. Cyber Command — working in close coordination with the National Security Agency and Israeli intelligence Unit 8200 — executed what officials are describing as a sweeping cyber operation that “effectively disrupted communications and sensor networks,” according to General Dan Caine, limiting Iran’s ability to detect, track, or respond to incoming aircraft and missiles.

The full scope of the cyber operation remains classified. But open-source signals and statements from officials have allowed analysts to piece together its broad outlines. Iran’s integrated air defense system — a patchwork of Russian-supplied S-300 batteries, domestically produced Bavar-373 systems, and aging radar installations — depends on a networked command-and-control architecture that coordinates detection, tracking, and fire-control across dozens of sites. That network appears to have been severely compromised before the first B-2 crossed into Iranian airspace.

The cyber operation builds on a long history of U.S.-Israeli digital warfare against Iran’s military infrastructure. The Stuxnet operation — revealed publicly in 2010 — destroyed roughly a fifth of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges using malware that manipulated industrial control systems while reporting normal operations to monitoring software. In the years since, both nations are believed to have maintained persistent access to critical Iranian networks, pre-positioning for exactly this kind of rapid, large-scale disruption.

Trump referenced the intelligence dimension directly in his Truth Social announcement of Khamenei’s death, crediting “advanced U.S. intelligence capabilities” for enabling the precision strike on the Supreme Leader’s compound. That phrasing, analysts note, may encompass both signals intelligence that located Khamenei and cyber operations that degraded his security detail’s ability to detect the incoming threat.

The integration of cyber, electronic warfare, and kinetic strikes into a single synchronized operational framework is what military planners call “multi-domain operations” — a doctrine the U.S. military has been developing and refining for more than a decade. Operation Epic Fury represents its most comprehensive real-world test. The early assessment, at least from the American side, is that the doctrine worked: Iran’s defenders were effectively blind, deaf, and fragmented in the critical opening hours when the outcome of an air campaign is typically decided.

Whether Iran’s cyber forces will strike back against American civilian infrastructure — power grids, pipelines, financial networks — remains among the most closely watched risks as the conflict continues. Intelligence officials have privately warned lawmakers that Iranian offensive cyber units remain intact and capable, even as the country’s conventional military has been devastated. That asymmetric threat may ultimately prove more durable — and more dangerous to everyday Americans — than any missile Iran has left in its arsenal.