While the President of the United States Donald Trump consider ordering that US Navy ships escort oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, for naval analysts and historians, there is a clear sense of “we’ve seen this before.”
the navy and maritime forces of the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps).
The so-called Tanker War of the late 1980s featured some of the same weapons and problems that a U.S. escort force would face today, and offers lessons about how, in war, things can quickly go wrong in unexpected ways — with fatal consequences.
See how events unfolded.
Iran-Iraq War
The seeds for the Tanker War were sown in 1980, when Iraq’s secular leader, Saddam Hussein, wary of the theocratic revolutionary government in Iran led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, launched an invasion against his eastern neighbor.
After advances by both sides in the early 1980s, the situation had reached a stalemate of war of attrition by 1984.
That’s when – to cripple Tehran’s economy and hopefully get world powers to intervene to protect access to oil.
Iraq used missile-armed jets to target Iranian oil infrastructure on Kharg Island (the same location where the US has bombed military installations in recent days).
Iran responded by attacking neutral merchant ships carrying supplies and weapons to Iraq, much of it via Kuwait at the northern end of the Persian Gulf.
“Iraq then began attacking oil tankers heading to and from Kharg Island, and the ‘Oil Tanker War’ began,” wrote historian Samuel Cox in a 2019 history for the NHHC (U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command).
USA gets involved
Attacks on ships by both sides increased exponentially over the next two years, and in November 1986, Kuwait – tired of seeing its ships being hit – asked for foreign help to protect them.
The Soviet Union was the first to provide aid, escorting oil tankers across the Gulf.
Washington, not wanting to lose influence to Moscow, devised a plan to fly the American flag on Kuwaiti ships, allowing them to receive U.S. Navy protection under federal law.
In the summer of 1987, in large numbers to escort former Kuwaiti tankers.
But even before the escort missions began, American sailors found themselves in danger.
Attack on the USS Stark
On the night of May 17, 1987, the missile-launching frigate USS Stark was on patrol in the central Persian Gulf, outside a no-war zone, when an Iraqi warplane reportedly mistook the American warship for an Iranian target and fired two Exocet anti-ship missiles at it.
“The two missiles killed 29 Stark crew members (out of approximately 220) instantly and eight others would die from their wounds and burns, with another 21 injured,” NHHC’s Cox wrote.
“Stark’s damage control effort was nothing short of heroic,” he wrote.
Despite the casualties and the crew fighting fires in temperatures up to 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit (nearly 2,000 degrees Celsius) and correcting a serious list caused by firefighting efforts that could have sunk the ship, the Stark managed to reach port in Bahrain under its own power.
Iraq apologized,
In the current war, three American F-15 fighter jets were shot down by Kuwaiti forces in a similar friendly fire incident, although no American airmen were killed.
“The risks to our men and women in uniform defending freedom can never be underestimated,” President Ronald Reagan said in a statement shortly after the Stark attack.
There would be more risks to come.
Embarrassment for the US Navy
Named Operation Earnest Will by the US Navy, the effective escort of the tankers began in late July 1987.
On July 22, two re-flagged oil tankers departed the United Arab Emirates towards Kuwait under the protection of five American ships, a destroyer, two frigates and two Coast Guard patrol ships.
But Iran had good intelligence about the train and Bridgeton, it would have to go through.
“On July 24, the Bridgeton struck an anchored Iranian contact mine. The giant ship absorbed the force of the mine which, despite the size of the hole, did not significantly impact the tanker,” said Cox, who recorded the result.
“The result, however, was one of the most ignominious photos in the annals of U.S. naval history, which showed the Bridgeton arriving in Kuwait with her former American escorts following in her wake, apparently using the large tanker as a ‘minesweeper’ for her own protection.”
The incident was a huge embarrassment for the US Navy.
The Pentagon suspended escort operations until it secured more minesweeping capabilities in the Gulf, but it was woefully unprepared and had to turn to allies for minesweeping ships, wrote U.S. Marine Corps 2nd Lt. Quentin Zimmer in an essay last year for the U.S. Naval Institute.
Even with help from allies, and the resources the US was hastily able to muster to send to the region, “the correlation of forces — mines versus minesweepers — continued to outpace US capabilities,” Zimmer wrote.
Mines are a concern again
The current extent of Iranian mining in the Gulf is unknown. THE CNN International reported last week that American officials believe Tehran has placed some mines in the Strait of Hormuz, but there have not yet been reports of ships being damaged by mines.
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Four dedicated minesweeper ships stationed there were decommissioned last year. Two of the three littoral combat ships expected to take up their duties were in Malaysia this week for “logistical stops”, the Navy said.
While President Trump has asked allies to send minesweepers to help keep the Strait of Hormuz open, none have offered help with equipment so far.
In a joint statement on Thursday (19), to ensure safe passage through the Strait”, without specifying what these efforts would be.
In the Tanker War, Belgium, France, Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom responded to the US call and participated in escort and minesweeper operations. But only American forces engaged in combat with the Iranians, according to a report by the Middle East Research and Information Project.
said Carl Schuster, former director of the Joint Intelligence Center at U.S. Pacific Command.
“Mines have a chilling psychological effect as well as an operational effect on maritime operations,” he said.
Fear of them restricts how American warships can operate in the Gulf, potentially limiting the range and effect of U.S. Navy air and missile strikes against Iran, Schuster said.
US warship almost torn in half
After the attack on Bridgeton, the next 24 escort missions were undamaged, highlights NHHC’s Cox.
But an American ship that had just completed its 25th mission, the frigate USS Samuel B Roberts, saw that luck run out on April 14, 1988.
While heading to refuel before its next escort mission, the frigate encountered a minefield laid by Iran the night before, according to Cox.
Afterwards, return the same way you entered.
It didn’t work. The warship hit a contact mine, and an explosive estimated to weigh 500 pounds broke the Roberts’ keel and left a 15-foot hole in her hull.
“The only thing that really held the ship together was the main deck,” Cox wrote.
His crew saved him, in part, by using heavy steel cables to tie cracked parts of the ship’s superstructure together.
that a large part of the crew went up to the deck before the mine hit.
The damage to the frigate again brought to light American deficiencies in minesweeping.
The mine attack on the Roberts precipitated an American retaliation that resulted in something unprecedented in the history of the U.S. Navy and, according to one naval historian, one of the most significant battles it ever fought.
Operation Praying Mantis
Four days after that Iranian mine nearly split the Roberts in half, the US launched Operation Praying Mantis, US strikes on Iranian oil rigs in the Gulf.
One of them was attacked by a group of three American ships, including the frigate USS Simpson. During the fighting, an Iranian patrol vessel fired a missile at the American ships.
The Simpson retaliated with four missiles of its own, disabling the Iranian vessel, before it was definitively destroyed by fire from the American flotilla.
There were more battles between the US and Iran that day, including one in which US Navy A-6 attack jets and an American destroyer sank an Iranian frigate with missile attacks.
In his 2005 book, “Decision at Sea,” naval historian Craig Symonds ranked Praying Mantis as one of the five most important American naval battles of all time, alongside, among others, the historic defeat of the Japanese Navy at Midway Island that changed the course of World War II.
Symonds said Praying Mantis established the US as the undisputed world superpower, with the ability to make real-time decisions on the battlefield thousands of miles away, the ability to accurately fire missiles that could hit ships they could only see electronically, and the ability to integrate all branches of the military into a cohesive machine.
The battle showed that the American military had accumulated the technology to become “not just the greatest military power on Earth, but the greatest military power the world has ever seen,” Symonds wrote.
That’s a phrase Trump often uses when talking about the current war in the Gulf.
But analysts and experts note that circumstances have changed in 2026.
Technology has advanced.
Nor is Iran’s attention distracted by a border war with Iraq this time.
Specialists something that is slow and meticulous in contrast to missile battles.
“The U.S. Navy has very little mine clearance capability. It’s always the first thing eliminated in budget cuts because we have traditionally depended on our allies for that mission,” said Schuster, the former U.S. Navy captain.
Others question whether the US was prepared for Iran to effectively close the Strait of Hormuz again, and why the need for oil tanker escorts was not planned for from the start of the war.
“History repeats itself,” said maritime consultant Frank Coles, former CEO of the Wallem Group, who sailed in convoys during the Tanker War.
“Anyone who remembers the Iran-Iraq war knows that escorts were necessary at the time. It’s disappointing that this wasn’t part of the planning process now.”
Ivan Watson da CNN International contributed to this report.
*Translation revised by André Vasconcelos
