US Navy Scrapped Its Gulf Minesweepers Months Before Iran Mined the Strait of Hormuz Plus Pro

The United States Navy has no dedicated minesweepers in the Persian Gulf. Iran has an estimated 2,000 to 6,000 naval mines. Three weeks into the war with Iran, this mismatch has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping – and revealed a capability gap that extends well beyond the US Navy.

The US retired its last four Avenger-class mine countermeasures (MCM) ships from Bahrain in September 2025, as part of a planned transition to unmanned MCM systems deployed aboard Littoral Combat Ships (LCS). The four Avengers – USS Devastator, USS Dextrous, USS Gladiator, and USS Sentry – arrived in Philadelphia for scrapping the day before reports surfaced that Iran had begun mining the strait. Their replacements, three Independence-class LCS vessels fitted with MCM mission packages, are the entirety of the US Navy’s dedicated mine countermeasures presence in the Fifth Fleet area of operations. Two of those have since been tracked to Malaysia for logistics stops, leaving an already thin force even thinner.