...
By Shane Croucher
Senior Editor
0
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
As missiles and drones light up the skies above them, industry data shows commercial ships are going dark as they transit the Strait of Hormuz.
Invisible to most—though not everyone—these vessels are finding their way through a chokepoint that is neither truly open nor truly closed, but stuck in a gray zone that threatens to make the Iran war permanent.
When ships switch off their Automatic Identification System (AIS), they are still on radar, visible to drones and warships and the bridge teams of the vessels around them. But they stop speaking to a wider crowd, including Iran.
Read More on Analysis
Dark crossings lower the costs of failing to end the war between the U.S. and Iran.
Enough oil gets through to prevent a full market panic, keeping prices painful yet low enough to manage. But the sustained Iranian risk to shipping keeps U.S. forces committed in the strait, as insurers reprice and Iran antagonizes.
The workaround becomes the forever war.
How the AIS Workaround Works
The AIS transponder in question broadcasts a vessel’s identity, position, course and speed to nearby ships, shore stations and aircraft.
International rules expect ships to keep it running, with an exception where protecting navigational information is justified—an exception Hormuz has stretched into standard practice.
What follows is not stealth, as one might assume, but choreography.
Under the UKMTO’s industry guidance now shaping Hormuz transits, "Active AIS may be a targeting factor." So a master may silence the transponder that broadcasts the ship's identity to the world.
The crew should still report its position every two hours to the British and American naval cells that watch over merchant traffic, and keep its navigation lights burning under the international rules of the road.
This weekend showed the doctrine of dark crossings at work.
Iran struck a container ship transiting the strait—the Cyprus-flagged GFS Galaxy, whose crew includes one mariner still missing—and the U.S. answered with heavy strikes, hitting some 140 targets in a single night.
By Monday, Washington and Tehran were again claiming control of the same waterway.
U.S. Central Command posted flatly on Sunday that "Iran does not control the Strait of Hormuz," while Iran’s Revolutionary Guard called it "our territory."
Between those claims, six ships crossed on Sunday—every one of them, according to preliminary Kpler data analyzed by Bloomberg, with its transponder switched off.
Under the recent transit guidance for Hormuz, masters are told to assume satellite-navigation signals will be jammed or spoofed for the entire transit.
They are advised to carry paper charts and drill bridge teams on fixing position by radar and landmark, and to post dedicated lookouts day and night.
Masters are instructed to hand-steer when conditions demand, to keep a continuous watch on the emergency radio channel, and even to delay entry if more than 60 radar or AIS contacts crowd within 12 nautical miles.
A dark crossing is hard work, doubling the bridge’s burden, and that is the trap. A useless workaround would be abandoned, while a complete solution would leave no need for one at all.
Dark crossings sit in the dangerous middle. They are practical enough to keep some ships moving, but not all, because they still don't guarantee safe, normal passage.
If it works for the majority of vessels that try it, however, economic pressures and new risk assessments along with higher insurance premiums may see the number of dark crossings attempted rise over time.
Crossing conditions once considered intolerable would become, through necessity, the new norm. This, assuming ongoing Iranian belligerence, would require a long-lasting American military presence in the strait.
Thus, another American forever war in the Middle East would unfold.
Tell US More
The public silence of a dark ship increases its dependence on others to navigate.
A May 4 advisory from the Joint Maritime Information Center, the U.S.-led clearinghouse for Gulf shipping threats, announced an enhanced security area to support Hormuz transits south of the main traffic lanes and pointed vessels toward Omani territorial waters.
A May 29 advisory went further: coordinate transit with the U.S. Navy’s shipping-guidance cell, keep a continuous watch on Channel 16, and comply immediately with instructions from U.S. forces.
The standing U.S. maritime advisory tells American-flagged ships to plan voyages with that same Navy cell, and if hailed over the radio by Iranian forces to ignore the call and keep sailing—because answering can help Iran aim.
Related Story
As Iran Buries Khamenei, a New Kind of Islamic Republic Rises
A formal convoy is easy to see out on the water. Warships travel beside merchant hulls, the commitment to defend them unmistakable.
The dark crossing version is much quieter. Ships coordinate, report, monitor, answer coalition hails and follow recommended routes without producing the public optics of convoy duty.
After Iran's June 25 drone strike on a cargo ship, CENTCOM said U.S. forces continue to provide "safe passage coordination and support" to vessels transiting the strait.
Going dark pushes a vessel deeper into U.S.-linked reporting, routing and coordination, less a free agent on the open sea than a client of an unadvertised system.
Predators in the Darkness
CENTCOM says its June 26 strikes hit Iranian missile and drone storage and coastal radar sites after the attack on the Singapore-flagged Ever Lovely.
Its June 27 strikes targeted surveillance infrastructure, communication systems, air defenses, drone storage and minelaying capability after a drone hit the Panama-flagged tanker Kiku, loaded with more than two million barrels of crude.
Degradation, though, is not blindness. Iran still has eyes to see, as the U.S. admits.
The same American advisory that routes ships toward the Navy warns that Iranian threats still include direct missile attacks, armed drones and armed unmanned boats, and recalls that Iranian forces have historically used small craft and helicopters to board vessels and force them toward Iranian waters.
The industry guidance that allows for going dark concedes that surveillance drones collect a ship’s position whether or not it broadcasts.
And as the Kpler data shows, some of the vessels Iran attacked on the Omani corridor had already turned off their transponders.
The Navy fields counter-targeting tools. Its shipboard electronic-warfare suite is built to detect and disrupt the radars that guide anti-ship missiles. But this appears to be for defensive counter-targeting, not covert blinding operations.
Iran, meanwhile, does not need to see every vessel perfectly. It just needs enough detection, doubt and disruption to make every transit feel contingent on its blessing or caprice.
A drone, a mine scare, a radio warning, a spoofed signal, a small-boat approach—each can do strategic work even when most ships survive passage through the strait.
All Iran has to do is make normal passage impossible and it is extracting strategic leverage from the strait.
Open and Broken
The language of "open" and "closed" around the strait confuses the reality and continues the conflict.
Iran described the strait as closed after the weekend’s attack; the U.S. military and President Donald Trump insisted it remained open. Both can point to evidence that validates their claim, and that is the problem.
Even the official threat dial oscillates with the argument. It was "critical" through late May, cut to "substantial" in mid-June when an interim deal briefly calmed the water, then raised again within a day of July's tanker attacks.
Related Story
Trump Declares Iran Ceasefire ‘Over’: 5 Scenarios for What Happens Next
When some ships get through, everyone's preferred story survives contact with the facts. Washington avoids the optics of strategic defeat, while Tehran avoids the costs of a full closure.
Insurers can price the danger, shippers can adjust to it, voters can be told the waterway is "open"—a word that once meant ordinary transit and now means passage that is darkened, delayed, militarized and insured at a premium.
A strait is not truly open when ships have to whisper their way through it under the watchful eyes of the world’s most powerful military. But nor is it truly closed when vessels are successfully getting through.
The Price of Adaptation
The worst outcome for U.S. strategy may not be that dark crossings fail, but that they partially succeed.
Kpler data shows observable crossings on the U.S.-supported southern corridor along Oman have stopped entirely—the last was Wednesday—while Iran’s designated northern route still saw a handful of crossings through Saturday. Dark transits outnumbered observable ones for three straight days.
Sunday’s total of six ships was the lowest in five weeks, in a strait that carried 125 to 140 sailings a day before the war. Brent crude jumped past $79 a barrel Monday morning, up more than 4 percent, but still well below the war's highs.
In the insurance market, war underwriters advised some owners to pause voyages after last week’s tanker attacks.
Related Story
US-Iran War’s Return May Leave Europe Short of Arms When It Needs Them Most
Marcus Baker, Marsh’s global head of marine, told Insurance Business that rates are unlikely to come down "until the market genuinely believes that the risk environment has changed."
Cover remains available, at 2 to 6 percent of a ship’s value, an illustrative $6 million premium for a single transit of a $100 million tanker.
Andy Lipow, president of Lipow Oil Associates, told clients the market is not pricing a closure at all but "a new normal": skirmish, calm, transit, repeat.
There is a history to this adaptation. Dark crossings first became common in mid-April, when the UAE began moving oil out of the Gulf on darkened tankers, a reason the wartime oil shortage proved milder than feared.
The tactic softened the shock, but softening the shock also dampens the urgency of finding a solution to the crisis.
Informational Chokepoint
Before the war, the strait carried 20 million barrels of oil a day, about one-fifth of everything the world consumed, plus roughly a fifth of global trade in liquefied natural gas.
Disruption to those flows is a serious matter for energy security, affordability for consumers, and the stability of the world economy.
For American voters, the question is whether the U.S. is drifting into another open-ended conflict that officials had sold to them as limited, technical, and controlled.
Now, the bills are arriving at the pump, in freight costs, and in Congress.
The Strait of Hormuz is a chokepoint because its geography is a narrow bend of water between Iran and Oman that most of the region’s oil cannot avoid. But dark crossings show the chokepoint is as much informational as it is geographic.
Who gets the ship’s position? Who trusts the route? Who answers the radio call? Who pays the premium? Who knows whether the dark contact on the radar is a tanker, a drone boat, a decoy, a mine or a target?
A ship going dark in the Strait of Hormuz is evidence that the system has learned a coping mechanism for the conflict. The forever war does not need Hormuz closed; it needs the strait permanently half-open.
View 0 Comments
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines