Trump pulled mine-sweepers from the Middle East and they’re sitting in Philadelphia as the Iran War rages
Andrew Feinberg
Wed, March 11, 2026 at 1:24 PM EDT
President Trump warns Iran against mining the Strait of Hormuz as U.S. Navy's minesweepers sit idle thousands of miles away.
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As President Donald Trump warns Iran against using mines to threaten oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. Navy’s purpose-built minesweepers are sitting stateside thousands of miles away with no plans to put them to use while the war rages on.
As gas prices in the U.S. continued to skyrocket, Trump on Tuesday took to Truth Social to demand that Tehran “immediately” remove any mines placed in the vital seaway and to do so “forthwith” lest the Iranian military suffer “consequences ... at a level never seen before.” That warning came after multiple news outlets reported Iran had begun mining the strait, a narrow waterway that is the only passage from the Persian Gulf into open ocean.
He also threatened to use drone strikes to “permanently eliminate any boat or ship attempting to mine the Hormuz Strait” and boasted of having done so against 10 Iranian “inactive mine-laying boats” in a separate post several minutes later.
But it’s unclear to what extent the U.S. now has reliable capacity to seek out and remove any mines that have already been deployed or are subsequently dropped in the strait because the ships the American Navy spent decades relying on for that purpose have been removed from the Persian Gulf region.
On Monday, a massive cargo ship, M/V Seaway Hawk, was spotted on camera arriving in Philadelphia carrying a quartet of Avenger-class Mine Countermeasure Ships that were based at U.S. Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain as the Navy’s front-line deterrent against mining operations in the Middle East until this past fall, when the last of those ships, U.S.S. Devastator, was decommissioned.
The four wood-and-fiberglass vessels, including Devastator, U.S.S. Sentry, U.S.S. Dextrous, and U.S.S. Gladiator, were built in the 1990s had been built in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and ships of that class were first deployed to the Persian Gulf region during Operation Desert Storm.
For the next four decades, the U.S. kept minesweepers forward-deployed in Bahrain to deter use of mines in the Gulf region amid fears that Iran could use them to effectively block the narrow chokepoint through which one fifth of the world’s oil supply passes each year.
But that long period of service ended in September with the decommissioning of Devastator, leaving only four Avenger-class ships in active service, based in the homeport at Sasebo, Japan .
And even as tensions between the U.S. and Iran continued to ratchet up over the last few months, the Trump administration continued with plans to bring the ships back to the U.S. for disposal this past January by contracting for their transportation on the semi-submersible cargo ship which left Bahrain for Philadelphia this past January.
Photographs released by the Pentagon on Jan. 21 show the Seaway Hawk carrying the four decommissioned minesweepers while being escorted by the Littoral Combat Ship U.S.S. Canberra — one of a troubled class of vessel which the Navy is pressing into service as a replacement for the minesweepers.
The cargo ship carrying four decommissioned minesweepers is escorted by U.S.S. Canberra, one of the Littoral Combat Ships that will be tasked with clearing mines in the Strait of Hormuz if needed (U.S. Navy Photo)
The cargo ship carrying four decommissioned minesweepers is escorted by U.S.S. Canberra, one of the Littoral Combat Ships that will be tasked with clearing mines in the Strait of Hormuz if needed (U.S. Navy Photo)
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It arrived in Philadelphia on Tuesday, the day Iran reportedly began laying mines.
According to the Navy’s own press releases, the Independence-class Canberra is the first ship of its class to be fitted with a mine countermeasures mission package as part of an effort to replace the Avenger-class minesweepers and find a use for the LCS, which was designed to operate in shallow, coastal waters with a minimal crew.
Decades-long LCS program has been plagued with cost overruns and questions over whether the ships would be survivable in a combat situation, but according to USNI News the Navy scrapped plans to decommission them and instead chose to repurpose them for mine-clearing work and as support vessels for unmanned systems.
Asked whether the single LCS equipped with the mine-clearing equipment package would be sufficient to replace the four purpose-build minesweepers, a U.S. defense official told The Independent: “We do not discuss the operational status of our assets or speculate on future operations to protect operational security.”
But Matthew Buckley, a former U.S. Naval aviator who spent considerable time serving in the Middle East region in the 1990s, told The Independent that the U.S. air campaign against Iran is likely executing long-held plans that would negate the need for the minesweepers by eliminating Iran’s ability to lay mines.
“ When I was flying combat sorties off to Abraham Lincoln in the mid 90s, you know, we were doing operation Southern Watch no fly zone missions over Iraq. And guess what we were doing during our downtime? We were strike planning Iran ... and one of my big strikes that I had planned was against an Iranian mine facility deep in the middle of Iran,” he said.
He added that the Avenger-class ships would not necessarily be readily available to clear any mines that might be laid because they’re “not built for a dynamic environment.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-pulled-mine-sweepers-middle-155733810.html
