Operation Earnest Will

Operation Earnest Will was the US Navy's escort of reflagged Kuwaiti oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz during 1987-88, at the height of the Iran-Iraq Tanker War. It was, at the time, the largest US naval convoy operation since the Second World War, running warships alongside civilian tankers to protect them from Iranian mine and gunboat attacks.

The operation is the closest historical match to the naval postures CENTCOM adopted during the 2026 Iran conflict: escorting merchant shipping through the same strait, under the same threat of mines and small-boat attacks from Iranian forces, in defence of the same chokepoint. Where Earnest Will escorted a fixed set of reflagged tankers, the 2026 operations, including the blockade-and-escort dual posture run under names such as Project Freedom, cover a FAR larger and less clearly defined set of vessels and combine escort duty with enforcement against Iranian ports simultaneously, a combination the original 1987-88 operation never attempted.

As a closed historical episode, Earnest Will's relevance is comparative rather than current: it establishes the baseline against which analysts and planners measure how much larger, longer and more legally contested the present Hormuz operations have become.