Admiral Brad Cooper, CENTCOM commander, told a Washington defence forum on Thursday 14 May that US operations had cleared 'roughly 90 per cent' of Iran's naval mine inventory and that Iran's military threat is 'diminished but not eliminated', as reported by Defense News1. The figure arrived with no published methodology and no independent corroboration.
Cooper's previous '100 per cent halt' claim had been contradicted by Windward, The National, and LSEG, citing the 61-vessel redirection count of 10 May and the earlier 58-redirect baseline. The 90 per cent figure does not state whether it counts mines destroyed in situ, deactivated in storage, neutralised by sweep, or simply absent from a sensor pass at the Larak-Qeshm corridor between Iranian islands. Defense News asked for clarification on methodology and CENTCOM did not provide one.
Counter-perspective: independent analysts at IISS and CSIS have noted that mine-counter-measures statistics are inherently denominator problems, because Iran has never published its mine inventory and Western estimates range from 3,000 to 6,000 weapons across pre-war stockpiles. A 90 per cent claim against an unknown denominator could simultaneously be technically accurate and operationally meaningless. CENTCOM has not addressed this in its public communications.
Pete Hegseth's Article 2 testimony on Tuesday 12 May rests on CENTCOM's operational credibility, and the Alaskan senator's constitutional deadline is days from expiry. A second challenged Cooper figure within four weeks of the first would erode that evidentiary foundation just as the constitutional clock runs down. The Larak-Qeshm corridor remains the test surface: a single mined-vessel incident there would settle the dispute empirically.
