A-10 Warthog ground-attack aircraft and AH-64 Apache helicopters are flying low-altitude combat patrols over the strait of Hormuz, hunting Iranian fast-attack craft and intercepting drones1. The A-10 has a maximum speed of roughly 700 km/h, carries no stealth profile, and was designed in the 1970s to destroy Soviet armour columns on the North German Plain. The Apache is a terrain-following attack helicopter built to engage ground targets from behind ridgelines. Neither platform belongs in airspace where functioning surface-to-air missile batteries or coastal anti-aircraft systems remain operational.
Their presence over the strait is an operational assessment CENTCOM has not stated in words. Commanders would not commit these aircraft — among the most vulnerable in the US inventory to ground-based air defences — if Iran's southern littoral missile and anti-aircraft network were still capable of engaging low-altitude targets. The supporting evidence is specific. CENTCOM confirmed it used GBU-72 5,000-pound penetrator munitions against hardened coastal anti-ship missile sites along the Hormuz shoreline. More than 130 Iranian naval vessels have been destroyed in 22 days — a pace Adm. Brad Cooper called the largest naval attrition campaign since The Second World War2. The target count has risen from 7,000 to more than 8,000 in days, with 8,000-plus combat sorties flown across the 22-day campaign3.
Iran's IRGC Navy built its Hormuz doctrine around asymmetric swarm tactics: hundreds of small, fast fibreglass boats armed with anti-ship missiles and rocket-propelled grenades, dispersed across coastal inlets along Iran's 1,100 km southern shoreline. The strategy assumed the US would send capital ships into the strait's confined waters, where speed and numbers could offset technological disadvantage. Instead, CENTCOM appears to have systematically destroyed coastal infrastructure from the air before committing low-altitude platforms for the close-in fight. The A-10's GAU-8 Avenger — a 30mm rotary cannon firing up to 3,900 rounds per minute of depleted-uranium armour-piercing ammunition — was designed to penetrate tank hulls. Against unarmoured fast boats at close range, it does not need to. The US Air Force has tried to retire the A-10 at least five times since 2014; Congress blocked each attempt4. Its return to combat in a maritime interdiction role its designers never envisaged is a function of two things: the IRGC Navy's degradation and the particular match between the A-10's low-speed manoeuvrability and the targets that remain.
