[jmyeet]

It's a good question and there are three aspects to this:

1. The US Navy is designed for the Cold WAr. It's often called a "deep blue" Navy because it's designed to operate in the open ocean in deep water. Also, it's designed to operate in colder climates like the North Atlantic and the North Sea. The Persian Gulf is none of those things. It's shallow, warm and narrow. The warm part also matters. It increases wear on ships, it's harder to keep them habitable, you get faster biofouling and so on;

2. Geography just isn't a friend here. The navigable part of the Strait of Hormuz at its narrowest is about 6 miles wide. You'll hear claims about it being 2 miles wide. That's incorrect. There are 2 mile wide navigation channels, one in each direction, and they're separated by a ~2 mile wide buffer; and

3. Another clue here was the continued use of so-called "stand off" weapons [1]. Rather than using gravity bombs, missiles continued to be fired from ships and planes. That's inefficient because you lose weight for the munition part to fuel. So you only ever do this if you can't safely use gravity bombs. Therefore, one can conclude that the military could protect air or water assets. Water assets can't be protected mainly from drones. There was a lot of talk about mines and that is a threat but the same drones that essentially destroyed Gulf military bases could overwhelm the defenses of an aircraft carrier battle group too. Plus there's drone boats. But the way aircraft were used also demonstrated a lack of air supremacy.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48380176

[relaxing]

1. You might want to call up the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain and let them know they aren’t designed to operate there. As well as the rest of the Navy that operates in similar waters in SE Asia and the Caribbean.