“In my view, it’s not a solution at all,” Jennifer Kavanagh, senior fellow and director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, a libertarian-leaning foreign policy think tank, said of the operation.
“It doesn’t really address the underlying problem here, which is that the uncertainty about the safety of transit means that ship captains and shipping companies are hesitant to take the risk,” Kavanagh said in a phone interview.
Project Freedom is a defensive mission—but it does not involve escorting individual ships, which would “be very expensive and resource intensive,” Kavanagh said. The strait is approximately 104 miles long and 21 miles wide at its narrowest point.
“It would have to be permanent, until you have a political solution,” she said. “So it’s really not feasible.”
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