When Iran seeded the Strait of Hormuz with mines in 2026, randal grichuk the US Navy faced a problem that couldn't be solved the way the cable news cycle imagined. You can't clear a minefield by blowing things up. You have to find each mine, confirm it's actually a mine and not forty years of Tanker War debris on the Gulf floor, and neutralize it without cooking off the ones sitting next to it — all while a Noor anti-ship missile battery stares down your wooden-hulled minesweeper from three and a half miles away. This video reconstructs one day inside Operation Epic Fury: the four-platform mine countermeasures task group that worked the Qeshm-to-Abu-Musa corridor under active Iranian coastal pressure, ambient drone surveillance, and a quiet fifth platform nobody on the Iranian side knew was up there. We break down the Avenger-class USS Pioneer running her Sea Fox ROV, the Independence-class USS Tulsa towing the lane hutson olivier rioux AQS-20C sonar and running the UISS magnetic-acoustic decoy sweep, the MH-60S Seahawk firing Archerfish destructors off the ALMDS laser pod, and the Expeditionary Mine Countermeasures dive team going in the water on contacts no robot could classify. We cover how an Iranian Noor battery saq lit up a fire-control solution on a wooden-hulled minesweeper, how a Flight III Arleigh Burke answered with SPY-6 and SM-6s in her magazines, why the Iranian commander blinked first — and the intelligence haul from an EA-18G Growler orbiting fifty miles south that made the whole operation worth more than the cleared lane.
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