> perturbed to see people talk of mass killings so casually

I'm almost perturbed to not see it discussed at all. What are the casualty estimates of blasting open the Strait?

I'm just going to throw some napkin pointers and rough guesstimate-arithmetics here.

-At the very minimum you would have to search and secure 130 000 square kilometers in a mountainous region, in a hostile country where you have no popular support, and where most of the male population has had somewhere around two years of military training. To be sure that Iranians couldn't lob anti-ship missiles into the strait, you'd probably need to double or triple that area. -And that's because of anti-ship missiles, with distances ranging from few hundred kilometers to thousand or more. And only one missile needs to get through to cause a mass casualty event onboard of a warship involving hundreds of people.

So, assuming that troops get to the shore, then there's the slight peculiarity of modern warfighting. Drones. Cheap and plentiful, with FPV drones having the range varying from 30 to 60+km, you can be assured that visitors stay on shore or island(s) will be filled with plenty of activities such as listening to never ending buzzing of drones or trying to find cover from those drones. As good as US electronic warfare efforts might be, wire-guided FPV drones don't really care. So unless the US incursion is going to be anything but a short 30 minute visit to a largely meaningless Tump island we're probably going to be looking at hundreds of casualties if we are extremely lucky. If they really want to open and "secure" the Strait, I think we're going to be looking at Russo-Ukrainian war-tier butcher's bill.

And since that would be perfectly fine for Israel, I think that's exactly what we'll be getting. I hope I'm wrong though.