No idea. Do you think it was pitched like that before the conflict began?

I don’t know. My prior is that this admin was never willing to put boots on the ground. And for purely self-serving reasons, they wouldn’t have risked a scenario where Iran blocked oil traffic through the strait, causing gas prices to go up.

So, to me, the two possibilities are: the military told the administration it couldn’t control the strait without boots on the ground, and Trump disregarded that advice.

The other possibility is that the military was overconfident. We know it has been developing plans to attack Iran for decades. It’s possible the military thought it could control the strait based on obsolete plans that didn’t account for new developments like Iranian fast boats and drones.