That is the part of this war that Washington has to get faster at fighting.

The Revolutionary Guard does not need every tanker to sail openly under an Iranian flag. The Treasury has documented a shadow fleet registered and managed through companies scattered across Hong Kong, Panama, the Marshall Islands, Liberia, the British Virgin Islands, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere. In June, the Treasury Department identified another network using front companies, foreign bank accounts, and shadow vessels to sell Iranian LPG disguised as Omani product.

The methods vary, but the principle is simple. Iranian petroleum can change vessels, corporate custody, flags, documentation, or declared origin before reaching its customer. The Treasury has documented ship-to-ship transfers of Iranian crude ultimately delivered to China, while other vessels have carried Iranian petroleum under flags ranging from Panama and Palau to Barbados and the Cook Islands.

The oil still has to move, so the blockade matters. But stopping a ship and dismantling the financial and corporate network capable of putting another ship in its place are two different problems.

I have spent the past year researching Venezuela’s shadow fleet and the corporate networks behind it, and one of the uncomfortable findings is how reusable this infrastructure can be. The Treasury Department has identified vessels that carried Venezuelan petroleum before moving Iranian cargo, while another network generated revenue from both Iranian and Russian petroleum. A broker, manager, insurer, or corporate intermediary does not necessarily belong to one country’s sanctions-evasion system.

Peel back enough layers and another uncomfortable fact appears. These networks do not operate only from Tehran, Moscow, or Beijing. The companies, ship managers, registries, banks, insurers, and professional service providers that allow them to function are spread across dozens of jurisdictions, including countries that trade with, cooperate with, and sometimes depend upon the United States.

That does not mean every intermediary knowingly works for Iran, much less that every government approves what happens under its flag. But somebody collects a fee when a company is incorporated, a ship is registered, a cargo is insured, or money changes hands. The shadow trade survives partly because it hides inside the infrastructure of legitimate global commerce.

Operationally, it begins to look a great deal like a transnational criminal organization, only with the resources and protection of a state behind it. It compartmentalizes operations, uses disposable companies, changes identities, exploits jurisdictional boundaries, disguises commodities, launders money through legitimate commerce, and replaces exposed nodes instead of defending them. Take down one company, and another appears.

The Treasury’s own sanctions actions illustrate the problem. One March action identified Iranian-linked vessels owned through companies in the Marshall Islands, British Virgin Islands, Liberia, and Panama, sailing under flags including Barbados, Comoros, Palau, Vanuatu, and Panama. Another identified a Panama-flagged tanker owned by a Marshall Islands company that had moved millions of barrels of Iranian oil to East Asia.

The Navy can seize a tanker. It has no mechanism for seizing a corporate registry.

None of this argues against hitting launchers or protecting shipping. Gerecht and Takeyh are not calling for a blockade alone. Their argument is that control of the Strait of Hormuz has to be paired with enough military pressure that Iran cannot compensate through the Houthis, Iraqi militias, attacks on pipelines, or other regional pressure points. The events of the past week demonstrate why that military problem is real.

But even a successful military campaign has a second requirement. The revenue that finances replacement weapons, militias, procurement networks, and the state itself does not exist only aboard tankers moving through traffic lanes monitored by the Fifth Fleet. It also moves through companies, banks, insurers, exchange houses, brokers, and intermediaries that can survive the loss of an individual ship.

That distinction also matters when measuring whether the blockade is working. Gerecht and Takeyh point to oil moving through the strait and Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline as evidence that Washington had begun restoring regional flows. Those numbers matter enormously to the world economy, but regional throughput is not the same thing as Iranian revenue denial.

Reuters reported last week that roughly one-third of Gulf oil exports remained missing despite “dark crossings” by tankers operating without normal transponder signals. This week, visible Hormuz traffic fell again, although ships moving dark make the actual volume harder to measure.

That is precisely the problem. A statistic measuring traffic through a chokepoint tells Washington something important about the blockade and global oil supply. It does not necessarily tell Washington how much Iranian-origin petroleum is still being monetized, through whom, or how much of the proceeds ultimately reach sanctioned Iranian institutions.

Measure the wrong pipeline, and you can mistake movement for pressure.

Gerecht and Takeyh also see statements from Iranian officials as evidence that pressure is producing political fractures inside the regime. They may be right. But political pressure and financial endurance are related without being identical, and the second deserves much more attention than their argument gives it.

The Revolutionary Guard’s own military thinking offers a useful analogy. Its mosaic defense doctrine dispersed capabilities so that destroying one location would not destroy the system. The shadow fleet operates on a similar principle: numerous vessels and corporate nodes, many of them disposable, with no single company carrying the weight of the entire network.

Washington cannot fight something like that with one instrument. Naval interdiction, financial intelligence, sanctions, customs enforcement, beneficial-ownership investigations, banking pressure, diplomacy, criminal prosecution, and cooperation with flag and registry states all have roles. The objective does not have to be finding every shell company on Earth. It is making the network slower, more expensive, more dangerous, and less profitable to operate.

The Treasury understands much of the problem already. OFAC has repeatedly targeted shadow vessels, owners, managers, exchange houses, and shell companies. Recent actions have identified Iranian petroleum moving through companies registered in places such as Panama and the Marshall Islands, and vessels carrying Iranian cargo under a remarkable collection of foreign flags.

The question is not whether Washington is doing this work. It is whether it can do it fast enough.

That changes what winning this part of the war looks like. Washington has to shorten the time between identifying suspicious vessel behavior, finding the company behind the vessel, establishing who actually controls it, tracing the financial relationships, and taking action. It also means leaning harder on the jurisdictions where these companies are registered, including friends and partners, when their corporate infrastructure is being exploited to keep Iran’s network alive.

Above all, the United States has to treat this as a network rather than a list of tankers. The Treasury, the intelligence community, the Justice Department, the State Department, the Coast Guard, the Navy, allied governments, financial institutions, and commercial maritime-intelligence firms see different pieces of the same system. Staying even with a state-backed network that behaves like a transnational criminal enterprise requires using every tool in the kit and sharing what those tools uncover quickly enough to matter.

That is a different race from keeping destroyers at sea.

Gerecht and Takeyh are right that the Navy’s readiness clock is real. American ships, munitions, crews, and maintenance cycles cannot remain under wartime strain indefinitely. But Iran has a readiness clock too, and it is measured in incorporation papers, flags, insurers, exchange houses, and bank accounts.

RIGHT-WING SOCIALISM WON’T WIN ELECTIONS

Washington has to make the American disruption cycle faster than the Iranian replacement cycle.

Right now, there is little reason to assume that it is.