Re:Iranian Anti-Ship Missiles
So the three main anti-ship missiles the Iranians have are the Farms, the Noor and the Silkworm. All of which can hit targets over-the-horizon, HOWEVER, all of which still need to "know" there is a target over-the-horizon.
Why the Strait of Hormuz itself is so vitally important is because Iran can, thanks to hilly terrain, get a radar mast high enough that they have line-of-sight coverage over the narrowest parts of the strait.
What this means is that Iran, without the use of aircraft, drones or other spotter ships, can directly detect, track and engage a ship as it passes the strait.
What the US can do is attrition not just the missiles themselves but the ability to actually give them targets, by destroying the radars much in the same way you can degrade air defenses by destroying their search & targeting radars.
What is to Iran's advantage is that unlike air defense, where every minute that radar is offline is another minute the enemy air force has to fucking rape your high-value targets, an anti-ship radar can sit quiet and sit pretty.
What is to the US et al.'s advantage is that unlike air defense, the threat to attacking air assets is generally minimal, and the US uses air based assets as one of its primary intelligence and assault platforms.
Terrain offers advantage to both. To Iran, as stated above, even modest elevation can result in the ability to see over-the-horizon (or rather extends the horizon due to vantage point), and the narrow waters of the strait means that they are assured even 50km or so of line-of-sight coverage is good enough to engage.
To the US et al, the relatively small area of advantageous terrain to Iran means a more concise search area and a much more predictable "have drones here" and "have assets ready to engage targets here". Whatever naval intelligence officers are on the task have likely already compiled a list of "best hills for Iranian anti-ship batteries" in the AO prior operation.
The IRGC gets all the good stuff, regular army has become useless.
So in the event of war, the IRGC would basically arm the regular army and regular army units would act as subordinate to IRCG.
The regular army is, aside from small arms and a few token pieces of equipment, largely disarmed at peace time to stop them from deciding that a military dictatorship is preferable to an Islamic caliphate and marching on Tehran.
The pickle the IRGC finds itself in is their mobilization plans for the regular army only work in the event of an invasion or other land-based conflict (even the hypotheticals of Iran invading Azerbaijan or Iraq, etc.) and not the kind of stand-off precision air-sea battle the US has chosen to fight.
Aside from doomer projections of total US boots on the ground invasion, the only major threat the regular army has now is a pool of potential promotion candidates looking to hop into a job with the IRGC.
