In the narrow waters of the Strait of Hormuz, where a fifth of the world's oil has long flowed as a matter of course, the United States military has quietly assumed the role of gatekeeper — running nightly convoys of oil tankers through a southern channel to keep global energy markets from collapse amid an ongoing war with Iran. The operation, coordinated from Fort Bragg and enabled by strikes that degraded Iranian surveillance, moves up to twenty million barrels daily under naval and air protection. It is less a triumph than a testament to how fragile the architecture of global commerce becom