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Notes -
Iran's ability to use aircraft to attack ships in 2026 is not qualitatively different from their ability to use aircraft to attack ships in 1986. If anything it is quantitatively different.
(The point of this link was to reference the fact that Iran has been kicking around the idea of tolling the strait for years).
Why would you think this? The fact that Iran could substantially disrupt traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has been known and discussed and acknowledged publicly for decades.
Are you for real. Their aircraft from 1986 is destroyed. The question is of what they can do and plan for in 2026. It turns out that their new "aircraft" works very well for this purpose. I think they didn't know it will, just like Americans didn't know it'd be so hard to shut down.
Or do you think there was an expectation that as soon as the US fails to topple Iran by killing some dudes, we'll enter this morass with strait blockade?
My sentence is expressing the fact that their ability to destroy ships with aircraft in the strait the year 2026 is not qualitatively different from their ability to destroy ships with aircraft in the strait the year 1986. It has nothing to do with whether their aircraft from '86 are still surviving or not. In a Strait scenario, a Shahed is not really qualitatively superior at destroying ships than the smart weapons technology Iran had purchased from the US during the Cold War, including strike fighters with precision-guided weapons and radar-guided anti-ship missiles.
The main advantage, I think, is quantitative: they have a lot of Shaheds, which are cheap and simple to operate.
While I think the exact degree to which they would be able to achieve this against US defenses was murky pre-war, I definitely do not think that US defense planners did not anticipate the possibility or fail to correctly assess that Iran had the ability to threaten strait traffic. The US government gambling that Iran wouldn't rather than that Iran couldn't seems much more likely to me.
(And again, Iran's actual capability to "close the strait" has been demonstrated to be marginal, so if the US Navy warplanners assessed that they would be able to clear the strait and escort ships through in the face of Iranian defenses, they were probably correct for a certain degree of risk - it would not surprise me if the Pentagon got the capability assessment of Iran more or less right but fumbled or failed to consider as outside of their area of competency the question of what degree of risk would be acceptable to the civilian market.)
I highly recommend reading up on some of the US Navy's problems with Iranian and Iraqi mines in the area to get an idea of the background and mindset the US military would be going into this with. The Iraqis laid a big minefield in the Persian Gulf during the Gulf War and successfully hit a cruiser and an amphibious assault ship (basically, a pocket carrier). Those are essentially next-bests if you can't actually hit a real aircraft carrier.
On a quick Google, initial mineclearing operations in the Persian Gulf took nearly two months to clear lanes for shipping and mopping up took the better part of a year after the war concluded. So that gives you an idea of "how long will it take to clear the strait of mines" baseline the Pentagon would be operating from (although I suspect they have fancier tech now).
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