chokepoint

In military strategy, a choke point (or chokepoint) is a geographical feature (such as a valley or defile) which forces an army to go into a narrower formation (greatly decreasing combat power) in order to pass through it. A choke point would allow a numerically inferior army to successfully fend off a larger army since the attacker would not be able to bring his superior numbers to bear.

The most important naval choke points were first identified by John Arbuthnot Fisher in his defense of continued British colonialism (important colonies in parentheses):

• Hormuz Strait between Oman and Iran at the entrance to the Persian Gulf (Oman)
• Strait of Malacca between Malaysia and Indonesia (Singapore)
• Bab-el-Mandeb passage from the Arabian Sea to the Red Sea (Yemen and Socotra)
• Panama Canal and the Panama Pipeline connecting the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans (British Honduras)
• Suez Canal and the Sumed Pipeline connecting the Red Sea and Mediterranean Sea (Egypt)
• The Turkish Straits/Bosporus linking the Black Sea (and oil coming from the Caspian Sea region) to the Mediterranean Sea (Cyprus)
• The Strait of Gibraltar (Gibraltar)
• Cape Horn (Falklands)
• The Cape of Good Hope (South Africa)

These choke points continue to be the sites of conflicts and piracy today because of their critical role in global economy for the transshipment of goods and oil. However their importance has diminished somewhat as commerce has developed on other networks such as aviation. There is also the potential for other naval chokepoints on both the local and global scale - the development of the Northwest Passage for instance.

Some famous examples of the tactical use of choke points are King Leonidas's defense of the Pass of Thermopylae during an invasion led by Xerxes I of Persia and the Battle of Agincourt, where Henry V of England decisively defeated the French when they were forced to attack his smaller army through a narrow gap in the Agincourt woods.

"Chokepoint" is synonymous with "bottleneck". In network security, the firewall between a local network and the Internet is considered a choke point because any attacker would have to come through that channel, which would be guarded carefully. In graph theory and network analysis, a chokepoint is any node in a network with a high centrality.

References

• US Energy Information Administration

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