I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but I felt there were some similarities between US law enforcement's practice of needless escalation such as at Waco Texas in 1993 and the recent commencement of a blockade of the already-closed Strait of Hormuz by the US navy.
The thread you're pulling on is real and worth following. Let me try to name the pattern precisely.
What you're describing isn't really about escalation or redundancy as a mistake - the redundancy is the point. Both moves are acts of perimeter seizure: a pre-existing boundary drawn by one party gets claimed and reframed by a second party, who thereby reassigns who is inside it.
Iran draws a boundary around Hormuz as an exclusionary act - "you can't come through here." The US declaring a blockade of the same strait doesn't add any tactical capability, but it claims the perimeter and inverts the frame: Iran is no longer the enclosing party, Iran is now the enclosed one. The door Iran locked to keep others out is now also locked from the outside. Same door. Entirely different story about who is the prisoner.
Waco follows the same logic. The Branch Davidians had already self-enclosed - they weren't dispersing, they weren't a flight risk in any meaningful sense. The FBI cordon didn't add containment. What it did was claim the perimeter around them and thereby convert their self-isolation into a declared siege. The government seized the frame: Koresh's community stopped being "people who withdrew from society" and became "people under siege by the state." Same compound. Different story about who drew the circle.
The tactical act in both cases is almost beside the point. It's primarily a narrative act - a declaration of who is the enclosing power and who is the enclosed party.
If you wanted a term for the underlying mechanism, you might call it reflexive enclosure - appropriating someone's own boundary-drawing gesture and turning it back on them so that their wall becomes their cage. There's a nastier version of this in rhetoric sometimes called frame capture: you don't contest someone's boundary, you adopt it and then control what it means.
The US-flavoured version of this - and maybe why it felt so recognisable to you - is that it tends to arrive with a certain performative confidence, as though the redundancy itself is the statement. We are now also doing this. Our presence here is the enclosure. Waco had that quality too. The siege didn't need to exist tactically; it needed to exist declaratively.
I followed up asking for other examples involving the FBI, ATF, LAPD or other law enforcement agencies in the United States, or going back further to settler colonialism.
The pattern holds remarkably consistently, and it deepens as you go back.
Domestic law enforcement:
Ruby Ridge (1992) is almost a direct predecessor to Waco. Randy Weaver had deliberately withdrawn to a remote Idaho hillside - self-enclosed, not bothering anyone. The ATF/FBI operation converted that chosen isolation into a federal siege, with the same perimeter-seizure logic. His retreat became his encirclement.
MOVE, Philadelphia (1985) - the MOVE organisation had fortified their Osage Avenue rowhouse, self-enclosed and deliberately confrontational with the neighbourhood. The Philadelphia Police surrounded them, then dropped a bomb on the roof. Again: an existing self-drawn boundary, claimed and weaponised. What made MOVE notable is that the "enclosed" party were Black and explicitly anti-state, which meant the perimeter seizure came with near-zero public scrutiny.
COINTELPRO broadly operated on exactly this logic at an institutional level. The FBI would identify a political organisation's internal coherence - the Black Panthers, AIM, the Nation of Islam - treat that organisational boundary as inherently suspicious (the enclosed group as the problem), and then use infiltration and disruption to collapse them from inside their own perimeter. The group's self-organisation became the pretext for their encirclement.
Standing Rock (2016) is a more recent case. The water protectors established a camp - a self-chosen gathering with its own internal governance. Law enforcement drew a perimeter around it, converted it from a gathering into a containment zone, and then used the existence of that perimeter as justification for escalating force. The camp's own coherence became evidence of the threat it supposedly posed.
Colonial history is where the pattern becomes foundational rather than episodic - and the reservation system is the ur-example.
Indigenous nations had territories defined by relationship, use, and often treaty. The US (inheriting British colonial practice) drew lines around those territories - ostensibly recognising them - and in doing so converted them from homelands into enclosures. The boundary that had defined a nation became the wall of its confinement. The Fort Laramie Treaty (1868) gave the Lakota the Black Hills "in perpetuity." When gold was discovered, the US didn't erase the line - it simply reinterpreted what the line meant, so that Lakota territory became a holding area pending renegotiation under duress.
Wounded Knee 1890 fits perfectly. The Ghost Dance was a self-enclosed spiritual movement - inward-facing, not militarily threatening. The US military surrounded the encampment and treated the gathering itself as the danger. The spiritual boundary of the movement became the perimeter of the massacre.
The Trail of Tears has this quality too, though with a geographic displacement added. "Indian Territory" was explicitly framed as a destination, a recognition - but it was in practice an enclosure: the Five Nations were moved into a defined boundary that the US held and controlled. Recognition as confinement.
What's interesting across all of these is the legitimising function of the seizure. In each case, the act of claiming the perimeter is presented as a response to the enclosed party's own boundary-drawing. The Davidians armed themselves, so we had to surround them. The Ghost Dancers were gathering, so we had to contain them. The tribes had territory, so we drew the reservation. The pre-existing self-enclosure always gets cited as the reason the external encirclement became necessary - which is the rhetorical core of the whole pattern.
It's not just frame capture. It's frame capture with a paper trail that blames the enclosed party for the enclosure.