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Iran’s real threat to the Strait of Hormuz was always the swarm, not the fleet. Airstrikes are the wrong tool for eliminating it.

Donald Trump has never been a man to understate his victories, and he is certainly not going to start now. So it was perhaps predictable that when American airstrikes and torpedoes tore through Iran’s conventional naval fleet last week, the numbers kept growing with each presidential announcement. Nine ships on Day One. Then 17. Then 24 — “their navy is gone,” he told reporters at a White House event. A Truth Social post had set the tone: “We are going after the rest. They will soon be floating [sic] at the bottom of the sea, also! Other than that, their Navy is doing very well!”

On Saturday, addressing Latin American leaders at his Shield of the Americas Summit in Florida, he claimed, “We’ve knocked out 42 navy ships, some of them very large, in three days. That was the end of the navy.”

Before accepting those numbers at face value, a word of caution is warranted. The Pentagon has not published a verified ship-by-ship accounting. Early commercial satellite imagery from Planet Labs and Vantor did show fires and smoke at the Bandar Abbas and Konarak naval bases, and open-source analysts have tentatively identified several sunken hulls — though smoke obscured much of the damage. “Early battle damage assessments can conflate hit, mission-killed, and sunk,” one defense analysis outlet noted dryly. The War Zone, which reviewed the satellite imagery, found that while some larger vessels appeared to have gone down, “many ships remain, and a number of warships in drydock are obscured.”

No independent organization has confirmed the escalating totals the administration has been broadcasting from the Pentagon podium. In wartime, governments have a long and entirely bipartisan tradition of announcing the destruction of things that turn out to be less destroyed than advertised.

But even if we were to take the claims at face value, for argument’s sake, the uncomfortable truth is that those ships were never the main instrument of Iran’s maritime menace. Destroying them is a bit like claiming you’ve neutralized a wasp’s nest by removing the decorative hive. The real threat — the stinging, swarming, darting part — was always somewhere else.

Iran operates two parallel naval structures, a distinction that matters enormously right now. The Islamic Republic of Iran Navy (IRIN), the “regular” navy that Trump has been busy sinking, maintains a conventional fleet of frigates, destroyers, and submarines suited for blue-water operations: the kind of ships that look impressive in harbor and on naval parade. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy (IRGCN), by contrast, is something altogether different: a force built not for blue water but for the brown and green, not for naval engagements but for harassment, disruption, boarding, and, if necessary, swarming. Its doctrine is asymmetric, its weapons cheap, dispersed, and hard to find from the air.

The IRGCN’s fleet consists of hundreds — possibly thousands — of fast-attack speedboats, many of them ordinary watercraft modified with missiles, rockets, heavy machine guns, and sometimes suicide-bomb payloads. Alongside these are shore-based anti-ship missiles, drones, and the ever-present threat of naval mines in one of the world’s most vital shipping corridors. It is this combination — mobile, distributed, replaceable — that has always constituted Iran’s real maritime leverage over the Strait of Hormuz. And it is precisely what aerial bombardment is least equipped to destroy.

Jane’s, the authoritative defense intelligence publisher, has described the IRGCN as “the resuscitator of fast inshore attack craft in the modern era, as well as the most prominent practitioner of ‘small boat swarm tactics that combine speed, mass, co-ordinated manoeuvre, low radar signature, and concealment’” among naval forces in the world. The Congressional Research Service, in its definitive assessment of Iranian military power, as CRS concludes, found that Iran “appears to focus most intently on ‘asymmetric warfare,’” with the IRGCN “centering on an ability to ‘swarm’ U.S. naval assets with its fleet of small boats.”

The U.S. military learned this lesson painfully — and then promptly forgot it. In the summer of 2002, the Pentagon spent $250 million on Millennium Challenge, the most expensive war game in American history. Retired Marine Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, commanding a force modeled on Iran, opened with a massive cruise missile salvo that sank sixteen American warships, then followed with swarms of suicide speedboats that finished off what remained of the carrier battle group — all within the opening hours of the exercise. The game was halted, the ships “refloated,” and the exercise restarted with a script guaranteeing a Blue Force victory. The lesson about small-boat swarms was never absorbed.

The history of Iran’s small-boat strategy is long and instructive. In 1988, during Operation Praying Mantis — at the time, the largest U.S. naval surface engagement since World War II — Iranian Boghammar speedboats ranged freely across the Gulf hitting civilian and commercial targets, even as American warships were busy sinking Iranian frigates. Carrier-based A-6 Intruders dropping cluster munitions eventually pushed the speedboats back — whereupon they simply beached themselves on an Iranian-controlled island and waited.

The pattern has been repeated in the decades since. In April 2020, eleven IRGC speedboats swarmed six American naval vessels during exercises in the Persian Gulf, coming close enough to USS Firebolt and USS Sirocco to force warning shots. In 2021, Iranian fast-attack craft crossed the bow of a U.S. Coast Guard cutter within 70 yards. In 2024, the IRGC seized the Portuguese-flagged container ship MSC Aries near the Strait of Hormuz, its speedboats boarding the vessel like something from a century-old piracy playbook.

For years, the Iran Primer at the U.S. Institute of Peace has documented a relentless cadence of incidents involving, not frigates or destroyers, but the small, fast, cheap, ubiquitous craft that American and Israeli airstrikes cannot meaningfully degrade.

One needs only to look across the Arabian Peninsula for the most vivid contemporary proof that conventional naval power is irrelevant to maritime disruption. The Houthis of Yemen, an Iran-backed militia in a war-shattered country, do not possess a single warship worthy of the name. What they do possess are missiles, drones, and explosive-laden skiffs. Between November 2023 and late 2025, that was enough to reduce Suez Canal transits from over 2,000 ships a month to fewer than 900, force major shipping lines to reroute around the Cape of Good Hope at a cost, according to shipping analysts, of roughly $1 million per voyage, and push the port of Eilat into near-bankruptcy. The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency estimated a 90 percent drop in container shipping through the Red Sea at the crisis’s peak — a figure it reported in June 2024. A naval force without a navy did all of that.

The Houthis’ campaign offered something else instructive: the persistent limits of airpower as a counter. Despite hundreds of American and British strikes on Houthi missile sites, drone facilities, and radar installations, the group’s ability to attack shipping was never more than temporarily suppressed. As Ian Ralby, a maritime security expert at I.R. Consilium, observed during the 2025 campaign: “If you want to sink a vessel, hitting it from above doesn’t work, hitting it on the water line may or may not work, but hitting it under the water definitely works.” The Houthis, a non-state actor with a fraction of Iran’s resources, absorbed over a thousand U.S. airstrikes and kept launching. The lesson for Iran’s IRGCN — dispersed, camouflaged, operating from ports, beaches, and fishing villages along a 1,500-mile coastline — is sobering.

None of this is to dismiss what the U.S. and Israel have achieved in Operation Epic Fury. The destruction of Iran’s conventional fleet has eliminated its capacity for blue-water power projection and stripped it of whatever prestige came with sailing frigates to the Indian Ocean.

That last point is underscored by the fate of the IRIS Dena, the IRIN’s newest and most capable frigate, a 1,500-ton Moudge-class vessel armed with anti-ship missiles, surface-to-air missiles, a vertical launch system, and a helicopter deck. The Dena had just participated in India’s International Fleet Review, a peacetime gesture of naval diplomacy in the Bay of Bengal. On March 4, while returning home, she was intercepted by the USS Charlotte, a Los Angeles-class submarine, and sunk off the coast of Sri Lanka by a Mark 48 torpedo. It was the first time a U.S. submarine has sunk an enemy warship since the Second World War. At least 87 out of a crew of 180 were confirmed dead. It was, as Pete Hegseth called it with unsettling satisfaction, a “quiet death.”

The Dena’s sinking, whatever its tactical and historic significance, is also a parable. She was 2,000 miles from Iranian waters, on a peacetime mission, posing no immediate threat to any shipping lane. The ships that do threaten those lanes — that have repeatedly seized tankers, fired on American vessels, and laid mines in the strait — are not frigates. They are rubber-hulled speedboats with rocket-propelled grenades, containers of mines stacked on dhows, shore launchers disguised as civilian infrastructure. Many of them can be “deployed” by driving them to the beach.

Trump declared at his Doral press conference on Monday that he would keep the Strait of Hormuz open, warning that any Iranian attempt at blockade would prompt “devastating strikes on infrastructure like electricity production facilities.” “If they want to play that game, they better not play that game,” he said.

The bluster is characteristic; the problem is structural. The Strait is just 21 miles wide at its narrowest, through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s daily oil consumption flows. A handful of mines, a few dozen speedboats armed with anti-ship missiles, and a shore battery or two can do extraordinary damage to tanker traffic without firing a shot at an American warship. Iran has shown, over four decades, an extraordinary willingness to use exactly these means.

Donald Trump has sunk Iran’s navy. That is not nothing. But the Iran that threatens global oil flows was never the one with the frigates. It was always the one with the speedboats. And those are still out there, somewhere, tied to docks and hidden in fishing harbors along one of the world’s most consequential coastlines — waiting, as they always have, for the order to move.