The Pentagon said it destroyed every submarine Iran had. Iran’s top naval commander says that is not true, and that domestically built mini-submarines are patrolling the Strait of Hormuz right now in a “trigger-ready state.”
The dueling claims, one from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and the other from Iranian Navy Commander Shahram Irani, have opened a dispute with direct consequences for the narrow waterway that carries roughly a fifth of the world’s traded oil. If even a handful of Iran’s Ghadir-class boats survived the recent fighting, the strait’s shipping lanes face a persistent undersea threat that neither side can fully verify or dismiss.
What Washington says it destroyed
Hegseth laid out the U.S. position during a Pentagon press briefing in May 2026. A Department of War transcript records him stating that Iran “once had 11” submarines and that they “are gone,” part of a broader claim that U.S. Central Command forces damaged or sank more than 120 Iranian naval vessels. A separate Defense Department summary repeated both figures.
Neither document provided hull numbers, coordinates, satellite imagery, or battle damage assessments to support the submarine count. CENTCOM’s own press releases confirmed that Iranian forces launched missiles, drones, and small boats at three U.S. destroyers during a strait transit, and that no U.S. assets were struck in the exchange. Retaliatory strikes followed. But CENTCOM has not released an after-action report listing specific submarines destroyed, and no independent imagery has surfaced to corroborate the claim of total elimination.
What Tehran says is still in the water
Commander Irani’s rebuttal came through a statement reported by Iran International in May 2026. He declared that domestically built light submarines are operating in a “trigger-ready state” inside the strait but offered no photographs, patrol logs, or vessel identifiers to back the assertion.
Iran has never published an official order of battle for the Ghadir class. Pre-war fleet estimates from open-source defense researchers, drawing on sources such as the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ Military Balance, have ranged from roughly 23 to more than 25 boats. Subtracting the 11 that Hegseth claims were destroyed produces the “at least 14” figure. That number is an inference, not a confirmed operational count, and readers should treat it accordingly. Whether the boats Irani referenced are pre-war survivors, newly built replacements, or some combination remains unclear.
Tehran has strong incentives to project strength after absorbing what Hegseth described as historically severe losses, and Iranian state media routinely showcases military hardware without disclosing actual readiness rates. Iran has not released its own casualty or loss figures from the conflict.
Why a 29-meter submarine matters in a shallow strait
The Ghadir is a diesel-electric coastal submarine roughly 29 meters long, designed to operate in the shallow, cluttered waters of the Persian Gulf. Each boat carries two torpedo tubes, requires a small crew, and can sit quietly on the seabed in depths where larger submarines cannot maneuver. In the Strait of Hormuz, where the navigable shipping channel narrows to about 3.2 kilometers in each direction, even one or two Ghadirs lying in wait can force warships into time-consuming anti-submarine searches and push commercial insurers to raise premiums on tanker transits.
That tactical reality is why the numbers dispute matters beyond a Pentagon talking point. A fleet of 14 or more operational mini-submarines would represent a qualitatively different threat than a force reduced to zero. And the observable pattern of Iranian activity in the strait suggests the threat is not hypothetical. CENTCOM has attributed ongoing mine-laying in the waterway to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and announced a mine-clearance mission to establish a safe corridor for commercial shipping. A navy still capable of coordinated surface attacks and mine operations is unlikely to have lost every undersea platform, though substantial attrition remains plausible.
What neither side will show you
The core problem for anyone trying to assess the strait’s undersea risk is that both governments are making claims they refuse to document. The U.S. has not released sonar recordings, wreckage photos, or geolocated strike data that would let outside analysts confirm 11 submarine kills. Iran has not produced imagery of intact boats on patrol or disclosed how many hulls it lost. Each side’s narrative serves its own strategic purpose: Washington wants to project decisive victory; Tehran wants to project unbroken deterrence.
Independent verification is scarce. Commercial satellite imagery can sometimes spot submarines in port, but Ghadir-class boats are small enough to be sheltered in hardened coastal tunnels that Iran has built along its southern shoreline. No third-party organization has published a post-conflict accounting of Iran’s submarine fleet, and the fog of an ongoing conflict makes such an audit unlikely in the near term.
What this means for the oil that moves through Hormuz
For shipping companies and energy markets, the precise number of surviving Ghadirs matters less than the uncertainty itself. Tanker operators and their insurers price risk based on the worst plausible scenario, not the best confirmed one. As long as credible doubt exists about whether Iranian submarines are still patrolling the strait, war-risk premiums will reflect that doubt, and some carriers may continue to reroute cargoes around the Cape of Good Hope at significant added cost.
The unresolved gap between American assertions of total destruction and Iranian claims of continued patrols has turned ambiguity into a weapon of its own. Until one side produces evidence that settles the count, the Strait of Hormuz will remain a waterway where the threat you cannot confirm is almost as disruptive as the one you can.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
