Iran’s hit-and-run seaIran lost its navy in the first month. It did not lose the strait.Washington struck hard at the outset. On March 4, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that a US submarine had sunk the frigate IRIS Dena off Sri Lanka."An American submarine sunk an Iranian warship that thought it was safe in international waters,” he said.By March 11, the United States claimed 60 Iranian warships sunk.However, Tehran never planned to fight fleet against fleet.The Revolutionary Guard fights from the shore. It hides mobile launchers along a rugged coast. It sends fast boats out of island coves. It launches drones in waves, then vanishes before American jets can find the launch site.The method showed itself on May 7. Iran fired missiles, launched drones and sent small boats at three destroyers, the USS Truxtun, USS Mason and USS Rafael Peralta, as they transited Hormuz.Central Command said no US asset was struck. Yet the attack forced a defensive barrage and a round of retaliatory strikes.Geography multiplies the threat. The strait narrows to 21 nautical miles.Bryan Clark, a retired Navy commander at the Hudson Institute, warned in March that the challenge lies in "the proximity of the drone launchers and the missile launchers” along the Iranian coast."Drones can fly low and slow; they can fly fast and low,” he said, "and they can do a lot of damage even to one ship.”The economics favour Tehran too. Defence analyst Kris Osborn notes that Shahed-style drones costing about $20,000 often force the Navy to fire interceptors worth millions.Each exchange drains a destroyer’s magazine. A ship with empty launch cells must leave the fight to be reloaded.Iran keeps adding layers. On September 7, Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, claimed a new anti-ship missile had flown over an American warship."This special missile created hell for the Americans, and they fled,” he said.Central Command acknowledged the attack but reported no damage.On September 8, the Guard announced it had captured a US Dive-LD underwater drone. It now plans to reverse-engineer it.
Washington’s doctrine under strainThe US Navy built its fleet for a different war. It is planned for open oceans and a peer rival. Its Aegis destroyers carry layered interceptors.Its carriers project air power far beyond the horizon. In Hormuz, that architecture meets an enemy that refuses to fight on its terms.Washington has cycled through approaches.It imposed a blockade of Iranian ports on April 13. It launched Operation Project Freedom on May 4 to escort shipping, then halted it within days.It reinstated the blockade on July 14 after the truce collapsed.Analysts now believe helicopters, fighters and surface drones shield tankers in nighttime convoys.The USS Theodore Roosevelt is heading to the region.In early September, Central Command struck Iranian oil tankers after the Guard fired ballistic missiles at a US carrier and destroyer.Paul Viscovich, a retired Navy commander, delivered the bluntest verdict in the Centre for International Maritime Security’s journal."Iran has met America’s great power forces and methods with asymmetric tactics the US Navy and Marine Corps were unprepared to counter,” he wrote.His remedy is to pair warships with cheap, expendable unmanned systems. That shift takes time Washington may not have.
The arithmetic of denialOfficial words have not matched official numbers. Hegseth complained in March that "when a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front-page news”.Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick later claimed: "There haven’t been American deaths.”President Donald Trump called the conflict "small potatoes”.The record says otherwise. The Pentagon’s own database lists at least 19 dead, 11 of them from hostile fire.On September 18, The Washington Post reported that five US officials put the toll at no fewer than 22. The sixth said 23.The public database then showed 18. Hegseth answered with an all-caps post: "This is DISGUSTING and FAKE.”The delays tell their own story. Joan Crenshaw worked on the casualty system during the war on terror."We got it very quickly,” she recalled.A current official told The Intercept that today’s lags blend incompetence with deliberate slow-walking.Damage to bases followed the same pattern.For months, the Pentagon played down the February 28 strike on Navy facilities in Manama.Then acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao conceded that Iran "blew the hell out of Bahrain”.
The ghost of the starkThe Gulf has seen this before. On May 17, 1987, an Iraqi jet fired two Exocet missiles into the frigate USS Stark. Thirty-seven American sailors died.Washington named them, mourned them, and blamed Tehran for the climate that killed them.A year later, in Operation Praying Mantis, the US Navy sank an Iranian frigate and a gunboat in a single day. The losses were public. So was the reckoning.Thirty-nine years on, the strait has turned against American power. Iran cannot defeat the US Navy at sea. It does not need to. It needs only to make every transit costly and every loss deniable. Washington has handed Tehran the second half of that strategy by concealing its own wounds.A great power that cannot count its dead cannot weigh its war. The Gulf states whose ports and revenues depend on Hormuz deserve the true ledger. So do the families of the sailors and Marines who pay it.
• The writer is a prominent news anchor, programme presenter and media instructor.