Is Iran Navy 'lying at the bottom of sea’? Debunking Trump administration's most repeated lie

By Mohammad Molaei

There is something darkly comic about the consistency with which Washington has declared Iran's navy destroyed. US President Donald Trump has made the claim of Iran’s Navy being “at the bottom of the sea” many times in the past three months.

Trump’s War Secretary Pete Hegseth promised to "annihilate" it on day one of the 40-day war of aggression. Secretary of State Marco Rubio elevated its destruction to a primary stated war objective. CENTCOM commander Admiral Brad Cooper stood before cameras and declared that "not a single Iranian ship" remained "underway in the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, or the Gulf of Oman."

And yet, weeks later, Iranian naval forces were patrolling the strategic waterway in full force. Months later, Ghadir-class submarines were surfacing in formation inside the Strait of Hormuz. And the strait itself – the waterway whose reopening was supposed to serve as living proof of Iran's naval defeat as the enemy claimed – remains closed to normal commercial traffic to this day. The body of a Navy pronounced dead, repeatedly and loudly, refuses to stop moving.

What was targeted and what was not

Let’s examine the numbers Washington loves to cite. CENTCOM reported at least 17 Iranian ships destroyed or sunk in the opening weeks of the 40-day imposed war. By April, Trump was claiming 158 destroyed vessels and a navy "annihilated." Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US military General Dan Caine said the US had "effectively neutralized Iran's major naval presence in the theater."

Here is what Washington is very deliberately not saying: nearly every ship that was found, targeted, and sunk belonged to the conventional surface fleet of the Islamic Republic of Iran Navy. The frigates, the corvettes, the vessels anchored at known ports, visible to satellite imagery, trackable by intelligence assets that had been watching them for years, were targeted.

Iran's actual maritime deterrence, however, was never built around those ships – not primarily. An honest assessment shows Tehran has spent three decades designing a naval strategy premised on exactly one assumption: that in any war with a big power, its conventional surface fleet would be destroyed. The doctrine was built around what survives that destruction and still fights. What survives is the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps Navy (IRGC) – and the 40-Day imposed war has done nothing to change that.

The naval architecture they couldn't kill

The IRGC Navy doesn't look like a navy in the traditional sense, and that is entirely the point. It has no aircraft carriers or guided-missile cruisers. What it does have is swarms of small, fast attack craft: hundreds of them, equipped with anti-ship missiles, capable of hiding in coastal inlets, among fishing fleets, and within the traffic of commercial ports.

From the air, at speed, with limited engagement windows, distinguishing a missile-armed IRGC speedboat from a fishing vessel is genuinely difficult for the most advanced navies. Destroying them comprehensively, over a 40-day war, is functionally impossible, as per military experts.

Then there are the shore-based anti-ship batteries – Noor, Qader, Khalij Fars – embedded into the mountainous Iranian coastline that runs the length of the strait's northern shore. These systems have been hardened, dispersed, and continuously upgraded for over thirty years.

They are not sitting in open fields, waiting to be photographed and struck. They are in tunnels, in caves, on mobile launchers that can move and re-hide between sorties. Even the American military, with its unmatched ISR capabilities, could not find and destroy them.

And then there are the mines. Before the war, some analyses assessed roughly 6,000 naval mines. They can be laid by small craft, by dhows, by modified commercial boats – vessels that look like everything else on one of the world's busiest waterways.

The Wall Street Journal reported that more than 60 percent of the IRGC fleet assigned to patrol the Strait of Hormuz remained intact after six weeks of imposed war.

That is the fleet that lays mines, boards ships, and turns the strait into a gauntlet. Sixty percent of it is still there. The "destroyed" navy Washington keeps announcing is the small fleet that was never the primary threat in the first place, as military experts assert.

First question: If the navy is gone, why won't the carriers come in?

This is the simplest test – and the one no American official, including Trump and Hegseth, is willing to address directly. Naval supremacy means you can go where you want with your ships. If your adversary's navy has been annihilated, you sail into their waters. You do not stay 300 kilometers away and call it a blockade.

Not a single American carrier strike group entered the Persian Gulf during the entire Ramadan War. The offensive operations – the airstrikes, the so-called blockade, everything – were conducted from the Arabian Sea, the Gulf of Oman, and the Red Sea.

Professor Alessio Patalano of King's College London, a man with no particular affection for the Iranian position, said it plainly: blockade operations began "farther from Iran" specifically to "prevent Iran from immediately bringing its advantages of small craft and short-range weaponry into play."

That is a Western academic, describing American naval posture, and saying that the US positioned its ships at a distance specifically to avoid Iran's "small craft and short-range weaponry." That is an acknowledgment, from a Western pundit, that those weapons remain a credible threat. It means the US military calculated that entering Iranian engagement ranges carried a serious risk and decided not to.

The USS Abraham Lincoln conducted its blockade enforcement operations in the Arabian Sea, a body of water that is not the Persian Gulf, is not the Strait of Hormuz, and is not anywhere near the Iranian waters that Iran has closed and patrolled throughout this war.

The Persian Gulf itself – the one Iran formally closed on March 2 – has not seen an American carrier inside it during the entire war. That fact alone, stripped of all rhetoric and spin, tells you more than any Pentagon claim.

Second question: If the threat is gone, what happened to USS Ford?

In mid-March 2026, a fire broke out aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford, the most expensive warship ever built, valued at $13 billion, and the most technologically advanced aircraft carrier in any navy in the world.

The initial US Navy statement was brief: the blaze was contained, two sailors sustained minor injuries, and the ship remained "fully operational." That is the standard Pentagon damage-management language.

Then CNN obtained footage from inside the ship. What that footage showed was not a contained dryer fire. It showed rows of bunks melted into twisted metal frames. Deformed bulkheads. Exposed wiring hanging from burned ceiling panels. Structural sections of the interior were completely gutted. The fire burned for more than 30 hours. The ship's fire suppression system failed, forcing the crew to fight it manually through the night.

Six hundred sailors lost their sleeping quarters. One of them told CNN, anonymously: "I seriously thought we were going to lose the ship." The Ford was pulled from combat and sailed to Souda Bay in Crete for repairs. The USS George H.W. Bush was deployed as a replacement.

The official version attributes this to a dryer fire in the laundry room. But the physics does not agree with that conclusion. A dryer fire, caught in a damage-control environment on a combat-deployed carrier with a trained crew and a functioning suppression system, does not produce 30 hours of uncontrolled burning.

It does not produce structural hull deformation, the kind visible in the CNN images, where internal steel has warped from sustained, intense heat. A dryer fire does not displace 600 sailors. It does not send the world's most advanced aircraft carrier to a repair port while a replacement is rushed in.

The Ford was operating, during this period, under what its own Presidential Unit Citation describes as "persistent threat from enemy missiles and one-way attack drones."

The same sailor who spoke to CNN described how, when the ship was in the Red Sea, the crew would be told to "expect to get hit and do damage control" when Iranian munitions appeared on the horizon.

A navy whose adversary had been destroyed does not receive those alerts. It does not sail under persistent threat. It does not send its flagship to Crete for repairs. These things do not happen in the operational environment of a defeated enemy, and yet they happened.

Third question: If the submarines were sunk, what fired at the Burke?

Here is where the narrative becomes particularly difficult for Washington. The Ghadir-class submarines are small – roughly 117 tons submerged – domestically produced, diesel-electric boats purpose-built for exactly the kind of water the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz represent: shallow, temperature-layered, and acoustically complex, saturated with noise from dense commercial shipping.

Standard anti-submarine warfare procedures, developed for the deep-water environments of the Atlantic and Pacific, work poorly here. The Persian Gulf's physics degrade sonar performance entirely.

What the Ghadir does in this environment is sit on the bottom and wait. Naval analysts call this "bottom-rest" concealment: the submarine settles onto the seabed, shuts down non-essential systems, and becomes acoustically indistinguishable from the surrounding geology.

An active sonar ping from a passing destroyer may return nothing useful. The submarine is, for practical purposes, invisible until it chooses not to be. This is not a theoretical capability. The 2010 sinking of the South Korean corvette Cheonan by a North Korean midget submarine in similar waters killed 46 sailors and definitively demonstrated that small coastal submarines in their optimal environment can sink ships built by far richer navies.

On May 10, 2026, well after Trump had declared the Iranian navy “annihilated,” Iranian Army Navy commander Rear Admiral Shahram Irani publicly confirmed that Ghadir-class submarines were deployed in the Strait of Hormuz under combat readiness conditions.

During a naval exercise that day, several Ghadir boats surfaced simultaneously in formation inside the strait, then submerged and returned to patrol. Between 14 and 20 remain operational, according to reporting from Army Recognition. These submarines also carry the Jask anti-ship cruise missile, tested from a Ghadir-class hull in 2019, meaning their threat extends beyond close-range torpedo ambush to standoff engagement.

The torpedo warning shots fired by Ghadir submarines at an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, compelling the American ship's retreat, serve as a direct operational demonstration of the logic these boats were designed for.

A destroyer in shallow water, with degraded sonar coverage, no reliable bottom picture, and a 117-ton submarine somewhere beneath it: the crew made the sensible decision.

What that decision tells us is that the "destroyed" Iranian submarine fleet was not, in fact, destroyed. Something fired those torpedoes. Something forced that retreat. That something is the Ghadir fleet that Washington said no longer existed.

Fourth question: Then why isn't the Strait open?

This is the one the markets answer every day: shipping insurance premiums remain at crisis levels. This is the one Lloyd's List answers every time it reports another vessel bypassing the route. The Strait of Hormuz, the waterway that carries roughly 20 percent of the world's seaborne oil, whose closure triggered a global energy crisis, is not open.

The IRGC closed it formally on March 2. The US launched a full-fledged campaign to reopen it on March 19. Then it imposed a naval blockade on April 13. Then it committed carrier strike groups, destroyers, minesweepers, Marine units, and years' worth of precision munitions to forcing a different outcome.

As of this writing, the strait remains a zone that commercial shipping avoids, insurance companies price as a war zone, and tanker operators treat as a corridor of unacceptable risk.

Rubio stated in Senate testimony on June 2 – months after declaring the Iranian navy gone – that Iran has "mined large segments of Hormuz" in international waters. CENTCOM's own operational parameters for the blockade explicitly exclude the strait itself: the blockade covers Iranian ports "inside and outside of the Strait of Hormuz, but not the strait itself."

Washington is blockading a waterway it declared open, from a safe distance, while the IRGC continues laying domestically produced Maham-3 and Maham-7 mines inside it and conducting attacks on merchant vessels. Twenty-one confirmed IRGC attacks on commercial shipping were reported. Twenty-six vessels were bypassing the blockade, per Lloyd's List data. Iran also seized two cargo ships in retaliation for US maritime banditry and piracy.

This is the operational picture of a force that absorbed real losses, adapted to them within days, and returned to executing its core mission, control of the strait, through exactly the instruments a 40-day bombing campaign could not destroy.

Why Washington keeps saying it anyway

The claim that Iran's navy has been destroyed is not, at its core, an honest and fact-based military assessment. If it were, it would have been quietly corrected weeks ago, when the operational evidence made it untenable.

It persists because it is political communication crafted for a domestic American audience that was promised a clean, decisive, and professionally executed military campaign, and that is owed a continuous narrative of success, regardless of what is happening in the Strait.

The problem is that this particular lie has a very short shelf life in the information environment, according to experts. Allied governments – Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Persian Gulf states – have their own intelligence services and their own pictures of what is happening in the Strait of Hormuz. These pictures resemble a force that has taken losses, adapted, and continues to operate with enough effectiveness to deny freedom of navigation in the world's most consequential maritime chokepoint.

Every day the strait stays closed; every day a tanker captain reroutes around the Cape of Good Hope rather than risk the Strait of Hormuz; every day the Ghadir fleet patrols beneath the surface of waters that American carriers will not enter, the official American narrative takes another hit, one it cannot absorb forever.

Mohammad Molaei is a Tehran-based military affairs analyst.

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