The US military used explosive unmanned boats in combat for the first time, according to US Central Command, sending three one-way attack surface drones against Iranian naval targets at Bandar Abbas Naval Base on the night of July 12.
CENTCOM, the command that runs US military operations in the Middle East, posted video of the attack and said it showed three drones exploding after moving toward an Iranian midget submarine and a ship maintenance facility. The command described the operation as the first combat use of sea drones by American forces.
The mechanism is blunt: an unmanned surface craft carries explosives to a target and detonates. CENTCOM called the boats “one-way attack surface drones,” which is the antiseptic military label for a weapon designed to be expended rather than recovered.
USNI News, the news service of the nonprofit US Naval Institute, reported that the boats made a “low-speed, uncontested approach” before detonating. USNI News also identified one target as a Ghadir-class Iranian midget submarine that was out of the water and hanging from a gantry at the time of the strike.
The public record described by CENTCOM and USNI News does not give a full damage assessment. It also does not say how the drones were guided, where they were launched from, or whether Iranian forces attempted to stop them. Those are not small omissions. For surface drones, the hard parts are finding the target, keeping control of the craft in a contested environment, and getting close enough before defenders shoot, jam, or ram the thing.
The strike marks a delayed American entry into a type of naval attack that others in the region had already shown off. Iranian and Houthi forces demonstrated explosive drone boats nearly a decade earlier, according to the report. The US use of similar weapons against Iranian naval infrastructure turns that playbook back toward one of its early adopters.
Bandar Abbas is one of Iran’s major naval bases, and the targets named by CENTCOM were military, not commercial shipping. The disclosed strike therefore sits in a narrower category than the drone-boat attacks that have alarmed merchant operators elsewhere: a military-on-military use against naval hardware and maintenance facilities.
The novelty here is institutional as much as technical. The US military has long operated unmanned aircraft and underwater systems, but CENTCOM’s statement says American forces had not previously used explosive surface drones in combat. With this attack, that line has been crossed, and the Navy now has a battlefield example of a cheap-looking weapon class that can force expensive defenses to pay attention.
This story draws on original reporting from Ars Technica.
