U.S. uses sea drones for first strike on Iranian naval base

Three Corsair unmanned surface vessels struck a submarine and ship maintenance facility at Bandar Abbas Naval Base in Iran on July 12, U.S. Central Command said, in the first American combat use of sea drones. CENTCOM said the attack degraded Iran’s ability to keep targeting commercial shipping and released video showing the drones closing on the port.

The strike landed at a base near the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran has relied on naval assets, drones and coastal surveillance to pressure tankers and other civilian traffic. CENTCOM said the operation was aimed at weakening Iran’s capacity to attack commercial shipping and innocent civilian mariners in one of the world’s most sensitive oil chokepoints.

The attack followed a broader round of U.S. strikes on July 8, when CENTCOM said American forces hit about 90 Iranian military targets along the coast. Those targets included air defense systems, coastal surveillance assets, missile and drone storage sites, naval capabilities and military logistics infrastructure, showing a campaign that had moved well beyond isolated retaliation.

The Corsair was not a brand-new concept in U.S. service. The military had fielded the platform since March 2026, and a Corsair sea drone was used last month in a rescue mission after an AH-64 Apache crashed in the Gulf of Oman. Even so, Bandar Abbas marked a different threshold: an uncrewed vessel was used as a weapon against a fixed military installation, not as a support system or a test platform.

The strike also built on earlier U.S. use of unmanned surface craft in the region. CENTCOM had reported destroying three Iranian-backed Houthi uncrewed surface vessels in the Red Sea on June 30, 2024, a sign that sea drones were already part of active operations before the Bandar Abbas attack. After the Iranian base was hit, Iranian officials said they intercepted and destroyed an American drone in Bandar Abbas, underscoring the retaliation risk that rises once both sides begin treating unmanned systems as frontline weapons.