Islamic Republic of Iran Navy

Iran maintains two parallel naval forces with different missions, equipment and chains of command. The Islamic Republic of Iran Navy (IRIN) was the conventional service, responsible for the Gulf of Oman, the Indian Ocean and long-range deployments, while the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy (IRGCN) controls the Persian Gulf itself with swarms of fast attack craft, anti-ship missiles and mines. That structure survived decades of sanctions through domestic shipbuilding, producing Moudge-class frigates, Sina-class missile craft, midget submarines and converted tankers serving as forward base ships.

Operation Epic Fury, the American and Israeli campaign launched at the end of February 2026, fundamentally altered this picture. Strikes on Bandar Abbas, Konarak and Bandar Anzali destroyed the core of the IRIN's surface fleet within days: the Moudge-class frigates Jamaran, Sahand, Zagros, Dena and Deylaman, the Alvand-class Alvand, Sabalan and Alborz, the Bayandor-class corvettes, the forward base ships Makran and Shahid Mahdavi, and the drone carrier Shahid Bagheri. The frigate Dena was torpedoed at sea by an American submarine, one of the few blue-water engagements of the campaign, while two vessels caught outside the theatre sought refuge abroad and were interned in India and Sri Lanka.

The IRGCN fared no better in its higher-value units. All four Shahid Soleimani-class catamarans were destroyed, along with the missile craft Paykan, Joshan, Derafsh and Separ at Bandar Anzali, the command ship Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis and a number of Ghadir-class midget submarines, one of them struck pier-side by uncrewed surface vessels as late as July 2026. Western assessments put total Iranian naval losses across both services at well over a hundred vessels, effectively ending Iran's ability to operate identifiable warships in the open sea.

What remains is the asymmetric layer, which was always the more dangerous part of the arsenal. The IRGCN retains hundreds of small fast attack and suicide craft dispersed along the coast and among the Gulf islands, coastal anti-ship missile batteries, sea mines, uncrewed aerial and surface systems, and a residual submarine force. These capabilities do not require ports or large hulls, are hard to target, and were demonstrated when Guard Corps craft seized tankers in the Strait of Hormuz in April 2026, weeks after the conventional fleet had been destroyed.

Iran's operational reach has therefore contracted from the Indian Ocean deployments and Atlantic port calls of previous years to the waters it can reach from shore. Reconstitution of a conventional fleet would take a decade and industrial capacity that sanctions and the campaign's damage to naval infrastructure have degraded further. The strategic threat to shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, however, rests on mines, missiles and small craft, and that threat has not been removed.