Iran says it recovered US Navy Dive-LD undersea drone at Strait of Hormuz; CENTCOM cites malfunction

Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said on 8 September 2026 that it had recovered a United States Navy uncrewed submersible at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz, and released video showing the vehicle on a barge. The vehicle was identified as an Anduril Dive-LD, a large autonomous underwater vehicle. The United States military and the manufacturer both confirmed the loss, while giving an account of how it occurred that differs from Tehran's.

The Dive-LD is built by Anduril Industries, a California defense company. It is 5.8 m (19 ft) long, about 2 m in diameter and weighs roughly 3 tons. Its missions include mine countermeasures, seabed mapping, intelligence gathering and the inspection of undersea infrastructure such as cables and pipelines. According to Anduril's website, the vehicle can operate for up to 10 days without returning to base and is designed to dive to depths of up to 6,000 m. In US Navy service the type is operated by Unmanned Undersea Vehicle Group 1 and its Undersea Vehicle Squadron 3; the first vehicles were delivered to the group in 2025.

The IRGC, through the Iranian state media outlet Tasnim, announced the capture, identified the vehicle as a Dive-LD and published footage of it aboard a barge. A US Central Command spokesman, a Navy captain, said the vessel had been surveilling regional waters and had "malfunctioned more than a day ago", adding that it "neither collected sensitive data nor carried any classified sonar or radar equipment". The Pentagon characterized the vehicle as defective and as an older model. Iran's account of how it obtained the vehicle and the US account of a malfunction followed by a recovery are not the same claim, and neither side has reconciled its version with the other's.

Anduril confirmed the loss of a Dive-LD operating in the region. "Dive-LD is an attritable autonomous system, meaning it is designed from the outset to operate in dangerous environments where loss of the vehicle is an expected possibility," the company said. "Its purpose is to keep warfighters out of the most dangerous parts of the undersea mission."

GlobalMilitary.net records the incident as a navy event dated 8 September 2026: a US Navy Dive-LD, captured, Strait of Hormuz. It follows a run of US uncrewed losses in the same theater. Three MQ-9 Reaper drones have been shot down over or beside the strait since the start of August 2026 — on 3 August, on 14 August over Qeshm Island in Hormozgan Province, and on 31 August — while a fourth was lost on 1 September over Khomein, in central Iran. Across 2026 as a whole, GMN's event log records 50 US uncrewed airframes lost, all tied to the 2026 Iran conflict; 48 of those were MQ-9 Reapers.

The Dive-LD joins a small group of large uncrewed maritime vehicles documented on GMN:

• the US Navy's Orca extra-large uncrewed undersea vehicle;
• the US Navy's Sea Hunter uncrewed surface vessel;
• Australia's Ghost Shark extra-large autonomous underwater vehicle.

Iran also has a long record of seizing merchant vessels in and around the strait; the most recent tanker seizure GMN logs there is that of the tanker Talara off Khor Fakkan in November 2025. The naval and aerial incidents in the waterway, including the Reaper shootdowns and this recovery, are compiled in GlobalMilitary.net's Strait of Hormuz activity tracker.

The IRGC video shows the vehicle in Iranian hands; neither Tehran nor Washington has said what will become of it. GMN's naval events log will carry any further detail either side releases on the circumstances of the loss.