IRGC Boats Try to Seize US Navy Drone in Strait of Hormuz, CENTCOM Destroys Two Vessels

U.S. Central Command says it destroyed two small Iranian boats on Monday, September 14, after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps tried to seize an American unmanned surface vessel patrolling the Strait of Hormuz. CENTCOM spokesman Capt. Tim Hawkins confirmed the attempt Tuesday, September 15, telling reporters, "Iranian small boats recently attempted to take possession of a U.S. unmanned surface vessel, but they were unsuccessful after CENTCOM forcefully responded." The drone, Hawkins said, "remains under U.S. operational control."

Hawkins told the Associated Press, as reported by the Times of India, that the vessel involved was a Saildrone, a roughly 25-foot autonomous craft the U.S. has used for years to monitor maritime traffic in the Gulf. He said the technology aboard is commercially available and carries nothing sensitive, and that all of CENTCOM's surface drones in the region remain accounted for.

Iranian state media offered a different account. Iran's outlets initially described the incident as a U.S. strike on civilian fishing vessels near the port city of Kargan and Larak Island in Hormozgan province, with officials reporting search-and-rescue efforts for missing fishermen, according to Fox News and Axios. CENTCOM's version and Iran's version of what happened on the water conflict directly, and neither side has produced independent confirmation settling the dispute.

A Second Drone Incident in a Week

The Monday confrontation came less than a week after Iran's navy said it recovered a U.S. Navy underwater drone near the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz on September 8. That drone, an Anduril-made Dive-LD autonomous underwater vehicle, malfunctioned during a surveillance mission, according to a Reuters report cited by Tom's Hardware. Hawkins described it at the time as an older, defective model that "neither collected sensitive data nor carried any classified sonar or radar equipment."

Anduril's own marketing tells a different story. The company promotes the Dive-LD as its most reliable and flexible large autonomous underwater vehicle, capable of operating for up to 10 days in demanding conditions. Tom's Hardware flagged a gap between how the manufacturer sells the platform and how the Navy is now describing the one it lost.

Iranian embassies wasted no time mocking the loss on social media. Iran's embassy in Ghana compared the recovery to pulling a plastic bottle out of a fishing net, calling the drone "still blinking like an idiot." Iran's embassy in Hyderabad posted, "Unboxing ceremony by our reverse engineers, tomorrow morning!"

What Experts Say Iran Is After

Cameron Chell, CEO of U.S. drone manufacturer Draganfly, told Fox News Digital the pattern looks deliberate. "These are very coordinated, absolutely deliberate drone capture missions," Chell said, arguing that even without classified data, examining U.S. hardware gives Iran "an immediate tactical advantage" by revealing how American surveillance and evasion tactics work in the theater.

Chell and other drone specialists argue that the Pentagon's insistence the lost equipment was "unclassified" or "defective" sidesteps a key point: operational insight into sensor placement, endurance and deployment patterns can be extracted from hardware regardless of its data classification.

The Pentagon's counter-argument, backed by analysts Reuters cited, is that a single malfunctioning older-model drone is unlikely to hand Iran a decisive military advantage, whatever propaganda value Tehran gets from mocking the loss. Both explanations have merit: the loss is minor in military terms, yet it still offers Iran a real intelligence-gathering opportunity.

History gives Tehran a track record here. After Iran recovered a U.S. RQ-170 Sentinel stealth drone in 2011, then-President Barack Obama publicly asked for it back, and Iran later claimed to have reverse-engineered the aircraft into its own drone designs. In 2022, Iran's navy tried to tow away an American Saildrone, prompting the U.S. to send a patrol ship and an MH-60S Seahawk helicopter to recover it.

An Unverified Claim Still Hanging Out There

Separately, Iran's state broadcaster IRIB claimed Tuesday that Iranian air defenses shot down a U.S. MQ-1 drone over the Strait of Hormuz, describing it as the third U.S. drone Iran had downed that day, a claim Al Jazeera also reported. CENTCOM has not confirmed that claim in any of the reporting available, and no U.S. official has addressed it on the record. Iranian state media has framed military incidents favorably to Tehran in the past, as seen in its fishing-boat account of Monday's confrontation. The MQ-1 claim should be treated as unverified until the Pentagon responds.

The confrontations are unfolding against a war between the U.S. and Iran that began in February, according to Fox News and Maharlika News reporting, with commercial shipping through the Strait still well below pre-war levels. Axios reports an average of 40 ships now transit the strait daily under U.S. military escort, even as oil flows remain depressed. Whether CENTCOM will publicly address the IRIB shootdown claim, and whether the Navy will disclose what, if anything, Iran actually extracted from the captured Dive-LD, remain open questions.