BREAKING: In April 2023, Iran’s navy claimed its domestically built submarine, the IRIS Fateh, detected and forced the USS Florida, a nuclear-powered Ohio-class submarine carrying 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles, to surface in the Strait of Hormuz. The US Fifth Fleet denied it ever happened. Iran played the footage on state television for weeks. The Fateh was Iran’s proof that indigenous technology could humble an American nuclear submarine 30 times its size.

Admiral Brad Cooper, CENTCOM Commander, confirmed Tuesday that the IRIS Fateh now has a hole in its side.

That is the official language. Not damaged. Not disabled. A hole in its side. The most operational submarine in Iran’s fleet, the crown jewel of three decades of indigenous submarine development, is sitting at Bandar Abbas with its pressure hull breached.

Iran commissioned the Fateh in February 2019 after a development program stretching back to 2013. Six years of sea trials. Decades of sanctions-era engineering. A 600-ton diesel-electric boat with four torpedo tubes, anti-ship cruise missile capability, mine-laying capacity, and the ability to operate at 200 meters depth for five weeks. Iran had completed the hulls for a second, third, and fourth Fateh-class boat. The entire next generation of Iran’s subsurface force was built on this platform.

That program is now a hull with a hole in it.

USNI News reports satellite imagery confirms the wreckage at Konarak and Bandar Abbas naval bases. The Shahid Bagheri drone carrier, struck within hours of Epic Fury’s opening. The IRIS Makran forward base ship, burning at its pier. Three frigates at Konarak, the Jamaran, Bayandor, and Naghdi, confirmed sunk. Seventeen vessels total. CENTCOM posted on X: two days ago Iran had 11 ships in the Gulf of Oman, today they have zero.

But here is what matters more than the ship count.

Iran’s entire Strait of Hormuz doctrine was built on asymmetric subsurface denial. Fast attack boats, midget submarines, mines, and the Fateh as the apex platform capable of launching cruise missiles from beneath the surface against carrier strike groups and tankers. That doctrine assumed the submarines would survive the opening hours of any conflict long enough to deploy into the Strait and begin interdicting shipping.

They never left port.

The Fateh was destroyed at its pier. The frigates were destroyed at their piers. The doctrine of subsurface denial requires the boats to be at sea before the first missile arrives. Every one of these vessels was caught pierside, which means either Iran did not expect the strikes or could not surge its fleet in time. Either answer is devastating.

Iran is still threatening the Strait. The IRGC declared it closed. Tankers have been hit. Insurance has been cancelled. But the weapons Iran built to enforce that closure, the weapons it spent decades and billions developing under sanctions, are burning at their moorings.

The Fateh was supposed to be the conqueror. Its name means exactly that in Farsi.

It conquered nothing. It never sailed.