After the US and Iran failed to reach an agreement following 21-hour-long marathon peace talks, Iran said that the passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz will continue to be hampered until an agreement is reached.“Iran is not in a hurry and until the US agrees to a reasonable deal, there will be no change in the situation of the Strait of Hormuz,” Iran’s state-affiliated Fars News Agency reported Sunday, quoting an unnamed official.While the talks were ongoing on Saturday, the US Department of Defense said that two US Navy guided-missile destroyers had passed through the Strait as part of a “freedom-of-navigation mission” — the first time American warships managed to transit since the war began on February 28.Iran denied the claim. In an official statement on Iran’s state broadcaster IRIB, Iran said Sunday that any such attempt would be met with a “firm and forceful response”.When the war began, US President Donald Trump had said that the US was “going to annihilate” Iran’s navy. Today, Iran very much controls passage of ships through the narrow waterway — one that was open until six weeks ago — and reportedly used that as leverage in the peace talks. How is it doing so despite its “obliterated” navy? Here’s what to know.Initial onslaughtIn a fact sheet dated April 6, the US Central Command (Centcom) — whose area of responsibility includes West Asia — said that it had sunk over 155 Iranian ships.Within the first week of the war, Centcom claimed to have inflicted considerable damage on Iran’s two navies — the conventional Islamic Republic of Iran Navy (IRIN) and the one of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). In a press briefing on March 5, Centcom commander Admiral Brad Cooper said that the US had “effectively neutralised at this point in time Iran’s major naval presence in theatre”.Story continues below this adAlso read | The Iran War has been paused — it is not over. Islamabad talks can deliver a fragile adjustmentAccording to a March 5 note by the open-source defence intelligence website Janes, satellite imagery showed that nearly all of the IRIN’s major surface combatants, docked in the Bandar Abbas and Konarak naval bases, were heavily targeted when the war began.Janes said that among IRIN’s primary surface combat ships were seven Alvand/Jamaran-class frigates, four of which were likely sunk or crippled in the first week itself. Both Bayandor-class corvettes were sunk at Konarak. Other vessels that had been sunk presumably included smaller missile-armed patrol vessels and support ships.Alex Pape, head of the maritime team at Janes, told The Wall Street Journal that in total, Iran’s navy has lost six of its seven frigates, its two corvettes, and one of three oceangoing conventional submarines. US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine at the Pentagon in Washington, DC, on April 8, 2026. Caine said that the Iranian Navy “now lies mostly at the bottom of the Arabian Gulf”. Photo: AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta/FileLast week at the Pentagon, US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine said that the Iranian Navy “now lies mostly at the bottom of the Arabian Gulf”. “We assess that we’ve sunk more than 90% of their regular fleet, including all of the major surface combatants,” he said.Story continues below this adHe added that the US had executed more than 700 strikes against naval mine targets and “destroyed more than 95% of their naval mines”.Despite Caine’s claims, US officials said Saturday that Iran’s inability to open the Strait of Hormuz for more shipping traffic was owing to the fact that it does not possess the capability to locate and remove all of the mines it had laid there.Doctrine overhaulOn April 18, 1988, the US Navy sank about half of Iran’s conventional naval fleet in a single day as part of Operation Praying Mantis, which was in response to Iran mining a US warship days earlier. This prompted Iran to rethink its naval doctrine, having realised that symmetrical warfare against a bigger military power was a losing proposition.Over the next few decades, Iran veered towards asymmetrical warfare in the form of fast-attack boats, naval mines, and shore-based anti-ship missiles, besides midget submarines and unmanned surface vessels that act as floating bombs. Farzin Nadimi, a senior fellow with the US-based Washington Institute, told The Wall Street Journal that more than 60% of the IRGC’s fast-attack craft and speedboat fleet remains intact and continues to pose a threat.Story continues below this adMore in Explained | ‘Iran chose not to accept our terms’: As Vance leaves Islamabad, key takeaways from his speechThis pivot was institutionalised in the form of two distinct navies: while the IRIN remained the symmetrical force, the IRGC’s navy would be deployed as part of the asymmetrical means to disrupt naval operations of its adversaries in the Persian Gulf.Nick Carl, a Middle East expert at the conservative-leaning think-tank American Enterprise Institute, told The Washington Post that though Iran’s navies had posed a major risk to international shipping through the Strait, “it’s not the only tool on which the Iranians rely in order to disrupt maritime traffic”.Data by the global conflict monitor Armed Conflict Location and Event Data said that since February 28, there have been at least 50 Iranian attacks against shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf. According to Carl, Iran attacked commercial ships using mostly missiles and drones rather than mines or ships.All this has meant that the IRGC’s ability to choke the Strait has not been significantly impacted by the destruction of Iran’s bigger military vessels.Story continues below this adIn a piece for The Indian Express, former Indian Navy chief Admiral Arun Prakash (retired) wrote: “Its navy may have been destroyed, but the threat posed by Iran’s coastal missile batteries, drone swarms, and sea mines has been sufficient to deter all but the most desperate commercial shipping from attempting a passage through the Strait of Hormuz.”Similarly, Mike Froman pointed out for the American think-tank Council on Foreign Relations that Iran seems to have found a conventional (read, non-nuclear) way of deterring future attacks from better-equipped adversaries: weaponising the chokepoint using “relatively few missiles and drones to bring the global economy to its knees”. According to Froman, this “may prove quite difficult to suppress and can be employed, repeatedly, frequently, at relatively low material cost and without the opprobrium of becoming a nuclear proliferator”.