Iran’s Deadly Mistake: Why 11 Attack Boats Couldn’t Stop This Destroyer

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]At 06:31 hours on May 5th, 2026, 11 Iranian Boghammer fast attack boats emerge from the shadow of Larak Island at 70 knots. Not one, not three, 11.

[00:00:12]Each carrying a two-man crew, a 23 mm auto cannon, and shoulder-fired Misagh-3 infrared missiles. All of them heading toward a single target. One American destroyer. The USS Truxtun.

[00:00:25]What happened in the next 4 minutes is something Tehran still hasn't officially explained.

[00:00:30]But to understand why 11 boats thought they could take down the most advanced surface combatant in the world, you have to go back 6 hours. Because this wasn't a reaction. This was a trap that had been set 72 hours before a single American sailor knew it existed. The setup.

[00:00:46]Intelligence reports reviewed after the battle revealed that the IRGC Navy had pre-positioned its assets long before Project Freedom, the US Navy's mission to escort stranded commercial vessels out of the Gulf, was even announced publicly. Three layers. That was the doctrine. Surface, air, and the one nobody was supposed to see.

[00:01:07]The USS Truxtun had left Bahrain at 06:12 hours. 240 sailors, one ship, heading straight into the throat of the Strait of Hormuz. 34 km of the most contested waterway on the planet, closed since February 28th, the day the war started. Tehran had been watching for 4 hours before the Truxtun reached the strait. They were waiting.

[00:01:31]And now you're probably thinking, why would 11 small boats attack a destroyer worth over $2 billion? That's That's exactly the question Tehran wanted you to ask. Because the answer tells you everything about how this battle was designed. The first layer. At 06:19 hours, the E-2D Hawkeye orbiting at 22,000 ft above the Gulf of Oman picked up the first signature, a thermal bloom from the Qeshm Island coastline. Faint, fast, low. Then two more, then five. Six Iranian Noor anti-ship cruise missiles sea skimming flying at Mach 0.9 3 m above the wave tops hiding inside the electromagnetic clutter of breaking whitecaps invisible to conventional radar until it was almost too late.

[00:02:18]Inside the Truxtun's Combat Information Center, the Tactical Action Officer, Lieutenant Commander Sarah Hines, didn't wait for confirmation. She had seen this pattern in simulations 43 times.

[00:02:30]"Vampire, vampire, vampire! Multiple inbound bearing 027!" The Aegis Combat System had already computed firing solutions before any human being had consciously decided to engage. The SPY-6 radar, rotating 7.5 times per second, was painting each incoming missile with a precision that made the engagement almost mathematical. Almost. Because two of the six Noor missiles were doing something unexpected. They were turning.

[00:02:59]Not random evasion, coordinated, pre-programmed terminal maneuvering.

[00:03:04]Breaking right, then hard left, then diving to under 2 m above the water, flying in the surface clutter where even the SPY-6 struggled to maintain continuous track.

[00:03:15]The Truxtun had between 38 and 52 seconds, not minutes, seconds. Here's what nobody tells you about those seconds. Hines later described it not as chaos, but as a strange, terrible calm.

[00:03:29]"Everyone knew what they had to do," she said in the after-action review. "The noise was in my head, not in the room."

[00:03:36]The CIWS, the Phalanx Block 1B, capable of firing 4,500 rounds of 20-mm tungsten per minute, opened up on the lead missile at 1,100 m. It hit, but the miss distance on the second maneuvering missile was 280 m. Close enough to feel.

[00:03:57]Close enough for every sailor on the port side to watch a streak of orange light cross the horizon at eye level and disappear into the sea.

[00:04:07]One of the six made it through the outer ring. That's the moment nobody talks about. At 0624 hours with one missile still inbound and 240 sailors holding their breath, an MH-60R Seahawk helicopter, call sign War Dog 7, was already airborne. The pilot, Lieutenant James Cooper, said afterward that he saw the missile before his radar did. It was below my rotor wash level. I don't know how to explain that. It was just there.

[00:04:33]War Dog 7 fired two AGM-179 missed. The second detonated the Noor at 340 m from the Truxtun's hull. The shockwave cracked the co-pilot's helmet visor. Both air crew were uninjured. On the Truxtun's flight deck, sailors found Iranian missile fragments, Iranian steel.

[00:04:54]340 m from home. The first layer had failed. So, Iran activated the second.

[00:05:00]The information war.

[00:05:01]Before the debris from the Noor had even settled on the water, Iranian state TV was already broadcasting that a US warship had been struck by two missiles and forced to retreat.

[00:05:14]The boats hadn't even launched yet. That tells you something important. The 11 Boghammers weren't just a military weapon, they were a media weapon designed to force American sailors into an impossible choice. Engage and risk killing someone Iran could later call a civilian, or hold fire and let them close the distance.

[00:05:34]The IRGC boats began broadcasting on international maritime distress frequencies the moment they left Larak Island, a legal gray zone, a trap inside a trap. This is where the battle shifted from kinetic to cognitive. The 11 boats At 06:31 hours, the Hawkeye called the contact 11 Boghammar fast attack boats in a fan formation spreading across the choke point like fingers closing around a throat. 70 knots, weapons mounted, moving fast. Not in a line, in a fan designed to surround, to complicate firing solutions, to make every engagement a potential international incident. The Iranian commanders knew the rules of engagement as well as the American ones, better in some ways, because they had written the trap around them.

[00:06:27]For approximately 7 minutes, the USS Truxtun faced a choice that no simulator had fully prepared anyone for.

[00:06:35]And then, the Apaches arrived. The response: two AH-64E Apache attack helicopters from the USS Tripoli reached the strait at 06:38 hours operating at the edge of their fuel range. The AN/ASQ-170 targeting system on the Block 3 Apache can distinguish a man with a weapon from a man without one at 4 km at night through rain. In the daylight of the Hormuz morning, it could read the intent on every Boghammar deck before a single trigger was pulled. What the crews saw eliminated any ambiguity. Weapons mounted, active, moving fast toward one American ship. At 06:41 hours, the engagement began.

[00:07:22]Boat one, gone. Boat two, gone. Boat three and four, simultaneous Hellfire strikes, 30-mm chain gun follow-up. By boat six, the remaining five turned and ran, dropping their radio transmitters into the sea as they fled south toward Iranian territorial waters.

[00:07:42]11 boats had come for one destroyer. Not one made it back, but Iran wasn't finished. At 0702 hours, as the Truxtun completed its transit and the first commercial vessel, a Maersk ship, the Alliance Fairfax, trapped in the Gulf since February, began its outbound passage, a flash message arrived from UAE defense coordination. Fujairah was burning. Iran had launched a drone strike on the Fujairah oil industry zone, the UAE's largest fuel storage facility. At almost exactly the same time, the Boghammer boats were engaging the Truxtun in the strait. This was not random. It was designed to send a message that no radar system and no Apache helicopter could intercept. We cannot stop your destroyer, but we can make your victory expensive. Two workers were injured. The fire burned for 11 hours. The global oil market felt it within the hour. And then, the pause. On May 6th, less than 24 hours after the battle, President Trump announced a temporary halt to Project Freedom operations. The White House cited great progress toward a possible final agreement with Iran.

[00:08:55]CENTCOM stood down the escort operations. In Tehran, state TV ran footage of the Fujairah fires on loop.

[00:09:03]In the strait, 200 commercial vessels remained stranded. Sarah Hines, the tactical action officer who called the first vampire warning at 0619, was eating breakfast in the wardroom when the stand-down order came through.

[00:09:18]She didn't say anything for a moment.

[00:09:20]Then she looked at the officer across from her and said, "Still here?" That's all. "Still here."

[00:09:26]Here's what the numbers actually say.

[00:09:29]Iran sent 11 boats to sink one American destroyer. The math didn't work out for them. Six boats are at the bottom of the Strait of Hormuz. Five ran.

[00:09:40]The USS Truxtun is still sailing. One Maersk ship is on its way home. Iran claims five civilians were killed.

[00:09:48]CENTCOM says six IRGC vessels. The difference has never been officially resolved. What has been resolved? The most contested 34 kilometers of ocean on the planet were crossed by one American destroyer under fire on May 5th, 2016.

[00:10:06]11 boats tried to stop it. Key Ron didn't expect this. They should have.

[00:10:11]The strait is quiet again today, but 200 ship