How the Art of Asymmetric Naval Warfare Impacts the U.S. War in Iran
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With Countries Such as Ukraine and Iran Adopting Guerilla-Scaled Military Tactics, Here's Why the United States Must Enact New Defensive Measures to Protect Warships
Article Written by Jett James Pruitt
The dynamics of international war are quickly evolving. The principles of asymmetric warfare—traditionally employed by resistance movements, guerilla forces, and confederated tribes dating back to Roman antiquity—are increasingly being adopted by nation-states in counteracting more powerful combatants.
Most recently, Iran demonstrated this by inhibiting lane traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a 21-mile waterway comprising approximately one-fifth of global oil and natural gas supply, as a means of applying economic and diplomatic pressure on the United States to end hostilities following the start of Operation Epic Fury. While the Trump administration swiftly responded by instituting a counter-blockade, the United States’ operational reach is nevertheless constrained by Iran leveraging a crucial chokepoint as a military tactic. As of this writing, the U.S. and Iran have yet to reach a permanent ceasefire.
There is no doubt the United States remains a military titan across air, land, sea, and cyber domains, and Operation Epic Fury has been successful in achieving stated objectives such as eliminating the top echelons of Iranian leadership and eroding the country’s missile, nuclear, and industrial production capabilities. However, ongoing tensions between the United States and Iran over control of the Strait of Hormuz illuminates how the US Navy must supplement its symmetrical capabilities (e.g., the ability to form blockades and counter-blockades) with tailored reforms that meet the evolving nature of interstate conflict. Under this framework, the US Navy must adopt the following three strategies to ensure its primacy over the maritime domain in ensuing decades.
Strategy 1: Embed counter-drone (C-UAS) technology on ships.
The rapid proliferation of first-person-view (FPV) drones spurred by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have permanently reconfigured battle dynamics in favor of asymmetric entities on sea. As of this writing, there has been modest progress in upgrading warships with C-UAS technology, with the USS Carl M. Levin carrying a new Coyote launcher system that reportedly doubles the capacity for missile storage from four to eight capsules. The navy also continues to employ conventional anti-aircraft weaponry such as ESSM and SM-G6 missiles.
However, these high-cost, high-energy systems are no longer enough in protecting US assets from versatile threats such as cyberattacks and unmanned drones. As naval warfare adopts an asymmetric dimension, the key to America’s future success on the sea will be an emphasis on precision, rather than power alone.
More concretely, navy strategists and engineers must further develop small and low-cost C-UAS devices that target a drone’s radio and cyber frequency, instead of merely shooting it down. A promising technology that may fulfill this need is the Detachable Drone Hijacker (DDH), a prototype developed in 2022 designed to render a drone useless by severing the internet connection between the device and its point of origin. The DDH costs approximately $250 and weighs 457 grams, thereby closing the ‘affordability gap’ between expensive conventional weapons and inexpensive civilian-grade drones.
US Marine Corps Captain Christian Thiessen, co-inventor of the DDH, commented to U.S. Navy News in April 2026: “The US builds extraordinary high-end platforms like the Ford-class aircraft carrier, F-35, or MQ-9. However, as we are seeing in the current wars in Iran and Ukraine, these high-end platforms are increasingly vulnerable to asymmetric attacks from distributed, low cost, unmanned systems.” He added “technologies like the DDH can help counter those threats in a scalable and cost-effective way.”
Therefore, in addition to embedding high-energy systems such as the Coyote launcher platform, America must methodically install cyber and radio-based C-UAS prototypes (including but not limited to the DDH) on as many deployed ships as possible. The ultimate goal of this initiative is to wean America off the practice of using shotguns and medium machine guns to interdict drones, which often risks collateral damage and poses a hazard to servicemembers. This particular tactic should only be deployed in the future as a method of last-resort.
Strategy 2: Force the asymmetric opponent to fight America's style of war, not the other way around.
In land warfare, asymmetric combatants are tasked with lulling the more powerful opponent into a protracted conflict, as well as induce a state of apathy, exhaustion, or uncertainty among conventional forces, by targeting supply depots and communication nodes to grind down operations. The impact of a Fabian Strategy is amplified when guerilla fighters successfully conceal or disperse their movement from sophisticated radar and satellite technology. The US Navy must hedge against this by compelling asymmetric entities to expend a disproportionate number of resources and personnel in one place advantageous to the fleet’s immediate needs. The fleet would subsequently ward off the attack, track the source of the ambush, and then eliminate the threat. This tactic can be summarized by the acronym LWT: lure, withstand, and target.
In order to accomplish this, the US Navy must prioritize concentrating combat operations within a compact, yet strategically-selected space, rather than sprawling assets over a large distance that can be targeted individually by guerilla forces. Recently, President Donald Trump announced the planned development of a new battleship protype that would be armed with hypersonic missiles, rail guns, laser platforms, and counter-drone technology. While the Navy still needs time to procure some of these technologies, and construction of the USS Defiant is not set to begin until the early 2030s, this project is nevertheless a step in the right direction by embedding powerful technologies in a smaller number of warships.
In symmetric naval warfare, the quantity of ships is typically a more important factor to the outcome of the battle than the quality of vessels. This dynamic is flipped in asymmetric combat, in which a more powerful belligerent such as the United States must be impenetrable from low-grade attacks before they accumulate in damage.
The underlying principle is naval commanders must tempt the asymmetric opponent to expose their vulnerability and then exploit their misstep, as well as design the fleet in a manner in which low-scale attacks can be compartmentalized and eliminated, piece by piece.
Strategy 3: Deploy espionage to sow division among the asymmetric opponent.
A central pillar of guerilla warfare is to sap the will of the larger opponent through mobility and operational speed. Given asymmetric techniques are increasingly employed by national or government-affiliated entities, it is crucial for the United States to devise novel methods of impairing the mobility of both government and non-state opponents. Since it would be unwise to strain resources in an attempt to eliminate all guerilla cells and units simultaneously, the best method to impair mobility is to utilize AI-powered intelligence operations to undermine cohesion and provide false information to unit leaders regarding the location of warships and personnel.
The US Navy partially fulfills this function via the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), which is tasked with collecting and analyzing information that aids decision making among unit commanders and protects fleets from potential threats. The ONI’s focus on the location and movement of vessels and military assets is suitable for symmetric naval warfare, but less effective for combating an irregular opponent. In the future, the ONI must expand its offensive capacities and enact new techniques to penetrate, and subsequently sabotage, the psyche of guerilla forces. As such, intelligence operations in naval warfare can no longer be predominately conceived in terms of ships, equipment, and radar systems; they must evolve to infiltrate the group-specific norms and jargon of each guerilla unit.
Overall, the United States Navy is in an exceptional position and remains the world’s most formidable maritime force. However, we cannot allow hubris or overexcitement to prevent the implementation of essential reforms that not only address immediate security concerns, but also lay the groundwork for the US to win future naval conflicts against a range of potential asymmetric adversaries such as Russia, Iran, Cuba, Belarus, and North Korea, as well as parastate entities such as Hezbollah, Hamas, Al-Shabab, the IRGC, and the Houthis. The tit-for-tat exchange of attacks between the U.S. and Iran further illustrate that America must expand upon its existing symmetric capabilities to avoid a stalemate in future conflicts.
As exemplified by Ukraine halting Russia’s presence in the Black Sea despite not even having a naval branch to begin with, no opponent is too small to outflank a titan. America’s sea titan, therefore, cannot remain idle in responding to naval warfare’s new asymmetric nature.
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Jett James Pruitt is a Native American, Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of the bestselling book THROUGH THE EYES OF A YOUNG AMERICAN. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of TheGenZPost.com and a political strategist specializing in Generation Z voter trends. He is currently a B.A. International Politics student at The University of London Institute in Paris. His next book, THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE: What America's Political Parties Must Do To Win Over Generation Z, will be released in major bookstores worldwide early 2027.
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