USS Abraham Lincoln Comes Home Claiming 64 Iranian Vessels Sunk: Do the Kill Marks Add Up?

Not on any published count. The War Zone tallied 103 drone silhouettes and 34 ship silhouettes, and later 10 submarine marks. Interesting Engineering counted 106 drones, 34 surface vessels, 23 missiles and 10 submarines, and the EurAsian Times put the total at about 174 marks. On every reading the island shows at least 26 more drone kills than the citation’s 77, 30 fewer ships than its 64, and 10 submarines the citation never mentions.

The Pentagon referred The War Zone’s questions to the Navy, which had not answered by publication. The citation covers the whole strike group, so the three destroyers that fired the Tomahawks may hold some of the drone kills, while the carrier’s painters may stencil only what the air wing claimed. Even so, a tally that moves by 30 ships depending on which wall you read is one the Navy should explain.

The citation’s 64 vessels sit inside a larger US claim. Adm. Brad Cooper, the CENTCOM commander, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on 14 May that US forces “destroyed 161 vessels in total across 16 classes of warships” in the 38-day campaign, gCaptain reported. By that arithmetic the Lincoln group claims four of every ten Iranian hulls lost.

The frigate IRIS Dena was torpedoed by a US submarine on 4 March about 20 nautical miles south of Sri Lanka; Sri Lanka’s deputy foreign minister put the dead at 80 of a crew of about 180, Naval News reported. Cooper said on 11 March that the last of four Soleimani-class missile catamarans was gone, “an entire class of Iranian ships now out of the fight,” Military Times reported. The Dena is a submarine’s kill; the citation does not say which of the rest the group claims.

So the 34 frigate-shaped silhouettes and the citation’s 64 vessels are mostly something smaller. Before the war the IISS counted roughly 126 patrol boats and small surface ships for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy, on top of a speedboat fleet that published estimates put anywhere from 1,000 to several thousand. Sixty-four is a believable count of fast attack craft, dhows and minelayers, not of warships.

The submarines are the hardest marks to credit. Hegseth declared Iran’s submarine force gone on 19 March, putting Tehran’s fleet at 11 boats, yet the Nuclear Threat Initiative had estimated 23 Ghadir-class midget submarines alone in September 2025, 19FortyFive noted. One Ghadir was still hanging from a gantry at Bandar Abbas when three Corsair attack drone boats hit it on 12 July, Naval News reported. Ten submarine silhouettes on one carrier, against a citation that lists none, is a claim with no public hull-by-hull accounting behind it.

Lincoln left San Diego on 21 November 2025 for a routine Pacific deployment and was redirected to the Middle East, where it flew from the first day of Epic Fury and then helped enforce the blockade of Iranian ports that Hegseth called ironclad. The deployment was extended twice. Stars and Stripes counted 286 consecutive days at sea without a port call and 40 days of continuous combat before USS George Washington relieved the ship in August.

The length is fleet arithmetic rather than choice. USS Gerald R. Ford set the modern record at 326 days when it returned to Norfolk on 16 May, and Lincoln stayed until a relief could reach the region. The War Zone’s carrier tracker on 30 September listed four carriers deployed, three in maintenance and the rest working up; USS Dwight D. Eisenhower finished a 15-month yard period in April and will not deploy until 2027. Tehran’s reaction to a third US carrier heading for the region came as that fleet had almost nothing in reserve.

Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao told Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand that eight strike-group sailors attempted suicide during the cruise. Ford went into Norfolk Naval Shipyard, where WHRO reported the Navy is testing whether a yard commanded by an admiral can clear a deferred-maintenance backlog more than a decade old. Lincoln will need its own yard period, taking a second carrier out of the rotation while USS George H.W. Bush and George Washington cover the Middle East.