The US just used a drone boat for the first time. Everyone else got there years ago.

Three unmanned speedboats called Corsairs drove themselves into an Iranian naval base at Bandar Abbas on Sunday and blew up.

It was the first time American forces have used explosive drone boats in combat.

The target was a Ghadir-class midget submarine sitting on a maintenance gantry. Each 24-foot boat carries up to 1,000 pounds of payload and can travel 1,000 nautical miles. Video released by CENTCOM shows them making a slow, uncontested approach to the pier before detonating.

That is the news. Here is what the announcement skipped.

The technology is not new. It is not remotely new.

The first unmanned underwater vehicle was built in 1957 at the University of Washington, funded by the US Office of Naval Research. It could dive 10,000 feet.

The US Navy has had a formal plan for unmanned undersea vehicles since 1994.

Sixty-nine years after the first one launched, the world's most expensive military has used one in anger for the first time.

Everyone else got there first.

Ukraine drove Russia's Black Sea Fleet out of Crimea with drone boats improvised from jet skis and speedboats, some assembled in sheds. Not with submarines. Not with carriers. With boats that cost less than a family sedan.

In December, Ukraine hit a Russian submarine at Novorossiysk — one of the most heavily protected ports in the region — using underwater drones. Its security service called it the first operation of its kind.

Ukraine's TLK-150 undersea drone is two and a half metres long. An advanced version has a range of 2,000 kilometres and carries close to five tonnes of explosives.

Iran has been running cheap unmanned boats in the Gulf for years. The Houthis have used them against Red Sea shipping, and captured an American underwater drone in 2018.

Saronic, the Texas company that built the Corsairs, was founded because of what Ukraine did. The firm formed in response to the asymmetric effects of unmanned boats in the Black Sea.

The US Navy signed a $392 million production contract with it in December. The boats reached the Middle East in late March, and spent three and a half months on surveillance and rescue work before Sunday.

Analysts have been blunt about where that leaves Washington. The US has been behind the curve. This week is the catching up.

Then there is the man who ordered it.

Donald Trump spent years attacking Barack Obama over drone warfare and its mistakes.

In his first two years in office, Trump launched 238 drone strikes. Obama launched 186 in his.

Trump rescinded the rule requiring near certainty of no civilian deaths outside war zones. He handed strike authority back to the CIA, which, unlike the Pentagon, does not report civilian casualties to Congress. He expanded the list of countries designated active combat zones. In 2019 he scrapped the requirement to publish civilian drone deaths at all.

Airwars has suggested he may have ordered more strikes in Yemen than every previous American president combined.

The critic became the heaviest user, then turned off the lights.

Here is the part that should stop you.

While the US Navy was driving explosives into an Iranian port, the US government was busy banning camera drones.

Under the 2025 defence act, any national security agency had until December 23 to audit DJI, the Chinese company that dominates the consumer drone market.

None did. The law never named who should. DJI publicly asked to be audited and said it had nothing to hide.

The deadline passed, and the company was blacklisted by default. No finding of wrongdoing. No evidence published. No review at all.

The FCC then went further than the law required and blacklisted every foreign-made drone and critical component — the first entry of its kind based purely on where something is manufactured. DJI would remain covered even if it moved production to America.

So the machinery of the state can shut a company out of the market without reading a page about it.

What it cannot do is buy a drone boat before Ukraine does.

America's first drone boat strike is not a demonstration of technological superiority.

It is a superpower with a $368 billion submarine programme taking notes from a country that fights with jet skis.