By Robbin Laird
The destruction of the IRIS Shahid Bagheri by U.S. Central Command strikes removed from the Iranian order of battle one of the most conceptually significant vessels in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy’s inventory.
The ship was not a blue-water combatant in the conventional sense. It carried no heavy missiles in the fashion of a cruiser, no strike aircraft in the fashion of a fleet carrier, and no submarines in its battle group. What it carried was something arguably more suited to contemporary conflict: a mixed force of unmanned aerial vehicles, loitering munitions, and electronic warfare systems, mounted on a converted container ship and capable of operating continuously across the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, and the Gulf of Aden for months at a time.
Understanding what Bagheri was, what it carried, and what its operational geometry looked like is essential to understanding both the scale of what was lost to Iran and the broader logic of how the IRGC-N was restructuring its approach to maritime power projection.
The Shahid Bagheri began its operational life as the Perarin, a Hyundai-built container ship approximately 240 meters in length with a beam of roughly 32 meters and a displacement in the range of 42,000 tons. Those dimensions place it firmly in the category of a large commercial vessel, which was precisely the point. Converting a container ship rather than constructing a purpose-built naval vessel allowed Iran to field a mobile aviation platform rapidly and at substantially lower cost than any purpose-designed warship of comparable capability would have permitted.
The conversion added an angled flight deck running approximately 180 meters of the ship’s length, together with a ski-jump ramp at the forward end. The ski-jump is a detail worth pausing on: it is a feature associated not with helicopter operations or drone launches from catapults, but with short-takeoff aircraft, a strong indicator that the ship’s designers anticipated eventually operating heavier fixed-wing assets or larger UAVs with conventional takeoff profiles, even if the current air group remained lighter.
The IRGC publicly claimed an endurance figure of 22,000 nautical miles and a sustained on-station capability of up to one year without refueling. Whether those figures hold under operational load with a full air group embarked remains unclear, but even substantially discounted, they describe a vessel capable of sustained global-range deployment in a way that none of Iran’s conventional surface combatants can approach.
The ship also accommodated electronic warfare and signals intelligence suites, making it a mobile collection platform as well as a strike enabler. In that role Bagheri was less analogous to a carrier in the Western sense and more to a forward deployed command-and-sensor node capable of extending Iran’s maritime domain awareness far beyond its coastal defenses while simultaneously cueing and directing the UAV elements it carried.
The Air Group: A Mixed UAV and Helicopter Force
Assessing the precise composition of Bagheri’s air group requires working from open-source imagery analysis and specialist assessments rather than official Iranian disclosure, but the picture that emerges is consistent across multiple independent evaluations. The ship operated a mixed force rather than a single dominant system, reflecting the same logic of heterogeneous UAV employment that Iran has applied across its land, air, and proxy force operations.
Among the documented or strongly assessed types, the JAS-313, an unmanned derivative of the Qaher-313 manned fighter project, figures as an ISR and light strike platform. The Mohajer-6, Iran’s most operationally mature armed ISR UAV with a combat radius on the order of 200 kilometers and the ability to carry guided munitions, provides a proven organic strike capability at operational range. The Ababil-3 adds endurance-focused ISR at shorter range. Deck and runway geometry analysis by open-source analysts suggests the ship can accommodate larger systems: the Shahed-129, the Gaza, and the Kaman-22 have all been assessed as plausible air group elements, with folding-wing configurations enabling efficient below-decks stowage.
The loitering munition question is the most operationally significant one.
While Iran has not formally confirmed the carriage of Shahed-136 or Shahed-131-class one-way attack drones aboard Bagheri, the combination of the ship’s published mission set, deck dimensions, and Iran’s broader operational doctrine makes their presence highly plausible. The Shahed-136, which Ukraine and its partners have documented extensively in the European and Black Sea theaters, carries a quoted range of up to 2,000 to 2,500 kilometers depending on profile and payload. A ship loaded with multiple dozens of such systems, positioned in the northern Arabian Sea, represents a qualitatively different threat calculation than the same drones launched from Iranian territory.
Manned rotary-wing asset have been listed as part of Bagheri’s complement. These provide organic search and rescue, transport, and close-in reconnaissance capabilities, giving the ship a degree of self-sufficiency that a pure UAV platform would lack. They also enable the ship to conduct boarding operations or humanitarian projection if required by IRGC messaging priorities.
Operational Geometry: Moving the Launch Point Forward
The strategic logic of Bagheri was not that it extended drone range in an absolute technical sense. A Shahed-136 launched from Iran’s coast has the same quoted range regardless of whether the launch platform is a truck in Chabahar or a ship at sea.
What Bagheri did was move the launch point itself. That distinction is operationally fundamental.
Iran’s coastline runs along the Persian Gulf and the northern Gulf of Oman. For a drone launched from those positions, the principal targets reachable at maximum range are within the Middle East and parts of the Arabian Peninsula. The Strait of Hormuz and the approaches to the Gulf represent the outermost boundary of easy Iranian reach. The Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, the broader Indian Ocean, and any shipping routes connecting Europe and Asia via Bab el-Mandeb require either very long range systems or precisely what Bagheri was designed to provide a mobile forward base that repositions the launch point many miles closer to those targets.
Positioned in the northern Arabian Sea or in the Gulf of Aden, Bagheri placed a full air group of Shahed-class drones and MALE UAVs within reach of the critical chokepoints at Bab el-Mandeb and the southern Red Sea, the shipping lanes carrying hydrocarbon exports from the Gulf to Asian markets, and the reverse flow of container and bulk cargo from East Asia and South Asia to Europe. These are among the highest-value maritime corridors on the planet. Disrupting or threatening them imposes economic pressure on actors far removed from any bilateral conflict between Iran and a specific adversary, giving the IRGC leverage that its conventional naval forces cannot generate.
The IRGC’s own public statements went further, framing Bagheri’s potential operational reach as extending from the Indian Ocean through to the Mediterranean. That framing is more aspirational than operational in wartime: the chokepoints at Suez and the Turkish Straits represent hard transit barriers under anything other than permissive conditions.
But in peacetime or gray-zone operations, the range framing served a deterrence function. It told European navies, NATO maritime forces, and Israeli planners that a persistent Iranian drone carrier presence need not be geographically contained to the Gulf.
That is itself a form of strategic pressure.
Doctrinal Context: Forward Base Ships and Distributed Maritime Harassment
Bagheri was not an isolated procurement decision. It was the most visible element of a broader IRGC-N conceptual shift toward what might be termed forward base ships: large auxiliary vessels repurposed as mobile platforms capable of sustaining persistent operations at extended range from Iranian home waters. The Makran, a converted supertanker that has conducted long-range deployments including a transit to the Atlantic, and the Shahid Mahdavi, another large auxiliary with aviation and logistics capabilities, reflect the same logic.
The underlying operational concept is a distributed maritime harassment and sea-denial posture built around swarming UAVs, cruise missiles, and fast-attack craft rather than blue-water surface combatants.
Iran cannot contest naval superiority against the United States, Israel, or a coalition of Gulf partners in a symmetric fleet engagement. That has been clearly demonstrated in the current ongoing war.
Instead the IRGC-N was built to impose costs through persistence, ambiguity, and the threat of sudden, difficult-to-attribute strikes against commercial shipping, energy infrastructure, and naval logistics. A mobile drone carrier capable of loitering for months in the Indian Ocean or Red Sea operationalizes that concept at a scale and geographic range that land-based UAV forces cannot match.
This doctrinal approach maps closely onto what analysts have elsewhere described as the kill web problem for Western navies: the challenge of defending against distributed, networked threats that do not concentrate in predictable ways and that can generate targeting solutions from multiple vectors simultaneously. Bagheri, carrying EW suites alongside armed UAVs and loitering munitions, was not just a strike platform but a sensor node that could enhance the targeting quality of other IRGC assets whether proxies in Yemen, fast boats in the Gulf, or land-based missile forces in Iran itself. Its presence in a theater complicated adversary air defense planning in ways that a ship with fewer organic electronic capabilities would not.
In short, the IRIS Shahid Bagheri represented one of the more innovative responses to the problem of how a regionally constrained naval power can project meaningful maritime threat capacity at intercontinental range in an era of affordable UAVs and precision loitering munitions. The combination of extreme endurance, a mixed UAV air group that included both ISR and strike assets, organic electronic warfare capability, and the operational concept of persistent forward basing in contested maritime corridors created a platform that complicated adversary planning in ways disproportionate to the cost of the conversion.
For Western naval planners, the Bagheri episode offers a case study worth careful analysis: not only in how the threat was eventually addressed, but in how quickly a conceptually sound low-cost solution to long-range maritime drone projection can be assembled from commercial hulls and off-the-shelf UAV technology and how readily that approach might be replicated by other actors watching the results.
Its destruction also shows that it is good to have a maritime task force within which such a ship operates to have an effective service life.
But such a ship type is a gray zone enabler, notably when liberal democracies are loath to respond effectively to the provacations of the authoritarian states.
Sources:
Official and governmental sources
International Institute for Strategic Studies. The Military Balance 2024. London: IISS, 2024.
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy. “Introducing the Ocean-Going Drone Carrier Shahid Bagheri.” Video and photo releases via Tasnim News Agency, Sepah News, and Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), 2023–24.
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy. “Forward Base Ships Makran and Shahid Mahdavi in Long-Range Deployments.” Official media outputs via Tasnim News Agency and Sepah News, 2021–24.
United Nations Security Council. Report of the Panel of Experts on Yemen. New York: United Nations, 2022–24.
United Nations Security Council. Report of the Panel of Experts Established Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 2202 (2015) concerning Ukraine. New York: United Nations, 2022–24.
United Nations Security Council. Reports on Threats to International Shipping in the Red Sea, Bab el-Mandeb, and the Gulf of Aden. New York: United Nations, 2022–24.
United States Office of Naval Intelligence. Iranian Naval Forces: A Tale of Two Navies.
United Kingdom Ministry of Defence. “Operations in the Red Sea: Updates on Houthi and Iranian-Enabled Attacks Against Shipping.” Official updates, 2023–24.
Think-tank and analytical reports
Binnie, Jeremy, and colleagues. “Iran’s Forward Base Ships and Long-Range Naval Operations.” Janes Defence Weekly, various issues, 2021–24.
International Crisis Group. Iran’s Maritime Risk-Taking in the Gulf and Beyond. Middle East Report. Brussels: International Crisis Group, 2021–23.
Nadimi, Farzin. “The IRGC Navy’s ‘Mosquito Fleet’ and Its Evolving Doctrine.” PolicyWatch essays and reports. Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2016–24.
Samaan, Jean-Loup, and colleagues. “Iran’s Maritime Strategy in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.” Research paper. Rome: NATO Defence College, 2021–24.
Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Iran’s Use of Proxies and Maritime Attacks in the Gulf and Red Sea,” by Michael Knights and Alex Almeida. Policy briefs, 2019–24.
Specialist ship and UAV analyses
CSIS Missile Defense Project. “Iranian Drones: Shahed-136, Shahed-131, Mohajer-6, Ababil-3, Shahed-129, Gaza, and Kaman-22.” Missile Threat, Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2022–24.
Sutton, H. I. “Iran’s New Drone Carriers Shahid Mahdavi and Shahid Bagheri.” Covert Shores, 2023–24.
Thimio, Claudio. “Warships of the World: Iranian Drone Carrier Shahid Mahdavi / Shahid Bagheri.” NavalAnalyses, 2024.
Maritime security and commercial shipping
International Chamber of Shipping. “Security Threats in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean: Guidance to Shipping on Drone and Missile Risks.” Industry advisory, 2023–24.
International Maritime Organization. “Recommended Preventive Measures Against Unmanned Aerial and Missile Threats to Shipping in the Red Sea, Bab el-Mandeb, and Gulf of Aden.” IMO circular, 2023–24
For my latest examination of maritime operations and maritime autonomous systems, see the following:
Lessons From the Drone Wars: Maritime Autonomous Systems and Maritime Operations