The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps told the Tehran-based wire Tasnim on 2 May that it is on 'full standby' for a return to hostilities and disclosed that roughly 60% of its small attack-boat fleet remains intact 1. The IRGC is Iran's ideological military, separate from the regular Artesh and tasked with revolutionary security; its small-boat flotilla is the harassment force that has worked the Strait of Hormuz since the opening days of the war. For 65 days the Guard has briefed only on operations, never on remaining capacity, so the survival figure marks Tehran's first wartime quantification of attrition.
Admiral Brad Cooper, the CENTCOM Commander, told reporters on 30 April that US operations had achieved a '100% halt' to Iran's seaborne economic trade . A halt of vessel intercepts is not a halt of the force that intercepts them, and the IRGC has made that distinction the basis of its negotiating posture. Roughly six in every ten of its asymmetric platforms still float; whatever ceasefire eventually arrives must price that residual capability in.
Tasnim, an IRGC-aligned outlet, ran the figure with no independent OSINT corroboration available; the precision of '60%' rather than 'most' or 'a majority' is itself the signal. Tehran is telling Washington, allies and Gulf insurers that the bargaining surface includes the standing capacity behind the 14-point text, alongside the text itself. The same logic explains the standby declaration: a force on declared standby raises the cost of any US escalation past the verbal threshold Trump set in his Florida pool spray. Together the announcement and the figure read as a single instrument of leverage delivered through state media rather than diplomatic cable.
