Jessica Karl, Columnist

The Iran War in Five Charts

Numbers help shed light on submarine attacks, drinking water supplies, Polymarket bets and more.

March 4, 2026 at 10:47 PM UTC

By Jessica Karl

Jessica Karl is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and author of the Bloomberg Opinion Today newsletter.

Explosive.
Photographer: Handout/Getty Images Europe

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As I sipped my morning coffee, I watched a grainy, black-and-white video of an Iranian warship in the Indian Ocean get torpedoed by a US submarine. According to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the walloping, which he described as a “quiet death,” was one of the few times the US has sunk an enemy ship since World War II. It’s an impressive superlative, considering the state of America’s undersea fleet: