The United States armed forces, with our Israeli allies, have devastated Iran’s regime, including its ballistic missile capabilities.
Yesterday afternoon, I posted about my skepticism of claims in a New York Times report, relying on unnamed intelligence sources, to the effect that intensive American (and Israeli) air attacks over more than a month had done little to depress Iran’s ballistic-missile capabilities. For example, the report maintained that Iran “still fields about 70 percent of its mobile missile launchers,” and had “retained roughly 70 percent of its prewar missile stockpile.” Moreover, the three Times reporters wrote:
Most alarming to some senior officials is evidence that Iran has restored operational access to 30 of the 33 missile sites it maintains along the Strait of Hormuz, which could threaten American warships and oil tankers transiting the narrow waterway.
My main counter was that, while I am in no position to contest the numbers the Times reports taking from non-public intelligence assessments, I perceived that the numbers had been spun in a way that misleadingly implied “Iran’s ready access to a robust, turnkey ballistic missile arsenal.”
Little did I know that, as I was writing about the Times article, and separately on the general state of play in the Iran war, the commander of U.S. Central Command, Admiral Charles Bradford Cooper II, was providing testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The intelligence he revealed, for the public record with his name attached to it, supports the instinct to doubt anonymous sources from a U.S. intelligence community that, as I said in the post, has a long history of getting Iran wrong and putting its thumb on the scale in favor of those (mostly Democrats and their media echo chamber) who have consistently opposed addressing the Iranian threat militarily.
Toward the beginning of his written testimony, after recounting the menace the Iranian regime has been since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s 1979 revolution, Admiral Cooper averred:
In less than 40 days of major combat operations, USCENTCOM forces systematically dismantled what Iran spent four decades and tens of billions of dollars building. The capabilities on which the regime relied to threaten our forces, coerce our partners, and project power across the region have been substantially degraded.
In later elaborating, Cooper got more specific (my italics):
In 38 days of major combat operations in coordination with the Israel Defense Forces, America’s servicemembers delivered a long-term rollback of Iran’s ability to project power in the region and beyond. Across more than 10,200 sorties and over 13,500 strikes, we targeted the full breadth of the regime’s ability to project power.
We damaged or destroyed over 85 percent of Iran’s ballistic missile, drone, and naval defense industrial base. More than 1,450 strikes on weapons manufacturing facilities set the regime’s ability to build and stockpile ballistic missiles and long-range drones back by years. The factories and technical workforce that produced Iran’s ballistic missiles, long-range attack drones, and naval platforms have been degraded to the point that Iran cannot replace its lost capabilities in the near term. We destroyed or buried much of Iran’s ballistic missiles, launcher vehicles, and long-range attack drones with more than 450 strikes on ballistic missile storage and systems and roughly 800 strikes on Iran’s drone-launching units and storage.
In the air domain, Iran’s air and air defense forces are functionally and operationally irrelevant. Before [Operation Epic Fury], the Iranian Air Force flew between 30 and 100 sorties each day. Today that number is zero. We destroyed or rendered non-mission-capable Iran’s fixed-wing airfields, hangars, fuel storage, and munitions stockpiles, and we knocked out 82 percent of its air defense missile systems along with the radar and command architecture that tied them together.
At sea, we destroyed 161 vessels in total across 16 classes of warships, effectively crippling the regime’s ability to operate. We eliminated more than 90 percent of Iran’s once-massive inventory of over 8,000 naval mines, with more than 700 airstrikes on Iranian naval mine targets. In sum, Iran’s navy can no longer claim to be a maritime power, and it cannot project into the Gulf of Oman or the Indian Ocean. Iran retains nuisance capability — harassment, low-end drone and rocket attacks, and residual proxy support — but it no longer possesses the means to threaten major regional operations or to deter U.S. freedom of action in the air or maritime domains.
The second-order effects of OEF are significant. More than 2,000 strikes against Iran’s command-and-control structures created leadership vacuums, paralysis, and internal confusion. We have seen reporting of desertions, personnel shortages, and signs of regime desperation in their attempts to compel discipline through arrest and execution. Most importantly for the region’s future: Iran will be highly challenged to proliferate advanced weapons to Lebanese Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas, or the Iraqi militia groups. The supply chain from Tehran to the proxies has been broken.
In short: in 38 days, we rolled back 40 years of Iranian military investment.
Clearly the job is not done. As I pointed out in yesterday’s first post, important objectives remain unachieved — the rabidly anti-American regime is battered but still in control of the country, and its nuclear weapons program, while substantially set back, is not destroyed (particularly in the sense that it retains masses of raw materials, much of it enriched to a point at or near what’s necessary for weapons construction). And it would be a calamity if American forces were withdrawn while Iran is exercising a chokehold on the Hormuz Strait (which it was not doing prior to President Trump’s ordering of the aerial attacks that started the war on February 28).
That said, the Iranian regime has been devastated. The implication from anonymous intelligence sources that it’s just a scratch is laughable. But it needs refuting. Admiral Cooper’s testimony shows the script is ready to hand.