As the conflict extends toward a third week, an arsenal of attack drones and ballistic missiles has helped make Tehran unlike any adversary the US has faced.
When the first cruise missiles began detonating inside Iran, the strikes had all the hallmarks of previous successful US military campaigns — unstoppable, overwhelming force delivered without warning.
But as the conflict extends toward a third week, the US war effort is showing unexpected signs of strain against an adversary whose military budget is smaller than the GDP of Vermont — but which has an arsenal of missiles and drones unlike anything the US has ever faced.
US forces have been forced to dig deep into inventories of expensive, hard-to-replace interceptors to counter the Iranian barrage. Even with the Pentagon saying Iran’s attacks are down more than 80%, hard-to-spot anti-aircraft missiles have prevented the total aerial dominance Washington is accustomed to.
“The United States led the long-range precision strike revolution, and this is the first war where we’re seeing the adversary have that kind of capability,” said Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center. “It’s putting stress on the system that we haven’t seen before.”
Tehran is still hitting valuable military installations and energy infrastructure across the Mideast daily, part of its strategy to raise oil prices to economically punishing levels. A strike in the United Arab Emirates near one of the world’s biggest oil refineries halted operations there Tuesday. The following day, the UK navy said three commercial ships had been struck by “projectiles” in the Strait of Hormuz and Persian Gulf. President Donald Trump has warned Iran against placing mines in the strait after reports that it had done so.
Iran spent years building its missile and drone arsenals, spreading them around the country and concealing them. Some of its sophisticated ballistic missiles — perfected with designs and technology from China, Russia and North Korea — have broken through US allies’ defenses across the region. Low-cost Shahed-136 drones have forced the US and its allies to use protection systems designed primarily to combat more advanced weapons.
The US Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain has been struck by several ballistic missiles and Shaheds, a rare and expensive early warning radar in Qatar was destroyed, and the radar for a $300 million THAAD battery — the most advanced ground-based mobile missile defense system in the US inventory — was hit in Jordan.
“It’s a race to see will our inventories get low before the Iranian missile inventories get low,” said Mark Cancian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
US officials insist that’s a contest Iran can’t win, but every day that Tehran’s weapons continue to threaten populations, military bases and oil installations across the Middle East, they ratchet up the political pressure on the White House. Leaders around the world are rushing to ensure oil supplies, with the International Energy Agency announcing the largest release of oil reserves in its history.
With oil prices spiking to the highest level in four years on Monday, Trump signaled he may be looking for an off-ramp from the conflict, providing some reassurance to financial markets. But the next morning, Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth said the US was delivering its most intense strikes of the war so far.
“We’re crushing the enemy in an overwhelming display of technical skill and military force,” Hegseth said. “We will not relent until the enemy is totally and decisively defeated.”
On Wednesday, Trump said, “We’re not finished yet,” but offered no specific timeline for how long the conflict will last.
The US hasn’t provided an estimate of how much the campaign is costing, but discussions of as much as $50 billion in additional funding are already underway in Congress. The Washington Post reported Pentagon estimates put the US tab at about $5.6 billion for munitions alone in just the first two days of the war. German defense giant Rheinmetall AG put the total value of munitions used by the US in the first 72 hours at $4 billion, including about 400 cruise missiles and 800 air defense interceptors.
Public data on missile stockpiles on both sides are limited.
Trump, saying US inventories “are not where we want them to be,” met with defense-industry executives Friday to come up with ways to boost production. But the closed-door meeting resulted mainly in confirmation of existing plans — which will take years to deliver results — according to official readouts. And the administration has yet to ask Congress for supplementary funding for the war.
If the war continues at this intensity, the US may be forced to pull hard-to-replace missiles from other regions. South Korea’s president sought to reassure officials Tuesday that the country’s defenses remain strong amid unconfirmed reports the US was pulling out its anti-missile systems. Already, Australia said that it will supply the UAE with advanced air-to-air missiles, useful for downing Shaheds. It is also sending an E-7A Wedgetail surveillance plane to the region, which will help provide early warning of Iranian attacks. Ukraine has offered drone-defense systems to help protect US forces, as well.
Just after US and Israeli strikes began on Feb. 28, Iran launched more than 300 ballistic missiles at targets around the Gulf, along with streams of Shahed one-way attack weapons.
Before the war, Iran had about 2,500 ballistic missiles, with ranges from a few hundred kilometers to more than 2,000. So far, it’s fired about 700. That arsenal could be exhausted in a matter of weeks, according to people familiar with the matter, but strikes with Shaheds could continue indefinitely, as the weapons don’t need much launch infrastructure and can be manufactured more easily than complex ballistic missiles.
Estimates of Iran’s Shahed inventory vary widely. More than 2,100 Shaheds have been fired so far, according to Bloomberg reporting. US and Israeli air strikes have reduced the country’s ability to produce more, but stockpiles remain and manufacturing them requires no complex components. A senior European official said strikes have disrupted the organization and coordination needed for large-scale manufacturing.
Still, the weapons are basically a fiberglass body with a motor, basic guidance, and explosives, meaning they can be assembled at a speedboat-repair facility, for example, according to a person familiar with Iranian drone manufacturing.
Although they are commonly referred to as drones, Shaheds are small, slow cruise missiles that are easy targets if they’re spotted.
But they are also cheap, with cost estimates running from $20,000 to $50,000. The high-tech Patriot PAC-3, which Ukraine has used to great effect against Russian attacks, costs about $4 million apiece.
The US and others have developed cheaper ways of downing Shahed-type weapons and small drones, including electronic warfare, automated cannons, lasers and helicopters.
But small numbers of these systems left many Shaheds to be shot down by missiles, and air defense doctrine calls for using more than one missile on most targets. In the United Arab Emirates alone, more than 1,000 Shaheds were used in attacks in the war’s first six days, compared with about 200 ballistic missiles.
The result: The US and its partners in the Gulf most likely burned through well over 1,000 PAC-3 interceptors alone. That’s almost twice the annual production of the weapons and more than the US and its allies have supplied to Ukraine since the Russian invasion four years ago, according to Kyiv. Officials there have been astonished at Gulf states deploying PAC-3s to bring down low-cost drones.
The US is ramping up production of interceptor missiles, but factories making the complex munitions have limited capacity. Lockheed Martin Corp., which makes the PAC-3, plans to increase output to more than 2,000 a year, but only by 2030. For this year, the company aims to make about 650.
The Defense Department is spending $93 million to replace as many as 10 SM-6 naval air defense missiles. Another $225 million is set aside to increase production of both those and SM-3 missile interceptors, made by RTX Corp’s Raytheon unit, from 96 to 360 annually. But that will take years. After years of underfunding missile purchases, not all the money for the added capacity has yet been approved by Congress.
In addition to running down supplies of interceptors, Iranian strikes have also taken a toll on the radars and other equipment used to direct them. One attack damaged a radar for a THAAD, an air-defense system of which the US has only 8 deployed around the world. The radar that was hit in Jordan is the first such loss in combat.
“It’s very expensive, it’s very high end,” William Alberque, a Europe-based senior fellow at the Pacific Forum, said of the THAAD radar. “I’m less concerned about that in terms of overall regional capabilities, but in terms of global capabilities that’s a huge blow to us.”
Just how much longer Iran will be able to keep up the daily attacks around the region isn’t clear.
Attacks against Iran’s missile launcher inventory have most likely made it difficult for Iran to fire its remaining ballistic missiles. Israeli officials have said at least two-thirds of Iran’s launchers had been destroyed.
“I think the regime will continue to conduct infrequent but steady missile and especially drone attacks,” said Jeffrey Lewis of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California. “And then the Trump people are going to have a big choice. Do they escalate by getting involved on the ground? Or do they negotiate a settlement that allows them to declare victory?”
Another type of Iranian missile — unlike anything in Western arsenals — is posing an unexpected threat to US aircraft.
Iran’s 358 surface-to-air missiles have a small, mobile launcher but are guided by infrared seekers. They can hit targets at altitudes up to 25,000 feet and because they have no radars, aircraft will have no warning they are being tracked until the missile is launched. They were a threat to US planes in last year’s campaign over Yemen.
This time, they’ve contributed to the US’s inability to establish the total control of the skies it enjoyed in other big conflicts like the Iraq war, known as air supremacy.
In Iran, US officials say they’ve only been able to attain “air superiority” — a significant advantage over the enemy but not total freedom of operation — and then only in some areas.
But localized superiority does not mean risk has been eliminated. The US has lost at least seven uncrewed MQ-9 Reapers since combat began, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The Reaper losses show that Iran’s military still poses a threat to air operations. Last week, Hegseth said the US and Israel should have air supremacy within days.
The US hasn’t lost any planes or helicopters to Iranian fire so far, although three US F-15 Strike Eagles were shot down in Kuwait by what the Pentagon said were friendly missiles.
Israel said it had shot down an Iranian jet over Tehran, the first time an F-35 had destroyed a crewed plane in combat. Qatar said it shot down two Iranian Su-24 strike aircraft.
Unable to fully control the skies early on, the US has had to use more of its advanced missiles that can be fired from a distance, so-called standoff weapons. Heavy reliance on those has also taxed allied inventories.
The first 100 hours of the war may have used hundreds of Tomahawk missiles, which can fly more than 1,000 miles and hit targets just a few meters wide.
Such weapons are crucial to fighting more advanced adversaries like China, as are the stealthy JASSM cruise missiles and the Precision Strike Missile, a new ballistic weapon with a range of a few hundred miles that was used in combat for the first time.
Such “high-demand, low-density” precision munitions have a history of production challenges, said Elaine McCusker, a former deputy comptroller at the Pentagon in the first Trump administration.
Fewer than 100 Tomahawks are produced per year — meaning it could take years to replace those fired in the Iran operation.
The US has begun to use closer-range weapons as Iran’s air defenses have been worn down. Air-dropped bombs such as Joint Direct Attack Munitions, or JDAMs, offer precision targeting and relatively low cost: tens of thousands of dollars per bomb compared with more than $1 million each for a cruise missile. JDAMs are plentiful too, with estimates of more than 500,000 in the US arsenal.
Leaning on long-range strike weapons also requires excellent intelligence to ensure the right target is hit without a pilot to directly observe it. Early in the fighting, a school in Iran was destroyed by a missile near a military base, killing more than 150 children.
Trump, who earlier blamed Iran for the strike, said Monday it was being investigated.
For the moment, Trump’s hints about a possible end to the conflict have taken some of the pressure off the oil market. But he’s also warned that the US might deploy special operations forces to Iran, escalating risks dramatically. And oil executives in the region warn that continued Iranian strikes could do unprecedented damage to the industry, with unpredictable implications for the world economy.
“The US appears to have underestimated Iran’s tolerance for pain and its ability to inflict it in return,” said Ankit Panda, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “There’s still tremendous uncertainty about how this progresses from here.”
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