{"id":187754,"date":"2026-07-02T15:29:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-02T15:29:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/187754\/"},"modified":"2026-07-02T15:29:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-02T15:29:08","slug":"iran-was-the-most-successful-failure-in-us-airpower-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/187754\/","title":{"rendered":"Iran was the most successful failure in US airpower history"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nestled inside the four months since the United States launched attacks on Iran was six weeks of the most intensive air campaign since the \u201cshock and awe<\/a>\u201d opening of the Iraq invasion. Yet the deal it produced, while still in final negotiations, seems to be a draw at best and, in many ways, favors Iran. Threatening to resume the bombing, as President Donald Trump has done several times, misunderstands why.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The US was engaged in two air wars simultaneously \u2014 one of destruction, and one of disruption. It lost the one that mattered most.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The first \u2014 the air war of destruction \u2014 centered on the US and Israel seizing the airspace high above Iran and exploiting it to strike at scale. Above 20,000 feet, where stealth and precision-guided munitions decide outcomes, the US military performed exactly as designed. It achieved air superiority<\/a> over large swaths of southern and western Iran, degraded air defenses, sank much of Iran\u2019s traditional navy<\/a>, and damaged elements of its missile and drone capabilities<\/a>. The war of destruction was measured in targets (DMPIs, or \u201cdesired mean points of impact\u201d in military parlance) hit and capabilities destroyed. By those metrics, the US won.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Yet Iran managed to keep the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed. A second\u00a0air war \u2014 a\u00a0war not\u00a0of\u00a0destruction\u00a0but\u00a0of disruption, imposing psychological and economic costs until the fighting became politically unbearable \u2014 decided that.\u00a0<\/p>\n

From the first day of this conflict, Iran\u2019s drones and missiles\u00a0were aimed not at preventing American air superiority over\u00a0Tehran, but at\u00a0making it beside the point.\u00a0Having largely ceded the higher altitudes, Tehran shifted its military effort downward, to the air littoral<\/a> \u2014 the low-altitude airspace \u2014 over and around the Strait of Hormuz, where inexpensive drones and missiles proved sufficient<\/a> to make the world\u2019s most important energy chokepoint too costly and dangerous to transit, for commercial vessels and the US Navy alike.<\/p>\n

Put another way: Iran did not need to win the war of destruction. It needed to make winning it not feel worth it to the US.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Tehran\u2019s strategy rested on a simple asymmetry: Populations tolerate<\/a> acute devastation better than chronic and increasing inconvenience. For Iran, fighting an existential war, devastation was something to be endured \u2014 martyred leaders\u00a0and generals,\u00a0bombed airfields, and sunk ships\u00a0only hardened<\/a> regime resolve.\u00a0For the US, with more limited interests at stake, inconvenience became something to escape.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When American airpower failed to open the chokepoint closed by Iranian airpower, the US expanded to a broader campaign of economic pressure. The naval blockade<\/a> on Iranian oil exports sought to impose reciprocal pressure on Tehran\u2019s economy and achieve leverage the air war of destruction had not. But the blockade became a time horizon contest, and the US was not positioned to win it. Intelligence assessments concluded<\/a> Iran could endure the blockade for at least 90 to 120 days, if not longer, while political and economic pressures \u2014 from American consumers<\/a> watching gas prices rise, European and Asian governments<\/a> calculating the cost to their economies, and Gulf states<\/a> quietly asking Washington how long this would go on \u2014\u00a0 continued to accumulate.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Iran\u2019s primary weapon\u00a0of disruption\u00a0was\u00a0the Shahed<\/a>\u00a0drone. By American standards,\u00a0it hardly rates; it\u2019s slow,\u00a0low-flying,\u00a0easy to shoot down,\u00a0and costs\u00a0tens of thousands of dollars\u00a0rather than\u00a0hundreds of millions. Yet\u00a0these drones\u00a0destroyed much more expensive radar and command and control facilities<\/a>, disrupted\u00a0oil production<\/a>,\u00a0and struck ports<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0airfields<\/a>\u00a0across the region.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Iran did not stumble into this. It tested and refined\u00a0the approach\u00a0for years through\u00a0Houthi attacks in the\u00a0Red Sea<\/a> and militia operations<\/a> in Iraq \u2014 learning how cheap, expendable systems could impose disproportionate costs. It watched $20,000 drones<\/a> prove their value when it\u00a0supplied them to Russia. By the time this conflict began,\u00a0Iran\u00a0already knew what worked.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The threat forced\u00a0American forces back \u2014 and that itself was\u00a0a\u00a0measure of Iran\u2019s success.\u00a0In 2003,\u00a0the\u00a0bulk of US combat and support\u00a0aircraft\u00a0were forward deployed<\/a> in Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia,\u00a0while\u00a0carriers\u00a0operated\u00a0from the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf.\u00a0That has\u00a0changed with this war against Iran.\u00a0The threat of Iranian strikes shifted<\/a> command of operations away from the Combined Air Operations Center at Al Udeid, while\u00a0carriers, stealth\u00a0fighters,\u00a0and tankers were increasingly pushed back to Israel<\/a>, Jordan<\/a>, and the Arabian Sea<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The US could still\u00a0strike\u00a0targets across Iran from those distances.\u00a0What\u00a0it could not do from\u00a0those distances\u00a0was police\u00a0a\u00a021-mile\u00a0strait. Keeping shipping\u00a0lanes\u00a0open requires persistent, close-in coverage \u2014 forces positioned near enough to detect and\u00a0respond\u00a0before a threat arrives. A drone launched from the Iranian\u00a0coast\u00a0can reach an oil\u00a0tanker in minutes.\u00a0The US military is not postured for the war of disruption.<\/p>\n

Closing that gap would require capabilities the US has\u00a0systematically deemphasized\u00a0or never developed, such as\u00a0aircraft\u00a0with large magazines\u00a0that loiter\u00a0for\u00a0long\u00a0periods\u00a0at\u00a0relatively low\u00a0altitudes, mobile air defenses,\u00a0and\u00a0mass-produced weapons to\u00a0defend\u00a0ships\u00a0against incoming drones and missiles.\u00a0These are precisely the capabilities\u00a0Iran\u2019s war of disruption\u00a0demanded. They are precisely what\u00a0the US could not bring to bear at scale.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Every day the\u00a0strait remained closed strengthened Iran\u2019s argument about which air war\u00a0mattered. War-risk insurance for transits effectively collapsed, leaving hundreds of ships<\/a> stranded in the Gulf.\u00a0The world\u2019s most powerful military could strike targets across Iran\u00a0but\u00a0could not guarantee the safety<\/a> of one of the world\u2019s most important waterways. Iran had found a way to achieve\u00a0global\u00a0impact\u00a0with\u00a0local weapons.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

That is the central lesson of this conflict. Decades of procurement choices optimized for the war of destruction \u2014 long-range precision strikes, stealth, and the ability to dismantle integrated air defenses from a distance \u2014 have left a gap in the US ability to wage the close-in, attritional fight. What the US lacks is the ability to produce large numbers of inexpensive systems near the surface, where persistence and mass matter more than survivability and range. LUCAS \u2014 a copy of Iran\u2019s own Shahed design \u2014 points in the right direction, but a $30 million<\/a> contract producing hundreds of drones still leaves the US outmatched against adversaries like Iran producing tens of thousands.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Fixing that means prioritizing procurement choices the Pentagon has resisted: drones with long on-station times, platforms with deep magazines, mobile air defenses, and mass-produced interceptors cheap enough to field at scale.<\/p>\n

But the deeper problem is conceptual. The US entered this conflict with a detailed plan for the war of destruction and no serious plan for the war of disruption. It approached Iranian missiles and drones as a nuisance<\/a> to be managed while the real campaign proceeded overhead. That miscalculation created air superiority over Tehran but failed to defeat the adversary where it actually mattered. The next time it will be no different unless fighting the war of disruption becomes part of the primary planning scenario, not an afterthought to the one the Pentagon prefers to fight.<\/p>\n

The framework agreement now being worked out is a measure of which air war mattered more. Trump\u2019s threat to hit Iran \u201cvery hard again, only harder\u201d misses the point. The US air campaign did not fail because it was not intense enough. It failed because it prioritized the air war that did not decide the outcome. More bombs will not win the war that mattered.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The question was never who controls the skies over Tehran. It\u00a0was always who\u00a0wins the war of disruption below them.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Maximilian K. Bremer, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel,\u00a0is a nonresident fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center and head of Mission Engineering and Strategy for Atropos Group.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Kelly A. Grieco is a senior fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center and adjunct professor\u00a0in\u00a0the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nestled inside the four months since the United States launched attacks on Iran was six weeks of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":187755,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3],"tags":[1726,18158,34,20025,212,11847,101],"class_list":["post-187754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-iran","tag-air-force","tag-air-power","tag-iran","tag-op-ed-commentary","tag-operation-epic-fury","tag-shahed","tag-strait-of-hormuz"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116851098420622098","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187754"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187754\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/187755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}