{"id":229379,"date":"2026-07-30T15:26:12","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T15:26:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/229379\/"},"modified":"2026-07-30T15:26:12","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T15:26:12","slug":"airpower-opened-irans-skies-why-hasnt-it-reopened-hormuz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/229379\/","title":{"rendered":"Airpower opened Iran\u2019s skies. Why hasn\u2019t it reopened Hormuz?"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth testified<\/a> before the Senate last Tuesday, he came ready to defend his claim of a \u201chistoric and overwhelming victory<\/a>\u201d over Iran. His scorecard was familiar: Iran\u2019s navy sunk, its missiles buried, its defense industrial base \u201calmost completely destroyed,\u201d and its military \u201cset back not just years, but likely decades.\u201d <\/p>\n

Senators kept asking the obvious question: If Iran\u2019s military had suffered such a decisive defeat, why was it still firing on US bases and commercial shipping? Whereas Hegseth measured success by the destruction accomplished, the senators saw the disruption that continued.<\/p>\n

That gap is the puzzle at the heart of Operation Epic Fury. Traditional airpower won the air war everyone expected it to win. It destroyed<\/a> much of Iran\u2019s air force, rolled back air defenses, achieving air superiority in the high skies and striking at will. And still, for months, that air superiority could not keep the Strait of Hormuz<\/a> open. Iranian drones and missiles have struck more than thirty<\/a> commercial vessels, keeping both warships and merchant shipping out of a waterway the United States dominated from high above. That is the paradox for current airpower theory to explain.<\/p>\n

Retired Lt. Gen. David Deptula, responding in these pages<\/a> to our July 2 commentary<\/a>, never answers that question. He changes it\u2014from why winning the war of destruction did not reopen the Strait to whether the \u201cair littoral\u201d is a legitimate label. His objection comes down to one claim: that nothing about Operation Epic Fury requires rethinking the Air Force\u2019s concepts of airpower. But the war says otherwise.<\/p>\n

The concept he dismisses\u2014the air littoral\u2014answers the question he avoids. The United States controlled the high altitudes over Iran, but that control did not extend downward\u2014and the two are not the same fight. Traditionally, winning air superiority has been a contest of destruction<\/a>\u2014find the enemy\u2019s aircraft, radars, and air defenses, destroy or degrade them, and the integrated system collapses.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The contest for the air littoral follows a different logic. There is no integrated system to collapse, only cheap, dispersed drones and missiles in the thousands. That is why the air war over Iran never reopened the Strait: In limiting its concept of air superiority to the blue skies, the Air Force abdicated its responsibility to control the air domain for the joint force.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Instead of contending with this new operational reality, Deptula attempts to argue it away. \u201cRenaming low-altitude airspace does not create a new domain,\u201d Deptula writes. US doctrine already recognizes that control of the air extends \u201cfrom the surface upward,\u201d and that threats at every altitude may belong to a single coordinated attack, he notes.\u00a0 The air littoral, he concludes, is a \u201cmade-up division of the air domain.\u201d<\/p>\n

But he mistakes the concept of the air littoral for an altitude. Whether the air littoral is a separate domain is beside the point, and not an argument we made. When we introduced<\/a> the term in Parameters in 2021, we defined it, drawing on the accepted maritime littoral<\/a> concept, as the airspace that \u201cmust be controlled to support land and maritime operations and can be supported and defended from the air and\/or the surface.\u201d Like the maritime littoral, the air littoral does not create a new domain but names the seam where domains interact to produce distinctive operational dynamics. Deptula can reject the terminology, but he cannot ignore the facts\u2014the seam is real.<\/p>\n

This is more than a semantic debate. Ideas shape how services think about their primary domain, what they plan for, and ultimately what they buy. Traditional airpower built its concept of control on responsive presence\u2014aircraft cannot permanently stay overhead, so airpower substitutes speed for persistence. From that follows a core tenet of doctrine: air superiority is temporary and local, achieved where and when it is needed rather than maintained everywhere at once. But that holds only if its advocates are right about where and when air superiority will be contested.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The war showed the consequences of being wrong. Cheap, expendable systems have moved the fight downward, into the air littoral. By treating air superiority there as unachievable, or as someone else\u2019s problem, the Air Force failed to build and field the capabilities modern air superiority requires. Traditional airpower was right about the nature of control and wrong about its location. It prepared for the contest it knew how to win rather than the one that decides the campaign.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s Air Force is beginning to recognize that seam, even if Deptula does not. Its 2025 Doctrine Advisory, Control Below the Coordinating Altitude<\/a>, acknowledges that operations in low-altitude airspace present distinctive command, control, and coordination challenges. That is an important step, but Operation Epic Fury suggests that this framing understates the problem. Inexpensive drones, precision-guided munitions, advanced sensors, and increasingly autonomous systems have dramatically increased the density and persistence<\/a> of military activity in that seam, and the challenge of controlling it.<\/p>\n

The Strait of Hormuz is where that significance became undeniable. Deptula calls its closure a \u201cjoint maritime-security problem,\u201d and says we err by attributing it to \u201cthe failure of American airpower.\u201d The campaign was unquestionably joint. But that does not answer the central question: Did the joint force gain sufficient control of the air to restore freedom of navigation through the Strait against Iran\u2019s drones and missiles? The answer is no\u2014and by the Air Force\u2019s own definition.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Air superiority is meant to enable<\/a> operations across the entire joint force\u2014not just the aircraft overhead. The continuing threat<\/a> from Iranian drones and missiles kept the US Navy from escorting commercial shipping through the Strait. By that standard, the joint force lacked air superiority exactly where and when it needed it most. Whatever else the campaign was, it was also an airpower failure.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This is not the first time the traditional view of airpower has misjudged this problem. Six years ago in these pages, Deptula expected<\/a> a campaign \u201cmodeled after the decisive take-down of Iraq\u201d in 1991 to deliver \u201cthe collapse of Iran\u2019s economy, negation of their military, denuding of their nuclear programs, and choking of their regional influence.\u201d All of it, he promised, would come \u201cin short order without any US boots on the ground,\u201d so long as the US Air Force has the right mix of fifth-generation aircraft. Two months before the start of Operation Epic Fury, he wrote<\/a> in Air & Space Power Journal that Israel\u2019s 2025 campaign <\/a>had \u201cdispelled the supposition that air denial strategies render air superiority obsolete.\u201d If he was right, Iran\u2019s drones and missiles should not have been able to close the Strait. Yet they did.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There was no quick, decisive victory. Iran can reconstitute its nuclear program<\/a>, with most of its highly enriched uranium believed to remain underground. Iran held on to as much as 70 percent<\/a> of its missile stockpile. And air denial<\/a> closed the Strait for months. It barely and briefly reopened after Washington accepted a framework agreement<\/a> on Iran\u2019s terms, and it is now effectively closed<\/a> again. This was not for want of fifth-generation aircraft or flawed execution, but because the assumptions underlying traditional airpower ignored the seam where this war was decided.<\/p>\n

Deptula charges us with applying a \u201cdouble standard,\u201d crediting Iran\u2019s successes to airpower while blaming America\u2019s failures on airpower as well. But our standard is the same for both sides. Airpower includes the drones and missiles Iran used to disrupt shipping, just as it includes the capabilities the joint force lacked to prevent that disruption. Whether those capabilities belong to the Air Force, Navy, or another service is beside the point. When US forces, including drones<\/a> and Shahed clones<\/a>, destroy Iranian aircraft, missile launchers, or air defenses, those are rightly celebrated as airpower successes. The same standard applies when Iranian missiles and drones deny freedom of action to the joint force.<\/p>\n

Deptula titled his commentary \u201cAltitude is not strategy.\u201d On that point, he is right; we never argued otherwise. We named a seam US adversaries are exploiting\u2014and will keep exploiting until it is closed. For most of airpower\u2019s history, control of the air meant defeating enemy aircraft and integrated air defenses. The Air Force remains unmatched in that traditional contest. Today, however, control is also decided in the air littoral,where masses of mobile, low-cost, unmanned, and increasingly autonomous systems\u2014modern airpower\u2014can deny<\/a> the joint force freedom of maneuver.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Operation Epic Fury forced this challenge into the open, and Deptula\u2019s framework leaves it unanswered. To reject the air littoral, and the value of air denial<\/a>, Deptula must explain how the US military can dominate the blue skies over Tehran and still lose the airspace that mattered most. The air littoral is the concept that explains that puzzle. Neither the defense secretary\u2019s scorecard nor Deptula\u2019s theory can account for that paradox. Both rest on a conception of airpower from a past era, when winning the blue skies was enough. For a force that has dominated the blue skies for generations, the hardest lesson may be that the decisive contest has moved below.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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

Kelly Grieco is a senior fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center and adjunct professor in the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth testified before the Senate last Tuesday, he came ready to defend his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":229380,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3],"tags":[1726,34,49,1488,20025,649,1403,101,75],"class_list":["post-229379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-iran","tag-air-force","tag-iran","tag-middle-east","tag-navy","tag-op-ed-commentary","tag-opinion","tag-pentagon","tag-strait-of-hormuz","tag-us-central-command"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/117009631242227101","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229379","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=229379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229379\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/229380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}