The Pentagon wants you to believe the war with Iran is effectively won. Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Admiral Brad Cooper, commander of US Central Command, painted a picture of a shattered adversary. He claimed Operation Epic Fury had obliterated 90 percent of Iran’s defense industrial base and left Tehran with at most a very moderate or small capability to continue strikes. He assured lawmakers that the weapons pipelines to Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Hamas are entirely severed.
It is a comforting narrative for a domestic audience weary of surging gasoline prices and a 38-day bombing campaign that has cost billions. The only problem is that US intelligence assessments, satellite imagery, and the stubborn reality on the ground tell a fundamentally different story.
Iran is not defeated. It is pacing itself.
The Mirage of the Ninety Percent Destruction
The claim that Iran’s strike capacity is reduced to a whisper relies on a flawed military metric: counting broken concrete instead of operational behavior. While joint US and Israeli forces dropped over 18,000 bombs on more than 13,000 targets during the 40-day campaign that paused with the April 8 ceasefire, the strategic effect is far more transient than CENTCOM admits.
Central to Admiral Cooper’s assessment is the destruction of visible factories, fixed launch pads, and known supply depots. Yet, leaked CIA assessments recently briefed to the administration reveal that Iran managed to retain roughly 75 percent of its mobile missile launchers and 70 percent of its ballistic missile inventory.
Western intelligence officials estimate that the US-led coalition has confidently destroyed only about one-third of Iran’s total ballistic missile stockpile. Another third was damaged or rendered temporarily inaccessible, leaving thousands of operational missiles untouched.
The mechanism behind this survival is Iran’s vast network of hardened underground missile cities, dug deep into the mountainous terrain of the country’s interior. Satellite surveillance tracked intense US and Israeli bombardment of these facilities, achieving high hit rates on visible tunnel entrances. However, independent analysis by groups like the Royal United Services Institute reveals that Iran has systematically dug out these bombed entrances and returned the sites to full operation within hours of an attack. Penetrating these underground networks requires sustained, repetitive strikes on precise geographic coordinates, a luxury the current fragile ceasefire does not afford.
The Strategy of Aggressive Conservation
If Iran retains thousands of missiles and drones, why has its volume of fire dropped by 90 percent since the opening days of the conflict? Admiral Cooper attributes this decline to American military dominance. The truth is far more calculating: Tehran is executing a deliberate strategy of inventory preservation to fight a war of attrition.
During the initial phase of Operation Epic Fury, Iran launched upwards of 80 ballistic missiles a day. Today, it fires between 10 and 20 missiles daily, often in precise, micro-volleys of one or two weapons.
This low rate of fire is not a sign of exhaustion. It is a tactical choice designed to achieve three specific goals.
- Sustaining a Long War: Iranian planners are budgeting their remaining stockpiles to last for months, anticipating that Washington’s political will to maintain a naval blockade will fracture before Tehran runs out of ammunition.
- Complicating Western Target Acquisition: By keeping mobile launchers hidden inside caves and bunkers, only bringing them out for fleeting, shoot-and-scoot operations, Iran minimizes their exposure to American air power.
- Exploiting Cost Asymmetry: A single Iranian-manufactured Shahed drone costs approximately $20,000 to produce. Intercepting it has traditionally required a US Navy Standard Missile or a Patriot interceptor costing upwards of $2 million to $4 million.
Admiral Cooper let slip a critical admission during his testimony: American forces have stopped using high-end, multi-million-dollar munitions to shoot down low-cost Iranian drones, shifting instead to cheaper, shorter-range weapons. The Pentagon was forced to make this adjustment because its stockpiles of advanced missile interceptors were depleting at an unsustainable rate. Iran’s strategy of cost asymmetry is working exactly as designed.
The Myth of the Broken Proxy Pipeline
The claim that Iran can no longer transfer arms to its regional proxies ignores the deep decentralization of the Axis of Resistance. Over the past decade, Tehran did not just ship completed weapons to its allies; it exported the machinery, blueprints, and technical expertise required for local production.
The Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon no longer depend on a continuous, unbroken maritime pipeline from Bandar Abbas to sustain a baseline of operations. They possess their own underground assembly plants, utilizing dual-use industrial components smuggled through commercial channels long before the current blockade was established.
Furthermore, the ceasefire period has allowed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to exploit gaps in regional surveillance to reorganize its logistics networks. While large-scale convoy movements are unfeasible under the shadow of American air superiority, small-scale, dispersed smuggling via overland routes through Iraq and Syria continues to function.
The Chokepoint Lethality
The ultimate measure of Iran’s enduring capability is its ongoing leverage over the Strait of Hormuz. Despite a massive US naval presence, commercial shipping and the maritime insurance industry remain paralyzed by the threat of Iranian intervention.
While CENTCOM claims to have neutralized 90 percent of Iran’s naval mine inventory, the remaining 10 percent represents hundreds of lethal devices. More importantly, Iran has changed its tactical focus, targeting the very air defense systems designed to protect regional infrastructure.
During the opening stages of the conflict, coordinated Iranian swarms successfully targeted and destroyed an AN/TPY-2 radar array supporting a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan. By knocking out the radar, Iran effectively disabled the entire air defense system, leaving the surrounding area exposed. A subsequent Shahed drone attack on a US operations center in Kuwait on March 1 proved to be the deadliest incident for American forces in the theater, exposing deep vulnerabilities in Western defense systems that officials tried to dismiss as anomalies.
The Trump administration’s stated war aims were ambitious: permanently dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, end its capability to threaten its neighbors, and trigger conditions for regime change. None of these objectives have been conclusively met. The regime’s hardline leadership remains firmly in control, and more than 400 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity remains securely buried beneath Esfahan.
By declaring the enemy’s strike capability very moderate, military leadership conflates a temporary drop in the enemy’s rate of fire with a permanent destruction of their capacity to wage war. Iran has survived the heaviest bombardment in decades, preserved its core strategic assets, and is actively utilizing the current diplomatic stalemate to rebuild its industrial base. The war has not ended; it has simply entered a quieter, more dangerous phase of strategic endurance.
