Two weeks into Operation Epic Fury, the dominant narrative has settled into a snug groove: The USA and Israel stumbled right into a conflict with out a plan. Iran is retaliating throughout the area. Oil costs are surging, and the world is going through one other Center Japanese quagmire. US senators have referred to as it a blunder. Cable information has tallied the crises. Commentators have warned of a protracted conflict.
The refrain is loud and, in some respects, comprehensible. Struggle is ugly, and this one has imposed actual prices on hundreds of thousands of individuals throughout the Center East, together with town I dwell in.
However this narrative is mistaken. Not as a result of the prices are imaginary, however as a result of the critics are measuring the mistaken issues. They’re cataloguing the worth of the marketing campaign whereas ignoring the strategic ledger.
Once you take a look at what has really occurred to Iran’s principal devices of energy – its ballistic missile arsenal, its nuclear infrastructure, its air defences, its navy and its proxy command structure – the image shouldn’t be one in all US failure. It’s one in all systematic, phased degradation of a risk that earlier administrations allowed to develop for 4 a long time.
I write this from Doha, the place Iranian missiles have triggered alerts for residents to take shelter and Qatar Airways has began working evacuation flights. I lived by 4 years of conflict in Baghdad.
I’ve labored for the US Division of State and suggested defence and intelligence companies in a number of international locations. I’ve no real interest in cheerleading for conflict.
However I’ve spent my tutorial profession learning how states authorise using drive by intelligence establishments, and what I see within the present marketing campaign is a recognisable navy operation continuing by identifiable phases in opposition to an adversary whose capability to undertaking energy is collapsing in actual time.
An arsenal constructed over a long time, dismantled in days
Iranian ballistic missile launches have fallen by greater than 90 p.c from 350 on February 28 to roughly 25 by March 14, based on publicly out there information. Drone launches inform the identical story: from greater than 800 on Day 1 to about 75 on Day 15.
The figures drawn from US and Iranian navy statements differ intimately however converge on the trajectory. A whole bunch of Iranian missile launchers have been rendered inoperable. In keeping with some reports, 80 p.c of Iran’s capability to strike Israel has been eradicated.
Iran’s naval belongings, fast-attack craft, midget submarines and mine-laying capabilities are being liquidated. Its air defences have been suppressed to the purpose at which the US is now flying nonstealth B-1 bombers over Iranian airspace, a call that indicators near-total confidence in air dominance.
The marketing campaign has moved by two distinct phases. The primary suppressed Iran’s air defences, decapitated its command and management, and degraded its missile and drone launch infrastructure. By March 2, US Central Command introduced native air superiority over western Iran and Tehran, achieved with out the confirmed lack of a single American or Israeli fight plane.
The second part, now below manner, targets Iran’s defence industrial base: missile manufacturing services, dual-use analysis centres and the underground complexes the place remaining stockpiles are saved. This isn’t aimless bombing. It’s a methodical marketing campaign to make sure that what has been destroyed can’t be rebuilt.
Iran now faces a strategic dilemma that tightens day-after-day. If it fires its remaining missiles, it exposes launchers which can be promptly destroyed. If it conserves them, it forfeits the flexibility to impose prices of the conflict. Missile and drone launch information counsel Iran is rationing its remaining capability for politically timed salvoes fairly than sustaining operational tempo.
This can be a drive managing decline, not projecting energy.
The nuclear threshold that earlier US presidents accepted
A lot of the criticism of the US-Israeli marketing campaign focuses on its prices whereas treating the established order ante as if it had been cost-free. It was not.
Iran entered 2026 with 440kg of uranium enriched to 60 p.c purity – sufficient, if additional enriched, for as many as 10 nuclear weapons. Earlier than the June strikes, Tehran was lower than two weeks away from enriching sufficient uranium for one nuclear bomb, based on US intelligence assessments. At the moment, the Worldwide Atomic Vitality Company acknowledged that Iran’s accumulation of near-weapons-grade materials had no clear civilian justification.
The present marketing campaign has broken additional the Natanz nuclear facility. The one in Fordow stays inoperable. The defence industrial services that may be wanted to reconstitute enrichment capability are being systematically focused.
Affordable individuals can disagree about whether or not diplomatic options had been absolutely exhausted, the Omani-mediated negotiations in February confirmed actual progress, and there are professional questions on whether or not Washington walked away too quickly.
However the critics’ implicit different, continued restraint whereas Iran inched in direction of a nuclear weapon, is the coverage that produced the disaster within the first place. Yearly of strategic endurance added centrifuges to the enrichment halls and kilogrammes to the stockpile.
The boundaries of navy drive in opposition to a nuclear programme are actual, and as others have argued elsewhere, strikes can destroy services however can’t eradicate information. The 440kg of enriched uranium stays unaccounted for.
A successor regime of any political color will inherit a strategic setting through which the case for nuclear deterrence has been strengthened, not weakened. These are real long-term dangers. However they’re arguments for a complete post-conflict diplomatic structure, not arguments in opposition to the marketing campaign itself.
The Strait of Hormuz: Iran’s losing asset
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is dominating the essential commentary. US Senator Chris Murphy has referred to as it proof that President Donald Trump misjudged Iran’s capability to retaliate. CNN has described it as proof that the administration has misplaced management of the conflict’s escalation.
The financial ache is actual: Oil costs have surged, a record 400 million barrels of oil shall be launched from world reserves, and Gulf states are going through drone and missile strikes on their power infrastructure.
However this framing inverts the strategic logic. Closing the strait was at all times Iran’s most seen retaliatory card, and at all times a losing asset. About 90 p.c of Iran’s personal oil exports cross by Kharg Island after which the strait.
China, Tehran’s largest remaining financial companion, can’t obtain Iranian crude whereas the strait is shut. Day-after-day the blockade continues, Iran severs its personal financial lifeline and alienates the one main energy that has persistently shielded it on the United Nations. The closure doesn’t simply harm the worldwide financial system; it accelerates Iran’s isolation.
In the meantime, the naval belongings Iran must maintain the blockade – fast-attack boats, drones, mines, shore-based antiship missiles – are being degraded day by day. Its naval bases at Bandar Abbas and Chahbahar have been severely broken.
The query shouldn’t be whether or not the strait reopens however when and whether or not Iran retains any naval capability to contest it. Critics evaluate the problem of escorting 100 tankers day by day to an not possible logistical burden. However you do not want to escort tankers by a strait if the adversary now not has the means to threaten them. That’s the operational trajectory.
A proxy community that’s fragmenting, not increasing
The regional escalation – Hezbollah resuming attacks on Israel, Iraqi militias hanging US bases, Houthis issuing threats within the Pink Sea – is cited because the clearest proof of US-Israeli strategic failure. The conflict is spreading, the critics say, simply because it did in Iraq. This misreads the dynamics of Iran’s alliance community.
My analysis on how states authorise proxy violence identifies 4 layers of management: strategic legitimation, operational coordination, financial-logistical distribution and deniability calibration. The present marketing campaign has disrupted all 4 concurrently.
The assassination of Supreme Chief Ali Khamenei eradicated the apex of the authorisation pyramid. His son Mojtaba’s appointment as his successor, a dynastic switch with out precedent within the Islamic Republic, indicators institutional fragility, not continuity. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) command construction has been decapitated at a number of ranges – the appearing defence minister was amongst these killed.
When proxies launch retaliatory assaults throughout the area, this isn’t proof of an increasing community; it’s proof of predelegated response authority, which is what a centralised command system prompts when it anticipates its personal destruction.
Predelegation is an indication of desperation, not energy. It means the centre can now not coordinate. The assaults will proceed, however they may turn into more and more uncoordinated, strategically incoherent and politically expensive for the host states the place these teams function.
Qatar and Bahrain are arresting IRGC operatives. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are intercepting Iranian drones over their very own territory. The regional setting that sustained Iran’s proxy structure, together with the grudging tolerance by Gulf states scared of Iranian retaliation, is being changed by lively hostility.
Hezbollah is weaker than at any level since 2006, degraded by greater than a yr of Israeli operations earlier than this marketing campaign started. Iraqi militias retain the flexibility to launch assaults, however they’re doing so right into a area the place they face rising isolation.
The Houthis in Yemen possess unbiased functionality however lack the command integration with Tehran that transforms militia exercise into strategic impact. What the critics described as an increasing regional conflict is healthier understood because the demise spasm of a proxy structure whose authorising centre has been shattered.
A transparent endgame
Probably the most politically potent criticism is that the administration has no endgame. Trump’s personal rhetoric has not helped: the oscillation between “unconditional give up” and hints at negotiation, between regime change and denial of regime change, feeds the impression of strategic incoherence. Solely 33 p.c of American respondents in a current Reuters-Ipsos ballot mentioned the president had clearly defined the mission’s function.
However the endgame is seen within the operational phasing, even when the rhetoric obscures it. The target is the everlasting degradation of Iran’s capability to undertaking energy past its borders by missiles, nuclear latency and proxy networks.
Name it strategic disarmament. That is nearer to the method of the Allies to Germany’s industrial war-making capability in 1944-1945 than to the US conflict on Iraq in 2003. The analogy is imperfect: Strategic disarmament with out occupation requires a verification and enforcement structure that nobody has but proposed, however the operational logic is identical.
Nobody is proposing to occupy Tehran. The query is what occurs when the bombing stops, and right here the critics elevate a professional concern, which Murphy articulated concisely after a categorised briefing: What prevents Iran from restarting manufacturing?
The reply requires a post-conflict framework that doesn’t but exist in public: a verification regime, a diplomatic settlement or a sustained enforcement posture. The administration owes the American public and its regional companions a transparent account of what that framework would appear like.
However the absence of a public diplomatic blueprint doesn’t imply the navy marketing campaign is failing. It means the marketing campaign is forward of the diplomacy, a sequencing drawback, not a strategic one. The navy circumstances for a sturdy settlement – Iranian missile capability too degraded to rebuild shortly, nuclear infrastructure inaccessible, proxy networks fragmented – are being created proper now.
Struggle is ugly, however the conflict technique is working
None of this minimises the human prices. More than 1,400 civilians have been killed in Iran, an ethical burden the US and Israel will carry. Oil value spikes are hurting each financial system on Earth. At the very least 11 US service members have been killed. I dwell with these sirens day-after-day, as does everybody throughout the Gulf. The prices are actual, they’re severe, and any accounting that ignores them is dishonest.
However the critics are making a special error: They’re treating the prices of motion as if the prices of inaction had been zero. They weren’t. They had been measured within the sluggish accretion of a risk that, left unchecked, would have produced precisely the disaster everybody claims to worry: a nuclear-armed Iran able to closing the Strait of Hormuz at will, surrounded by proxy forces that might maintain the whole area hostage indefinitely.
Seventeen days in, Iran’s supreme chief is useless, his successor is reportedly wounded and each principal instrument of Iranian energy projection – missiles, nuclear infrastructure, air defences, the navy, proxy command networks – has been degraded past near-term restoration. The marketing campaign’s execution has been imperfect, its public communication poor and its post-conflict planning incomplete. Struggle is rarely clear. However the technique – the precise technique, measured in degraded capabilities fairly than cable information cycles – is working.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
