With Operation Epic Fury in its sixth day, it is hard to tell how long the current United States military campaign against Iran will last. It may not be swift; yesterday, the US Senate rejected a resolution to halt further action. Meanwhile, President Trump has been alarmingly indifferent to the question:
Whatever the time is, it’s OK, whatever it takes. Right from the beginning we projected four to five weeks, but we have the capability to go far longer than that. We’ll do it.
US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth struck a different note with reporters: ‘This is not Iraq, this is not endless.’ Yet he has refused to rule out deploying ground forces to Iran and later said, ‘We have only just begun to fight.’ In fairness, it must be hard to draw up a timetable for success when you are not wholly clear why you started a conflict to begin with.
The challenge is maintaining adequate stockpiles
The opening phase of the conflict has demonstrated the staggering military superiority the United States and Israel enjoy over Iran. It is not just a technological advantage but a logistical one: careful thinking about airbases and ready availability of air-to-air refuelling meant that 400 US and Israeli aircraft were able to carry out 1,500 sorties within the first 12 hours of the operation: roughly one airstrike every three or four hours by each aircraft.
Iran is unquestionably overmatched. Hegseth, with the characteristic playground-bully aggression which accompanies his fundamental inadequacy, boasted that:
This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.
Yet this encapsulates a problem which Western nations have faced before, for example when countering strikes by Houthi militia against shipping in the Red Sea over the past two and a half years. They can deploy exquisitely capable, almost faultless defences against rockets, missiles and drones, but the countermeasures they have are elaborate, expensive and time-consuming to manufacture.
There are three principle ways of intercepting incoming ordnance. One is to use air-to-air missiles fired by combat aircraft; there are also ship-borne surface-to-air missiles like Raytheon’s RIM-156 and RIM-174.
The third option is to rely on ground-based systems, Lockheed Martin’s Patriot MIM-104F PAC-3 MSE missiles and THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) interceptors. Both rely purely on kinetic energy (‘body-to-body’ contact) to destroy targets, although earlier Patriot versions carry a small high-explosive warhead. Their performance is astonishing. In the first five days of the conflict, the UAE’s Patriot and THAAD batteries intercepted 172 out of 186 Iranian missiles fired and 755 of 812 Shaheed drones.
This sophistication comes at a price. A THAAD battery comes at a price of around $2 billion (£1.5 billion), and each interceptor costs $12.7 million (£9.5 million). Meanwhile, a Patriot battery is between $1 billion (£750 million) and $2.5 billion (£1.9 billion), and every individual missile is in excess of $4 million (£3 million). By contrast, an Iranian Shaheed drone can cost less than $50,000 (£37,000).
Cost is not the only problem. As well as the United States, Patriots are operated by Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the last two of which also have THAAD batteries. Qatar, too, is procuring THAAD. These weapons are vital to the security of America’s allies in the Middle East, and most of the Gulf monarchies have sufficiently deep pockets to make them a justifiable investment.
The challenge is maintaining adequate stockpiles. In last June’s 12 day war against Iran, the US is believed to have launched around 150 THAAD interceptors from a total of 632 believed to be in its possession. Production is scheduled to quadruple over the next seven years – but only from 96 to 400 interceptors annually. Meanwhile Lockheed Martin only produces 600 Patriot missiles each year. There have been numerous reports of Gulf states becoming anxious that collectively they and the United States could run out of missiles. Meanwhile, Iran is estimated to have several thousand missiles and several thousand more drones.
President Trump has dismissed this notion, blustering on Truth Social that America has ‘a virtually unlimited supply of these weapons’. That cannot possibly be true, though it is marginally less nonsensical than Hegseth’s ejaculation that ‘the only limits we have in this is President Trump’s desire to achieve specific effects on behalf of the American people’.
Whether or not the US has enough Patriot and THAAD missiles to defend against Iranian strikes is a microcosm of a wider issue. The West has entered a new phase of asymmetric warfare, one which does not necessarily play to its advantages. Shooting down a $50,000 drone with a $4 million interceptor is insane and unsustainable. Directed-energy weapons – lasers – offer one way out, with the US Navy trialling the Helios high-energy laser and the Royal Navy planning to install DragonFire on a handful of warships in 2027. We are not there yet.
It is a wider mindset: for decades, the US, with Britain trying to follow suit, has lavished tax dollars on the most sophisticated equipment available, with little regard to the range of possible adversaries. ‘Good enough’ has never been good enough, yet it has resulted in, at best, score draws in Vietnam, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen. And no one thinks the current administration is in learning mode. Over by Christmas, anyone?
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