By Omid Souresrafil
The United States went into this war against Iran convinced that a sustained campaign of precision strikes would bring the Islamic Republic to its knees within days or, at most, a few weeks. The assumption was familiar: decapitate leadership, degrade critical infrastructure, and watch the target society fracture or sue for peace on American and Israeli terms. That calculation has proven catastrophically wrong.
Instead of collapse, the United States is confronting a grinding reality in which its forward military presence in the Persian Gulf is becoming progressively untenable. Host governments are recalibrating the costs and benefits of continued cooperation. Iranian retaliation and credible threats are raising the price of hosting American bases and forces. Munitions stockpiles are being drawn down faster than they can be replenished. Air and missile defenses are being tested by mass, inexpensive, and increasingly accurate systems that invert the traditional cost-exchange ratio. And the Strait of Hormuz remains a persistent reminder that Iran possesses the means to impose global economic pain disproportionate to its conventional military strength.
This is not a story of Iranian battlefield supremacy in the classic sense. It is the story of a nation that has spent decades preparing to fight a different kind of war—one that exploits the vulnerabilities of overextended empires, the brittleness of concentrated bases, the economics of high-tech Western arsenals, and the self-interest of regional actors who ultimately prioritize their own stability and economies over Washington’s strategic abstractions.
The contrast between the confident rhetoric in Washington and the accumulating frictions in the Gulf could not be sharper. Having family ties to Hormozgan province and having witnessed, even from afar, the lived experience of a society that has endured invasion, sanctions, and repeated external pressure, I see patterns that American planners consistently underestimate: the capacity of rooted societies to absorb punishment and adapt asymmetrically rather than meet superior conventional force head-on.
The Recurring Fantasy of Quick Triumph
American strategic culture has repeatedly fallen prey to the belief that superior technology, air power, and “shock and awe” can produce rapid political results against determined adversaries. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was sold as a cakewalk that would transform the region. Libya in 2011 was presented as a limited humanitarian intervention that would quickly remove a dictator and stabilize the country. In both cases, the initial military phase succeeded in its narrow tactical objectives while setting in motion years or decades of chaos, blowback, and strategic disappointment.
The same pattern of overconfidence appears to have shaped the decision to strike Iran. Planners appear to have assumed that a combination of Israeli and American air and missile power could degrade Iran’s nuclear program, missile forces, and command infrastructure to the point of collapse or capitulation. Historian and political scientist Roy Casagranda has been blunt in his assessment: such approaches repeat the fundamental error of Iraq in 2003—treating the destruction of physical assets as equivalent to the destruction of political will and societal cohesion. In reality, external attacks on Iranian infrastructure have often consolidated domestic support around the government by framing the conflict as an existential defense of the nation rather than a partisan dispute.
Iran is not Iraq in 2003 or Libya in 2011. It is a large country with significant depth, mountainous terrain ideal for dispersal and concealment, a population hardened by decades of sanctions and the memory of the devastating Iran-Iraq War, and a leadership that has spent more than twenty years deliberately preparing for precisely this contingency. The assumption that Iran would crumble quickly ignored both its history and its preparation.
Iran’s Doctrine of Asymmetric Attrition: History, Adaptation, and the Metamorphosis of Warfare
Iran’s strategy rests on a clear-eyed recognition of its relative conventional weakness against a U.S.-Israeli coalition and a corresponding investment in asymmetric tools that maximize cost imposition on the adversary while minimizing its own vulnerability.
Alastair Crooke has described this as a fundamental metamorphosis in the “ways of war.” Rather than contesting air superiority—an impossible task against combined U.S. and Israeli air forces—Iran has pursued missile dominance over relevant airspace and maritime approaches. Missile production facilities, launchers, and armories have been buried deep underground in hardened complexes and dispersed across the country’s geography. Command has been decentralized into provincial structures capable of operating autonomously if central leadership is disrupted. This “mosaic” or “insurrectionary” model makes the force extremely resilient to decapitation or infrastructure strikes.
The economic logic is equally important. Western missile defense systems and precision munitions are extraordinarily expensive. A single Patriot or THAAD interceptor can cost millions of dollars. Iranian drones and many missiles can be produced for a tiny fraction of that cost. When the exchange ratio favors the attacker by orders of magnitude, mass and saturation become viable strategies. Iran has observed and learned from earlier demonstrations: the 2019 attacks on Saudi oil facilities (widely attributed to Iran despite Houthi claims), the sustained Houthi campaign in the Red Sea that forced global shipping rerouting, and Hezbollah’s use of drones and missiles against Israeli targets. Each case illustrated how relatively low-cost systems can impose outsized strategic and economic costs.
This approach draws on Iran’s own historical experience. During the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, Iran absorbed a brutal invasion, chemical weapons attacks, and international isolation yet fought to a stalemate through a combination of conventional defense, human-wave tactics in key phases, and the rapid development of indigenous missile capabilities. After the 1979 revolution and throughout decades of sanctions, Iran developed what has been called a “resistance economy”—prioritizing domestic production of critical goods, reverse-engineering and indigenizing military technology, and building parallel financial and trade networks (most notably with China for oil exports). The Islamic Republic did not collapse under “maximum pressure”; it adapted and, in several sectors, increased its regional influence through the “Axis of Resistance” proxy network.
Other societies have demonstrated similar patterns of wearing down superior powers through persistence and adaptation rather than direct symmetric confrontation. Vietnam combined guerrilla warfare, political mobilization, and international diplomacy to erode American will despite massive U.S. technological and firepower advantages. The Soviet Union and later the United States both discovered in Afghanistan that even overwhelming conventional superiority cannot easily overcome terrain, local knowledge, external support for insurgents, and the willingness to absorb casualties over a long period. Algeria’s National Liberation Front paired armed struggle with sophisticated political and diplomatic efforts that ultimately forced French withdrawal. Cuba has survived more than six decades of U.S. embargo through domestic mobilization, shifting alliances, and the cultivation of national resilience narratives.
Iran has synthesized these lessons with its own geography, history, and technological adaptations. The result is not an attempt to defeat the United States in a conventional war it cannot win, but a strategy designed to make sustained American military operations in and around the Persian Gulf prohibitively expensive in blood, treasure, political capital, and strategic opportunity cost (particularly relative to competition with China).
The Arithmetic of Depletion: Munitions, Defenses, and Industrial Reality
The material dimension of this conflict has exposed uncomfortable truths about the sustainability of American power projection.
Reports from the current campaign indicate that the United States has consumed large percentages of key advanced munitions inventories in a relatively short period. Significant portions of THAAD interceptors, Patriot missiles, Tomahawk cruise missiles, and precision strike missiles have been expended. Replenishment of many of these systems is measured in years, not months, because the defense industrial base was optimized for peacetime production rates and just-in-time supply chains rather than sustained high-intensity conflict.
This depletion is not merely a logistics problem; it is a strategic one. Every interceptor or precision munition used against Iranian or proxy attacks is unavailable for other contingencies. The opportunity cost is especially stark given simultaneous demands from Ukraine and Israel’s multi-front operations. Colonel Douglas Macgregor has emphasized that the U.S. military’s ability to sustain operations against a prepared adversary with dispersed, hardened assets is constrained by both inventory and the speed at which that inventory can be regenerated. Iran’s missile forces are numerous, dispersed, and partially underground—precisely the characteristics that make them difficult to eliminate quickly through air and missile campaigns.
Air and missile defenses face a related but distinct challenge. Systems designed to protect against limited salvos or less sophisticated threats struggle when confronted with mass attacks that mix low-cost drones, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and maneuvering hypersonics. The economics are unforgiving: the defender must intercept nearly everything; the attacker needs only a small percentage to penetrate to achieve significant effects. Iran has invested in improving accuracy, saturation tactics, and electronic warfare measures that further complicate interception.
Colonel Larry Wilkerson has long argued that American foreign policy is distorted by a military-industrial-congressional complex whose institutional incentives favor perpetual deployment and procurement over coherent, sustainable strategy. The result is a force structure superb at short, decisive campaigns against weaker opponents but brittle when faced with protracted conflict against an adversary that refuses to fight on American terms. Chalmers Johnson’s earlier warnings about the “sorrows of empire”—the way militarism abroad eventually undermines the republic at home through debt, distorted priorities, and blowback—read as prescient in the current context.
The Geographic Squeeze: Forcing the United States Out, One Host at a Time
The most consequential development is not any single Iranian military success but the cumulative effect on the willingness and ability of Gulf host nations to continue providing the territory, infrastructure, and political cover necessary for large-scale U.S. operations.
Qatar hosts Al Udeid Air Base, the largest U.S. military installation in the region and a linchpin for CENTCOM air operations. Concentrated, high-value targets are inherently vulnerable to saturation attacks. Doha has always maintained pragmatic relations with Iran, including through their shared ownership of the world’s largest natural gas field. Iranian missile threats or limited strikes raise the direct risk to Qatari territory and economy. The rational calculation for any host government becomes: does continued facilitation of U.S. operations against Iran increase or decrease our own security and prosperity? For Qatar, the answer is increasingly unclear.
Bahrain hosts the U.S. Fifth Fleet headquarters. It also possesses a substantial Shia population with cultural and historical connections to Iran. Iranian retaliation has already reached Bahrain in reported incidents, and the prospect of becoming a primary battlefield in a wider war is politically and economically toxic for the monarchy. Domestic stability considerations and the obvious targeting risk combine to push toward reduced U.S. operational freedom or outright drawdown pressure.
Oman has functioned for decades as the region’s most reliable neutral intermediary. It has no interest in hosting operations that transform its territory into a target or that close off its own diplomatic and economic channels with Iran. Quiet restrictions on access or facilitation of backchannel diplomacy are consistent with Oman’s long-standing role and self-interest.
The United Arab Emirates experienced painful demonstrations of vulnerability during earlier Houthi/Iran-linked attacks on Abu Dhabi and other sites. Its leadership has pursued a hedging strategy—Abraham Accords normalization with Israel alongside pragmatic engagement with Tehran. A prolonged conflict that exposes the limits of American protection while raising direct risks to UAE infrastructure and shipping reinforces the logic of distancing and backchannel management rather than open alignment with escalation.
Saudi Arabia under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has made economic transformation under Vision 2030 its overriding priority. Aramco facilities remain high-value targets whose disruption would devastate national revenue. Riyadh has already demonstrated willingness to pursue its own diplomatic track with Iran (facilitated by China) and has resisted being drawn into open-ended escalation. Each new round of conflict strengthens the argument that hosting or enabling large-scale U.S. strike operations is a net strategic liability rather than an asset.
Jordan faces its own domestic political pressures, including from a significant Palestinian population and broader public opinion wary of entanglement in wars that do not serve core Jordanian interests. Iranian influence operations and allied militia networks add another vector of pressure. U.S. bases on Jordanian soil become political liabilities when the primary mission appears to be support for operations against Iran that carry escalation risks for the host.
The cumulative effect is a progressive shrinking of the U.S. forward footprint. Each reduction in access or operational freedom degrades American ability to sustain tempo, complicates logistics and command-and-control, and signals to remaining hosts that the political and security costs are rising. Iran does not need to physically eject every American soldier; it needs to make the presence sufficiently costly and risky that host governments themselves demand or facilitate its reduction. That process is now visibly underway.
The Logical Horizon: Consolidation, Israel, and the Multipolar Reckoning
If current dynamics persist, the United States will find itself with a narrower, more precarious basing structure increasingly concentrated around direct support for Israel. That shift carries consequences. Israel’s own defenses have been stressed by prior exchanges with Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran itself. Its economy has absorbed significant costs from prolonged reserve mobilization. International political support has eroded in important quarters. And Iran’s strategy does not require the military defeat of either the United States or Israel—it requires rendering their preferred regional military posture unsustainable on cost-benefit grounds.
John Mearsheimer’s realist analysis has long cautioned against peripheral wars that distract from great-power competition, particularly with a rising China. Noam Chomsky has documented how U.S. interventions in the Middle East reliably generate resistance and instability that then justify further intervention—a self-reinforcing cycle of blowback. The current conflict fits that pattern: actions taken to degrade Iranian capabilities have instead highlighted Iranian resilience, expanded Iranian leverage over the Strait of Hormuz and regional infrastructure, and accelerated the very hedging behavior among Arab Gulf states that weakens the U.S. position.
The broader strategic context is a world moving toward multipolarity. Iran’s relationships with Russia and especially China (the primary destination for discounted Iranian oil and a key sanctions-evasion partner) provide economic and diplomatic buffers that earlier generations of Iranian leaders could only dream of. BRICS expansion and parallel financial mechanisms reduce the isolating power of unilateral U.S. sanctions. The petrodollar system faces gradual erosion when major energy producers and consumers explore alternative arrangements. None of this means the United States disappears as a global power; it means the era of uncontested regional hegemony in the Persian Gulf is ending.
Watching from The Mountains of Southern Iran
The contrast between official narratives and accumulating realities is stark. The ships and aircraft based here once represented unambiguous power projection. Today they operate in a strategic environment where adversaries have developed tools to raise the costs of that projection dramatically, where host nations weigh their own survival and prosperity above alliance loyalty, and where the industrial base that sustains high-end munitions cannot keep pace with consumption in even one theater—let alone multiple simultaneous demands.
Iran is not “winning” a conventional war. It is demonstrating that a determined society with strategic depth, long preparation, and asymmetric tools can make sustained American military presence in its immediate region prohibitively expensive without ever needing to match U.S. or Israeli conventional capabilities ship-for-ship or aircraft-for-aircraft. This is the same logic that has repeatedly humbled overextended powers throughout history: not glorious battlefield victory, but the patient accumulation of costs until the expedition becomes politically and economically unsustainable at home.
The United States attacked Iran expecting rapid capitulation or collapse. What it is encountering instead is a methodical, multi-domain effort to raise the price of continued forward deployment until host governments themselves conclude that the American presence has become more liability than asset. One base, one ally, one recalibration at a time, the United States is being eased out of the positions that once allowed it to dominate the Persian Gulf.
Whether American leaders absorb this lesson and pursue a strategy of offshore balancing, diplomatic off-ramps, and realistic accommodation with a multipolar order—or whether hubris and domestic political incentives drive further escalation—will determine whether this conflict marks a painful but manageable adjustment or a more dangerous descent into wider war. History suggests that rooted societies defending their core interests tend to outlast expeditions launched for abstract hegemony or the satisfaction of powerful lobbies. Iran is testing that proposition again, in real time, before our eyes.
The eagle is being chased. The only remaining question is how far it will fly before recognizing that the old assumptions no longer hold.
