Iran’s military may be degraded, but it has not stopped striking more than a month after the United States and Israel launched their war against Iran on Feb. 28, the Associated Press reported. While Trump administration officials have described the campaign as effectively neutralizing Iran’s military capabilities, the AP said Iran’s ongoing missile and drone attacks are still producing regional chaos and economic and political disruption.
U.S. President Donald Trump has sought negotiations and, according to the AP report, has threatened extreme destruction to secure Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium and to pressure Tehran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The AP said experts believe Iran can keep its leverage by withstanding the conflict long enough to push Washington toward an off-ramp.
The AP reported that U.S. officials pointed to a steep drop in Iran’s ballistic missile launches since the opening of the campaign as evidence that the strikes were working. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine told reporters on March 4 that Iran’s “ballistic missile shots fired are down 86% from the first day of fighting and their one-way attack drone shots are down 73%.” Two weeks later, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said ballistic missile attacks had fallen “90% since the start of the conflict,” and on Tuesday Hegseth said Iran fired its “lowest number” of missiles and drones in the prior 24 hours, without providing updated percentages.
But independent strike-tracking data from ACLED, a U.S.-based group that monitors conflicts, complicates the administration’s portrayal of a rapid collapse in Iran’s capabilities. The AP said ACLED data showed Iran fired off almost 100 strikes on March 1, fell to 53 the next day, and then hovered in that range briefly; in the three and a half weeks since March 6, ACLED data showed Iran had not exceeded 50 strikes on any given day. Over the last three weeks, ACLED data showed an average of about 30 strikes per day, with the AP adding that Iran at various points increased the tempo.
The AP report said missile-defense effectiveness also remains a live concern. It said ACLED data indicated that some 40% of Iran’s salvos across the region are breaking through air defenses, and that Iran has been using fewer missiles while deploying more low-flying drones that are harder to intercept. “We are vaporizing billions of dollars in long-range anti-missile defenses, which are scarce national resources,” Tom Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in the AP report. Karako warned that the United States and Israel could run out of interceptors before they can take out the remaining missile stockpiles and mobile launchers, a goal he said has been “maddeningly difficult.”
Other experts cited in the AP report suggested the early decline in Iran’s strike tempo may reflect strategy as much as depleted capacity. Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center who focuses on U.S. military strategy and operations, said that “That makes me question whether it’s a capacity issue or a strategy issue,” referring to the initial reduction in Iran’s strike rate. The AP report also quoted Farzin Nadimi, an expert on the Iranian missile program at The Washington Institute, as saying that “A good percentage of Iranian missiles, at least half of the arsenal, is stored in very hardened facilities that are not easily reachable with air power,” and that the situation appeared to involve “some level of complexity” that U.S. and Israeli planners may have underestimated.
The AP said analysts also believe Iran has tried to fine-tune timing and targets to maximize damage, contradicting Hegseth’s description of Iran as striking “flailing recklessly.” Assaf Orion, a retired Israeli brigadier general and senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies, said in the AP report that “In this asymmetrical war, the most important thing for Iran is attack the world economy in hopes of coercing the U.S. to stop.” Nadimi told the AP that Iran had been striking targets more efficiently, allowing it “to use fewer missiles to achieve the same result,” and the AP said Iran had concentrated firepower on sensitive economic sites including oil pipelines and water desalination plants across the Persian Gulf, including attacks that struck nearby states such as the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait.
Last week, the AP report said Iran fired ballistic missiles and drones at a Saudi air base, wounded more than two dozen U.S. troops and damaged aircraft. The AP added that the length of Iran’s ability to sustain its level of retaliation remains unclear because U.S. and Israeli intelligence on Iran’s missile and drone inventory is limited, and that while military experts offered varying estimates on the remaining arsenal, they agreed Iran likely still has thousands of cheap, locally manufactured drones. Karako said Iran “built itself to be able to ride a war like this out,” adding, “It has been preparing for this.”