THE PUNDIT

The most important fact about Iran’s military tactics in the current war is that Tehran has fought asymmetrically with unusual strategic clarity. It has not attempted to mirror the United States or Israel in aircraft quality, pilot training, sortie generation, or battle management. It has instead attacked the architecture that makes American and Israeli airpower effective: forward bases, refueling capacity, radar and communications nodes, missile-defense economics, civilian morale, and the wider regional operating environment.

Iran has mounted an “asymmetric counter-air campaign” aimed at the U.S. Air Force’s nodes. Rather than trying to defeat U.S. aircraft in the air, Iran has gone after the enablers on the ground and in the rear: tankers, airborne warning assets, radars, satellite terminals, and the air-base infrastructure on which sustained air operations depend.

The American airpower in the Middle East does not rest only on fighters and bombers. It rests on an ecosystem. Tankers extend range and sortie persistence. Airborne warning aircraft help manage crowded airspace and coordinate multinational operations. Ground radars and communications nodes compress warning times and feed interceptor networks. If those systems are disrupted, even temporarily, the practical superiority of the United States becomes harder to convert into uninterrupted operational dominance.

Iran has systematically targeted exactly these categories, and official Israeli and U.S.-aligned reporting from the war is consistent with that picture of a campaign centered on launchers, storage, air defenses, sensors, and production systems. For example, an Iranian strike on Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia wounded 12 U.S. troops on March 27, while waging repeated attacks on the same base and on other nodes across the Gulf.

Massed drones attacks

Iran’s first major tactical instrument has been massed low-cost drones. CSIS’s analysis of the first week of the campaign argues that drones were not auxiliary tools but central instruments of pressure, used to impose operational, economic, and psychological strain while preserving higher-end missiles for more selective use.

In the first week of the conflict, Iran launched more than 1,000 drones and Gulf states began looking for far cheaper interceptor solutions because existing defenses were burning through expensive missiles against relatively cheap threats.

This cost-imposition logic has been one of Tehran’s clearest achievements. Patriot interceptors cost at roughly $4 million apiece, compared with an estimated Shahed cost as low as $20,000 and a prospective interceptor drone priced around $2,526.

Even allowing for uncertainty in unit-cost estimates, the broad asymmetry is stark. Iran has therefore used drones not merely to destroy targets, but to force depletion, expose inventory weaknesses, and oblige the United States and its partners to confront the unsustainable economics of defending every point against every incoming object. That is a tactical method with strategic implications, especially in a long war.

Layered systems

Iran’s second instrument has been the layered use of different strike systems for different effects. CSIS describes a “layered architecture combining drones, ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles.” In practice, this means drones can help saturate defenses, create noise, and compel interceptor expenditure, while ballistic or cruise missiles are reserved for harder, more consequential targets when windows open.

Against Israel, this logic has taken an additional form, that is of pressure on the multilayered missile-defense shield and on civilian resilience behind it. Israel said its interception rate has remained above 90 percent, which is tactically impressive. But a 90 percent interception rate is not the same thing as impermeability, especially when incoming salvos are sustained over time.

Iranian cluster-munition warheads have posed an extra challenge because they must be intercepted before dispersal, and one failed interception in March scattered bomblets into civilian areas in Tel Aviv, causing deaths and infrastructure damage. In other words, Tehran does not need to collapse Israeli defenses outright to create fear, disruption, and political pressure; it needs only enough leakage, often enough, to keep Israeli society mobilized under strain.

This distinction between denial and decisive breakthrough is central to understanding Iranian tactics. Tehran has not demonstrated an ability to destroy Israel’s air-defense architecture or to stop Israeli strike aviation from operating. What it has demonstrated is the ability to keep imposing residual damage and recurring alarm despite heavy attrition.

Iranian launches fell after the first days of the war but that “lingering launch capacity” continued to inflict damage, especially to energy facilities. Despite enormous U.S.-Israeli firepower and the killing of senior Iranian leaders, Iran remains militarily and politically intact and continues to hold powerful leverage through the Strait of Hormuz and regional escalation channels.

The Gulf Theater

The Gulf theater shows the same pattern. According to CSIS, the UAE absorbed the largest volume of recorded strikes in the first week of Iran’s drone campaign, and the broader aim was less territorial conquest than persistent disruption across military installations, energy infrastructure, and economic centers.

This suggests that Iran understands the war not only as a battlefield contest, but as a regional systems contest. Gulf hosts of U.S. power are not just rear areas; they are targets whose vulnerability can reshape coalition calculations. The more exposed these states feel, the more politically costly U.S. basing becomes, and the more difficult it is for Washington to preserve the illusion of sanctuary behind the front.

That word, sanctuary, may be the one most damaged by this war. For decades, large U.S. air bases in the region functioned as relatively secure hubs from which aircraft, tankers, and command platforms could operate. The War on the Rocks analysis argues that the democratization of precision strike has effectively ended that era. Cheap one-way attack drones, proliferating missiles, commercial satellite imagery, open-source intelligence, and persistent surveillance have made concealment harder and fixed forward basing riskier.

Iran has also shown an understanding of political-military time. Tehran’s strategy in this war has not been calibrated retaliation but escalation designed to restore deterrence and prove that the Islamic Republic cannot be punished at low cost.

That is a striking departure from earlier periods in which Iran often tried to signal resolve while avoiding uncontrolled regional war. In the present conflict, the signal has been harsher: if Iran itself is struck deeply, then the region around it becomes unsafe, logistics become costly, and escalation travels outward rather than remaining confined to Iranian territory.

Iran’s Objectives

Seen from this angle, Iran’s tactics against the United States and Israel have revolved around six interlocking objectives.

First, stretch and degrade the missile-defense economy. Iran’s mass drone use has forced the expenditure of expensive interceptors and accelerated interest in cheaper defensive alternatives.

Second, attack the enabling layer of airpower rather than the most glamorous platforms themselves. The reported strikes on Prince Sultan Air Base, along with the wider campaign against radars, communications, tankers, and battle-management systems described by War on the Rocks, fit this pattern.

Third, maintain enough launch survivability to produce intermittent but continuing leakage. CSIS data suggests Iran’s launch tempo diminished but did not vanish, which is sufficient for coercive pressure if the war is prolonged.

Fourth, complicate Israeli interception with warhead diversity and saturation mechanics. Reuters’ reporting on cluster-munition missiles illustrates Tehran’s effort to make each successful interception problem harder, not just more numerous.

Fifth, regionalize the war by making Gulf infrastructure and U.S. host states part of the battlespace. This widens pressure on Washington beyond Israel alone.

Sixth, convert military endurance into diplomatic leverage. Reuters’ reporting on the ceasefire and later instability around it shows that Iran has sought not only battlefield effects but bargaining power rooted in continued disruption capacity, especially around Hormuz.

Iran’s limits

Yet the analysis also requires sobriety about Iran’s limits. Tehran has suffered very serious damage. AP reported U.S. claims of more than 13,000 targets hit, around 1,500 air-defense targets struck, over 450 ballistic-missile storage facilities attacked, and some 800 one-way-attack-drone storage facilities targeted. AP also noted that U.S. officials describe roughly 80 percent of Iran’s air defenses as destroyed, while other reporting says its missile arsenal has been cut sharply even if thousands remain.

That damage helps explain why Tehran’s tactical approach has favored endurance over decisive battlefield climax. Iran cannot afford to spend its remaining capabilities in a single spectacular blow unless it expects transformational payoff. Instead, it has dispersed pressure across time and geography.

The goal appears to be less the annihilation of enemy capability than the steady corrosion of enemy freedom of action. In strategic terms, Iran has been fighting for a negative outcome: not conquest, but the prevention of a cheap American-Israeli victory.

More than six weeks into the war, despite superior firepower, Israel has not converted military pressure into decisive political resolution, and analysts argue that the air campaign has not produced a durable strategic endgame.

This is where the Iranian campaign intersects most directly with Israel’s own operational dilemma. Israeli airpower has been tactically formidable, and official IDF updates throughout late March repeatedly emphasized strikes on Iranian missile launchers, storage sites, air defenses, and weapons-production facilities.

But those same updates show what Israel believed it needed to keep hitting over and over: not a collapsing enemy, but a firepower array still capable of threatening Israeli civilians. That repetition suggests the core problem of this war has not been initial penetration but durable suppression.