As the US-Israeli war on Iran enters its second week, Washington has been unleashing a barrage of triumphant claims about the scale of its successes.
“We’ve wiped every single force in Iran out, very completely,” declared US president Donald Trump at a press conference this week. He also claimed there had been a “90 per cent decline” and “83 per cent drop” in Iranian missile and drone “launchers”.
Trump’s self-styled secretary of war Pete Hegseth also claimed that “the last 24 hours have seen Iran fire the lowest amount of missiles they have fired yet”.
As if on cue, Iran’s most powerful armed force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), announced on Wednesday that it launched its “most intense and heaviest” operation, purportedly including launches of its more advanced Khorramshahr medium-range ballistic missiles. Missile and drone attacks against the Gulf states, Iraq and Israel are also continuing.
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So, has the US misjudged Iran’s firepower?
“There is obviously a lot of bluster and rhetorical propaganda going on both sides,” says Arash Azizi, a lecturer at Yale University and author of The Shadow Commander: Soleimani, the US, and Iran’s Global Ambitions.
“But the US’s claim about total destruction of Iran’s capabilities does appear to be exaggerated. Iran still maintains significant missile and drone capabilities.
“Iran is fighting a gradual war, and it can go on with certain missiles and drones for quite some time. I estimate for another few weeks or months.”
Nicolas Heras, interim executive director at the Middle East Policy Council and senior director at the New Lines Institute, says the IRGC had plans prepared for executing a six-month campaign of drone attacks against its opponents during an active war.
The plans for “external attacks” rely on “dispersed drone assets” stored in remote and heavily populated areas within range of regional states.
“The drone force is Iran’s basic strategy to apply strategic pressure on its opponents,” Heras says. “Iran’s ballistic missiles are also dispersed, and most, except for the more advanced munitions, can be fired from platforms that can be repaired if needed.”
Despite having world-class air defences, the Gulf states have found intercepting some of the relatively cheap Iranian Shahed-136 attack drones difficult.
Further afield, Israel has said half of the approximately 300 ballistic missiles Iran has launched against it so far in this war contain cluster warheads, which disperse smaller munitions over wider areas more indiscriminately than larger conventional warheads.
Complementing these continued kinetic drone and missile firings, Iran is actively engaging in information, intelligence, and psychological warfare.
“The Iranians have been careful during this war to make less bombastic statements about their capabilities and the effects of their strikes, indicating that the regime is trying to position itself to be a credible source of information as a deterrent to its opponents’ information and psychological warfare activities,” Heras says.
“The Islamic Republic regime has active intelligence support from China and Russia, and so long as the regime survives the war and has industrial capability left, it can be a predatory actor in the Gulf and beyond for years to come.”
