In nearly six weeks of war with Iran, the United States’ and Israel’s military performance has been unexpectedly effective. Between the start of the war on February 28 and the start of this week’s cease-fire, U.S. and Israeli airstrikes destroyed thousands of targets in Iran. Although Iranian retaliatory strikes caused damage, American and Israeli air defenses worked well. Complete details about the targets the U.S. and Israeli militaries hit, the Iranian drones and missiles they intercepted, and the units they deployed are not yet public. But judging by the available information, it is likely that the two militaries’ methods and technology attained new levels of tactical effectiveness.
The performance should give pause to U.S. adversaries that have been watching the war in Iran unfold. Massive volleys of long-range drones and ballistic missiles are a preferred offensive tool of China, North Korea, and Russia, used to pound military bases and headquarters, sink fleets, and level civilian infrastructure. If a U.S. adversary were to undertake a war of aggression in Asia or Europe, its plan would be to launch strikes to try to neutralize U.S. and allied military forces, likely inflicting high civilian losses in the process, and then use that cover to carry out its war objectives. The success of high-end Western missile defenses against Iranian strikes calls such a plan into question. Ballistic missiles and drones may not be the decisive offensive weapons that many countries thought them to be. They could still be effective in a campaign of attrition and coercion—but this would be a slow process, not a path to quick victory.
The implications are most consequential for a potential war with China. Until now, U.S. defense analysts expected that China could use long-range strikes to severely impair American air and naval operations in a conflict over Taiwan. The way the war in the Middle East has progressed suggests that this basic assumption must be reassessed. The United States may be able to carry out far more effective operations against China than analysts once thought—and this potential could give China good reason to refrain from military aggression for some time.
BETTER THAN EXPECTED
For years, the U.S. military predicted that a war with Iran could become quite costly. As of early 2026, Iran had a large arsenal of more than 2,500 ballistic missiles and several thousand one-way attack drones, including its own Shahed drone, that could reach the Gulf states, Israel, and U.S. bases in the Middle East. In a war, those missiles and drones were expected to cause widespread damage. General Frank McKenzie, who served as head of U.S. Central Command from 2019 to 2022, warned in his memoir that the volume of Iranian strikes “would overwhelm air and missile defenses and reach their targets,” resulting in “many thousands of casualties, both military and civilian.” U.S. air and naval bases near the Persian Gulf could be incapacitated, the Gulf states’ oil and energy infrastructure might be destroyed, and Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz with mines and antiship missiles launched from its own coast.
Iran managed to close the strait, but its missile campaign fell well short of expectations. The BBC reported that in the first five days of the war, Iran launched 550 ballistic missiles and 1,500 drones against targets in the Gulf and 128 ballistic missiles and 1,100 drones against Israel. Thanks to U.S. air defenses and those of U.S. allies, very few got through. On February 28 and March 1 alone, U.S. and Gulf militaries intercepted 400 Iranian missiles and 1,000 drones, according to The Wall Street Journal. Iran launched 262 ballistic missiles and 1,475 drones at the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in the first ten days of the war; only two missiles and 90 drones hit the country. Of the more than 290 missiles and 500 drones that Iran had launched at Israel by March 15, none were reported to have hit any military target of significance. After March 15, a few missiles and drones infiltrated Israel’s air defenses and struck civilian areas; one hit the Old City in Jerusalem. As of April 3, at least 250 Israelis had been killed or injured, and air raid warnings have been frequent. The overall harm, however, was still relatively low.
Iran’s missiles and drones struck at least 17 U.S. military bases and installations across the Gulf, doing notable damage to radar systems and to the U.S. naval base in Bahrain. The worst consequence has been economic. The few missiles and drones that sneaked past air defenses wreaked havoc on airports and energy infrastructure, including the Ruwais oil refinery and the port of Fujairah in the UAE, oil fields in Saudi Arabia, and the Ras Laffan liquefied natural gas complex in Qatar. Qatar shut down the complex on March 2 rather than risk further strikes and damage, a move that raised gas prices throughout the world. On the same day, the Saudi national oil company Aramco shut its Ras Tanura refinery as a precaution after incoming drones were intercepted.
Although the resulting energy crunch has imposed costs on the United States and its allies, the damage pales in comparison to what most experts predicted. Iran did not, for example, inflict thousands of military and civilian deaths or destroy all the region’s oil refineries. Washington’s ability to project power has not been curtailed. Gulf bases remain operational; the damage from Iranian missiles was not severe enough to impair air operations and force the U.S. military to rely on aircraft carriers, distant bases, or intercontinental bomber missions. Before the cease-fire came into effect, the Pentagon had reported that hundreds of U.S. and Israeli sorties were mounted daily from land bases and aircraft carriers to hit military or industrial targets inside Iran.
Missiles and drones may not be the decisive offensive weapons that many thought them to be.
The United States and Israel, meanwhile, made impressive achievements with their own strikes on Iranian leadership and ballistic missile sites. The Israeli military said that it killed 40 senior military figures in the first minute of its February 28 attack, including the leaders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Iranian army’s chief of staff, and Iran’s former defense minister. Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in his home. Iran’s intelligence minister, the head of the Basij militia, and the influential security chief Ali Larijani were killed in Israeli strikes in the following weeks. Targeting an adversary’s leadership is hardly new to warfare, but it has rarely, if ever, been so comprehensive. Striking individuals at long distances from the air is particularly challenging. U.S. special operations forces became adept at these targeted killings during the war on terror, but even model cases, such as the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, in 2006, and of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the so-called Islamic State, in 2019, involved years-long campaigns. In the current war, the United States and Israel knocked out most of their adversary’s senior leadership at the outset.
The United States and Israel also successfully went after Iran’s ballistic missile launchers. In March, they claimed to have destroyed or disabled roughly 50 to 80 percent of Iran’s 400 or so launchers. Hitting ballistic missile launchers is the holy grail of modern warfare: it is cheaper to strike a missile or its launcher on the ground than to defend against an incoming missile, and destroying an opponent’s launchers reduces the frequency and size of its missile volleys. Typically, this task is tricky because missile launchers are mobile. By taking out as many as they did, the United States and Israel exceeded expectations.
Success in both decapitation and strikes on ballistic missile launchers was due in part to Israel’s superb technical and human intelligence capabilities. Israel has been collecting intelligence on Iran for decades, long enough to get close to leaders and learn the locations of sensitive military targets. The U.S. military, meanwhile, refined the process of collecting intelligence, finding a target, tracking the target, and then striking it during 20 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Surveillance from U.S. and Israeli drones and satellites has steadily improved, and the United States can now monitor any part of the battlefield at all times. Although the U.S. government has not released details, The Economist has reported that both militaries used artificial intelligence tools to help filter through data to find military targets and to design the strikes against them in ways that maximize the probability of a successful hit.
This tactical success in Iran is not a one-off affair. The current war is the fourth time in two years that U.S. and Israeli air defenses have parried the Iranians, following missile barrages in April and October 2024 and the 12-day war in June 2025. Israel also eliminated the upper tier of Hamas and Hezbollah leadership between 2023 and 2025 and killed dozens of Iranian senior military leaders and scientists in the 12-day war; in January 2026, the United States located and detained Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in a lightning special operation.
There is one significant challenge that the United States and Israel did not overcome: preventing Iran from using antiship missiles, drones, and mines to close the Strait of Hormuz. They similarly have had trouble stopping the Houthis’ attacks on ships in the Red Sea over the past few years. Even the most sophisticated militaries struggle to locate and neutralize antiship missiles and drones before an attacker launches them. The difficulty is likely to persist because of the small size and mobility of these weapons. Surveillance and airstrikes can chip away at this advantage, but in general, approaching the shore of a hostile country by ship remains a dangerous proposition.
GAME-CHANGER
How Iran has fared in this war has direct bearing on how China might fare in a potential war in Asia. China, similar to Iran, would very likely rely on long-range precision-strike weapons at the outset of such a conflict. Since the mid-2010s, U.S. defense analysts have been writing study after study and playing endless war games to consider how a war over Taiwan might pan out. Nearly all have concluded that China would use ballistic, cruise, and hypersonic missiles to strike Taiwan and U.S. bases in Japan and the Philippines. Beijing would likely launch a massive air campaign to clobber Taiwan, as well as send a thousand or more ballistic and cruise missiles—depending on the model and scenario—to rain down on U.S. bases and either sink U.S. Navy vessels or drive them far from China’s coast. Analysts often predict total destruction, precluding U.S. air and naval operations near Taiwan. The Center for Strategic and International Studies ran one war game 24 times in 2022 and found that the United States and Japan “lost dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and thousands of servicemembers”—losses that “damaged the U.S. global position for many years.”
The war in Iran does show that the United States and its Asian allies have vulnerabilities. In a war over Taiwan, for example, China might follow the Israeli and American example and try to decapitate Taiwanese political and military leadership with direct strikes or covert action. Beijing is rumored to have many supporters in Taiwan and elsewhere in the region. Its agents may be well placed to identify, locate, and track key leaders. Better Taiwanese and U.S. operational security and counterintelligence is necessary to thwart that activity.
Furthermore, China’s missiles and air defenses are much more capable than Iran’s. Beijing is reported to have prototype hypersonic missiles that are fast, maneuverable, and difficult to intercept. It is also likely to have a better ability to identify critical targets, including radars, air defense systems, and moving ships. Above all, the war with Iran has reduced the United States’ stockpile of interceptors, and Washington will need to replenish them as quickly as possible. Otherwise, U.S. forces will be much more vulnerable to strikes from China than they have been to strikes from Iran.
The tactical success in Iran is not a one-off affair.
But on the whole, Washington’s success calls into question pessimistic assumptions about Taiwan, particularly given how few Iranian missiles and drones were able to penetrate U.S. and allied defenses. Iran’s barrage was by no means small—it had launched approximately 850 ballistic and cruise missiles by mid-March—and was certainly large enough to warrant reassessment of how many Chinese missiles U.S. and allied defenses may intercept. Even a small reduction in the efficacy of Chinese strikes could be significant if it allows some U.S. bases and a good number of ships to remain operational. War games tend to assume that U.S. and allied air defenses can shoot down between 75 and 91 percent of incoming missiles, until interceptors are exhausted or destroyed by the enemy. But the war with Iran suggests that these numbers may be too low. The UAE appears to have intercepted 99 percent of all incoming missiles and to have done well against drones, too, without exhausting its interceptors. If U.S. and allied defenses again prove more efficient than expected in a war against China (and if Washington adequately restocks), bases in the Western Pacific might endure a Chinese bombardment, enabling U.S. air and naval operations to degrade Chinese forces amid an invasion of Taiwan. The U.S. military may still not be able to thwart a Chinese invasion, but if China expects to incur higher losses, it could change its calculations.
China might also have reason to worry about the safety of its ballistic missile launchers and military commanders, depending on the effectiveness of Chinese air defenses. If those defenses match the U.S. and Israeli capabilities that have been on display over the past several weeks, there is less cause for concern, since the United States would be unable to conduct decapitation attacks or hunt ballistic missiles and other mobile targets in the event of a war. Yet if China’s capabilities are substantially weaker—unlikely, but a possibility China cannot rule out—its missile launchers on the ground and even its military leadership would be vulnerable.
These anticipated costs should affect China’s strategic calculations, especially if the U.S. forces now engaged in the Middle East quickly redeploy to Asia after the current war ends. Chinese leader Xi Jinping may decide to postpone aggression until his military can build enough ballistic missiles, hypersonic missiles, and drones to overwhelm better-than-expected U.S. and allied defenses. The economic damage of the war in Iran could also prompt Xi to hold off. A war in Asia would halt trade and suspend Taiwan’s semiconductor industry, hurting the U.S. and Chinese economies alike. Taking into account that unwanted consequence and the increased difficulty of a military campaign, Xi may instead focus on other means of pursuing “reunification” with Taiwan, such as diplomacy, economic coercion and incentives, and political subversion.
TIME FOR A RETHINK
Over the past four years, first-person-view drones have revolutionized small-unit infantry tactics in Ukraine and surface drones have undermined the supremacy of conventional fleets in the Black Sea. These successes have suggested that, in future conflicts, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and one-way attack drones could be used to incapacitate U.S. and allied militaries and cause vast economic and civilian devastation. Yet the success of missile defenses and decapitation strikes in blunting Iran’s ballistic missile and drone threats suggests that the danger of such offensive campaigns has been exaggerated. Rather than providing an adversary with the capacity to wipe out entire bases and neutralize U.S. and allied militaries, missile and drone strikes may function more like traditional bombing campaigns, slowly damaging key targets over time. The effects of such campaigns can be mitigated by defensive investments. U.S. power projection might be relatively unimpaired.
Only six weeks after the start of the war with Iran, any assessment of its implications is, necessarily, a preliminary one. But U.S. and Israeli tactical successes so far should motivate Washington to revisit its operational and strategic thinking. Incorporating real-world performance metrics—such as interceptor hit and expenditure rates—from the war in Iran into U.S. modeling, war-gaming, and quantitative calculations could change expected outcomes in a potential conflict with China, which could help the U.S. military refine its operational plans.
The demonstration of American capabilities in Iran, moreover, should serve as a warning to the United States’ enemies. It might even be enough to deter China, the most formidable among them. And if so—if Beijing rethinks its aggression and Washington addresses its remaining vulnerabilities in Asia—the current war will have some positive outcomes. It could keep Asia peaceful in the years to come.
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