The Iran war has called into question the feasibility of the American way of war. For decades, the United States has premised its national strategy on the ability to fight using forces forward deployed close to enemy territory. But this war has profoundly undermined the notion that the bases and surface ships needed to project such power will continue to enjoy sanctuary from adversary attack. This reality has major implications for U.S. policy toward and campaign planning against more powerful adversaries such as Russia and China, who will also surely seek to deny the United States the ability to fight in the manner it prefers.
How did we get here?
America has largely embraced a forward defense approach since World War II. Insulated by its fortunate geography, the United States has honed a model of warfare that emphasizes projecting power to counter and defeat threats at a distance rather than on its shores. This approach is predicated on U.S. naval power at sea combined with an unparalleled network of allies and partners on land that grants a combination of access, basing, and overflight permissions.
The United States’ forward military posture varies by region and is ideally tied to the capabilities required to deter and, if necessary, defeat threats in line with U.S. national security interests. For that reason, the United States did not always keep large standing forces in the Middle East or have the ability to rapidly deploy such forces in the event of conflict. Those capabilities emerged only in the early 1980s in response to the 1979 Iranian Revolution and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, eventually leading to the formation of U.S. Central Command.
These investments largely delivered on their promise in the 1991 Gulf War. The United States was able to amass over half a million troops in the region within a few months of Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. It then pummeled Iraq in a six-week campaign of land- and sea-based air strikes followed by a victorious 100-hour ground war, all with very low casualties or equipment losses. In 2003, the United States again relied on these assets plus its foothold in Afghanistan to easily overthrow the regime in Baghdad (notwithstanding the insurgency and civil war that followed).
Throughout this period, U.S. bases and carriers had virtual sanctuary from Iraqi attacks despite being located relatively close to Iraqi territory. Carriers regularly operated in and near the Persian Gulf, while the United States maintained large bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia. In 1991, Iraq did launch one devastating ballistic missile attack against a U.S. base in Saudi Arabia, killing 28 service members. But despite that harrowing episode, most Iraqi Scuds were intercepted or inaccurate, doing little damage to U.S. bases.
After 1991, Iraq’s ability to attack U.S. bases or ships was minimal, given the military damage it had suffered, in addition to general Iraqi tactical incompetence and economic ruin. During the insurgency and civil war in Iraq, U.S. bases located within the country did come under repeated attack, but bases outside the country and carriers in the Gulf remained largely safe. Overall, the United States was effectively able to deploy and employ forces in the region at will.
The end of an era
Fast forward to 2026, and it is clear that Iran went to school on the U.S. way of war and understands how to leverage its limited assets to strike at the heart of U.S. power projection capabilities both on land and at sea. Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, has said as much, explicitly threatening that the United States will no longer have “a safe haven for its mischief and for establishing military bases” and that the region will “no longer serve as shields for American bases.” He has also openly warned that “history will record that the Iranian nation sank the superpower of America in the Persian Gulf.”
It is true that the United States has enjoyed tactical and operational successes in the war. It has degraded Iran’s conventional military and damaged its nuclear program. The United States’ integrated air and missile defense regional architecture, developed over nearly 20 years, has also performed well, albeit at a high cost. No one can say that Iran has outright prevented the United States from projecting power into the region—the U.S. military has done so, though how long it can sustain the high tempo of current operations remains to be seen.
Yet despite these achievements, the Iran war has also demonstrated that U.S. forward-deployed forces in the Middle East no longer enjoy sanctuary from attack. Devastating Iranian and Iranian-sponsored attacks have struck hundreds of sites used by the U.S. military and dramatically curtailed U.S. freedom of navigation. The United States has been reluctant to regularly send destroyers into the confined waters of the Gulf due to the persistent threat of Iranian mines, cruise and ballistic missiles, and drones. Although it continues to safely and effectively operate outside the Gulf in the Sea of Oman, the decision not to militarily reopen the Strait of Hormuz reflects the fact that operating there is more costly than it once was.
Meanwhile, Iran has also fired thousands of missiles and drones at land targets in the region, hitting U.S. bases and tragically killing seven U.S. service personnel while injuring over 400. Iran has successfully struck over 200 targets in Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Kuwait, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. It achieved most of these hits with projectiles, whose accuracy, resilience, and numbers U.S. political leaders clearly underrated prior to the war. But Iran also apparently conducted at least one effective fighter jet strike on a U.S. base in Kuwait—a rather astonishing feat, if true.
Moreover, Iran’s strikes have not been random or haphazard. Despite the loss of almost all senior Iranian leaders in the war’s opening days, Iran was still able to execute a well-coordinated campaign that clearly reflected extensive prewar intelligence gathering on targets relevant to U.S. power projection. These included aircraft hangars, munitions storage, fuel storage, command facilities, and airports. Attacks on these sites had disruptive effects beyond the physical damage they caused, because they forced U.S. personnel to evacuate many additional locations that were deemed too vulnerable to further strikes.
Iran also damaged dozens of U.S. aircraft, including critical airborne warning and control aircraft and aerial refueling aircraft. These scarce platforms are vital to the U.S. ability to rapidly sortie combat aircraft and cannot be quickly or cheaply replaced. The fact that some were attacked while parked in the open in predictable locations reflects just how strongly the United States still believed in the sanctuary of its bases—even in a shooting war against an adversary whose formidable missile arsenal was one of the stated justifications for the war
Finally, Iran has systematically targeted U.S. air defenses in the region, with a particular focus on radars and communications infrastructure. This pattern, easily visible in publicly available satellite imagery of the region, shows Iran’s effort to puncture the regional U.S. defensive shield—a shield intended to cover not only itself but its allies. Unfortunately, the trend lines are clear: the operating environment in the Middle East has become dramatically less permissive than was previously the case.
Policy recommendations
Even at this early stage, the Iran war holds some lessons for potential U.S. policy toward and campaign planning against more formidable adversaries such as Russia and especially China. Not only are these foes just as likely to go to school on the U.S. way of war as Iran was, but their material capabilities to interfere with that way of war are significantly greater: Iran’s economy (including its defense industry) and population are a fraction of Russia’s and absolutely dwarfed by China’s. The Iran war should thus be thought of as a preview of coming attractions that could be much worse in a great power conflict—though the United States can turn its current predicament into future wisdom if it learns the right lessons.
First, the United States needs to finally come to grips with the reality that its bases and carriers (and potentially even its homeland) will not have sanctuary in future wars against major powers. Russia and China both have large inventories of accurate conventional long-range strike capabilities that can damage U.S. forward bases and ships. They have deliberately developed these capabilities to interfere with U.S. power projection capabilities, which they understand have underpinned U.S. power for decades.
The Iran war shows that when it comes to base attacks, Russia and China don’t even necessarily have to directly destroy combat aircraft in order to degrade U.S. combat power. If they use their large arsenals to systematically crater runways, destroy fuel depots, and damage enabling aircraft, they can significantly cripple the U.S. ability to project power, even if many of its fighters and bombers remain intact.
Similarly, the war shows that when it comes to naval attacks, adversaries don’t necessarily have to sink a major ship in order to achieve meaningful effects. Merely the threat of such attacks can be effective if it deters the United States from entering hostile waters and thereby reduces the U.S. ability to project power.
To deal with these threats, the United States should dramatically accelerate its thus far rather unimpressive efforts to disperse and harden its bases, particularly in Asia. While its Middle East bases are already dispersed, they require greater hardening and resilience as well. The United States should also invest in rapidly replenishing and increasing its munitions stocks if it wishes to continue to credibly defend its forward bases from attacks in anything like the manner seen in the recent war.
Finally, further investments in attack submarines are critical, as they provide a long-range strike capability not dependent on either bases or carriers. Large numbers of attritable unmanned systems can also help project power from a more diverse array of bases and ships and at a more reasonable cost.
While the Pentagon is unlikely at this stage to publish its much-anticipated Global Posture Review—for the first time in recent history—it should immediately reassess the assumptions originally embedded in that analysis. Some dynamics in this war should cause more conservative estimates, such as various Gulf and European allies and partners publicly restricting U.S. use of their bases in this war. Others may be more sanguine, such as the decreasing likelihood that Gulf states will permit a Chinese military base on their territory anytime soon, given that Beijing has enabled Iranian attacks on their territory. Therefore, defense planners should reconsider posture vulnerability in the Middle East; how allies and partners in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia are reconsidering granting the U.S. military access, basing, and overflight permissions following this war; and the dependencies of U.S. posture across regions. This war may have shaped these key issues such that the U.S. military is not appropriately postured to counter contemporary or future threats.
More broadly, U.S. policymakers must soberly recognize that the costs of fighting a war in Europe or the Indo-Pacific will be higher than what the United States became accustomed to in the unipolar era. That reality should, in turn, discipline U.S. diplomatic and political decisionmaking prior to a decision to ever employ military force. The United States will not be able to engage in relatively low-risk, at-will power projection against a great power the way it once did against Iraq, or even as it has managed to do in the current stalemate versus Iran.
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