Jordan attack shows US badly underestimated Iran’s ability for survival and capacity to strike back

I started writing this column, dear readers, after watching the World Cup final in which Spain outclassed 10-man Argentina to lift a well-deserved title, their second since 2010. The president of the United States, Donald Trump, was in attendance at the MetLife stadium in New Jersey. As is his wont, he even refused to leave the podium during Spain’s customary victory photo. Who can blame him? Trump may have relished the opportunity to take his mind off for more than couple hours from the action under way in West Asia.

He must have, because details pouring in from the conflict may sink further his tanking popularity at home. Trump might have the world’s mightiest military at his command, but American vanity is receiving body blows in the brutal war of attrition, as a much weaker adversary is not just refusing to bend but delivering quite a few counterpunches. Trump and his ‘secretary of war’, testosterone junkie Pete Hegseth, are being made to look a little foolish.

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The deadly Iranian attack on the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base on Friday that claimed the lives of three American service members – the fourth Iranian offensive in five days on US forces in Jordan alone – was the latest entry in a spate of strikes on American positions across the region since the war’s reopening.

Washington has spent the better part of a year underestimating two things at once – Iran’s resilience in enduring sustained bombardment, and its capacity to strike back. Both errors stem from the same flawed assumption that a nation’s fighting power can be measured chiefly by the number of buildings reduced to rubble. For months, the prevailing narrative in Washington has been that intense, sustained American and Israeli strikes have severely degraded Tehran’s ability to project power across the Gulf and Arab states. That hypothesis is in sore need of revision.

The public narrative of the war has followed a familiar arc since the campaign that began with American and Israeli attacks on February 28 that wiped out the top Iranian leadership, including the octogenarian Ayatollah Khamenei and military commanders. As New York Times observes, “in the weeks that followed, the Pentagon says it hit around 13,000 targets, eviscerated the country’s Navy and Air Force, vastly degraded Iran’s missile and drone arsenals, and killed some 40 high-level military and intelligence leaders.”

And yet, despite frequent tall claims from Trump and Hegseth, the intelligence picture assembled by America’s own agencies pointed at a more sobering story. By early April, three sources familiar with classified assessments told CNN that roughly half of Iran’s missile launchers remained operational and thousands of cheap drone stocks were intact, along with a substantial portion of its coastal defence missiles used to threaten shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

Reuters reported that American officials could only confirm the destruction of roughly a third of Iran’s missile arsenal, a figure far removed from the language of near-total defeat used in public briefings.

By May, the New York Times revealed that “Iran has restored operational access to 30 of the 33 missile sites it maintains along the Strait of Hormuz” and “still fields about 70 percent of its mobile launchers across the country and has retained roughly 70 percent of its prewar missile stockpile” that includes ballistic and cruise projectiles despite months of strikes. The findings directly contradicted Trump’s claim to CBS that Iranian missiles were no linger a threat.

American intelligence also observed that Iranian crews were digging out missile silos and underground bunkers that were damaged by the airstrikes, and restoring them to working condition within weeks, and in some cases “returning them to operation hours after an attack.”

Washington’s early assumption that overwhelming firepower would translate quickly into Iranian compliance was always unsound and has not been borne out. Iran has continued to launch, continued to hit targets, and continued to demonstrate that a bombing campaign from air cannot ensure victory without clearly defined end state.

From an American perspective, the more alarming development is the seemingly qualitative leap in Iran’s offensive capabilities as evidenced in the recent strikes on Jordanian soil. The strikes did not only prove that Tehran’s missile stockpile is far from depleted, but the way the projectiles deviated from predictable trajectories and gave America’s vaunted THAAD missile defence systems the slip indicates that Iran possesses capabilities that were underestimated by the Americans, either through hubris or design.

Wall Street Journal quoted US officials to report that Iranian missiles “travel at extremely high speeds and can maneuver as they streak toward the earth”. Moreover, the precision required to strike fortified targets like the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, which is a critical node for US air operations, suggests a level of sophistication previously unseen. It has led to speculation in western media that Tehran may be receiving advanced intelligence from external actors such as Russia or China.

There is one more message in Iran’s extensive targeting of Jordan where US bases have suffered the most extensive damage. Jordan provides a vital strategic advantage for the US, allowing for streamlined air operations across Syria, Iraq, and the entire region. New York Times quotes David Deptula, a retired US air force lieutenant general and a main architect of the 1991 Gulf war, as saying that “Friday’s attack was not just an attack on a base… It was an attack on the US regional coalition and an attempt to make the political cost of hosting American forces greater than the security benefit.”

By concentrating ballistic missile strikes and drone attacks on Jordanian bases, Iran is trying to implement an erosion of US air defence umbrella in the entire region. This may bring further reputational damage to Washington’s already depleting status. It is of critical importance to Iran in its larger objective of playing for time while keeping up the offensive – a risky gambit that depends on the theory that Trump will blink first.

As Vali Nasr, professor at Johns Hopkins University, writes in New York Times, “Iran’s current rulers believe that any display of restraint will only invite further American pressure. To deter the US, and to compel it to negotiate in earnest for an end to the war and a broader nuclear deal that would give Tehran the security and economic relief it craves, they believe Iran has to be aggressive and escalate the conflict beyond what the US is prepared to countenance.”

With US fatalities from the war creeping up to 17 (the number is nearly 4000 for Iran) and CENTCOM launching ninth straight night of attacks on different targets, the war is widening in scope and deepening in depth.

At the brink of an all-out war in West Asia that may crush global economy, American strategy needs a recalibration. Doubling down on massive air attacks on military and even civilian targets risks a perpetual cycle of escalation against an adversary that has proven its capacity to rebuild and strike back. Americans have been here before, and after a hell-for-leather ‘war on terror’ for years post 9/11, came around to a realization that “sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is.”

The Iranian regime is prepared for the long haul and is ready to absorb everything that Americans an throw at it. It is locked in an existential battle and believes the wider public has rallied around the flag. If the US wishes to bring this conflict to a genuine close, it will have to redefine its military and diplomatic objectives.

(The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)