The US-Israeli air campaign has devastated Tehran and cities across the country, destroying homes and killing more than 1,900 people, according to Iran’s deputy health minister.
US and Israeli officials and commanders say the campaign is designed to destroy Iran’s missile and drone programs and will soon succeed in eliminating Tehran’s ability to attack countries in the region. Israeli army said 70% of Iran’s missile launchers Incapacitated by the 16th day of the war. The Pentagon says it has disabled about 90% of Iran’s ballistic missile and drone capabilities, though it has not provided further details.
Former military officials and experts say that if the air strikes continue, Iran’s missile program will collapse. But he says eliminating its drone capability is a more difficult objective. Drones do not require large production facilities and can be launched from trucks, making them an elusive target.
“The challenge is that these things are probably relatively easy to hide, and so it’s going to be harder to find them all, to bomb them all,” said Tom Caraco, director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington, DC.
“It depends on how good our and the Israelis’ intelligence is, where everything is,” he said.
Iran’s ability to continue missile and drone attacks has raised questions about the effectiveness of the US-Israeli air campaign, the quality of the intelligence supporting it, and the assumptions shaping the attacks, according to former officials and analysts.
Nicole Grajewski, an assistant professor at the Center for International Research et Sciences Po in Paris, told NBC News that Iran has spread its missile arsenal across the country more than before, using decoys to refocus launches and rapidly digging up damaged missile bases.
In the early days of the war, Iran fired dozens of ballistic missiles at its neighbors. On the third day of the war, the numbers dropped sharply, and now Iran is typically firing fewer than 25 missiles a day at the Gulf states.
As far as drones are concerned, the number of attacks has also declined from the first few days of the conflict, when Tehran fired hundreds at its neighbors.
After the initial phase of the war, the number of Iranian air strikes has varied from day to day and country to country. There has been an overall decline in the number of ballistic missiles fired daily. Since the war began, Iran has kept a steady rate of drone strikes targeting the Gulf states, with an average of about 120 drone strikes per day.
