A Tactical Victory with a Strategic Vacuum

CENTCOM's account of the war on Iran is impressive. The blanks it leaves are the ones that will matter.

On 14 May 2026, the Commander of US Central Command stood before the Senate Armed Services Committee and described a war that, in his words, "rolled back 40 years of Iranian military investment" in 38 days. Admiral Charles Bradford Cooper II's account of Operation Epic Fury is impressive by any measure: 85 percent of Iran's ballistic-missile, drone, and naval-defence industrial base damaged or destroyed, 82 percent of its air-defence systems disabled, over 90 percent of its naval-mine stockpile eliminated, 161 vessels sunk across 16 classes, 1,450 strikes on weapons facilities and 2,000 more on command-and-control nodes. "Iran can no longer project power across the region," he concluded.

Tactically, the claim is defensible. Strategically, it is a story with notable omissions. The testimony delivers an autopsy of Iran's conventional defeat with admirable precision, but says far less about the asymmetric toolkit that powered Tehran's regional expansion across four decades, and even less about how Washington intends to neutralise Iran's destabilising influence in the Middle East.

In his statement, Cooper concedes that "we should expect Iran will try to reconstitute what it can, as fast as it can." History justifies the warning. After the June 2025 "12-day war," American and Israeli sources had already estimated that half of Iran's surface-to-surface missile arsenal and two-thirds of its launchers had been destroyed, alongside critical damage to Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan. By February 2026, Iran was once again capable of wave attacks, meaning that much of what was counted as "destroyed" in 2025 had been either concealed beforehand or rebuilt in under nine months. Iran's missile self-sufficiency rests on shifting production, not just stockpiles, onto hidden infrastructure. The 85-percent figure does not tell us how much refers to irreplaceable capacity versus dual-use facilities that can be reconstituted. Israeli military assessments suggest Iran could return to its pre-war missile-production rate within twelve to twenty-four months once the bombing stops.

The Asymmetric Playbook, Intact

If conventional damage is reversible, Iran's asymmetric playbook is barely touched. Cooper asserts that "the supply chain from Tehran to the proxies has been broken," then immediately acknowledges that Iran "retains nuisance capability through harassment, low-end drone and rocket attacks, and residual proxy support."

Hezbollah is the test case. Earlier this year, Israeli assessments put the organisation at roughly 15 percent of its pre-war stockpile of around 150,000 projectiles. It still resumed direct fire on northern Israel on 2 March 2026, two days after the combined US–Israeli strikes on Iran. As of December 2025, the US-chaired Cessation of Hostilities Supervisory Committee, also known as "the Mechanism", had judged that around 85 percent of disarmament tasks south of the Litani river were complete. Events since 2 March suggest re-armament is outpacing disarmament. Hezbollah redeployed several hundred elite operatives into the area within days, while anti-tank missiles, MANPADS, and rocket launchers had been pre-positioned in civilian infrastructure for exactly this contingency. Add to that Hezbollah's growing use of first-person-view drones, small, low-flying, radar-evading, assembled from commercial parts for a few hundred to a few thousand dollars apiece. These modern warfare gems can disable tanks, strike fortified positions, and target individual soldiers or civilians from anywhere within a few kilometres. Eliminating them entirely is practically impossible. A "degraded" Hezbollah retains the capacity for continuous, low-cost attrition and a security threat to Northern Israel.

The same logic applies to Iran itself. Since March 2026, Tehran has launched missiles and drones against hydrocarbon infrastructure across the Gulf Cooperation Council and at commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. Preventing this would require a sustained, integrated campaign of military and economic coercion led by Washington with regional and extra-regional partners, a configuration hardly achievable today.

Strikingly, the policy framing has narrowed to match the military reality check. Until 2025, US officials identified three Iranian threats: nuclear, ballistic, and proxy forces. The current Administration's ask of Tehran has been narrowed to the nuclear programme and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint that became a flashpoint as a consequence of the war, not its cause. CENTCOM quietly preserves the older triad in its testimony. The divergence between the negotiating agenda in Islamabad and the military commander's threat picture is itself a worrying contradiction.

CENTCOM's three stated priorities — defending the homeland, deterring Iran, preserving advantage versus China — are organised around burden-shifting, through tools such as Foreign Military Sales reform, the Middle East Air Defense (MEAD) network and partner-led counter-drone work. The statement does not signal appetite for a follow-on war. It signals a posture designed to absorb a long, low-intensity confrontation. The triggers for re-escalation are identifiable (nuclear breakout, attack on US forces, interference with shipping) but none touches Iran's destabilising regional behaviour, a silence that effectively grants Tehran continued latitude through its proxies.

This means that the burden of confronting Iran's nuisance capacity, by default, falls on Israel. An essentially identical doctrine is now applied by Israel in Gaza, southern Syria, and southern Lebanon. It sways from the failed Israeli-governed buffer zones of 1985–2000, but retains kill-zones in bordering countries, permanent freedom of military action across the region, in addition to indefinite "mowing the grass" airstrikes against deeper targets in Iran or its proxy hosts.

Containment as Default Horizon

CENTCOM's other large assumption is that MEAD, operationalised during Epic Fury, marks the beginning of a durable integrated multilateral regional security architecture rather than a one-off wartime initiative. In the CENTCOM statement, the performance metrics of the existing MEAD were genuinely historic with more than 6,000 attack drones and 1,500 ballistic missiles intercepted. According to Cooper, this would be "the largest integrated air-defense umbrella ever fielded on earth." Yet every previous regional security framework has collapsed for the same structural reasons, none of which have been resolved, such as intra-GCC rivalries, divergent foreign-policy orientations, and recalibration of threat perceptions following diplomatic openings with Tehran.

Compounding this is an erosion of confidence in American willingness to absorb risk on partners' behalf. The 1990–91 benchmark — a 35-state coalition and half a million troops within months of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait — is no longer the reference point in Gulf capitals. They look instead at the muted US response to the 2019 strikes on Saudi Aramco, the abandonment of Kurdish partners, the 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal, and CENTCOM's own admission that "most countries have declined to participate in helping to reopen the Strait of Hormuz." The result is a hedging strategy the testimony does not acknowledge. Several GCC states have built parallel comprehensive partnerships with Beijing to acquire Chinese ballistic missiles, armed drones, and communications infrastructure, which impose concrete interoperability and intelligence-sharing limits on MEAD itself.

The US and Israel have shown they can dismantle much of Iran's conventional military apparatus with remarkable speed and coordination. The very success of that operation exposes the limits of force against an adversary whose power has never depended on parity of technology or firepower, but on deceit, deniability, and the ability to translate limited capabilities into persistent political and psychological pressure.

A containment-plus-burden-shifting posture signals a transition from problem-solving to risk management. That implies a phase of chronic instability in which adversaries are not defeated but continuously managed, and deterrence operates permanently below the threshold of decisive confrontation. Technology can align sensors and interceptors, but it cannot reconcile divergent threat perceptions, hedging instincts, or declining confidence in external guarantees, even when the convener is the United States.

The core residual challenge of how to confront the resilient, low-cost, decentralised forms of power that still underpin Iran's destabilising strategy is precisely the one the CENTCOM statement does not address.