The U.S. and Israel have degraded Iran's missile stockpiles, but Iran is widening the war across 11 countries using drones.
The U.S. and Israel say they have degraded Iran's missile stockpiles and launchers, blunting Tehran's ability to unleash the massive barrages that opened the war.
Yet Iran is still striking back by widening the conflict across the Middle East, hitting at least 11 countries in six days and jolting the global economy in a bid to pressure Washington to end its attacks.
Iran's ballistic-missile launches were down 90% from the first day of fighting, the Pentagon said Thursday. Drone attacks fell 83% from the first days of the campaign.
The U.S. and Israel are betting that crippling Iran's missile arsenal is key to crushing the regime's ability to fight back. But Iran still has other ways to retaliate, most important its arsenal of low-cost drones. It continues to launch drones by the hundreds at Arab neighbors across the Persian Gulf, spreading fear, roiling markets and disrupting shipments of oil and goods from a region that is crucial to the world's economy.
"Iran's emphasis now is persistence, not volume," said Hasan Alhasan, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies and a former foreign policy analyst for the crown prince of Bahrain.
During the initial days of the war, Iran launched waves of drone and missile attacks on Israel as well as Arab states, hitting U.S. military bases, embassies, airports and oil-and-gas infrastructure. Tehran has shot more than 500 ballistic missiles and launched 2,000 drones, although many have been intercepted, according to the Pentagon.
Israel and the U.S. said they have since destroyed hundreds of ballistic missiles, launchers and drones. They have successfully attacked what Iran calls its "missile cities," where it houses missiles and launchers.
"We identify a decline in the number of launches daily" on Israel, Effie Defrin, an Israeli military spokesman, said on Thursday, adding that Iran still has the capability to fire at Israel.
The Israeli military said Iran was sending fewer missiles at a time on Wednesday, and at some point that day Iran launched just one missile at a time.
Acled, a conflict-monitoring group whose analysts scour local news sources and contacts for real-time conflict data, found an 80% drop in missile events and a 42% drop in drone events from the start of the conflict Saturday through Wednesday across the Middle East, though the data doesn't show whether that reflects fewer launches or more interceptions.
In the United Arab Emirates, which has been one of the main targets of the Iranian air assault, ballistic missile attacks have dropped off to the single-digits in recent days after an initial salvo of 165 last weekend.
Drone attacks have settled into a rhythm of between 120 and 150 a day for the last four days, according to the U.A.E.'s Defense Ministry.
Iran is losing the battle to protect its advanced missile capabilities, but it has a fallback strategy of relying on its arsenal of low-cost, one-way attack drones which it produces by the thousands, said Farzan Sabet, an arms control researcher and Iran expert at the Geneva Graduate Institute.
"Iran's ability to do very high levels of destruction is going to decline," he said. "But it is going to be able to keep firing these drones, and it is going to create a general risk perception" in the oil-exporting Gulf region.
Iran has more short-range missiles and drones than it does long-range ballistic missiles that can reach Israel. That means Iran could still cause disruption in the global economy even through relatively small attacks. Iranian threats have all but closed off the Strait of Hormuz, the world's most important energy shipping lane.
Iran has launched a sweeping attack across at least 11 countries in the wider region, including Turkey, Cyprus and Azerbaijan. On Wednesday, an Iranian missile targeted a military base in Turkey where the U.S. has nuclear weapons stationed, according to U.S. and regional officials, an attack that showed Iran still has some long-range capabilities. The missile was intercepted by a U.S. warship.
With its air defenses down, Iran can do little to stop the American and Israeli strikes, so widening its attacks is meant to impose maximum economic costs on the U.S. while riding out the assault.
"We are seeing the expansion of the threat landscape. This is part of Iran's strategy essentially to increase pressure on the U.S. political establishment by increasing the costs to both the U.S. and its allies," said Sinan Ulgen, a former Turkish diplomat and director of the Edam think tank in Istanbul.
Lacking a significant air force, Iran heavily relies on its long- and short-range missiles, and drone firing capabilities to strike its adversaries. Gulf countries are closer to Iran than Israel, making them vulnerable to less sophisticated weapons, such as short-range missiles and Shahed drones, which cost around tens of thousands of dollars each; not millions needed for missiles/interceptors.
Even a small number of attacks can have an outsize economic impact. Thousands of ships remain stuck on either side of the Strait of Hormuz, trapping roughly a fifth of the oil and liquefied-natural gas the world consumes each day. Drone attacks also hit an important Saudi oil facility and forced Qatar to shut down gas exports.
Stocks fell sharply and U.S. oil prices pushed above $80 a barrel for the first time in more than a year.
Iran's drones in particular have posed a challenge both for U.S. and Gulf air defenses, killing six American troops in Kuwait last weekend and crashing into hotels and high-rise buildings in Dubai and Bahrain. Those strikes have shattered the illusion of safety in Gulf countries that have positioned themselves as globally connected centers of finance and tourism.
Meanwhile, it isn't known how many long-range ballistic missiles Iran still has, and could deploy later in the conflict.
"It would make sense for them to keep their most potent weapons for the later stage of the conflict when defensive assets of countries involved have thinned out because of early strikes," Ulgen said.