Snatching strategic defeat from the jaws of tactical victory

 

Operation Rising Lion and Operation Epic Fury have redrawn the Middle East's military map. Whether the United States and Israel have won the war—or merely a series of battles—depends on six questions whose answers will not be known for years.

Nagesh Bhushan | Hyderabad, India

On June 11th 2025, Israeli jets crossed into Iranian airspace and began the most audacious military operation in the Middle East since the Gulf War. Twelve days later, a ceasefire brokered by Donald Trump halted what both sides were already calling the defining conflict of the region's modern era. Nine months later, the United States joined in earnest, launching Operation Epic Fury on February 28th 2026—a campaign that lasted 71 days, struck more than 9,000 targets, and gutted Iran's navy, air defences, and ballistic-missile stockpile. On May 5th, Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared offensive operations concluded. The guns, for now, have fallen silent.

The silence, however, is not the same as victory. Both sides claim success, and both claims are—with qualifications—analytically defensible. That paradox reflects a fundamental asymmetry in how each side defined winning. Israel and America defined victory as what they could destroy. Iran defined victory as what it could preserve. By those asymmetric standards, both sides can claim partial success. The strategic verdict remains genuinely open.

"For Iran's regime, merely surviving an armed conflict with the United States constitutes victory."

The military ledger: what was destroyed, what was not

The physical damage inflicted on Iran across both campaigns is historically significant by any measure. More than 140 naval vessels were destroyed or damaged. Iran's Russian-supplied S-300 air-defence network—painstakingly assembled over a decade—was eliminated to the point where American B-1 bombers, the slowest and least survivable aircraft in the US arsenal, flew over Iranian airspace without serious challenge. That single operational detail communicates more about the collapse of Iran's integrated air defence than any satellite photograph.

Iran's ballistic-missile stockpile—the centrepiece of its deterrence architecture—was reduced by an estimated 80% of strike capacity in the 12-day war. It was then reconstituted to roughly 2,000 systems by February 2026, then targeted again during Epic Fury. More than 30 senior IRGC commanders were killed in the opening hours of Rising Lion alone. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei himself was killed in February 2026—the first killing of an Iranian supreme leader in the republic's history.

And yet the campaign's most important objective—the permanent elimination of Iran's nuclear programme—was not achieved. The IAEA's director-general has been explicit: nuclear knowledge cannot be erased through military action. Underground facilities at Fordow and Natanz sustained damage but were not destroyed. Most consequentially, 440 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60% purity—sufficient, if further enriched, for as many as ten nuclear weapons—remains unaccounted for. Whether it lies buried under rubble or was evacuated before the first strike is the most strategically important intelligence question of the conflict.

 

ISRAEL — Objectives vs Outcomes
Destroy nuclear programme	Sites struck; 440kg HEU unaccounted for; weaponisation pathway open	✓~
Degrade missile arsenal	80% strike capacity eliminated; rapid reconstitution followed	✓
Achieve air dominance	S-300 destroyed; B-1s flew freely; near-total ISR permissiveness	✓✓
Dismantle proxy axis	Hezbollah and Hamas degraded; Houthis active; axis persists in form	✓~
Regime change	Khamenei killed; IRGC-dominated successor consolidated power	✗

 

UNITED STATES — Objectives vs Outcomes
End nuclear breakout	Underground sites survived; HEU unlocated; knowledge intact	✗
Degrade conventional forces	Navy gutted; air defence eliminated; 9,000+ targets struck	✓
Preserve global deterrence	40–80% of entire US THAAD global interceptor inventory expended	✗~
Keep Strait of Hormuz open	Project Freedom paused; blockade ongoing; oil-price shock active	✗~
Regime change	Protests suppressed; IRGC holds; Mojtaba Khamenei consolidating	✗

 

IRAN — Objectives vs Outcomes
Regime survival	Islamic Republic intact; succession protocols functioned under war	✓
Preserve deterrence	~70% of missile arsenal survives; Hormuz threat preserved	✓~
Cost imposition	114:1 interceptor-cost ratio; Pacific deterrence gap opened	✓✓
Preserve nuclear knowledge	Cannot be bombed away; weaponisation pathway structurally open	✓
Nuclear fatwa (unintended)	Khamenei's death removed the theological prohibition on weapons	✓~

 

The mosaic that would not break

To understand why the Islamic Republic survived two rounds of the most intensive aerial campaign mounted against a middle-tier power since the Gulf War, it is necessary to understand the doctrine designed precisely for this contingency. Iran's Mosaic Defence—formally articulated over two decades by IRGC commanders and think-tanks linked to the Supreme National Security Council—distributes military capability, command authority, and political succession across a sufficiently large number of nodes that no decapitation strike, however precise, can collapse the system as a whole.

The doctrine's logic was validated under conditions its designers never expected to face. Khamenei was killed. The IRGC's entire senior command was eliminated in the opening hours of Operation Rising Lion. Iran's integrated air-defence network was destroyed. And yet, within hours, a new supreme leader had been appointed, IRGC provincial units were acting under pre-authorised strike protocols, and ballistic missiles continued to launch. One IRGC coordination deputy later admitted publicly that units had requested authorisation to fire earlier than they did—but that the delay was caused not by confusion, but by the need to appoint replacement commanders before major strikes could be formally authorised. Even that bottleneck is now being redesigned, with proposals to delegate strike authority to sub-provincial commanders to eliminate the approval delay entirely.

"The gamble that Iran's state apparatus would fracture without its supreme leader fundamentally misjudged Iranian military doctrine."

The most significant unintended consequence of the campaign may prove to be the removal of Khamenei's religious fatwa prohibiting nuclear weapons. That theological constraint was a real element of Iran's political architecture—imperfect as a practical barrier, but meaningful as a limiting factor on internal debate. With Khamenei gone, the fatwa goes with him. The Arms Control Association has assessed that the strikes may have strengthened the political case for weaponisation rather than weakened it. That is a strategic irony of the first order.

The cost nobody is counting

Among the least-discussed consequences of the 83-day campaign is what it has done to American deterrence in the Pacific. THAAD batteries expended approximately 198 interceptors in the first 16 days of Epic Fury alone—roughly 40% of the entire US global inventory of 534 rounds. Across the full campaign, assessments range from 40% to 80% of total THAAD stocks expended. The cost asymmetry that enabled Iran's Mosaic Defence drone strategy is stark: a Shahed-136 drone costs between $20,000 and $50,000 to produce; a PAC-3 MSE interceptor costs $3.7m—a ratio of 114 to one in Iran's favour. Defence analysts estimate three to five years would be required to rebuild interceptor stockpiles to pre-war levels.

China has observed every interceptor expended and knows exactly the dimensions of the current gap. CSIS titled its ceasefire assessment 'Last Rounds?'—a pointed reference to how deeply the campaign drained the strategic reserves that underpin Pacific deterrence. The war that was sold domestically as being about Iran may, in its most consequential second-order effect, have been about Taiwan.

The six questions that will decide the verdict

The tactical ledger is settled. The strategic verdict will be determined by six questions whose answers will emerge only over the next 18 to 36 months.

 

SIX SCENARIOS THAT WILL DECIDE THE STRATEGIC VERDICT
S1: Weaponisation	Does Iran convert its preserved nuclear knowledge and HEU into a weapon within two years? If so, every tactical success is retroactively rendered strategically irrelevant.
S2: Pacific gap	Does China exploit the depleted US interceptor stockpile before it can be rebuilt? The 3–5 year reconstruction timeline is a known, fixed vulnerability.
S3: IRGC fracture	Do mid-level IRGC officers defect at scale under economic pressure and sustained targeting? This is the single variable most likely to determine whether the regime collapses.
S4: Third campaign	Does Iran's reconstitution outpace diplomacy, forcing a third round of strikes? Tehran Reloads, as the Hudson Institute put it—and the clock is already running.
S5: Regional order	Does the post-war moment produce a Sadat-Begin style stability architecture, or a power-vacuum scramble among Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Israel?
S6: Russia & China	Do adversaries probe elsewhere while American attention, resources, and interceptors are absorbed in the Gulf? Ukraine, the Arctic, and the Taiwan Strait are all watching.

 

The preliminary verdict

Scored against their own stated objectives, the hierarchy of outcomes is clear, if uncomfortable.

Israel achieved the most of its goals: air dominance over Iran, significant missile degradation, and the dismantling of the proxy-command architecture that connected Tehran to Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. It failed on regime change and achieved only a temporary nuclear setback. Its grade is partial strategic success, with a critical unresolved tail risk on weaponisation.

The United States achieved conventional military degradation at significant scale but failed on its most ambitious objectives: nuclear elimination, Strait of Hormuz security, regime change, and preservation of its global deterrence posture. It expended irreplaceable strategic reserves and opened a measurable window of vulnerability in the Pacific. Its grade is tactical success paired with strategic ambiguity and significant second-order costs.

Iran achieved its minimum essential objective—survival—and preserved more than its adversaries anticipated: nuclear knowledge, approximately 70% of its missile arsenal, the Hormuz threat, and—in an irony its leadership did not plan for—the political case for weaponisation, now freed from the theological constraint that had formally limited that debate.

"The war that was sold domestically as being about Iran may, in its most consequential second-order effect, have been about Taiwan."

The Middle East Institute's formulation is the sharpest summary of the current analytical consensus: for 30 years, Israel dreamed of a scenario in which the United States might go to war with Iran, with the minimal objective of removing the existential threat posed by its nuclear programme, and ideally toppling the regime. That scenario arrived. And yet the United States and Israel may be snatching strategic defeat from the jaws of tactical victory.

The war is not over. The doctrine it was designed to defeat—Mosaic Defence—is being restructured in real time to fight the next round: deeper underground, with dispersed command authority extended to sub-provincial levels, with a supply chain being rebuilt through China's grey-zone logistics networks, and with the theological constraint on nuclear weapons now removed. The tiles have been smashed. The picture, degraded but recognisable, remains on the wall.

 Sources include CSIS, RAND, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Middle East Institute, the Arms Control Association, the Soufan Center, the Hudson Institute, the IAEA, and open-source operational reporting from Reuters, AP, and Al Jazeera. All strategic assessments reflect the state of available public information as of May 20th 2026.