How tough is Iran? A string of military losses raises questions

Iran is often cast as one of the world's most dangerous villains, a rogue state whose growing nuclear program and shadowy military capabilities threaten Israel, the United States and beyond.

But that portrayal has come into question since war erupted between Israel and Hamas in October 2023, soon drawing in the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia in Lebanon and then Iran itself. Over the year and a half that followed, Iran has suffered blow after blow.

There was the airstrike on an Iranian Embassy building in Syria last year that killed several senior Iranian commanders. The assassination three months later of one of Iran's top militant partners while he was visiting Tehran, Iran. The Israeli strikes on Iranian air defenses in April and October 2024. The systematic decimation or defeat of Iran's strongest allies around the Middle East, including Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah and President Bashar Assad of Syria.

Those humiliations accelerated Friday with the start of an Israeli campaign that has gone after targets across Iran, crippled its air defenses and killed several of its top military commanders and a number of prominent nuclear scientists. The new round of conflict has killed hundreds of people in Iran and at least 24 in Israel.

The fighting has shown, as never before, just how compromised and weak Iranian forces really are -- and how few ways they have of hitting back.

"Iran has basically demonstrated that it was outgunned and outsmarted again by Israel," said Ellie Geranmayeh, an Iran expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Lacking anything close to the conventional military might of Israel or the United States, its longtime enemies, Iran tried a different approach. For years, its strategy for self-protection rested on the idea that the combination of its armed partners in the region and its own missile capabilities would be enough to deter attacks on Iranian soil.

One of those partners, Hezbollah, sat right on Israel's northern border with an arsenal of rockets. In Iraq, Iranian-backed militant groups were in position to target American military installations there. Iranian short-range missiles could also threaten US bases in the Middle East. And Tehran could launch a barrage of long-range missiles and drones into Israel that would potentially overwhelm Israeli air defenses and shatter the country's sense of security.

Or so the thinking went.

Instead, Israel demolished Hezbollah during a war in Lebanon last year, then turned the same playbook on Iran.

"Hezbollah has been weakened so dramatically in 2024 that this option no longer holds the power it once held," said Fabian Hinz, a missiles, drones and Middle East expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Berlin. Now, he said, "Iran does not have a lot of options left."

Israeli intelligence managed to penetrate Iran so thoroughly that Israel was able to launch drone attacks on Iranian targets from inside Iran on Friday and to kill some of the most senior figures in the military's chain of command.

That delayed Iran's retaliatory response, giving Israel time to prepare for Iran's missiles and to launch more attacks.

Beyond its Hezbollah-and-missiles deterrence strategy, Iran had also invested heavily in air defenses to protect itself. But Israel ground down those systems in attacks last year, leaving its warplanes dominant over Iranian airspace this time around.

Israel is using that freedom of movement to go after Iranian missile launchers as well as the production facilities that would allow Iran to replenish its missile stocks, Hinz said.

While the US military has said Iran had about 3,000 missiles, it is not clear that all of them have the range to hit Israel. And Iran must shoot off so many at a time to penetrate Israeli air defenses that it will deplete its stockpile more quickly than it can manufacture more, analysts said.

Shifting geopolitics has also limited Iran's options.

Once, Iran might have turned to its tried-and-true strategy of using its short-range weaponry on neighbors such as Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates, or on US military facilities in the region. But relations with Gulf Arab states have improved in recent years, making Iran reluctant to target them. And provoking the United States into entering the conflict directly would only increase Iran's problems, analysts said.

Iran could still go after ships in the Strait of Hormuz, which it controls, using drones, submarines or limpet mines. But that would likely have limited effect on the conflict and might risk drawing in the United States.

Israel, meanwhile, seems determined to keep striking Iran, even if it means paying a price in civilian lives.

"Israel is taking each strike that Iran is able to get through Israeli defenses in stride, and seems to be using it as fuel to either rally Israelis in favor of the conflict or even just to continue the conflict another day or another week," said Afshon Ostovar, an Iran military expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. "It doesn't seem to be really changing Israel's calculus."

The risk of pushing Iran into a corner, of course, is that the conflict will lead to an outcome Israel and the United States do not want.

Many Iranians who already abhorred their theocratic and authoritarian rulers blame them for the sharp escalation of the conflict. As the civilian death toll rises, however, some may come to soften toward their leaders or at least harden their attitudes toward Israel, Geranmayeh said. Patriotic posts, though not pro-regime ones, are already proliferating on Iranian social media.

And the more threatened Iran feels, the more likely it is that Iran will conclude it has no option but to pursue a nuclear weapon, analysts said. Experts agree that it will likely retain that capability even after the Israeli attacks.

"The irony in all of this is that Iran could still emerge from this conflict with a bomb," Ostovar said. "Now, unlike the past, there's a real explicit need for a nuclear weapon, because Iran has no deterrence left whatsoever."