Unlike conflicts that don’t pause until one belligerent or the other loses, the conflict in the Persian Gulf is characterized by periods of quiet followed by high-intensity combat. With so many timeouts, this makes it hard but not impossible to keep score. Is the war in Iran like Groundhog Day, beginning at the same place where it left off in the previous ceasefire? Or is damage to Iran's defenses cumulatively increasing over time without recovering fully before the U.S. strikes again, tending in a definite direction for those with the patience to look?
Despite claims to the contrary, things do not reset to where they first began. Each U.S. strike wave degrades peak capability in complex Iranian systems further — especially at the high end. By comparing systems, it is clear that net Iranian strength is lower than pre-2026 levels measured by category. From the standpoint of pure arithmetic, Iran is losing.
This is because some things like losses to high-end air defense systems, the manned air force, and the manned navy are hard for Iran to replace since they need special training and require equipment with long lead times to manufacture. If any country placed an order for a major air defense system today, for example, they could expect to take delivery between 2030 and 2034 even without the hindrance of sanctions and a CENTCOM blockade. This is true for everyone, but it is especially true for Iran.
Iran’s case is worse because it effectively competes with Russia’s own needs (and other customers) for new-build Russian air defense systems. Not only are there production constraints, but the Ukraine war uses up high-end air defense interceptor stocks as fast as they can be made. Russian long-range AD reserves were never sized for sustained regional war, limiting what Iran can get after Moscow’s needs are taken into account.
The same core constraints apply to the Iranian acquisition of high-end Russian offensive missiles. Russia produces about 200+ per month according to Ukrainian intelligence, including up to approximately 65 Iskander-M ballistic missiles, 80 Kh-101 cruise missiles, and 29 Kalibr. However, nearly all of this output is consumed by the war in Ukraine or held in Russian strategic reserves. Iran has to be very parsimonious before plinking at mobile targets beyond the now disused fixed-location U.S. Gulf bases.
What Iran does is adapt. Technology transfer from Russia and China is easier for these nations to provide than scarce physical weaponry. The result is that high-end integrated air defenses remain heavily degraded from the 2024–2026 strikes. There is little evidence of rapid, large-scale 1:1 replacement of those specific systems with equivalent imported or identical indigenous batteries. Instead, analysts describe a shift toward mobile “shoot-and-scoot” systems, dispersal into hardened or concealed positions, emission control, and low-cost/passive alternatives. Given this process of adaptation, Iran is essentially different each time the war resumes, creatively lowering itself to cope.
CENTCOM has also adapted. It relies less on Gulf basing, which is vulnerable to Iran. It focuses more on a blockade, which has severely crippled the Iranian economy and has plunged the country into a deep financial crisis. The Iranian rial plummeted to record lows, trading around 2.5 million rials per U.S. dollar (down from roughly 630,000 in 2024). Port cities like Bandar Abbas have seen commercial shipping grind to a halt, destroying local dock employment and regional trade. This campaign has not been without cost to the West, however. The crisis, simply by continuing, has pushed Brent crude past $126 per barrel at times, inflating maritime insurance costs and raising fuel prices globally.
The result is that America can choose between wearing down the IRGC slowly or trying to accelerate its collapse. This channels the direction in which U.S. military efforts are likely to go if hostilities resume. Instead of focusing on purely military target sets in March 2026, the new emphasis could be on energy, nuclear, and electric grid targets, in a word, to do to Iran what Ukraine and Russia are already doing to each other in Eastern Europe. By attacking the electric grid, the U.S. could increase popular pressure on the ayatollahs, paralyze critical infrastructure, and degrade war-sustaining capabilities without putting a single boot on the ground. Here again we find a connection between the wars in Ukraine and the Gulf. Russia has systematically targeted Ukraine’s high-voltage substations and power plants to fracture distribution networks, freeze civilian populations during winter, and force Kyiv into submission through infrastructural collapse. Moscow has done the math. “The economics of attacking electrical generation overwhelmingly favor the attacker. This asymmetry is driven by two factors: the cost-exchange ratio of munitions and the industrial lead times for heavy equipment” to make good the damage.
For the energy sector, capacity depends on physical hardware. A single high-voltage autotransformer weighs over two hundred tons and costs millions of dollars, but is not mass-produced. There is no global stockpile of this specialized equipment; they are built to order, and lead times for large power transformers exceed twenty-four months.
U.S. and Israeli plans have emerged to do the same thing to Iran, and though they have not yet done it such a targeting plan might be regarded a war crime. As the Guardian explains, “Donald Trump, other senior U.S. officials and their cheerleaders appear to be embracing attacks – and threats of attacks – on Iranian civilian infrastructure, which legal experts say appears to constitute serious war crimes under international law.” That is a matter for international lawyers to decide.
However, it might be possible to tailor attacks on the Iranian grid to hamper only (or mostly) military targets. After all, part of Iran’s power grid — comprising over 1,000 generation points and more than a million kilometers of transmission lines — powers military installations, industrial bases, communication nodes, and air defense/missile command centers. Arguably, that is a legitimate attack on dual-use infrastructure if you could avoid collateral damage. It would also undermine Iran’s cyber and information operations.
The IRGC heavily relies on internet-connected and automated infrastructure to coordinate its cyber warfare, missile launches, and regional logistics. A systemic failure of the electrical grid would seriously affect internal military coordination and surveillance capabilities. An attack on Iran’s grid cannot be totally ruled out.
Targeting Iran’s oil infrastructure would more directly undermine the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) by hitting its chief source of funding. These revenues directly fund the IRGC’s domestic apparatus as well as its regional proxy network such as Hezbollah, the Houthis, and militias in Iraq. Should these be struck, what will it use to pay security forces, procure military hardware, and sustain patronage networks?
It may be said that up to this point the IRGC and armed forces have borne the brunt of U.S. and Israeli blows. But the example of the war in Ukraine provides a strong indicator of what would happen if the U.S. used but a fraction of the methods now in widespread application in Europe. If the war restarts or if the blockade merely continues, it could cause real damage to Iran and real privation among the population.
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