An Iranian attack on a United States military site in Jordan that killed three US soldiers has shown the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s (IRGC) ability to inflict a deadly toll five months into the US-Israel war on Iran.
The strikes on Friday were the first time US soldiers have been killed by Iranian attacks on US military installations since March 1, just hours after the US and Israel launched the war.
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While the Pentagon has not released full details of the attack, analysts say the deadly incident underscores an uncomfortable reality for Washington: Despite barrage after barrage of US air strikes, Iran maintains the military capability it needs to continue a prolonged asymmetric war.
“Iran’s military capabilities remain formidable. It has reconstituted faster than expected,” Jennifer Kavanagh, the director of military analysis at the Defense Priorities think tank, told Al Jazeera.
“Its attacks are becoming more precise over time, likely with the help of Russian and Chinese intelligence,” she added.
“Iran’s military is certainly not ‘combat ineffective’ as the Pentagon has suggested. It has sustained significant damage but is learning and adapting over time.”
Why is Iran still able to kill US soldiers?
Iran’s ability to continue to kill US personnel in the region is due to a combination of many factors, undergirded by the location and design of the US military sites spread across the Middle East and the Gulf, according to Andreas Krieg, a senior lecturer at the School of Security Studies at King’s College London.
Some 50,000 US forces are operating from “exposed, fixed bases within range of Iran’s increasingly sophisticated missile and drone arsenal”, he said.
Many personnel are “often housed in semi-permanent facilities, designed primarily to protect against rockets, mortars and improvised explosive devices, rather than precision ballistic missiles carrying large warheads”.
Such strikes, therefore, can “cause substantial damage”, he said. Near misses can lead to traumatic brain injuries from “blast overpressure”, while interceptions can cause injury from falling debris.
All told, the official US military death toll in the war stands at 18, including the seven soldiers killed in the March 1 Iranian strikes on a tactical operations centre in Kuwait and the Prince Sultan airbase in Saudi Arabia.
Aside from the three killed in Jordan, the military has said other deaths were not the direct result of Iranian strikes. They include six airmen killed in an accidental refuelling crash in March and, most recently, an Army sergeant killed during the controlled detonation of a downed armed drone in Iraq.
About 500 US soldiers have been wounded since the war began, with about 220 structures and pieces of major US military equipment or buildings reported damaged or destroyed following the breakdown of the ceasefire on July 8.
Overwhelming air defence
Iran has relied on its “increasingly sophisticated” missile and drone arsenal to overwhelm US air defence systems, including the surface-to-air Patriot systems and the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) ballistic missile intercepting system, according to Krieg.
It has developed ballistic and cruise missiles, as well as armed drones, that can approach targets “along different trajectories and different speeds”. When coupled with decoys and dispersed sites, they can render the US defence systems less effective.
“Even when most incoming weapons are destroyed, a small number penetrating the defensive shield can inflict considerable casualties,” Krieg said.
Mona Yacoubian, the director of the Middle East programme at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), said that Iran appeared to show “greater intent” in attacking US military assets in the recent round of attacks, compared with the early weeks of the war.
“I think what’s important to underscore is that this does appear to be a new pattern in terms of, I would argue, the intensity of Iranian strikes that are seeking to hit US military targets,” she said.
“That seems to be much more the case now than even in other periods of the war.”
Yacoubian added that the toll of the latest strikes may be a result of increased accuracy, the degradation of US defence and radar systems, or more “lucky hits” from the sheer scale of attacks. It may be a combination of the factors, she said.
As of Wednesday, the US and Iran have traded strikes for 11 consecutive days.
Iran’s army said it most recently targeted F-15 warplanes, drone preparation sites and a helicopter storage facility at the Prince Hassan and King Faisal bases in Jordan. Bahrain’s military also said it had intercepted several aerial attacks from Iran.
The US, meanwhile, repeatedly struck sites along the Strait of Hormuz in the most recent escalation, with Central Command (CENTCOM) saying on Tuesday that US forces had targeted “Iranian military operations centres, maritime capabilities, aircraft hangars, drone storage facilities, and military logistics infrastructure”.
On Wednesday, US Senators grilled Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on his claims that Iran’s military had been “functionally destroyed” in the war.
“Mr Secretary, you stated that on day 14 of this conflict, on the second week of the conflict, you stated that Iran’s military had been ‘destroyed,’ and ‘made combat ineffective.’ Was that an accurate statement, yes or no?” Senator Jon Ossoff asked.
Hegseth maintained the war had been a “historic military victory”, with Iran’s navy, air force and “defence industrial base” rendered ineffective.
However, he conceded, “We never expected they would stop having capabilities to shoot. The question is at scale against opponents like the United States of America.”
But Jason Campbell, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and former Pentagon official, said the US attacks appear to indicate that not only does Iran maintain its missile and drone capabilities, but that it may be tapping advanced weapons not previously used.
“We’re aware that Iran had a number of tools that it had refrained from using early on in the war that it could bring to bear later on if it chose to,” Campbell said.
“And one of those is using some of its larger, more capable ballistic missiles that can be, as they’ve just demonstrated, fired with great precision and have greater capability to evade air and missile defences”.
Campbell said that “US senior leadership, at many stages along this way, has vastly either overstated the degree to which Iran and Iran’s capabilities have been degraded, or focused on aspects of Iran’s capabilities that really are not very prominent in their ability to carry out their own strategic objectives”.
Patrick Bury, a senior associate professor at the University of Bath and former NATO research analyst, agreed that Iran will likely be able to continue to exact a deadly toll on US assets and personnel for the foreseeable future, despite Washington’s vast military superiority.
“The real issue American military power faces is that there is an asymmetry of cost imposition,” he told Al Jazeera.
“It’s well documented that the Iranian stockpiles, particularly of drones and missiles, are much cheaper to produce and fire than the kit needed to intercept them at the moment.”
“That’s why Iran is able to inflict damage in the strategic sense”, he added, “and why this problem isn’t going away at all”.
Or, as security lecturer Krieg explained: “Iran does not need to defeat the United States militarily; it needs only to penetrate its defences often enough to impose human, operational and political costs on America’s regional presence.”