US air superiority over Iran hobbled by lower-altitude threats, experts say
Washington's inability to secure uncontested aerial superiority over Iran stems from US underinvestment in countering lower-altitude threats that Iran has effectively deployed, experts speaking to the Middle East Institute said on Tuesday.
"One of the strange things about this war is that the United States and Israel are excelling where you would expect them to excel - in the airspace, higher altitudes, fighting the more traditional fight against integrated air and missile defences that the Iranians have," Kelly Grieco, senior fellow with the "Reimagining US Grand Strategy" programme at the Stimson Center, said on a virtual panel.
"Where they're struggling the most is where they've underinvested - certainly in the United States - and not taken as seriously: The lower-altitude threats to air control, where the Iranians are relying more on highly mobile systems and exploiting that to deny air superiority to the United States where it really needs it," she added.
Speaking to reporters just hours later, US President Donald Trump insisted that Iran has lost all its capabilities since he and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched their war on 28 February.
"Can you name one thing that's not gone, or can you name one thing they're doing?" Trump said.
"We are roaming free over Tehran," he added.
Different wavelengths
Grieco said Iran is "not trying to compete" with the US and Israel in this war, because it recognises that it can't have air superiority.
And air superiority is not to be conflated with air supremacy, an element the US possessed in its war on Iraq in 2003.
'Iran is taking a very different approach. [It’s] waging its own war of disruption, and so it’s able to access and exploit the low-altitude airspace'
- Kelly Grieco, Stimson Center
"Israel and the United States are waging what I would call a war of destruction, very much forced on destroying things like launchers and missile stockpiles, drone stockpiles," she explained.
"Iran is taking a very different approach. [It's] waging its own war of disruption, and so it's able to access and exploit the low-altitude airspace, in particular with [its] drones, and to be able to cause significant damage and pain to the Gulf states in particular."
Iran's Shahed drones, while incredibly cost-effective compared to the millions of dollars it takes to intercept them, have already proven deadly.
Because Gulf countries have invested in the ballistic missile threat architecture, they need a different set of sensors and radars to be able to detect low-altitude Iranian drones, Grieco said.
"The Gulf states in particular have been relying a lot on fighter aircraft and anti-air missiles to intercept a lot of these Shahed drones," Grieco added.
Anti-air missiles, also known as surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), include the elite US-made Patriot system as well as systems like the Russian S-300.
The US has famously not allowed for nations with Patriot systems to also utilise Russian air defences.
Ten days into the war, the Trump administration was informed that its Gulf partners are running so low on missile and drone interceptors that they now need to be selective about which projectiles to target.
Two interceptors are generally needed to down one incoming projectile.
"Defences are worth the trouble, and it wasn't clear 30 years ago they would be," Michael O'Hanlon, chair of the defence and strategy programme at the Brookings Institution, said on the panel.
"But... they're not worth the trouble against everything. We can afford to spend 10 times as much on every defensive intercept as the Iranians spend on every weapon, but we can't afford to spend 100 or 1,000 times as much. And therefore... we can't use the high-end interceptors against drones."
Solutions
Last week, the Department of State notified Congress of munitions sales to the UAE, Kuwait, and Jordan, in a bid to restock their defence capabilities as they bear the brunt of Iran's retaliatory air strikes primarily targeting US assets.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio waived the congressional review requirements for these foreign military sales, citing an emergency that is in the interest of US security.
O'Hanlon suggested up to $75bn is likely required to replenish US stockpiles.
"If we are depleting Patriot Thaad and standard missile inventories... in a way that causes me concern... we should have a bigger inventory requirement for each of those systems, and we should have a more capable industrial base," O'Hanlon said.
To counter drones specifically, US allies in the Gulf, as well as Jordan, require laser weapons, given the weather is generally cooperative with such a system, O'Hanlon said.
"The main problem with lasers is they don't work very well through clouds for most types of electromagnetic radiation. And whether it's infrared or visible light, ultraviolet or even if you went up into higher frequency and lower-wavelength...water is a really bad thing for any of those to try to get through," he explained.
Russia has used them extensively in its now four-year war on Ukraine, and that conflict is what depleted US-made interceptors "at the pace we're building them right now", O'Hanlon said.
Still, O'Hanlon has no anxieties about the US losing its deterrence capability, particularly in terms of more powerful threats like North Korea or China.
"The Iranians have realised this is going to be potentially a long war," Grieco said.
"And if they are waging a war of disruption and trying to make this costly and painful, the volume [of attacks] doesn't matter on any given day. It's their ability to sustain it day after day after day, to impose costs and remain a threat."
On Tuesday afternoon at the White House, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth had a different assessment of how well the US was doing.
"Iran had a modern military, a modern navy, a modern air force, modern air defences... Never has a modern military been so rapidly and historically defeated from day one with overwhelming firepower," he said.
"The air campaign that we've conducted, that Israel's conducted alongside us, was one for the history books."
This article was sourced from Middle East Eye.
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