Traditional military advantages have come up short against new strategy, hardware, AI and ‘missile math’ that is reshaping combat.
David Kilcullen, The Australian, 11th April 2026
Six weeks into the war and a few days into a shaky ceasefire, it’s much too early to assess the Middle East conflict’s impact. Global energy, agriculture, plastics and chemical supply chains are disrupted. Humanitarian, economic and geopolitical shockwaves will ripple out for months, even if the ceasefire holds—which looks unlikely. Still, some military lessons are already emerging. Here are a few of them.
Enablers are key
The US/Israeli air campaign depends on three critical enablers. These are air-to-air refuellers such as the KC-30A tanker, which extend the range of strike aircraft to and from targets; airborne warning and control systems (AWACS) such as the US E-3 Sentry or Australia’s E-7A Wedgetail, which provide command-and-control; and strategic airlift such as the C-17 transport aircraft, essential to logistic sustainment. Iranian targeters recognise the role of these enablers and have been trying hard to destroy them, with some success—particularly against tankers and AWACS on the ground at fixed airbases.
In a long campaign, dynamic targeting is king
Indeed, fixed bases, static headquarters and immobile infrastructure—refineries, pipelines, oil and gas fields, harbours, airports, desalination plants, data centres, bridges, power stations—have taken a beating on all sides. The US/Israeli campaign was planned in detail for the first 72 hours, with targets developed ahead of time and much damage inflicted during the war’s first three days. This equates to the first cycle of a pre-planned Air Tasking Order (ATO)—basically, a hit list that matches targets with strike and reconnaissance assets, and synchronises strikes across an area, usually covering 24 to 72 hours.
Once the initial ATO ran its course, the war evolved into dynamic targeting. Technically this just means developing targets on the go, inside the standard ATO timeline. These could be new targets, or re-attacks on things already struck but not destroyed. Increasingly, though, it means reacting to rapid shifts in political direction from the White House, or hitting pop-up targets like mobile missile launchers that ‘shoot and scoot’, fast attack boats at sea, or drone launchers emerging from caves (of which there are many along the Persian Gulf’s mountainous northern coastline) then pulling back into cover. Dynamic targeting is much more demanding than a standard ATO: sustaining it is, and will continue to be, a limiting factor in the campaign.
Battle damage assessment
Obviously enough, dynamic targeting depends on what planners call ‘battle damage assessment’ (BDA)—the ability to determine the effect of a strike on a given target, its function, and the ‘system of systems’ it supports. This is complex, can be dangerous and labour-intensive, and is utterly essential for a campaign like this. At least the US/Israeli side, possibly the Iranians also, are using AI to accelerate BDA, but human judgement is still crucial. BDA has also become a point of contention, with competing claims and counter-claims battling in the global media space. This is not new: contested BDA claims were a core part of the narrative battle during the Syrian civil war, in Ukraine, and in Gaza, for example. This time around, the US seems to be stopping open-source platforms like commercial satellite imagery providers sharing their data, limiting our ability to assess who is doing what damage to whom.
‘Missile Math’ Matters
What American planners call ‘missile math’—the cost balance between attacker and defender—also matters here. Shooting down a cheap drone with an expensive missile or, worse, missing it altogether, is unsustainable. Likewise, low-cost attritable intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms and strike assets are crucial tools. Iranian platforms like the Shahed drone, the Saqr 358 loitering air defence missile, or cheap one-way-attack drones or sea mines offer asymmetric cost advantages: it’s cheaper for an attacker to launch large numbers of these than for a defender to destroy them. Increasingly, whichever side can consistently go after these platforms ‘left of launch’—while they are being manufactured, transported or readied for firing—will gain an advantage. Cheaper systems like Ukrainian-style interceptor drones or anti-drone gun systems will also play important roles as the war goes on.
Mobile, low-profile air defence
Larger air defence systems such as Patriot, SA-300 or THAAD missiles—big targets with large radars and obvious launch platforms—are being struck and damaged on both sides. Iran’s systems, in particular, have been hit very hard. But a different threat—loitering surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) like the Saqr, or shoulder-launched short-range missiles like Iran’s version of the venerable SA-7 ‘Grail’, are now appearing in large numbers and successfully shooting down aircraft. These are quick to set up and move and easily concealed in a vehicle, house or crowd, making them much harder to defend against. The campaign may ultimately come down to whether Iran runs out of shoulder-launched SAMs before US/Israeli forces run out of bombs.
Sustained saturation attacks
On the other side, Iran is consistently launching daily missile strikes against its Gulf neighbours and as far afield as Israel. These are ‘saturation attacks’ where a large number of missiles and drones is launched to saturate air defences by giving them too many targets to engage, allowing one or more missiles to penetrate the shield.
In 2024 and 2025 Iran was quite sophisticated in timing its attacks so that fast-moving ballistic missiles, launched later, arrived on target while Israel’s Iron Dome or other defences were busy dealing with a prior wave of slower-moving rockets and drones. We are seeing less sophistication this time, but Iran has proven it can sustain saturation strikes over multiple weeks. Though fewer missiles are being launched than in the war’s opening days, launch numbers have been consistent over several weeks, suggesting Iran is not close to running out of rockets, and may even be holding back its best ballistic missiles, until Israel runs out of interceptors. Israel’s interception rate is also dropping, according to some sources.
Production during conflict
All sides stockpiled missiles, bombs and rockets before the war. But the usage rate is so high—and the war has now gone on so much longer than originally contemplated, at least in Tel Aviv and Washington D.C.—that missile production during conflict is becoming important. For Iran, the challenge is manufacturing under fire. Underground hardened factories, dispersed production sites hidden in civilian infrastructure, and redundant supply chains are critical, as Ukraine has found in its war against Russia. For its part, Russia has been supplying key components to Iran, leading Israel to strike Russian ships in the Caspian Sea early in the war. North Korea and China may also be contributing components.
For Israel and the United States, the challenge is different: US missiles are expensive, sophisticated, dependent on inputs such as semiconductors and rare earths with shaky supply chains, and production timelines are too slow for the current wartime usage rate. This is why stockpiles of weapons in other theatres—the United States, Europe or the Indo-Pacific, for example—are being depleted so that more missiles can be sent to the Middle East, running the risk of denuding defences in other theatres. This is worth watching as the war goes on.
Asymmetric sea denial
At sea, Iran has used a combination of sea mines, fast attack craft, aerial, undersea and semi-submersible drones, and land-launched rockets and missiles to close the Strait of Hormuz. This is known in the business as ‘sea denial’—preventing adversaries using a portion of seaspace at a time or in a manner of their choosing. In this case, the methods are asymmetric or unconventional, in that Iran is not using its own navy (which has been destroyed) for this task, but rather applying other small, cheap, low-profile assets. As in the ‘missile math’ discussion, these systems are dramatically cheaper and quicker to produce than the ships they target.
Those targets are tankers and cargo vessels, not warships: Iran has not sunk or seriously damaged any US warship, but has shut the Strait completely for commercial vessels. This echoes what the Houthis did in the Bab el-Mandeb, on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula, in 2024-25. So far, other than threats of civilisation-level destruction, the US administration seems to have few answers to this, giving Iran a bargaining chip as the conflict continues.
Decentralisation as a resilience factor
A related bargaining chip is the Iranian regime’s demonstrated ability to decentralise command-and-control, delegating authority down to lower-level commanders across more than 30 military districts, and to dozens of local leaders. This has made the regime resilient to the ‘decapitation’ strikes launched early in the war which killed large numbers of senior Iranian leaders from Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, down. By delegating missile-launch authority to local level, reducing the need to communicate or share orders, Tehran has made its command system much more survivable, while allowing central leaders to keep a lower profile and making some actions more easily deniable. At the same time, there is clearly a coordinated targeted effort going on, with waves of missiles hitting specific categories of targets in accordance with central direction, suggesting that Iran maintains a low-profile, low-emission communication system linking shooters, commanders and sensors.
Words matter for ABO
Access, Basing and Overflight (ABO)—setting things up so that aircraft and ships can base themselves from a given location, refuel and rearm, access local support and overfly or sail through a given area—are critical enablers for any campaign. President Trump has expressed great anger that allies such as Spain and Italy have denied overflight, while earlier in the war the UK denied use of Diego Garcia for offensive operations. Likewise, NATO nations and other allies including Australia have angered Mr. Trump by declining to deploy their troops and ships into harm’s way, at no notice, in response to a war of choice.
The lesson here is that insulting and belittling allies, of which Mr. Trump has made a habit of late—let alone threatening to seize their territory by force, as he did to Denmark over Greenland a few weeks before attacking Iran—can backfire when you need those allies for ABO or to contribute to a coalition operation. The consequences for NATO and other allies are still unclear, but it’s worth noting that consulting with allies, or at the very least informing them in advance that they were about to suffer an unprecedented energy and supply-chain shock, would have helped avoid this.
The meme war alongside the air war
On the theme of influence and information operations, a very active information campaign is taking place on both sides. US/Israeli efforts have focused on limiting access to BDA information for Iran by classifying or concealing casualties and strike damage, and using mainstream legacy media and social media to communicate directly with Iran. For its part Iran’s embassy in Zimbabwe on X, and its influencer teams on Tik Tok, have been busy trolling Mr. Trump, producing viral videos featuring Lego-style animations, catchy soundtracks and an aesthetic clearly designed to appeal to Gen Z or younger audiences. This trend has been noted by analysts for years and a variation of it has also been prominent in the Ukraine war. The speed and sophistication of the meme war is particularly notable, though, this time around.
Final observations
Beyond these basic military points, a few other obvious things come out of the past six weeks of war:
You can’t bomb a chokepoint, like the Strait of Hormuz, open—you need either an agreement to reopen it, or regime change (and then an agreement, with the new regime). But you can’t do regime change from the air: to paraphrase the historian T.R. Fehrenbach on the Korean War, ‘you may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life—but if you desire [regime change] you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud.’ Thankfully, there seems little appetite for boots on the ground at present—but this in turn makes regime change a remote prospect.
Likewise, big surface ships are sitting ducks—note that no big-deck amphibious ships or aircraft carriers have come into the actual Gulf so far, for good reason. More broadly ‘small, cheap, many, smart’ beats ‘big, slow, expensive’—larger numbers of smaller, stealthier, less expensive systems are proving better at surviving and easier to sustain over time.
Finally, we could note that others are watching—China, in particular—and the conclusions drawn in Beijing are likely to matter most.
