At first glance, the Israeli-U.S. attack on Iran is an uneven fight. The United States and Israel have overwhelming air superiority, precision-guided munitions, integrated intelligence, and multilayered missile defense systems against Iranian retaliatory strikes. While it’s hard to see a political theory of victory over Iran in this campaign, the operational theory of success is based on precision strikes quickly taking out Iranian air defenses, command and control, and missile launchers.

The attackers do not want to find themselves trapped in an attritional slugfest, where they burn through hundreds of millions of dollars per day, exhaust their stocks of the most advanced interceptors, and face the prospect of a prolonged war—not by losing on the battlefield but by simply exhausting their anti-air weapons in the coming days and weeks.

At first glance, the Israeli-U.S. attack on Iran is an uneven fight. The United States and Israel have overwhelming air superiority, precision-guided munitions, integrated intelligence, and multilayered missile defense systems against Iranian retaliatory strikes. While it’s hard to see a political theory of victory over Iran in this campaign, the operational theory of success is based on precision strikes quickly taking out Iranian air defenses, command and control, and missile launchers.

The attackers do not want to find themselves trapped in an attritional slugfest, where they burn through hundreds of millions of dollars per day, exhaust their stocks of the most advanced interceptors, and face the prospect of a prolonged war—not by losing on the battlefield but by simply exhausting their anti-air weapons in the coming days and weeks.

Running out of air defense isn’t a hypothetical scenario. It’s precisely what happened to Israel during last year’s strike campaign against Iran. The grinding logic of attrition—and the unresolved problem of using high-end, limited-availability precision weapons to generate strategic outcomes—threatened to catch up with the Americans and Israelis despite their overwhelming technological superiority. Israel’s stocks of Arrow 3 anti-ballistic missile interceptors were running critically low, prompting the United States to rush additional missile defense assets—including guided missile destroyers armed with SM-2, SM-3, and SM-6 interceptors, as well as ground-based THAAD systems—to the region. A similar situation occurred during the nine-month Battle of Mosul against the Islamic State in Iraq in 2016 and 2017.

During the June 2025 conflict, Iran reportedly launched 631 missiles, of which around 500 reached Israeli airspace. Although Israel claimed an 86 percent interception rate, achieving this required firing vast numbers of interceptors, which placed enormous strain on Israeli and U.S. stockpiles of expensive precision-guided munitions. Without the Arrow 3 system, Israel loses the ability to neutralize threats above the atmosphere, leaving less time for terminal-phase interceptions and exposing the country to far greater risk. The campaign cost Israel hundreds of millions of dollars daily and forced the nation into a wartime lockdown, an unsustainable economic strain.

The brief war demonstrated that even the most technologically advanced versions of precision warfare, as practiced by the Israelis and Americans, cannot eliminate the attritional nature of modern military conflict. In short, running out of ammunition is always a problem. “Shell hunger” was a feature of most great-power wars in the past, with militaries pausing until they received new shells to continue the fight.

In the 21st century, however, running out of precision-guided munitions means it’s unlikely that you can keep fighting—their production is too slow and expensive to get large numbers of new supplies in an ongoing campaign.

This uncomfortable truth lies at the heart of how the United States and its allies and partners envision modern warfare. Their idea of war is embodied by military concepts such as multidomain operations, or MDO. The theory behind MDO is compelling, at least for the opening round of any military campaign. It involves a tightly coordinated, intelligence-led campaign in multiple warfare domains, including air, land, sea, cyber, information, and space. The idea is to combine all these effects to achieve maximum impact, penetrating and disintegrating enemy systems with such speed and precision that adversaries simply cannot adapt fast enough to respond, let alone engage the attacker in a prolonged battle of attrition. In the case of the current attacks, this means that U.S. and Israeli operations seek to overwhelm Iran across all domains, cause the regime and its military to rapidly collapse, and avoid a long and costly war of attrition.

But to paraphrase Leon Trotsky’s famous quote about war: As a military planner in Israel or the United States, you may not be interested in attrition, but attrition is certainly interested in you. Advanced technology and doctrinal innovation cannot wish away the fundamental dynamics of attrition that have haunted conventional warfare for centuries.

Take the Russia-Ukraine war, where both sides possess drones, long-range fire, and sophisticated command and control systems. Yet so far, the technological sophistication has not produced rapid, decisive results. In part due to the lack of the organizational capacity required to successfully integrate emerging technologies into existing structures, we’re witnessing a slow, grinding contest dominated on both sides by precision firepower that is failing to achieve significant operational results.

Neither side is winning, and both have adopted strategies of exhaustion to gradually break the other’s will to resist. Ukraine and Russia defy any optimistic timelines offered by technology enthusiasts about how quickly and decisively future wars will be fought.

Israel’s recent military operations in Gaza tell a similar story, albeit in a different context. Despite Israel’s formidable precision strike capabilities and massive intelligence advantages—key elements of MDO—the campaign still demanded costly ground operations, urban clearing, and an extended commitment that no amount of remote firepower could shortcut. Ultimately, Israel was unable to force an enduring political settlement despite having overwhelming conventional superiority.

So why does standoff warfare consistently fail to deliver quick decisions? At its core, the problem is the persistent gap between theory and reality. Strategies that rely on airpower and precision missile strikes may reduce casualties on your side, but they seldom compel a determined, adaptable adversary to surrender quickly.

Instead, these campaigns more often than not devolve into drawn-out contests that drain military resources and political will. This is not a new lesson from military history. From the Allied bombing campaigns in World War II to the precision strike operations of the past two decades, wars are rarely won from the air. Even the most carefully orchestrated “shock and awe” campaign quickly exhausts the list of targets that can be destroyed from afar, necessitating ground operations by land forces.

Therefore, we believe that senior military leaders should more clearly convey the inherently attritional character of war to civilian policymakers. All too often, new military concepts are presented as near-panaceas—elegant solutions that promise to deliver victory efficiently and at minimal cost. The language alone is seductive and obscure: “multidomain convergence,” “standoff strike architecture,” “integrated fires,” “joint all-domain command and control.” But the reality of warfare is messier, longer, and far more expensive than these tidy concepts suggest.

A good example is the recent testing of high-intensity warfare scenarios against Russia or China in war games. One of the most striking findings is how quickly the inventories of precision munitions—both attack munitions and interceptors—become exhausted. In simulations, stockpiles run out in days or weeks. Without rigorous, honest communication by military professionals up the chain of command and to the civilian authorities, leaders risk discovering these shortfalls only after missiles are flying, casualties are mounting, and adversaries are adapting faster than anticipated.

Yet even if these hard truths were communicated, it may not deter the political leadership from proceeding. Before launching the war, U.S. President Donald Trump was reportedly briefed on the U.S. military’s concerns about dwindling stockpiles of precision munitions. Trump ordered the attack anyway.

If attritional dynamics cannot be wished away by doctrinal innovation or technological sophistication, what does that imply about the likely course of the Israeli-U.S. strike campaign?

First, the air campaign against Iran will be shaped as much by elusive U.S. and Israeli political objectives as by the two countries’ interceptor and missile stockpiles. What will happen if the United States runs out of targets after a week of strikes and the Iranian regime hasn’t collapsed? Will the White House simply stop and call it a victory?

Conversely, what if Israel and the United States cannot destroy the majority of Iran’s missile launchers and inventories in the first days, and Iran succeeds in draining Israeli and U.S. interceptor stockpiles to the point where they become critically low? This would result in more of Iran’s missiles reaching U.S., Israeli, and Persian Gulf country targets. The United States would then have to make painful trade-offs by taking munitions from stockpiles reserved for other major contingencies, such as a possible war with Russia in Europe or China in East Asia.

Second, both Israel and the United States will strive for a swift end to hostilities. The problem is that theoretical constructs such as MDO widen, rather than narrow, the gap between the tactical, military level of warfare and the strategic, political one. This is partly due to the widespread assumption of MDO planners that decapitation strikes at the outset of such a campaign can lead to the rapid collapse of enemy resistance. There is no plan B if this does not happen, except to continue striking targets.

MDO also presupposes an almost perfect information environment and in-depth knowledge of the enemy in order to carefully select key nodes (e.g., specific leaders and military installations) whose elimination or destruction will paralyze Iran’s resistance.

However, standoff precision warfare as envisioned by MDO is unlikely to compel the Iranian leadership to quickly concede defeat. Iran knows that the United States and its allies are racing against time. Tehran is therefore pursuing an attritional strategy, attempting to saturate Israeli, U.S., and Gulf air defenses in hopes of depleting interceptor stockpiles. It fired more than 1,200 missiles and drones during the first 48 hours of the war. But Iran is facing a race, too: It has already seen 200 of its ballistic missile launchers destroyed, according to Israeli military sources.

In the fog of war, it remains unclear which side will gain the upper hand. The United States and its allies may eventually win—but at what price in terms of materiel and treasure? Iran knows that Israeli and U.S. theories of success are premised on a quick and decisive strike campaign. Iran’s strategy will therefore be to play for time, rather than operate in a way to support the U.S.-Israeli timeline. Israel, the United States, and their regional allies may have the clock, but Iran has the time.