6 months of war in Iran has left the Pentagon depleted and still fighting
The U.S. is still at war, caught in a Middle East conflict with no obvious end.
In April, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stood before reporters and declared the mission against Iran accomplished, framing the campaign as a crushing American victory and a showcase of U.S. military power.
Yet six months after the fighting began -- a milestone which will be marked on Friday -- the U.S. is still at war and again caught in a Middle East conflict with no obvious end. And while American and Israeli strikes have battered Iran for months, the conflict has also taken a toll on Pentagon resources and American lives as the war drags on.
The war has unfolded in fits and starts, with bursts of overwhelming American firepower repeatedly giving way to promises that diplomacy might bring it to an end. There has been a constant back-and-forth between the fighting stopping and threats from President Donald Trump. Now the conflict sits in a fragile space where the U.S. has threatened increased economic pressure against Tehran with no promises daily fighting couldn't easily resume at any moment.
Since Hegseth's declaration, additional American troops have been killed and hundreds more wounded. In all, 18 U.S. service members have died and more than 750 have been wounded, according to Pentagon data. The war has also depleted some of the Pentagon’s most important missile stocks, leaving fewer available for another major conflict. Replacing them will take years, even if planned production increases stay on schedule, as individual missiles can take roughly two years to build and field to the force, according to an analysis from the Center for Strategic & International Studies.
The war also followed Hegseth's declaration that strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities last year had delivered the "final blow" to Tehran’s nuclear program. The attacks badly damaged some of the country’s most sensitive sites and, experts say, set back Tehran’s ability to build a bomb by years. Yet the administration later pointed to the same nuclear program it had claimed was destroyed as one of several shifting justifications for going to war.
The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment.
The U.S. and Israel launched the war on Feb. 28, striking key Iranian military sites and killing much of the country's senior leadership and military commanders. Iran retaliated immediately, attacking American bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan and Iraq -- attacks on U.S. bases on a scale not seen since the Vietnam War.
But Tehran's most consequential move came at sea when it shut down commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, turning the waterway into a household name almost overnight. The blockade choked one of the world's most important shipping lanes and Iran dictated where the war’s frontline would be, rattling the global economy.
"This is existential for the regime. They're focused on staying in power, and they're going to use every tool they have -- including the Strait of Hormuz -- to prolong this as long as possible," said retired Gen. Joseph Votel, the former commander of U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East. "Iran’s strategy is to extend the war in both time and geography, and frankly, they’ve succeeded."
Both Hegseth and Trump have boasted that the U.S.-Israeli war decimated Iran's military, pointing to an air campaign that they have framed as crippling Tehran, casting the strikes as a major blow against a regime that has antagonized the United States for nearly 50 years.
"Never in the history of warfare has an enemy suffered such clear and devastating large-scale losses in a matter of weeks," Trump said in an April prime-time address to the country, referring to early days of the war. "I have vowed that I would never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. This fanatical regime has been chanting death to America, death to Israel, for 47 years."
Trump on Wednesday told Al Jazeera he was in "no rush" to negotiate an end to the war. "I have no time schedule, none," Trump said. "I’m not in a hurry … We are winning very big."
But the war has continued, leaving the Trump administration with a problem that has become harder to solve as the war drags on. Pulling out of the war risks handing Iran a victory. Staying could mean accepting more casualties, more spending and further strain on weapons stocks, without any guarantee the fighting produces a better outcome.
"If the U.S. walks away, it is a very visible signal that it lost, that it went in, made the situation worse and couldn't fix it," said Jennifer Kavanagh, director of military analysis at the think tank Defense Priorities. "All of the options are bad because the U.S. has suffered a strategic defeat. There’s this belief that if we just stay in, the options will get better. That’s simply not true."
The war has also forced the Pentagon to confront a problem it largely avoided in Iraq and Afghanistan by keeping a sprawling military operation supplied while the enemy is actively trying to disrupt it. For the post-9/11 wars, U.S. forces could move food, fuel, ammunition and spare parts around the battlefield with effectively no interference.
Iranian strikes have damaged or destroyed much of the U.S. infrastructure across the region that commanders once relied on, according to an ABC News analysis of satellite imagery. Bahrain, home to the Navy's 5th Fleet, had been a particularly critical node in that system, being a major supply apparatus for resources.
"We counted on Bahrain as a major supply hub. Without that availability, we’ve had to defer to other locations," said Votel, who added that Diego Garcia, a joint American-British base in the Indian Ocean, is one of those options.
"We don’t have a lot of other maritime [options] for our vessels. It has some impact on sustainment," he added.
For ships and aircraft, that can mean longer trips to refuel, rearm or undergo repairs, current and former U.S. officials and national security experts explained. For the troops at sea, they have reported poor food quality and delays in mail shipping, both of which military leaders have long pointed to as critical for morale and issues that the Pentagon claims have been overblown. The Defense Department has largely kept the media away from covering the war to verify that and other claims easily -- a departure from norms where the press has embedded with troops on the frontlines since the Civil War.
On the ground, U.S. bases have struggled to fend off Iranian attacks. Many were built during the post-9/11 Global War on Terror, when major military hubs sat well behind a lot of the fighting and insurgent groups had little ability to threaten from the air. That left installations across the region with limited protection from drones and missiles when air defenses inevitably fail to blunt every attack.
Six American troops killed in an Iranian drone strike in Kuwait in the opening hours of the war were working inside a command center that was effectively a large trailer with little protection against an aerial attack, according to defense officials and an ABC News review of imagery of the base. Concrete barriers around the facility offered protection against the mortars and rockets that shaped U.S. base defenses during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the building lacked hardened overhead protection against drones.
Much of the infrastructure at Middle East bases were never built to withstand sustained attack. Much of the infrastructure resembles mobile homes or converted shipping containers that are functional for housing and offices, but offering little protection from aerial attacks.
An Army investigation into the 2024 drone attack on Tower 22 in Jordan by Iranian-backed militants, which killed three American troops, found inadequate infrastructure contributed to the casualties. A separate Pentagon review found major gaps in counter-drone defenses and training across U.S. installations. While the U.S. has sophisticated defense weapons to take down missiles and drones, some inevitably still penetrate through those defenses. But those counter-weapons and other munitions are running low.
The Pentagon has fired more than 1,000 Patriot interceptors, nearly half the U.S. inventory; more than 200 THAAD interceptors, roughly two-thirds of that stockpile; and at least 1,000 Tomahawk missiles, or an estimated one-third of the inventory, according to an April analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Those weapons take years to replace.
"I don’t think it’s some great disaster. Iran’s nuclear program has been set back a lot, and their economy is in real trouble," said Elliott Abrams, a former Trump administration special envoy for Iran who has held senior national security posts in several Republican administrations.
Abrams said the broad outlines of a war with Iran, including it contesting the Strait of Hormuz, were well understood in national security circles before the fighting began. What is less clear, he said, is how much Trump absorbed those warnings.
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