What we know about Iran’s military capabilities via drone and missile attacks
The U.S.-Israeli air campaign has battered Tehran and cities across Iran, destroying homes and killing more than 1,900 people, according to Iran’s deputy health minister. In the background, day after day, the patterns in drone and missile strikes have become its own kind of battlefield record—messy, partial, and hard to read.
U.S. and Israeli officials and commanders say the campaign is aimed at decimating Iran’s missile and drone programs and that it will soon cripple Tehran’s ability to strike at countries in the region. The Israeli military said 70% of Iran’s missile launchers were disabled by the 16th day of the war. Meanwhile, the Pentagon says it has degraded about 90% of Iran’s ballistic missile and drone capabilities, though it hasn’t provided more details. Misryoum newsroom reported that the claims—often presented in very different terms—leave plenty of room for doubt, especially when the targets are spread out and the data is never fully public.
Former military officers and experts told Misryoum newsroom that Iran’s missile program will likely be crushed if the air assault continues. Still, they argue the drone problem is tougher. Drones don’t require large, centralized production sites in the way big missile programs often do. They can also be launched from a truck, which makes them more mobile—and in practice, more elusive targets.
“The challenge is it’s probably relatively easy to hide these things, and so finding all of them, bombing all of them, is going to be hard,” said Tom Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C., think tank. He added that it comes down to intelligence—how good it is, where the systems are, and how well forces can locate them fast enough. It’s one of those statements that sounds almost obvious, but in a war like this it turns into a brutal bottleneck: detection can lag, and by the time a strike is planned the thing you wanted to hit might already be gone.
Iran’s ability to keep up missile and drone attacks has raised questions, including about effectiveness, intelligence quality, and the assumptions that shaped the assault, according to Misryoum editorial desk analysis. Some analysts say Iran may have adapted in ways that weren’t fully expected. Iran may have dispersed more of its missile arsenal around the country than previously believed, used decoys and quickly excavated damaged missile bases to resume launches, Nicole Grajewski, an assistant professor at the Center for International Research at Sciences Po in Paris, told NBC News. Even hearing that, it’s hard not to picture the ground itself being worked on—dirt shifted, equipment recovered, a base made to look damaged until it isn’t.
In the opening days of the war, Iran fired dozens of ballistic missiles at its neighbors. On the third day, the number dropped sharply, and now Iran typically fires fewer than 25 missiles a day at Gulf states. The drone picture is different. Misryoum editorial team stated that after the early phase, the number of Iranian aerial attacks declined from the first few days, but then varied from day to day and country to country. Ballistic missile launches have declined overall, but Iran has kept up a steady rate of drone attacks, targeting Gulf states with an average of roughly 120 drone attacks per day since the war’s start.
One detail sticks, almost small enough to miss: the shift in tempo is not just about hardware—it’s about the rhythm of what can be launched, what can be repaired, and what can be disguised. If the air campaign is meant to end those rhythms, drones seem built for persistence. And missiles… well, they may be degrading, but “disabled” and “eliminated” aren’t the same thing, not even close. Where this leaves Iran’s capabilities—especially under continued pressure—remains hard to pin down, and maybe that’s the point of why the tracking matters so much.
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