On March 27, Iranian drones and missiles struck Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, destroying an E-3 Sentry, an airborne command center for U.S. operations in the region, and damaging multiple KC-135 tankers. It was not the first strike. Earlier in the month, an Iranian attack had already damaged five KC-135s at the same base. In the history of these aircraft, no enemy had ever achieved such a hit until Iran did both — within two weeks.
These strikes are the latest in a broader pattern, part of a deliberate counterair campaign waged through asymmetric means in the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. Prior to the current two-week ceasefire, Iran systematically targeted the enablers that make American airpower so effective — radar and communications infrastructure, aerial refueling tankers, and now an Airborne Warning and Control System — across U.S. bases in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. By degrading these enablers, Iran aims to constrain America’s ability to both project airpower over Iran and defend the Gulf against Iranian drone and missile attacks. The goal is the same as traditional counterair: to weaken the enemy’s ability to fight in the air. Iran’s method, however, relies on cheap drones and missiles rather than fighters and bombers and seeks air denial instead of air superiority.
Iran is the first adversary to execute a sustained asymmetric counterair campaign against U.S. forces, but it is unlikely to be the last. The proliferation of long-range precision strike — the military revolution the United States once led — has put the enabling layer of American airpower within reach of more adversaries. The United States is woefully unprepared for this new era, in which sanctuaries are gone, attrition can exhaust defenses, and persistent surveillance makes concealing high-value assets increasingly difficult.
To meet the challenge, the Air Force should rethink how it operates in forward locations. That means using automated systems at scale to absorb attrition that crewed platforms cannot, reconceptualizing airpower as three-dimensional, denying and defending where attacks are low value, dominating where strikes matter most, and anticipating how adversaries will exploit vulnerabilities to keep U.S. airpower operating under sustained attack.
Asymmetric Counterair
U.S. Air Force doctrine defines a counterair mission as one that “integrates offensive and defensive operations to attain and maintain control of the air and protection of forces by neutralizing or destroying threats from all domains.” The goal is control of the air, from air denial at the contested end of the spectrum to air superiority or supremacy at the other. Whereas defensive counterair protects friendly forces and assets from attack, offensive counterair seeks to prevent the enemy from ever getting airborne. As Giulio Douhet, the Italian general considered the father of airpower theory, advised, “It is easier and more effective to destroy the enemy’s aerial power by destroying his nests and eggs on the ground than to hunt his flying birds in the air.” Traditionally, air forces strike enemy aircraft, airfields, command-and-control systems, and support infrastructure to destroy or degrade them before they can be employed.
Iran’s current approach follows the same principle but through asymmetric means. Lacking advanced fighters or bombers, it relies on ballistic missiles, one-way attack drones, and a deep understanding of U.S. air operations as a system. By targeting the enablers, Iran cannot achieve air superiority, but it can impose enough interference to degrade American operations, raise their cost, and constrain what they accomplish — all without ever overcoming or even challenging U.S. airborne overmatch.
Iran’s Strategy
Like all offensive counterair operations, Iran targets enemy air and missile threats, command and control, and support infrastructure. U.S. Air Force doctrine explains why these targets matter: Aerial refueling extends range, on-station time, and tactical flexibility; the Airborne Warning and Control System is a high-value airborne asset whose loss “could seriously impact United States warfighting capabilities”; and command-and-control systems, if destroyed or disrupted, “may substantially reduce” the “ability to detect and respond to attacks.” Since Feb. 28, Iran has hit each of those target categories, systematically striking what U.S. Air Force doctrine identifies as most critical for air operations.
Tehran has also attacked the ground-based air sensing layer. Drones destroyed two AN/GSC-52B satellite communications terminals at the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain. Other attacks damaged or destroyed early warning radars in Qatar and Jordan, such as the AN/FPS-132 at Al Udeid Air Base and the AN/TPY-2 primary sensor of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense battery at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, which are both used to detect ballistic missiles and cue defenses. Satellite imagery also shows repeated strikes on radomes and satellite dishes at Camp Arifjan and Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait.
These systems coordinate the integrated air and missile defense network, passing targeting data to Patriot batteries, Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, and fighter interceptors. Degrading them compresses warning times, creates coverage gaps, and complicates coordination at a time when interceptor stockpiles are stressed. Put differently, Iran is trying to systemically weaken the defenses that would stop its own strikes, making each subsequent attack more likely to succeed.
Iran has also targeted the aerial refueling tankers essential to projecting U.S. airpower. It has struck Prince Sultan Air Base twice, damaging multiple tankers. The immediate loss is manageable, as the United States almost certainly has enough tankers in the theater to cover gaps. The deeper problem is structural. The KC-135 fleet, already under peacetime strain, relies increasingly on parts cannibalized from retired aircraft at the boneyard. On top of that, its replacement, the KC-46 Pegasus, is years behind schedule, faces ongoing technical problems, and still remains smaller than the KC-135 fleet.
With no spare capacity to absorb sustained losses, Iran forces U.S. planners into a dilemma: forward-deploy tankers and risk further damage, or pull them back and reduce strike capacity, while increasing flying hours on aging aircraft. Tankers operating from more distant bases must fly longer routes to reach their refueling tracks, burning more of their own fuel and reducing what they can offload. The result is fewer sorties, shorter range, and less time on station. Iran does not need to destroy the tanker fleet to achieve this effect. It only needs to make forward basing dangerous enough to force a choice, and every strike on the flight line at Prince Sultan brings that choice closer.
Finally, Iran struck the airborne command and sensing layer on March 27. The U.S. Air Force’s 16 E-3 Airborne Warning and Control System provides airborne battle management, deconflicting airspace, cueing fighters, and coordinating strike packages across multiple services and nations. The last E-3 entered service in 1992, and no replacement is expected until at least 2028, and then only as an initial operational capability. With a fleet mission-capable rate below 60 percent even before the war began, the six deployed E-3s were already barely sufficient to sustain two continuous orbits over the airspace. Losing one imposes hard choices: either push remaining aircraft and crews beyond sustainable rates or curtail other missions, leaving windows when the theater operates without a clear air picture. The United States can decide to send another aircraft to the theater, but that means curtailing the training pipeline or pulling from other critical missions like homeland defense or deterrence in the Indo-Pacific.
Taken together, these strikes constitute a systematic attack on the sensors, logistics, and command-and-control systems that make American airpower function — and the impact is real.
A Template, Not an Anomaly
Iran’s asymmetric counter campaign is a harbinger of air wars to come. Three converging trends are reshaping the contest for air control and exposing the structural vulnerabilities of the American way of air warfare.
The first is the democratization of precision strike, which has ended the age of the air base as a sanctuary. For the last 30 years, U.S. air operations have depended on a small number of large, fixed forward bases that adversaries largely could not reach. That assumption underwrote everything, including how the Air Force based its assets, where it parked its tankers, and the investments it made — or did not make — in hardening base infrastructure. The proliferation of long-range ballistic and cruise missiles, along with cheap one-way attack drones with “good enough” accuracy, has ended that sanctuary.
Dispersal is the doctrinal answer, but it has political and practical limits. Gulf states had already restricted the use of their bases for offensive operations against Iran before the war began. As Gulf partners face attacks for hosting U.S. forces, other allies like the Philippines are observing the consequences and may reconsider their willingness to host U.S. operations in future contingencies. Even where access exists, dispersal requires prepositioned equipment, trained personnel, and logistics infrastructure that takes years to build. The sanctuary age is over, but the U.S. force posture has not caught up.
The second trend is the return of mass, allowing adversaries to impose sustained attrition against an air force built around small numbers of expensive and exquisite systems. The Air Force has spent decades trading quantity for quality, resulting in ever more capable, ever more expensive, and hence ever fewer aircraft and systems. That trade-off becomes a liability when an adversary can generate volume and impose attrition — whether in the air or on the ground. Iran’s sustained salvos aim to exhaust missile defenses, absorb high interception rates, and achieve enough leakage to hit critical targets. A force built around 16 E-3s and an aging tanker fleet has little to no capacity to absorb even a few losses, much less the kind of sustained attrition Iran has structured its campaign to exploit.
The United States faces only hard choices. It can absorb losses and press on, creating significant risk for deterrence and future conflicts. It can pull assets further back and out of the continuously expanding range of missiles and drones, accepting delays and reduced effectiveness in the current conflict. It can consolidate critical assets at a handful of bases, economizing on depleted defenses but concentrating risk. Or it can pursue a different approach — defeating mass at scale and increasing the production of critical enablers. But that would require a fundamental shift in how the Pentagon acquires and fields capabilities, and there is little sign that change will come quickly despite initial efforts at acquisition reform.
The third trend is the proliferation of near-real-time intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, which makes it increasingly difficult to hide assets and personnel in theater. Commercial satellite imagery, cheap surveillance drones, social media, and open-source intelligence — augmented, if reporting is accurate, by state-based space capabilities — have fundamentally changed the calculus of operational security. An adversary with access to such persistent coverage can watch a flight line at Prince Sultan around the clock — tracking which tankers are parked and when —, observe Airborne Warning and Control System operating patterns, and map windows of vulnerability for a targeting campaign to exploit. The battlespace has become translucent, trending towards transparency. The emerging requirement is to hide in the noise — to use mass, dispersion, and unpredictability to make high-value assets hard to distinguish and hard to target, even when they are observable. A force built around small numbers of large, fixed, irreplaceable platforms following predictable schedules is the opposite of that.
Each of these trends erodes an area where U.S. airpower once had primacy. Taken together, they point to a new age of air warfare, one that is not only accessible to regional adversaries like Iran but, more importantly, also to peer and near-peer competitors able to apply it at scale. The old principles have returned to air warfare: Sanctuary is no longer assured, mass once again means mass and not just precision, and surprise no longer means stealth.
This approach is not unique to Iran. In the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, Azerbaijan used cheap Turkish and Israeli drones to destroy Armenian air defense radars and surface-to-air missile batteries, targeting the sensing layer first to clear the way for further strikes. Ukraine has applied the same logic against Russia, using long-range strikes to damage Russian A-50 AWACS and other aircraft, as well as aviation fuel and radar sites.
Chinese military doctrine has articulated this approach for decades, treating air warfare not as a contest between individual aircraft but between integrated systems, and building a missile force specifically designed to threaten and collapse the American air combat system at its most vulnerable points — logistics, runways, command and control, and communications. What Iran has executed with ballistic missiles and cheap drones, China could execute at a far greater scale and sophistication, and the U.S. force posture has not kept pace.
Back to the Future
In the war with Iran, the United States is largely living with yesterday’s decisions — a force structure and industrial base built for a different era and a different threat. While the ceasefire is welcome news, there is little that can be done to change that now. On the margins, commanders can continue to disperse assets within and across bases, deploy inflatable decoys to complicate targeting, harden what can be hardened, and acquire interceptor drones, including from Ukraine, which has learned hard lessons about defending against exactly this kind of campaign. But these are palliatives. The window to make different choices closed long before the first missile hit Prince Sultan airbase.
The attacks are also a warning about air wars to come. Iran has exposed the fragility of the system that makes U.S. airpower possible: aging tankers parked out in the open, a handful of irreplaceable Airborne Warning and Control Systems, and radar networks at fixed positions visible to commercial satellites. These are structural vulnerabilities, and this is not an isolated episode.
Regional conflicts often presage changes to the character of war. The Air Force largely ignored the lessons of the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict and has yet to fully internalize those emerging from Ukraine, where cheap drones and long-range strikes exposed the vulnerability of critical airpower enablers deep in rear areas. Iran now offers a third data point — a clearer pattern of where air warfare is heading. Dominating the skies above 30,000 feet is no longer sufficient for either protection or success.
The Pentagon should rapidly strengthen its exposed flank. The place to start is the enabling layer itself. It was never designed to absorb attrition because, for the last 30 years, it never had to. Recent debate over the defense industrial base has focused on munitions and expendable one-way attack drones, not on support platforms assumed to be lower priority targets. That is the gap Iran has exposed. Traditional crewed platforms cannot fill it — they are too expensive, too few, and too slow to produce.
Automation offers a path forward. Uncrewed platforms are cheaper to build and operate and are not bound by the crew rest cycles, training pipelines, and basing requirements that make crewed tankers and Airborne Warning and Control Systems predictable and vulnerable. They will not replace the KC-46 or the E-7, but they can provide the mass and resilience those platforms cannot.
The Air Force has pursued automation for the high-end fight. It should pursue it first for the dull, dangerous, and increasingly targeted missions of the support force as well.
But adaptation should go beyond technology. It requires a shift in how airpower itself is understood. Two-dimensional lines on a map should give way to a new conception of a domain that is fundamentally three-dimensional. Forces should deny and defend at altitudes and ranges where offensive value is low, and defeat and dominate at altitudes from where targets can be struck most effectively. There is no need to copy adversaries’ strategy or weaponry, but there is every need for understanding them. Victory will go to those who anticipate how adversaries will exploit asymmetry — and act before the first strike lands.
Maximilian K. Bremer is a nonresident fellow with the Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center and head of Mission Engineering and Strategy for Atropos Group.
Kelly A. Grieco is a senior fellow with the Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center and adjunct professor in the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University.
Image: Saeed Sajjadi via Wikimedia Commons
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