Hunt the archer, not the arrow – opinion

Destroying a single launcher eliminates every missile it would have fired for the rest of the war, along with every interceptor that would have been used to stop them.

By Gregg Roman, Middle East Forum

American and allied air defenses have performed impressively in the war with Iran.

Batteries in Israel and across the Gulf have intercepted most of the ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones that Tehran has launched at them.

Yet this tactical success conceals a strategic dead end. Last week, after 13 consecutive nights of American strikes, Washington suspended its escalation.

It did so not because Iran relented or diplomacy advanced, but because the interceptors are running short. The defender, not the attacker, approached exhaustion first.

The cause is a deliberate Iranian strategy, and it deserves to be understood on its own terms. Iran fires inexpensive weapons and compels the United States to answer with expensive ones.

A Kheibar Shekan, the solid-fuel workhorse of the Iranian arsenal, travels 1,450 kilometers behind a maneuvering warhead and now flies in formation with jet-powered drones that divide a defender’s radar.

It costs a small fraction of the interceptor sent to destroy it. A single Patriot interceptor costs approximately $4 million; a THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) round, approximately $15 million.

Iran spends in the thousands and imposes costs in the millions, night after night. No defender, however capable, can sustain that exchange indefinitely.

The evidence of strain is substantial. American forces reportedly have expended more than 1,500 Patriot interceptors in this war and retain fewer than a thousand.

The THAAD position is more precarious still. The United States has taken delivery of no new interceptors since August 2023, expects none before the spring of 2027, fields only eight batteries, and operates a mere 13 of the radars on which those batteries depend.

Iran, recognizing the value of the sensors, has attacked them deliberately since a radar requires far longer to replace than a missile requires to fly.

The conclusion follows plainly. A strategy confined to defense cannot win a war of attrition against an adversary cheaper than oneself.

The alternative is to strike the problem at its source, before the missile leaves the rail. Military planners term this approach left of launch: the deliberate effort to find, fix, and destroy an enemy’s launchers, drones, and supply lines in the interval before they fire.

It is not a novel proposition. The United States attempted it before, in the same desert and against the same difficulty.

During Operation Desert Storm in 1991, coalition aircraft achieved command of the Iraqi skies within days yet could not prevent Saddam Hussein from firing mobile Scud missiles at Tel Aviv and Riyadh.

Iraqi crews concealed their launchers, emerged to fire, and withdrew within minutes. The fixed sites proved easy to destroy. The mobile launchers proved nearly impossible to locate from the air.

In response, the coalition inserted ground forces to hunt them. American Delta Force and British SAS units operated deep in western Iraq, in sectors the operators named Scud Alley and Scud Boulevard, staging from a forward base at Al Jouf.

The undertaking exacted a price. Four SAS soldiers died on these patrols—among them, members of the team later known as Bravo Two Zero.

Candor requires acknowledging what the hunt did and did not accomplish.

No confirmed destruction of a mobile launcher from the air has ever been established for that war, and historians continue to dispute the number the ground teams destroyed.

The physical count, however, is not the measure that matters. The hunt compelled Iraqi crews to hide, to fire in haste, and thereby to fire less often and less accurately.

It kept Israel out of the war and preserved a fragile coalition. Most importantly, it transferred the initiative from the party firing the missiles to the party pursuing them.

Suppression is itself a form of victory, even absent a confirmed kill.

A contemporary version of this campaign against Iran and its proxies would not rely on commandos alone. It would integrate four elements into a single chain designed to close the interval between a launcher’s exposure and its firing:

1. Persistent surveillance. Long-endurance drones would loiter over the launch corridors of western Iran and proxy territory, watching for a vehicle to break cover.

2. Cyber and electronic warfare. Offensive operations would corrupt launch coordinates, jam firing telemetry, and disable the command networks that direct a missile, all before it is fueled.

3. Special operations against logistics. Interdiction would target the sinews of the system: the solid-rocket motors, the transporter-erector-launchers moving to their positions, and the advisory personnel who sustain the crews.

4. Rapid strike. Stealth aircraft and loitering munitions would engage a launcher within the narrow window, five to ten minutes, between its exposure and its launch.

The strongest argument for such a campaign is not tactical but economic, and it is decisive.

To destroy a single launcher on the ground is to eliminate not one missile but every missile that vehicle would have fired for the remainder of the war, and with them, every interceptor that would have been expended to stop them.

A guided bomb costing less than $100,000, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, removes a launcher whose continued operation would consume interceptors worth many multiples of that figure.

A campaign of this kind would reverse the exchange Iran has imposed, shifting the burden of cost onto Tehran.

The obvious objection holds that the United States is already expanding production. It is, and the effort merits approval.

Since January, the Pentagon has placed the defense industrial base on a wartime footing, with agreements intended to raise Patriot output toward 2,000 interceptors annually by 2030 and THAAD output from 96 to 400.

But an agreement is not a delivered weapon. The interval from order to delivery now approaches 52 months. Funds appropriated in 2027 will yield interceptors around 2030. But the United States is fighting this war now.

No production schedule can replenish a stockpile that empties this year, and every interceptor expended over the Gulf is one unavailable to Ukraine or to the Pacific, where a larger contest may await.

Missile defense remains necessary. It protects the populations and the infrastructure that no state can afford to lose, and it buys time. But defense has never won a war of attrition, and it will not win this one.

The United States possesses the aircraft, the sensors, the operators, and the doctrine required to carry the war to its origin. What it requires is the decision to do so.

The proper answer to an arrow one cannot afford to intercept is to hunt the archer who fires it. Washington should begin.