The first week of the U.S.-Iran war has been defined by speed, reach, and taking away Tehran’s ability to see, to command, and to strike back in volume.
Now, multiple indicators suggest the U.S. and Israel are moving beyond the opening “shock-and-awe”—and into a phase aimed at causing more enduring destruction of Iran’s military capabilities. The new priority appears to be Tehran’s defense-industrial backbone, especially the facilities and supply chains that let it keep building ballistic missiles and drones.
This shift matters because it changes what “success” looks like. Phase one was about blinding and disorienting Iranian forces while suppressing immediate retaliation.
Phase two, if it unfolds as current reporting suggests, is about preventing Iran from regenerating its most dangerous capabilities over months and years—turning a fast-moving air campaign into a sustained effort to dismantle production capacity, not just fielded systems.
“We’re not just hitting what they have, we’re destroying their ability to rebuild,” Commander of U.S. Central Command, Navy Admiral Brad Cooper, said in a press conference on March 5. “And so, as we transition to the next phase of this operation, we will systematically dismantle Iran’s missile production capability for the future, and that’s absolutely in progress.”
Phase One: Air Dominance, Command Disruption, and Crushing Retaliation Capacity
The early phase of the campaign—launched February 28 under what U.S. officials have calledOperation Epic Fury—appears to have been designed to create permissive conditions for follow-on strikes deeper inside Iran.
Initial briefings from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine said the opening U.S. target set focused on IRGC command-and-control nodes, air defenses, missile and drone launch infrastructure, and key military airfields.
That first wave leaned heavily on cross-domain effects, including U.S. Cyber Command and U.S. Space Command initiating “non-kinetic effects to disable Iran’s communications ability,” before a large, synchronized strike package rolled in—more than 100 aircraft launching from land and sea, supported by tankers, early warning, electronic attack, bombers, and unmanned platforms.
Independent assessments by non-governmental military research organizations, such as the Institute for the Study of War, have described the opening phase in operational terms that align with that picture.
At the March 5 press conference, Adm. Cooper said U.S. and Israeli forces had achieved air dominance, enabling strikes “deep inside Iran,” and reported that Iranian ballistic missile attacks were down 90% since the war began, with drone attacks down 83%.
Independent analysis by The Debrief of publicly released, day-specific tallies from Gulf-state defense ministries points to a pattern that partly matches Cooper’s claim—but with an important wrinkle.
Using Qatar and the UAE as consistent reference points, the number of ballistic missiles detected in the opening salvo fell from a combined 202 to 21 by March 5. This aligns with a roughly a 90% drop, suggesting missile activity has sharply declined. collapsed.
However, drone pressure appears far more persistent. According to the same public data, drone detections fell from 221 to 135, a 39% decrease, with the UAE still reporting triple-digit daily drone figures even late in the week. This is seemingly at odds with the DoW’s suggestion of an 83% decline in drone attacks.
It is important to note that these numbers should be treated as directional rather than definitive, as they rely solely on publicly available reporting from a limited set of countries, each with its own counting methods and time windows, and do not capture the full theater-wide picture.
Maritime power was another major theme of the opening week. Especially if the U.S. and Israel aimed to remove Iranian leverage in the Gulf and deny the IRGC Navy a role in escalation. According to Adm. Cooper, U.S. forces had destroyed 30 Iranian warships, including an “Iranian drone carrier ship, roughly the size of a World War II aircraft carrier.”
The most dramatic display of Iran’s navy being dismantled came in footage released by the DoW, showing a U.S. Navy submarine firing a torpedo that struck and sank the Moudge-class frigate IRIS Dena off Sri Lanka’s southern coast. The attack was the first time since World War II that an American submarine had sunk an enemy warship with a torpedo.
The opening phase, however, has not been cost-free. U.S. Central Command reported that six U.S. service members had been killed in action: Army Reserve soldiers Capt. Cody A. Khork, Sgt. Nicole M. Amor, Sgt. Declan J. Coady, Sgt. Noah L. Tietjens, Maj. Jeffrey R. O’Brien and CWO 3 Robert M. Marzan.
“We honor our fallen Heroes, who served fearlessly and selflessly in defense of our nation,” Chief of Army Reserve and Commanding General U.S. Army Reserve Command, Lieutenant General Robert Harter, said in a statement. “Their sacrifice, and the sacrifices of their families, will never be forgotten.”
In its most recent update on Monday, March 2, CENTCOM reported that 18 additional U.S. service members had been seriously wounded in Iran’s initial retaliatory strikes.
The air campaign also suffered a rare and expensive setback when three U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagles went down over Kuwait in what CENTCOM described as an apparent friendly-fire incident, mistakenly engaged by Kuwaiti air defenses amid active combat conditions. All six aircrew ejected safely and were recovered.
As The Debrief recently reported, the ruthless speed and integration on display in the opening days of the U.S.-Israeli campaign has had effects well beyond the Middle East, causing some in China’s analytical ecosystem away from the familiar “America in decline” storyline and toward a more cautionary reading of U.S. power – centered on strike reach, intelligence penetration, electronic warfare, and the rapid collapse of an opponent’s missile forces.
In that framing, Beijing’s takeaway is less about whether Washington is “stretched thin” and more about what happens when the United States chooses to act with tempo and coordination. As one Chinese political scientist quoted in the Chinese media put it, “We absolutely must not underestimate America’s capabilities.”
Ultimately, the logic of phase one is recognizable to anyone who follows modern air campaigns: establish freedom of action in the air, fracture the enemy’s kill chain, and rapidly reduce the volume of incoming threats. Phase one, in other words, was about creating conditions.
Phase two appears designed to exploit them.
Phase Two: Striking the Industrial Base That Sustains Missiles and Drones
Phase two of the combined U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran appears to be increasingly focused on Tehran’s ability to rebuild.
On March 5, Reuters reported that Israel’s war plan was entering a second phase that would see fighter jets attacking ballistic missile sites “buried deep underground,” including bunkers storing ballistic missiles and equipment.
Reports have also indicated that Israel has already begun striking underground infrastructure sites used to store ballistic missiles—an important detail because underground “missile cities” have long been central to Iran’s survivability strategy.
On March 5, the Israeli military issued warnings in Farsi for civilians to evacuate two industrial zones near Tehran: Abbas Abad and Shenzar. The warnings noted that the IDF would be “targeting the Iranian regime’s military infrastructure” and that “your presence in this area puts your life in danger.”
A March 5 report by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and the Critical Threats Project (CTP-ISW) described why those areas matter. The Abbas Abad Industrial Zone hosts companies linked to Iran’s defense industry and procurement ecosystem, including a firm tied to aluminum alloy products for defense-linked entities—materials that can be critical for aerospace structures, airframes, and certain missile components.
The CTP-ISW report additionally points to strikes at other nodes relevant to sustaining warfighting capacity, including an ammunition depot area and renewed damage at the Parchin Military Complex, which it says Iran has used to develop and manufacture advanced munitions, including drones and missiles.
The strategic rationale is not hard to read. Destroying launchers and stockpiled missiles can reduce salvos in the near term. However, it doesn’t necessarily solve the longer problem if the adversary can keep producing, reconstituting, and dispersing systems.
Reports and remarks from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suggest Washington’s objectives remain unchanged and have not expanded. At the same time, Adm. Cooper has framed the shift in operations as a bid to prevent Iran from regenerating its arsenal, saying the U.S. will “systematically dismantle Iran’s missile production capability for the future.”
In practice, phase two could involve an expanded target set that looks less like traditional battlefield attrition and more like industrial disassembly: machine tools, propellant and motor production, guidance and electronics manufacturing, warhead fabrication, storage depots, test stands, transportation nodes, and the procurement intermediaries that connect sanctioned military programs to civilian industrial parks.
The IDF’s initial targeting of industrial zones is a clue that the campaign may now be hunting those seams—where military output depends on dual-use infrastructure and suppliers.
This is also where the campaign’s technology story sharpens. Striking hardened, buried, and dispersed targets is a different fight than suppressing radar systems or cratering runways.
Phase two will likely depend on persistent intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, rapid target development, and weapons designed to penetrate or collapse subterranean infrastructure.
What Comes Next: The Endgame Is Still Murky—and Politically Contested
Phase two of operations appears much clearer than phase three.
Publicly, U.S. officials have emphasized limited objectives. Reuters quoted Defense Secretary Hegseth saying, “There’s no expansion in our objectives,” even as he described the campaign as ongoing and framed Tehran’s strategy as betting the U.S. cannot sustain a longer fight.
At the same time, other signals point in a more open-ended direction. President Donald Trump has said the United States “must be involved” in selecting a new supreme leader in Iran—language that implies a political outcome beyond degrading missiles and drones.
Reports have also indicated that President Trump has voiced support for the idea of Kurdish forces conducting an offensive into Iran. However, Kurdish officials have denied any plans to deploy or involve ground forces in Iran.
Israel’s messaging adds another layer. On March 5, Israeli Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir described a transition to a “next stage” that moves beyond air superiority and ballistic missile systems toward increasing the “damage to the regime’s foundations and its military capabilities.”
“We have additional surprising moves in our hands, which I do not intend to reveal,” Zamir said.
The phrase—“regime’s foundations”—is the kind of elastic political-military language that can cover anything from internal security services to state media infrastructure to leadership targets.
Domestically in the United States, the uncertain endgame is already a flashpoint. On March 5, the House rejected a war powers resolution that would have constrained the president, reflecting the growing political fight over authorization, oversight, and what “victory” is supposed to mean.
Reports earlier in the week noted that Democrats emerging from briefings said officials had not outlined an exit strategy, with critics warning of the risk of another open-ended conflict.
Meanwhile, Tehran has tried to shape that debate through deterrent signaling. On March 4, an Iranian military official, cited by semi-official media, warned Iran would target Israel’s Dimona nuclear site if Israel and the U.S. sought regime change—an explicit attempt to raise the perceived cost of a maximalist end state.
Ultimately, if phase one was about collapsing Iran’s ability to execute coordinated retaliation, phase two is about whether Iran can ever restore the industrial throughput that makes mass missile warfare possible—and whether the U.S. and Israel are prepared to keep the pressure on long enough to matter.
That’s where the next phase blurs into the bigger, still-unanswered questions. Once the U.S. and Israel have shattered the launchers and begun tearing into the factories that replace them, what political outcome are they actually trying to build—or prevent—on the far side of the bombing campaign?
For now, what comes next appears to be a concerning mystery.
Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan. Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com