标签： Asia

New data published by The Washington Post in a Thursday report has laid bare the starkly uneven burden of missile defense operations against Iran, showing the United States has expended far more advanced interceptor assets shielding Israel than Israel itself has deployed to protect its own territory.

According to the report, the unprecedented scale of US interceptor usage is the root cause of the critical stock shortages previously documented by Middle East Eye and other regional news outlets. The gap in available munitions has already had ripple effects across the region: during the peak of active conflict, Gulf US allies saw their requests for emergency interceptor resupplies rejected, despite Israel stepping in to deploy Iron Dome batteries and personnel to defend the United Arab Emirates, a key regional partner.

Breaking down the volume of deployments, The Washington Post confirmed the US launched more than 200 Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) interceptors to counter Iranian attacks — a figure equal to roughly 50 percent of the Pentagon’s entire global stock of the advanced defense system. In addition to the THAAD deployments, US Navy vessels operating in the Eastern Mediterranean fired more than 100 Standard Missile-3 and Standard Missile-6 interceptors to down incoming threats.

By comparison, Israel’s own interceptor usage was far lower. Israeli defense forces launched fewer than 100 Arrow interceptors and approximately 90 David’s Sling interceptors. Notably, the David’s Sling systems were also diverted to counter projectiles launched by Yemen’s Houthi movement and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, groups whose missile and drone arsenal is far less sophisticated than that of Iran.

These numbers paint a clear picture of a “lopsided dynamic” at the heart of the US-Israel military alliance, the Post concluded. The revelation has sparked pushback from foreign policy analysts, with Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, describing the data as “stunning” in a post on the social platform X. “Very understandable that many view the Iran war as ‘Israel first’ when you see these statistics,” Parsi added. “The US depleted far more of its advanced missile defense interceptors inventory to defend Israel than Israel itself did.”

The disclosure comes as Washington and Tehran hold indirect talks to finalize a proposal to end the conflict, with a fragile ceasefire currently holding across active front lines. Former US President Donald Trump has publicly threatened to resume full-scale attacks on Iran if the country does not accept his administration’s terms for a permanent ceasefire.

But the depleted interceptor stockpiles leave the US in a strategically vulnerable position. Even before the conflict escalated, defense officials had publicly acknowledged that US interceptor inventories were already stretched thin, and the massive deployment for Israel leaves just 200 THAAD interceptors remaining in US stockpiles globally.

The military dynamic of the conflict has centered on a race between two sides: the US and Israel have sought to destroy as many of Iran’s ballistic missiles and mobile launchers as possible inside Iranian territory, while Iran has aimed to exhaust the stockpiles of defense munitions held by the US, Israel, and their regional Gulf partners. A recent New York Times report corroborated that Iran has retained roughly 70 percent of its pre-war mobile missile launchers and 70 percent of its total ballistic missile stockpile, leaving it with substantial remaining strike capacity if conflict resumes.

Compounding the strategic vulnerability, The Washington Post notes that if hostilities restart, the US will almost certainly be forced to take on an even larger share of missile defense duties for Israel. This additional burden stems from a recent decision by the Israeli military to take several of its own domestic missile defense batteries offline to conduct scheduled maintenance. One unnamed senior US official told the outlet that “the imbalance will likely be exacerbated if fighting restarts.”

Recent steep losses of U.S. military aircraft during joint U.S.-Israeli operations in the Middle East have ignited urgent new debate over whether American air power can endure sustained high attrition in a potential future great-power conflict against China in the Indo-Pacific.

In May 2026, the nonpartisan U.S. Congressional Research Service (CRS) published a detailed report documenting that at least 42 U.S. aircraft have been lost or damaged beyond field repair since the launch of Operation Epic Fury, the February 2026 U.S.-Israeli military campaign targeting Iranian military and infrastructure assets. The toll cuts across every major segment of U.S. air power: fighter jets, refueling tankers, special operations aircraft, helicopters, and uncrewed surveillance and strike drones, painting a stark picture of the campaign’s high intensity.

A breakdown of the confirmed losses includes four F-15E Strike Eagle fighters—three destroyed in friendly fire incidents over Kuwait in March, and a fourth shot down over Iranian airspace in April—plus one damaged F-35A stealth fighter, one A-10 Thunderbolt II destroyed by enemy fire, seven KC-135 refueling tankers, one E-3 Sentry AWACS early warning aircraft, two MC-130J special operations transport aircraft, one HH-60W combat rescue helicopter, 24 MQ-9 Reaper strike drones, and one MQ-4C Triton surveillance drone. Several additional aircraft were damaged on the ground at Saudi Arabia’s Prince Sultan Air Base during Iranian missile and drone counterattacks, while the two stranded MC-130Js inside Iranian territory were deliberately destroyed by U.S. forces to prevent capture.

The CRS notes that the U.S. Department of Defense has not publicly released a full official damage assessment, but Capitol Hill lawmakers are already preparing to investigate the wide-ranging operational, budgetary, and defense industrial base implications of replacing these high-value military aircraft. Analysts have attributed the heavy losses to a mix of overlapping factors: tactical mistakes on the battlefield, surprisingly resilient Iranian air defense networks, long-unaddressed vulnerabilities in U.S. operational doctrine, and improved Iranian strike capabilities backed by technical and intelligence support from China and Russia.

Writing for Forbes in March 2026, defense analyst Peter Suciu argued that common fog-of-war challenges contributed heavily to avoidable losses. These include ground crew and pilot errors caused by turned-off emitters or transponders during covert operations, widespread communications overload from constant radio traffic, disruptive enemy electronic warfare, rapidly shifting operational plans, failures in data linking and digital command systems, and human factors such as stress, fatigue, and inadequate training for high-intensity combat. Dense multinational operating environments, conflicting radar readings, unrecognized identification friend-or-foe (IFF) system failures, and pilots forgetting critical combat procedures have also amplified avoidable losses, Suciu added.

Beyond tactical missteps, analysts emphasize that even after months of preliminary strikes, Iran’s integrated air defense network has retained enough operational capacity to impose heavy costs on U.S. air operations. Ahead of Operation Rising Lion—Israel’s June 2025 pre-emptive strikes on Iran’s nuclear program, widely seen as the precursor to February 2026’s Operation Epic Fury—defense journalist Arie Egozi documented that Iran operated a layered, multinational air defense architecture including Russian TOR-M1, SA-5, SA-6, and S-300PMU systems, Chinese-designed HQ-2 and FM-80 batteries, upgraded legacy HAWK missiles, British Rapier systems, and Swedish RBS-70 short-range weapons.

Per Egozi’s analysis, the Russian-built TOR-M1 is capable of engaging fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, drones, guided missiles, and precision-guided ordnance even in heavily contested electronic warfare environments, while the S-300PMU forms the backbone of Iran’s long-range defense capability, with advanced multi-missile compatibility, extended range, and improved lethality. Iran has also integrated Chinese-built YJ-14 search radars, modernized air surveillance systems, and a unified command-and-control network to protect key national assets including Tehran, military sites, port facilities, and oil infrastructure.

While U.S. and Israeli strikes did degrade Iran’s largest fixed-site air defense systems such as the S-300PMU, hundreds of mobile, concealed, and dispersed short-range systems survived pre-emptive attacks and continue to pose a major threat to coalition aircraft. Lower-cost, highly portable systems have proven particularly difficult to suppress. The Robert Lansing Institute (RLI) reported in February 2026 that under a €500 million contract signed in December 2025, Russia agreed to supply Iran with 500 Verba man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS) and 2,500 9M336 missiles for delivery between 2027 and 2029. The RLI notes that Verba MANPADS are optimized to engage low-flying aircraft, helicopters, cruise missiles, and drones, and their widespread deployment across Iran has already significantly complicated U.S. air operations, increased attrition risk for low-altitude airframes, and forced coalition aircraft to alter flight routes, cruising altitudes, and mission timelines. MANPADS deployed around high-value Iranian sites also create localized no-fly zones that hinder intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) operations, combat search and rescue (CSAR) missions, and rapid strike sorties.

The heavy attrition experienced during Operation Epic Fury has also exposed critical gaps in the U.S. military’s core operating doctrine for high-intensity conflict, the Agile Combat Employment (ACE) framework. As analyst Michael Blaser outlined in a 2024 Proceedings article, ACE is designed to increase aircraft survivability by dispersing airframes across multiple small bases and relocating them frequently to outpace enemy targeting cycles. However, Blaser argues that this strategy relies on two unrealistic assumptions: that adversaries lack the long-range strike capacity to hit dozens of dispersed airfields simultaneously, and that enemy kill chains—the sequential process of identifying, tracking, and attacking targets—will remain slower than the U.S. military’s ability to generate sorties and relocate aircraft.

The CRS report’s documentation of six U.S. aircraft destroyed on the ground at Prince Sultan Air Base by Iranian counterstrikes—five KC-135 tankers and one E-3 AWACS—directly illustrates this vulnerability. Blaser adds that modern artificial intelligence, machine learning, and persistent space-based surveillance have cut adversary kill chains to less than 24 hours, allowing peer competitors to identify and target dispersed U.S. aircraft faster than U.S. crews can relocate them to new positions.

These doctrinal and operational vulnerabilities have been further exacerbated by alleged intelligence and targeting support provided to Iran by China and Russia. The report notes that China has supplied Iran with commercial satellite imagery, access to ground receiving stations, and AI-powered intelligence tools that can process satellite data, flight tracking, and commercial shipping information to identify U.S. deployments. Chinese private firms have also used AI-enabled open-source intelligence (OSINT) to map U.S. force positions and reconstruct coalition flight patterns. Russia, meanwhile, has reportedly provided Iran with its own satellite imagery, real-time targeting data, and ISR support tracking U.S. troops, warships, and aircraft, enabling far more precise Iranian strikes on U.S. radar sites, command infrastructure, and forward positions. Together, this support has helped Iran build a distributed, plausibly deniable intelligence network that underpins its most effective counterstrikes.

The strategic implications of these losses extend far beyond the Middle East, directly shaping U.S. military planning for a potential future conflict with China in the Pacific. Unlike Iran, China fields a far larger, more capable missile arsenal, has a much deeper defense industrial base, and operates a far denser integrated strike network across the Indo-Pacific.

A 2023 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) led by analyst Mark Cancian already warned that the U.S. and its regional allies could lose hundreds of aircraft in a conflict over Taiwan, with 90% of those losses occurring on the ground to pre-emptive Chinese missile strikes. The report attributed these projected losses to China’s large, sophisticated arsenal of ballistic and cruise missiles, which can target the small number of fixed air bases available to U.S. forces across the Western Pacific.

If the heavy attrition seen in Operation Epic Fury is any indication, future conflicts against peer great-power competitors will not be decided by which side fields the most technologically advanced stealth fighters. Instead, victory will likely go to the power that can keep enough of its air fleet dispersed, survivable, and operational through weeks of sustained missile and drone attacks.

A landmark and deeply controversial court ruling in Turkey has upended the leadership of the country’s main opposition bloc, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), triggering immediate outrage from the party’s current leadership and laying bare escalating tensions between the ruling establishment and Turkey’s oldest political force.

The Ankara court’s judgment ordered the temporary removal of sitting CHP Chairman Ozgur Ozel and his entire executive team, installing former party leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu and his political allies to take over their roles in an interim capacity. The ruling, issued by Turkey’s Court of Appeals, stems from claims of electoral fraud that nullified the CHP’s 38th Ordinary Elective Congress held in November 2023, the party meeting where Ozel secured his victory to replace Kilicdaroglu. Under the terms of the ruling, all subsequent party congresses held after the 2023 extraordinary gathering are also legally invalidated.

Founded by iconic Turkish statesman Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the CHP has secured historic electoral gains against the long-ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in recent national contests. Most notably, imprisoned CHP presidential candidate Ekrem Imamoglu – the former popular mayor of Istanbul – has consistently led in opinion polling, with results showing he would defeat incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in a head-to-head general election. It remains uncertain whether the latest court ruling will also invalidate Imamoglu’s 2025 party primary victory, which secured his place as the CHP’s presidential nominee.

Imamoglu was taken into custody in March 2025 on a sweeping array of charges including corruption, extortion, bribery, money laundering, espionage, and ties to terrorism – all allegations he has forcefully denied. Dozens of CHP local officials and grassroots party workers have also been arrested in what the opposition has decried as a coordinated campaign of political repression. Prior to Imamoglu’s arrest, the CHP had largely escaped the heavy-handed state interference that has targeted smaller left-leaning and pro-Kurdish political parties in Turkey for years, a pattern that shifted dramatically after the party won major gains in 2024 local elections.

Kilicdaroglu, who led the CHP from 2010 to 2023, was credited with expanding the party’s electoral base and broadening its public appeal, but growing criticism from the party’s younger generation of politicians and his 2023 presidential election loss to Erdogan led to his departure from the leadership role. Following the court ruling, Kilicdaroglu signaled he was prepared to reassume his former post, telling TGRT News: “May this decision be beneficial to Turkey and CHP.”

The current CHP leadership has rejected the ruling as politically motivated and has pledged to contest it. Per Turkish law, the party has a 14-day window to file an appeal with the country’s Court of Cassation. “All decisions taken by courts acting on instructions [from the government] are null and void as far as we are concerned,” CHP Deputy Chairman Gokan Zeybek stated, according to reports from independent Turkish outlet Medyascope. “Now we are going to Ankara. We are going to stand up for our headquarters, the headquarters entrusted to us by the nation, entrusted to us by the organisation.”

The ruling marks the most significant escalation in a months-long crackdown on the CHP, deepening political uncertainty in Turkey ahead of upcoming national presidential elections.