Name: Calculating Iran's Missile Math After First Week of War
Uploaded: 2026-03-06T21:31:41.000Z
Duration: 6 min 7 s
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Basic passive voice

Their Navy is gone, 24 ships in three days.

So they have no air force, they have no air defense.

All of their airplanes are gone, their communications are gone, missiles are gone, launches are gone about 60% and 64% respectively.

I'm joined now by Becca Wasser, Defense lead for Bloomberg Economics.

Becca, do we know how much of that is true?

Well, at this point in time no one actually knows.

It's very difficult to do battle damage assessment in the fog and friction of war.

That being said, we have updated numbers from U.S.

central Command where they say that the United States has taken out about 90% of Iran's missile capability, about 80% of their drone attack ability and increase the number of warships that have been sunk to 30.

However, that doesn't mean that the threat has dissipated.

I think we've seen continued attacks, particularly on the Gulf, largely from drones.

I think we're going to continue to see Iran strike back in whatever means it has possible.

So all of that is to say that yes, there are great statistics coming out of the Defense Department at the moment about what they believe has been diminished in Iran, but

that doesn't necessarily mean that Iran's capability to strike back is fully degraded.

Yeah, there's a theory out there that Iran slow walked the beginning of this war in order to degrade some of the capabilities of countries around it.

There are a number of different strategies that Iran could have.

If you look at the rate of missile fire and you look at the rate of drone attacks, you do see for example against the UAE, this big wave, almost over 100 drones in the first day alone.

But since then it has slowly and slowly dissipated, particularly on the missiles as the US has taken out some of their ability to launch missiles.

So I think you are seeing this sort of trend where yes, you could see that maybe Iran is holding back some capabilities in order to be able to respond further in in the conflicts.

But you know, there's also the chance that they are being heavily attrite of their capabilities and they don't really have that much to be able to bring to bear.

You've also seen them take the approach of trying to regionalize the conflict which is trying to bring in the Gulf states and to a lesser extent we're starting to see some involvement from some European countries as they scramble to protect their assets and bases located elsewhere in the Middle East.

I mean NATO making comments now too do we see Naito getting involved and Canada as well saying, you know, I mean, Mark Carney really did a nice 90 degree turn there and said that they would have no problem getting involved, but

Why would they need to get involved in a defensive way?

Well, I do think that we're not necessarily going to see NATO become a party to this conflict, but

what we could see are individual NATO members get involved and part of this is for defensive reasons.

If you look across the region, the UK and France in particular have a number of military assets located at different bases, including in some cases CO located with US forces at bases in the Gulf and elsewhere in the Middle East.

So we've seen the UK already respond in order to defend some of their assets, including in places like Jordan, Cyprus as well as Qatar.

We've also seen France do something very similar.

So we might see their involvement in these one offs and in these purely defensive means.

But I don't think we're necessarily going to see NATO as a whole join into the conflict, at least not at this juncture in time.

As things go on, we could see that shift.

But right now I think it's going to be one offs.

Becca, if this does continue for a bit longer, Washington is going to have to move to maybe less expensive but shorter range missiles.

Because for something like that you really apparently need complete air superiority.

The United States does not have air superiority or the ability to fly overseas, fly over Iran unconstituted, uncontested.

Right now what it has is localized air superiority.

It has the ability to fly safely over Iran in pockets in particular areas.

It doesn't have it over the entire country.

And that's really important as the US is shifting to its next wave of attacks in this campaign where it's trying to be able to push aircraft forward and use shorter range joint direct attack weapons, which it has in greater numbers than some of these higher end, limited and higher cost long range standoff weapons.

So the US needs to establish air superiority if it wants to make this shift towards moving closer in and using the weapons that it has in greater abundance.

That being said, that doesn't mean that the the US has unlimited missiles.

We've seen in the past, for example, in operations against the Islamic State where the rate of US airstrikes were so high that they actually ran dangerously low on joint direct attack munitions and almost had to pull some of those missiles from other theaters, including Europe.