US bombing has destroyed a percentage of Iran's drone arsenal, but it's impossible to eliminate the threat from the air. The drones can be hidden anywhere in a mountainous region 1.5 times the size of California, creating an insurmountable scale problem for aerial surveillance and strikes.

Despite facing conventionally superior US and Israeli forces that can degrade its missile and nuclear capabilities, Iran leverages low-cost asymmetric tactics like drone strikes. This strategy allows it to inflict continuous damage and prolong the conflict without needing to match its adversaries' military might.

The US is trapped because effective military leverage against Iran requires accepting the risk of casualties. However, the administration has framed the operation as low-risk, preventing it from taking decisive action and backing itself into a corner where it cannot achieve its objectives.

Iran's victory condition isn't military dominance but strategic disruption. By using asymmetric warfare—mines, drones, and missiles—to create chaos in the Strait of Hormuz, it can halt the flow of oil. This cracks the petrodollar system and achieves its primary geopolitical objective without needing to defeat the US Navy in a conventional battle.

Previous administrations didn't attack Iran not due to a failure of nerve but because of a sober assessment of the strategic consequences. They understood that while the U.S. military could execute the strikes, Iran could always close the Strait of Hormuz, and there was no viable long-term plan for victory, making restraint the wiser strategic choice.

The hope that airstrikes can catalyze a popular uprising for regime change is historically unfounded. Unlike in Afghanistan or Libya where local ground forces existed, there is no organized army on the ground in Iran to capitalize on air power, making a decapitation strategy highly unlikely to succeed.

Iran employs inexpensive weapons against shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. This asymmetric strategy avoids direct military confrontation while making the risk too high for insured commercial vessels, effectively closing the strait without a formal blockade.

While the US demonstrated its ability to destroy targets in Iran, it failed at the critical operational objective of decisively winning the attrition war against Iran's mobile missile and drone launchers. The US could not find and stop all the attacks, revealing a key vulnerability to persistent, low-cost threats.

Contrary to political rhetoric suggesting total dominance, US air superiority in Iran is limited to specific geographic areas and time-sensitive windows. This lack of persistent control forces the use of expensive, high-end munitions to mitigate risk to pilots, further draining valuable inventories needed for a high-end fight.