Military strikes have crippled significant portions of Iran's defence infrastructure, but shifting war aims and widening regional violence are raising questions about what victory would look like.
A joint American and Israeli air campaign against Iran has completed its first full week of operations, leaving Tehran's military capabilities severely degraded but its government still intact — and Washington struggling to articulate a coherent political objective for the conflict. According to reporting by The New York Times, the war began when Israeli missiles destroyed a government compound in central Tehran, killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei along with a number of senior military and intelligence commanders.
The strike, while devastating for Iran's top brass, also eliminated a group of officials whom White House strategists had identified as potential interlocutors for a rapid diplomatic resolution — a development that has left the administration scrambling for an alternative political path forward, the Times reported, citing American officials.
US Central Command has deployed more than 50,000 troops to the region, supported by two aircraft carriers, roughly a dozen warships, and scores of additional aircraft. Approximately 4,000 targets have been struck across Iran, according to military officials, with particular emphasis on ballistic missile storage and launch facilities. Admiral Brad Cooper, head of US Central Command, stated this week that Iranian ballistic missile launches had fallen by 90 per cent compared to the opening days of fighting, and one-way drone strikes by 83 per cent. The first week of combat is estimated to have cost Washington around $6 billion, the bulk of which was spent on interceptor munitions.
Despite these losses, Iran retains roughly half of its ballistic missile arsenal and an even larger share of its drone stockpile, US officials told Congress in classified briefings. Tehran's strategy — internally code-named "Operation Madman" — aims to maximise economic and political costs for Washington and its allies by widening the geographic scope of the conflict. Iran has already struck oil and gas infrastructure in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Bahrain; effectively choked the Strait of Hormuz to tanker traffic; and attacked civilian hubs including airports and hotels in several Gulf states. The average retail price of petrol in the United States rose by nearly 27 cents per gallon in the war's first week, according to the Times.
Six US Army reservists were killed in Kuwait last Sunday after a drone strike attributed to Iranian forces, marking the conflict's first American casualties. A February 28 airstrike on an elementary school in the southern Iranian town of Minab — most likely American in origin, according to a Times analysis — killed at least 175 people, including children, and drew widespread international condemnation.
Hezbollah has also entered the fray, firing projectiles into Israel and provoking retaliatory Israeli military operations in Lebanon. Analysts warn that Iran's Revolutionary Guards have significantly tightened their grip over the Lebanese militant group since its last major confrontation with Israel in 2024, reducing the organisation's operational autonomy.
President Donald Trump's stated war aims have shifted dramatically day by day. Having initially called for a popular uprising against Iran's clerical leadership — a scenario that has not materialised — Trump subsequently declared that he would personally have a say in selecting Iran's future leadership, before on Friday demanding "unconditional surrender." White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly stated that the administration's goals remain the destruction of Iran's ballistic missile capacity, the dismantling of its navy, severing its arms-supply lines to proxy forces, and permanently preventing Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
Iranian officials, for their part, remain publicly defiant. They have expressed confidence that their government will outlast the military campaign, and that Washington and Tel Aviv will eventually lose the domestic and international political will to sustain it. American officials, meanwhile, are now planning for a conflict that could extend for weeks — with no clear consensus in Washington on what a negotiated or imposed end-state for post-war Iran would look like.