US Missiles and Autonomous Weapons Being Used Against Iran

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Key Takeaways

• The US launched two major strikes on Iran in 2025 and 2026, deploying stealth bombers, cruise missiles, and autonomous drones.
• Operation Epic Fury marked the first-ever combat use of the LUCAS autonomous one-way attack drone.
• AI tools were integrated into targeting and intelligence functions during the 2026 campaign.

A Conflict Decades in the Making

The two-year stretch between June 2025 and March 2026 produced some of the most consequential military operations the United States has conducted since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. American forces struck Iranian soil not once but twice, deploying weapons that had never before been used in combat and, in the second operation, introducing autonomous drone technology into a live war for the first time in US history. The scale of what happened, the hardware involved, and the doctrinal shifts it revealed deserve a careful look.

Understanding what these operations actually involved, and why the weapons chosen matter beyond the immediate conflict, requires going back further than 2025.

The Longest Fuse in American Foreign Policy

The animosity between Washington and Tehran dates to 1979, when the Islamic Revolution toppled the US-backed Shah and Iranian students held 52 American diplomats hostage for 444 days. That crisis poisoned the relationship at its roots. Decades of sanctions, proxy conflicts across the Middle East, and recurring confrontations over Iran’s nuclear ambitions kept the wound from healing. The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which offered Iran sanctions relief in exchange for limits on its enrichment program, was abandoned by the Trump administration during its first term in 2018 and never fully revived under Biden. By the time Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, Iran had enriched uranium to 60 percent purity, stockpiled enough fissile material for an estimated nine nuclear bombs according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and was producing an estimated 50 ballistic missiles per month.

Iran’s missile program, in particular, had become a central concern. A 2022 assessment by then-US Central Command (CENTCOM) Commander General Kenneth McKenzie placed Iran’s total ballistic missile inventory at more than 3,000 units. Those missiles had medium ranges capable of striking targets throughout the region, and Tehran had supplemented the arsenal with HESA Shahed-136 one-way attack drones, which it supplied to Russia for use against Ukraine and to Houthi forces in Yemen. The Shahed became a symbol of Iran’s willingness to wage asymmetric warfare at low cost and high volume, a lesson that would later be turned back against Tehran in an ironic reversal.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which controls Iran’s ballistic missile force, had spent decades building a layered deterrent against exactly the kind of attack that eventually came. The Shahab, Sejjil, and Emad missile series gave Iran the ability to strike targets more than 2,000 kilometers away with conventional warheads. The underground facilities at Fordow and Natanz were designed with the explicit assumption that no adversary could destroy them from the air. The mountains of Qom province protected Fordow from everything except, it turned out, a weapon specifically engineered over more than 15 years to do exactly that.

Iran’s strategy relied on three reinforcing pillars. The first was deterrence by threat: if any adversary attacked, Iran would retaliate with ballistic missile salvos against military bases, economic infrastructure, and, implicitly, global oil supply routes through the Strait of Hormuz. The second was dispersal: spreading missile stockpiles, production facilities, and enrichment equipment across dozens of sites to prevent any single strike campaign from eliminating the capability entirely. The third was depth: burying the most sensitive sites so deeply underground that no conventional munition could reach them. The GBU-57 was designed to defeat that third pillar, and the events of June 2025 and February 2026 tested all three simultaneously.

After the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel, the United States maintained at least one aircraft carrier in the Middle East or eastern Mediterranean continuously. That sustained presence, combined with the ongoing US naval campaign against Houthi forces in Yemen under Operation Rough Rider, kept American strike capacity in the region at elevated levels long before the Iran operations began. The US military had essentially been rehearsing the logistics and tactics of sustained Gulf operations for over a year before Midnight Hammer launched.

The immediate fuse for the June 2025 strikes was lit on June 13, when Israel launched Operation Rising Lion, a sweeping air campaign that destroyed significant portions of Iran’s air defenses and the centrifuge hall at Natanz. Israel’s fighters lacked the specific munition required to destroy Fordow, a uranium enrichment facility bored deep into a mountain in Iran’s Qom province. Only the United States possessed the capability to reach targets that deep underground, and after eight days of Israeli strikes that degraded Iran’s air defenses to the point of near-collapse, President Trump ordered American forces to act.

Operation Midnight Hammer

On June 22, 2025, at precisely 12:01 a.m. local time in Missouri, seven B-2 Spirit stealth bombers lifted off from Whiteman Air Force Base and began an 18-hour eastward flight across the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. The mission, code-named Operation Midnight Hammer, was one of the most tightly compartmentalized operations in recent American military history. A second group of B-2s departed simultaneously and flew westward, toward Guam, a deliberate deception intended to mislead any party monitoring aircraft transponders and satellite signatures. Joint Chiefs Chairman General Dan Caine later described the deception as “known only to an extremely small number of planners and key leaders.”

The real strike package, flying with minimal communications, linked up with F-22 and F-35 escort aircraft over the Middle East before crossing into Iranian airspace. Those escort fighters flew ahead of the bomber formation at high altitude and high speed, sweeping the flight path for surface-to-air missile threats and enemy interceptors. None appeared. Iran’s air defense network, already hammered by a week of Israeli strikes under Operation Rising Lion, offered no resistance.

The weapon the B-2s carried had never been used in combat before. The GBU-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator, known as the MOP, is a 30,000-pound, 20-foot-long bunker-buster bomb designed specifically to destroy hardened underground targets. Developed since 2004 by Boeing in partnership with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the weapon is encased in hardened steel and fused to detonate approximately 200 feet underground after penetrating rock and concrete. Its detonation creates an overpressure effect that sends shockwaves through the surrounding rock, designed to destroy equipment and structures that survive the initial penetration. Each B-2 can carry two MOPs, placing the theoretical maximum delivery capacity of the Midnight Hammer formation at 14 bombs. That is exactly how many were dropped.

At 2:10 a.m. Iranian time on June 22, the lead B-2 released the first two MOPs on the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant. The facility sits 80 to 90 meters underground inside a mountain and was specifically built to be invulnerable to conventional air attack. The first bomb blew off the concrete cap covering a ventilation shaft. The next four bombs entered the exposed shaft sequentially, each one traveling at more than 1,000 feet per second before detonating inside the facility’s centrifuge halls. General Caine described the sequence at a Pentagon press briefing: the cap was forcibly removed by the first weapon, and weapons two through five entered the main shaft and exploded in the mission space. Over the following 25 minutes, a total of 12 MOPs struck Fordow’s two ventilation shafts, and the seventh B-2 dropped two more on Natanz.

Simultaneously, a US Navy submarine operating in the Central Command area of responsibility launched more than two dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles against surface infrastructure at the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Center, the third target on the night’s list. The USS Georgia (SSGN-729), an Ohio-class guided-missile submarine capable of fielding more than 150 Tomahawks, had been in the region since September 2024. Whether the Georgia was the submarine involved was not publicly confirmed, though it was the only vessel in the region with sufficient launch capacity.

The total munitions count for the operation was approximately 75 precision-guided weapons, including the 14 MOPs. About 125 aircraft in total participated in or supported the mission, including dozens of aerial refueling tankers that provided the multiple mid-flight refuelings required for the B-2s to complete their 37-hour round trip. The operation was the longest B-2 operational strike mission since their deployment against Taliban targets in Afghanistan in 2001.

The entire strike package was in and out of Iranian airspace without a single shot being fired against it. Joint Chiefs Chairman General Dan Caine, describing the operation the following morning, called it the largest B-2 operational strike in US history. The Fordow facility had been specifically designed with the assumption that no country outside the United States could threaten it; that assumption turned out to be correct in the sense that only American technology could reach it, but wrong in every other way.

Initial battle damage assessments indicated severe damage to all three sites. The Pentagon assessed that the strikes had set Iran’s nuclear program back by one to two years. Post-strike commercial satellite imagery from providers including Maxar showed munition entry holes above the Fordow underground facility and signs of land subsidence, suggesting the underground structures had partially collapsed inward. Images of Natanz showed similarly significant destruction of the centrifuge hall that had already been partially damaged by Israeli strikes on June 13. The Isfahan site showed several buildings destroyed by the Tomahawk impacts.

That assessment, as events in early 2026 would demonstrate, may have been optimistic. Iran had reportedly been loading material onto trucks outside Fordow’s entrance in the days before the strike, and the question of what, if anything, had been evacuated before the bombs fell would generate substantial intelligence debate for months afterward.

Iran Rebuilds, Tensions Reignite

The ceasefire that followed the Twelve-Day War in June 2025 did not produce a durable diplomatic outcome. Iran’s currency entered a near-freefall in the months after the fighting ended, exacerbated by a new round of international sanctions imposed in September 2025. That economic collapse fueled protests that began on December 28, 2025, and spread across the country in January 2026, becoming what observers described as the largest challenge to the Islamic Republic since the 1979 revolution itself. Iranian security forces responded with lethal force, killing thousands of demonstrators.

Meanwhile, European intelligence sources reported in October 2025 that Iran had accepted shipments of chemical precursors for solid rocket motor propellant, and in November 2025 the US Treasury Department sanctioned entities involved in procuring ballistic missile propellant ingredients on Iran’s behalf. In February 2026, the IAEA disclosed that Iran had hidden a stockpile of highly enriched uranium in an underground facility that had survived the June 2025 strikes. While the agency said it found no evidence of an organized nuclear weapons program at that point, it could not provide definitive assurances about the material’s location or intended use.

Nuclear talks held in Muscat, Oman, on February 6, 2026, appeared briefly to offer hope. Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Al-Busaidi reported on February 27 that a breakthrough had been reached, with Iran agreeing to never stockpile enriched uranium and to accept full IAEA verification. Trump said publicly he was “not thrilled” with the negotiations. Within 24 hours, American and Israeli forces were in the air.

The Trump administration cited intelligence it said showed Iran was planning a preemptive missile strike on US forces in the region. A preliminary assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency, which leaked to the press and was characterized by the administration as politically motivated, assessed that Iran had moved much of its enriched uranium stockpile before the strikes and that the operation might set back Iran’s nuclear program by only a few months. CIA Director John Ratcliffe contested that assessment the following day, saying new information showed severe damage to nuclear facilities that would take years to rebuild. The public saw competing intelligence assessments, no physical evidence either way, and a war already underway.

The Military Buildup Before February 28

The physical preparations for what became Operation Epic Fury had been underway for weeks. On January 23, 2026, Trump announced that an “armada” was heading to the Middle East, including the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and several guided-missile destroyers. On February 13, Trump ordered the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group to join the buildup. Satellite photos taken in late February confirmed that all US ships normally based at the Fleet Headquarters in Bahrain had departed, a precautionary measure previously taken before the June 2025 strikes.

The USS Gerald R. Ford was positioned off the Israeli coast, in the eastern Mediterranean, while the USS Abraham Lincoln operated in the North Arabian Sea, south of Iran. Together, the two carriers represented a combined strike capacity that included F/A-18E/F Super Hornets, F-35C Lightning IIs, and EA-18G Growler electronic warfare aircraft. Fourteen aerial refueling tankers were deployed at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport to extend the reach of the Ford’s carrier air wing to Iranian targets. F-22 Raptors were flown from Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Virginia to Ovda airbase in southern Israel, the first time those aircraft had deployed to Israel for combat operations.

The USS Abraham Lincoln, operating in Carrier Strike Group 12, carried F/A-18E/F Super Hornets from Strike Fighter Squadron 41 and VFA-97, along with F-35Cs from Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 314. The Gerald R. Ford, leading Carrier Strike Group 3, carried its own mix of Super Hornets, EA-18G Growlers from Electronic Attack Squadron 142, and E-2D Hawkeye airborne early warning aircraft. The two strike groups represented a force projection capability that the United States had not deployed in the region at equivalent scale since the period leading up to the 2003 Iraq invasion.

Fourteen Arleigh Burke-class destroyers and three littoral combat ships constituted the surface fleet in the Arabian Sea, Persian Gulf, and eastern Mediterranean. Each Arleigh Burke carries up to 96 Tomahawks in its vertical launch cells and is equipped with the Aegis Combat System, providing both offensive missile strike capacity and ballistic missile defense in the same hull.

CENTCOM described what it assembled as the largest regional concentration of American military firepower in a generation. All six branches of the US armed forces, including Space Force and the Coast Guard, would participate in the operation. Days before the operation, reports indicated that Gulf allies, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE, had told Washington they would not allow US forces to use their bases or airspace for offensive strikes against Iran, fearing Iranian retaliation. That constraint forced planners toward the carrier-based and Israel-based architecture that ultimately executed the operation, and explains the significance of the UK’s decision to allow US access to Diego Garcia and RAF Fairford for bomber operations.

Operation Epic Fury Begins

At 1:15 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on February 28, 2026, simultaneous American and Israeli strikes began across Iran. Within the first 24 hours, US and Israeli forces struck more than 1,000 targets. The primary objectives, as stated by President Trump that day, were to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, destroy Iran’s ballistic missile program, raze its missile production industry, and destroy its navy and other security infrastructure. A fourth and unstated objective was apparent from the operation’s opening moments: the elimination of the Iranian government’s senior leadership.

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in the opening hours of the campaign. His daughter, son-in-law, grandchild, and daughter-in-law were also killed. Dozens of other senior officials and military commanders perished in the first wave of strikes. Iranian state media confirmed Khamenei’s death in the early hours of March 1, 2026. It was the most dramatic targeted killing since the January 2020 assassination of General Qasem Soleimani, and it removed a figure who had led the Islamic Republic for more than three decades.

CENTCOM described the opening sequence: multiple waves of cruise missiles obliterated Iranian command and control nodes and air defense systems. Admiral Brad Cooper, CENTCOM’s commander, would later state that more than 160 Tomahawks may have been used in this opening phase alone. Over the first 24 hours, American forces used more than 20 distinct types of aircraft, ships, missiles, and weapons systems to hit targets across Iran.

The Tomahawk and the Long-Range Strike

No weapon in the US arsenal is more closely associated with opening strikes than the Tomahawk, and Operation Epic Fury was no exception. Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers, each capable of carrying up to 96 Tomahawk missiles, fired in sustained salvos at Iranian command and control centers, air defense installations, and ballistic missile infrastructure. The USS Thomas Hudner, the USS Frank E. Petersen Jr., the USS Spruance, and multiple other destroyers released Tomahawk Block IV and Block V missiles from positions in the Arabian Gulf, the Gulf of Oman, and the eastern Mediterranean.

The Tomahawk Land Attack Missile, manufactured by Raytheon Technologies, is a precision-guided subsonic cruise missile measuring 20 feet long with an 8.5-foot wingspan. It weighs approximately 3,330 pounds, carries a 1,000-pound conventional warhead, and can strike targets more than 1,000 miles from the launch point. GPS guidance and terrain-contour matching give it an accuracy measured in feet rather than yards. The Block V variant, introduced in recent years, adds improved navigation and a Maritime Strike Tomahawk capability that allows mid-flight retargeting. At approximately $1.3 million per unit, a Tomahawk is not cheap, but its combination of range, precision, and the ability to be fired from a ship far outside Iranian retaliatory range made it the logical choice for neutralizing air defenses before any crewed aircraft entered Iranian airspace.

The volume of Tomahawk use in Epic Fury has raised questions about US stockpiles that analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies began flagging within days of the operation’s start. A Raytheon production agreement signed with the Pentagon before the operation was aimed at eventually reaching 1,000 Tomahawks per year; as of early 2026, actual production rates fell well short of that target.

The Bombers: B-2, B-1B, and B-52

The B-2 Spirit had already made history over Iran in June 2025 during Operation Midnight Hammer. In February 2026, it returned as the spearhead of a broader bomber campaign that this time included the entire triad of US long-range bomber aircraft. Seven B-2s had struck Fordow the previous summer; Operation Epic Fury deployed B-2s alongside B-1B Lancers and B-52H Stratofortresses in a bomber campaign of substantially greater scope.

The B-2 Spirit, built by Northrop Grumman, is a flying-wing stealth bomber with a 172-foot wingspan that can carry 40,000 pounds of ordnance and fly 6,000 nautical miles without refueling. Its radar cross-section is roughly comparable to a large bird, making it effectively invisible to conventional air defense radar. Each aircraft costs more than $2 billion, and the US operates a fleet of around 20. Their role in Epic Fury was to strike hardened and deeply buried Iranian missile storage facilities, facilities of the kind that lesser munitions cannot meaningfully threaten.

Three B-1B Lancers flew directly from Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota on missions lasting more than 30 hours, serving as what defense analysts called “bomb trucks,” capable of carrying up to 75,000 pounds of ordnance each. The B-1B Lancer is a supersonic bomber with a variable-sweep wing designed in the Cold War era but heavily upgraded since. It lacks stealth characteristics but compensates with payload capacity. As Iranian air defenses were progressively destroyed, the risk of operating non-stealthy aircraft over Iran diminished, and the B-1B’s sheer carrying capacity became a significant operational advantage.

The B-52H Stratofortress, the oldest airframe in the US bomber fleet, also participated. By the time the B-52s were committed over Iran, CENTCOM had achieved what Admiral Cooper called air dominance, a condition in which US and allied aircraft can operate throughout Iranian airspace without significant interference. That environment allowed the B-52, which carries no stealth whatsoever, to operate over Iran and deliver large-scale munitions loads against missile launch sites and military infrastructure.

The LUCAS Drone

The weapons development story of Operation Epic Fury, and arguably of the broader conflict, is the debut of the Low-cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System, known universally as LUCAS. Its first combat use, confirmed by CENTCOM on February 28, 2026, represents something genuinely new in American military history: the operational deployment of an autonomous one-way attack drone against an adversary who invented the concept.

The LUCAS originated in a captured Iranian Shahed-136. At some point in the early 2020s, US forces acquired a damaged Shahed airframe, and the Pentagon set about reverse-engineering it. The primary contractor was SpektreWorks, an Arizona-based unmanned systems company founded in 2018 that had previously built the FLM-136, a Shahed-inspired target drone used to train US air defense crews. SpektreWorks adapted that training platform into a strike weapon, retained the delta-wing pusher-propeller airframe, integrated American electronics, and designed an autonomous flight system capable of operating beyond line of sight with GPS and inertial navigation. In GPS-denied environments, the system can switch to visual navigation.

LUCAS measures approximately 10 feet long with an 8-foot wingspan, carries about 18 kilograms of explosives, and has a range estimated at more than 700 kilometers. It can launch from catapults, rocket-assisted rails, or mobile ground vehicles, requiring no runway. The platform integrates with the Multi-Domain Unmanned Systems Communications (MUSIC) mesh network, enabling it to coordinate with other LUCAS units in autonomous swarm operations and to serve as a communications relay node in contested electromagnetic environments. Per unit cost: $35,000.

SpektreWorks publicly unveiled LUCAS at a Pentagon exhibition on July 16, 2025. The first operational squadron was deployed to the Middle East in December 2025, under Task Force Scorpion Strike, a CENTCOM unit stood up under Special Operations Command Central specifically to operate the new drones. On December 16, 2025, the USS Santa Barbara, a littoral combat ship, conducted the first sea launch of a LUCAS drone in the Persian Gulf. Forty-three weeks after its public debut, LUCAS was in combat over Iran.

That timeline matters. Traditional US major defense acquisition programs can take seven years to reach a procurement milestone, let alone a combat deployment. The LUCAS program, operating under the Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies mechanism and an initial $30 million contract, went from concept to combat in less than a year. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had issued a “Drone Dominance” directive in July 2025 ordering all services to integrate affordable autonomous systems into combat training and operations by the end of 2026. LUCAS was the most visible result.

CENTCOM’s statement on February 28 was pointed: “These low-cost drones, modeled after Iran’s Shahed drones, are now delivering American-made retribution.” Former military drone operator Brett Velicovich described the deployment of LUCAS against IRGC Shahed manufacturing sites as strategic irony of the highest order. The drone Washington used to strike Tehran’s drone factories was built by copying Tehran’s drone and rebuilding it with American components.

The design was also architected for multi-vendor scalability from the start. SpektreWorks is not the sole producer. Griffon Aerospace had already been pitching the MQM-172 Arrowhead, a competing Shahed-derivative, before Epic Fury began. The Pentagon deliberately avoided single-supplier dependency, and Secretary Hegseth announced a $1 billion multiyear drone procurement program requiring competing manufacturers to participate in head-to-head operational evaluations rather than winning contracts through traditional lobbying and evaluation processes.

A retired Navy Rear Admiral with involvement in the program described LUCAS’s operational niche clearly: you don’t send LUCAS after a hardened bunker. You send it after the radar protecting the bunker, or the fuel depot keeping the air force flying. At $35,000 per unit, the economics of drone warfare that Iran had long exploited, spending tens of thousands of dollars to force adversaries to expend hundreds of thousands in interceptors, could now be turned around. A modest LUCAS swarm costs a fraction of a single Patriot interceptor missile.

That logic was clearly understood within the US military before February 2026, but it took a live war to prove it in practice.

The Full Arsenal of Operation Epic Fury

LUCAS and Tomahawks were the headline weapons, but the full scope of what CENTCOM deployed was substantially broader. The following table provides a reference view of the primary US weapons systems involved.

Beyond these core systems, HIMARS rocket artillery systems launched what analysts identified as the Army’s new Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) in what appeared to be its first combat use, as well as Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) rounds. HIMARS launchers, which have been deployed across the Middle East for years, provided ground-based fires supplementing the air and naval strikes. MQ-9 Reaper drones, which carry Hellfire missiles and precision-guided bombs, flew daylight operations over Iran once air dominance was established, a capability that would have been suicidal in the early hours of the campaign when Iranian air defenses were still functioning.

The F-22 Raptor brought a unique combination of stealth and speed to the operation. In June 2025, F-22s had entered Iranian airspace alongside B-2s to draw surface-to-air missile fire during Midnight Hammer. In Epic Fury, they performed air superiority and escort functions alongside strike duties whose exact nature CENTCOM did not publicly detail. F-22s from Langley had also participated in January 2026’s Operation Absolute Resolve against Venezuela, suggesting the aircraft had developed a pattern of rapid global deployment in Trump administration operations.

The F-35 Lightning II appeared across all three variants. The Air Force flew F-35A models from land bases. The Navy operated F/A-18E/F Super Hornets and F-35C variants from the Abraham Lincoln, while Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 314 provided F-35Cs from the same carrier. CENTCOM released footage of these aircraft launching and recovering on February 28 without specifying their individual missions.

A-10 Thunderbolt II attack jets, designed decades ago for close air support against armored formations, played roles in the campaign once Iranian air defenses had been sufficiently degraded. Their slow speed and limited stealth made them unsuitable for the opening phases but useful once the environment became permissive.

Electronic Warfare and the Invisible Battle

What happened in the electromagnetic spectrum during Operation Epic Fury was as consequential as what happened in the visible one. Iran’s integrated air defense network, already damaged by Israeli strikes over the previous two years, depended on radar systems, communications links, and command and control nodes that presented specific electronic vulnerabilities. The EA-18G Growler, a two-seat electronic attack aircraft derived from the F/A-18F Super Hornet, was the primary American tool for exploiting those vulnerabilities.

Both carrier strike groups carried EA-18G squadrons. The Growler’s jamming pods can suppress and blind radar systems across a wide frequency range. Its AGM-88 High-Speed Anti-Radiation Missiles home in on the electronic emissions of air defense radars, destroying the radar itself by following its signal to the source. In the early hours of Epic Fury, EA-18Gs operating from the Lincoln and the Ford flew alongside strike packages, blinding Iranian radar operators and destroying the systems that survived long enough to emit a tracking signal.

CENTCOM also deployed RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft, four-engine jets based on the Boeing 707 airframe that carry crews of more than 30 intelligence operators, electronic warfare officers, and in-flight maintenance technicians. The RC-135 fleet provides near-real-time intelligence collection and analysis, giving strike planners continuous visibility into which Iranian systems were active, which had been destroyed, and which were reorienting to compensate for losses. P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft, based on the Boeing 737 airframe, operated in the region for anti-submarine warfare and intelligence gathering, tracking Iranian naval assets including submarines and fast-attack boats.

The combination of these surveillance and jamming platforms created what Admiral Cooper later called an environment of total electromagnetic dominance over Iran. By March 5, 2026, Cooper announced that the coalition had achieved air dominance, enabling F-22s, B-1Bs, and even vulnerable MQ-9 Reaper drones to operate over Iran during daylight hours.

AI in the Targeting Loop

Among the most consequential and contested aspects of Operation Epic Fury was the reported integration of artificial intelligence tools into the targeting and intelligence functions of the campaign. Reports emerging in early March 2026 indicated that the Pentagon used AI services including tools from Anthropic during its operations against Iran. The disclosure carried an unmistakable irony: the Trump administration had labeled Anthropic a supply chain risk and a potential national security threat the day before those tools were reportedly used in a live military operation.

CENTCOM did not publicly confirm or deny the specific AI platforms used, but acknowledged the deployment of “special capabilities” it declined to detail. The deployment of LUCAS drones, which incorporate autonomous AI flight controls, GPS-denied inertial navigation, and swarm coordination capability, represents a form of machine decision-making already integrated into the weapons themselves. Whether higher-level targeting decisions, such as which facilities to strike or which time-on-target sequences to execute, involved AI-assisted analysis is a question that has not been fully answered in public.

What is clear is that the operation incorporated AI tools in decision support and battle damage assessment roles. AI systems can rapidly model enemy responses, assess battle damage from sensor feeds, and game out escalation pathways in time frames that human analysts working alone cannot match. In a campaign that struck over 1,000 targets in 24 hours and required continuous reassessment of Iranian retaliatory capacity, that kind of computational support was operationally useful regardless of whatever political complications attended it.

The broader question of autonomous weapons in war is not easily answered by pointing to LUCAS. The LUCAS drone, while autonomous in navigation and terminal guidance, was not making independent decisions about which buildings to target. Those targeting decisions were made by human operators before launch. LUCAS’s autonomy operates at the level of executing a mission it has been assigned, not selecting its own objectives. That distinction, between full autonomy over targeting and autonomy over navigation and execution, is where the policy debate is concentrated.

Books like Kill Chain by Andrew Cockburn, written years before these events, examined the mythology and reality of precision warfare in ways that remain relevant to how these weapons are understood and misunderstood. The Eye in the Sky film, which dramatizes the ethics of drone strike authorization, now feels less like a thought experiment and more like a period piece from a pre-LUCAS world in which human operators retained more visible control over each individual strike decision. The 2026 campaign moved the boundaries in ways that fiction had anticipated but policy had not fully addressed.

Drone Warfare by Medea Benjamin raised questions about accountability in remotely conducted war that become more complicated, not less, when the drone flies itself to the target.

The Cost Arithmetic

The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated the cost of the first 100 hours of Operation Epic Fury at approximately $3.7 billion, inclusive of munitions expenditure, attrition, and the elevated operational tempo of US forces across the theater. Air operations from land-based aircraft alone cost $125.2 million in the first 100 hours. Each additional day of the campaign added at least $30 million in unbudgeted costs, with total costs projected to rise substantially as the operation extended into March.

The individual weapon costs tell their own story. A single Tomahawk cruise missile runs $1.3 million to $3.6 million, depending on the variant and production lot. A JDAM guidance kit, which converts a gravity bomb into a precision weapon, costs approximately $80,000. A Tomahawk and a JDAM can destroy the same building if the aircraft can get close enough to use the cheaper option; the Tomahawk’s advantage is that it launches from hundreds of miles away, outside any Iranian response radius. As Iranian air defenses collapsed and coalition aircraft could operate freely over Iranian territory, the cost equation shifted toward cheaper JDAM-equipped bombs delivered by fighters. Tomahawks expended in the opening hours, where the risk was highest, were replaced in later strikes by orders of magnitude cheaper munitions.

The LUCAS drone’s cost proposition is in a different category. At $35,000 per unit, the drone costs less than one-fortieth of a single Tomahawk. A swarm of 50 LUCAS drones, sufficient to saturate the radar coverage of a significant air defense battery, costs less than two Tomahawk missiles. That arithmetic is why Secretary Hegseth’s Drone Dominance program existed before Epic Fury, and why its budget and ambitions will almost certainly expand afterward.

There are limits to how far cost reduction in autonomous systems can go without creating new problems. Cheaper systems mean higher volumes, and higher volumes mean more opportunities for accidents, misidentification, and the kinds of incidents that produce civilian casualties and political complications. More than 160 people were killed when a missile struck a girls’ school adjacent to a naval base in Minab on February 28. Both the US and Israel denied responsibility, with the US pledging an investigation. That single incident, whatever its cause, illustrated that precision warfare at scale is still imprecise warfare at scale.

Iranian Retaliation

Iran’s response to Operation Epic Fury was immediate, substantial, and geographically broad. By March 5, 2026, a military source told Fars News Agency that Iran had fired more than 500 ballistic and naval missiles and nearly 2,000 drones since February 28. Approximately 40 percent of those launches were directed at Israel; the remaining 60 percent targeted US military installations and US allies across the region, including Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

The United Arab Emirates alone received 189 ballistic missiles, 941 drone attacks, and three cruise missiles through March 4, according to UAE Ministry of Defense figures. The UAE’s air defense network intercepted the vast majority of incoming rounds, with 161 of 174 tracked ballistic missiles shot down and 645 of 689 detected drones destroyed. Interception debris and falling projectiles nonetheless fell on populated areas in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, injuring more than 112 people and killing four foreign nationals. A Shahed-type drone struck near the Fairmont The Palm Hotel on Palm Jumeirah. Dubai International Airport sustained minor damage from a suspected strike and was evacuated.

Iran attacked Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the regional headquarters of CENTCOM and home to thousands of US troops, with ballistic missiles and drones. Qatar intercepted all incoming rounds, but the attack demonstrated Iran’s willingness to strike the most heavily defended US installations in the region. Bahrain’s US Naval Support Activity, Kuwait, and Jordan’s air bases were all targeted.

Three US service members were killed and five seriously wounded during Operation Epic Fury, CENTCOM confirmed. Those losses, while small in historical terms, came within the context of a campaign that was described publicly as avoiding US ground casualties by design.

By March 5, CENTCOM reported that Iranian ballistic missile attacks had decreased by 90 percent from their peak, and drone attacks were down 83 percent. Analysts attributed the decline partly to the physical destruction of Iranian missile launchers, more than 300 of which the IDF reported were inoperable, and partly to Iran rationing its remaining inventory for a potentially longer conflict. Iranian missile production capacity before the war was estimated at 50 to over 100 ballistic missiles per month, a rate that could partially offset battlefield losses given sufficient time. The rate at which the US and Israeli campaign was destroying production facilities would determine whether that reconstitution was possible.

The Defense Systems

The missile defense architecture protecting US forces and allies in the region during Epic Fury was as significant as the offensive systems. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) batteries, positioned across the Gulf states, were designed to intercept ballistic missiles at high altitude during their terminal descent phase. Patriot missile systems provided a lower-altitude layer, and the Aegis Combat Systems aboard US Navy destroyers contributed a third tier of intercept capability.

The Aegis-equipped Arleigh Burke-class destroyers that fired Tomahawks in the offensive role simultaneously defended carrier strike groups and regional allies against incoming Iranian missiles. The system was originally designed for the Cold War threat of Soviet anti-ship missiles but was adapted extensively for the ballistic missile defense mission following lessons learned in the Houthi campaign in Yemen, which had provided years of live operational experience against Iranian-supplied missiles and drones before the 2026 war began.

British Royal Air Force Typhoon fighters deployed in Qatar intercepted at least one Iranian drone approaching the emirate. The UK, while not participating offensively, allowed the US to use RAF Fairford and Diego Garcia for what Prime Minister Keir Starmer described as a “specific and limited defensive purpose,” specifically to destroy Iranian missiles at source through US bomber operations from those bases.

The Phase Two Shift

By March 5, 2026, CENTCOM and the IDF announced that the campaign was transitioning to its second phase, shifting focus from suppression of Iranian air defenses and leadership strikes to the systematic targeting of Iran’s defense industrial base, and specifically its missile manufacturing facilities. Admiral Cooper’s announcement of air dominance was the enabling condition for this shift. With Iranian radar networks largely destroyed and the country’s command structure decapitated, US and allied aircraft could now fly against deep interior targets in daylight without the stealth platforms required in the first phase.

Satellite imagery from March 4 confirmed that the Parchin Military Complex east of Tehran, a site with a history extending back to Iran’s pre-2003 nuclear weapons research and a key facility for drone and missile production, had been struck for the second time since February 28. The IDF issued evacuation warnings for the Abbas Abad Industrial Zone and Shenzar Industrial Zone in Pakdasht, Tehran Province, telegraphing the next series of strikes on manufacturing infrastructure.

IDF Chief of Staff Major General Eyal Zamir reported on March 5 that Israeli pilots had conducted approximately 2,500 strikes and expended more than 6,000 munitions since February 28. The combined US and Israeli sortie rate represented an operational tempo with few modern precedents outside the 1991 Gulf War.

Constitutional and Legal Questions

Not everyone in Washington accepted the legal premise of the operation. Several members of Congress, primarily Democrats but including some Republicans, raised concerns about whether Trump had the constitutional authority to order offensive military operations against Iran without a formal declaration of war or specific congressional authorization. The administration cited the right of self-defense under the United Nations Charter, arguing that the pre-emptive strike was justified by Iranian threats to US forces. The administration did not publicly release the intelligence underlying that claim, and an unspecified Pentagon source told Congress in closed-door briefings that no intelligence existed showing Iran was planning to attack US forces first.

The War Powers Resolution of 1973 requires the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of committing US forces to hostilities and sets a 60-day clock on unauthorized military action. The Trump administration’s position, consistent with administrations dating back to the Clinton era, was that the president’s authority as commander-in-chief supersedes the statutory limitations of the War Powers Resolution. Whether the courts will ever weigh in on that question has remained unresolved through decades of American military interventions, and Operation Epic Fury appeared unlikely to change that pattern.

The question of whether the June 2025 Midnight Hammer strikes had actually “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, as Trump claimed at the time, was directly relevant to the authorization debate. If those strikes had achieved their stated objective, then the argument for the 2026 campaign rested on Iran’s post-strike reconstitution, a reconstitution that the IAEA acknowledged it could not fully account for. Some lawmakers pointed to this uncertainty as evidence of the administration making contradictory claims: either the June 2025 strikes worked, in which case the 2026 war was unnecessary, or they did not, in which case the earlier declaration of success was misleading.

The Autonomous Weapons Policy Question

The LUCAS deployment opened a debate that had been running in academic journals and Pentagon working groups for years and now had a real-world test case to examine. The central question in autonomous weapons policy is where the line falls between a weapon that operates autonomously and one that kills autonomously. Those are different things, and conflating them has muddied every public discussion of the topic.

A Tomahawk cruise missile, once launched, navigates autonomously to its target using GPS and terrain-following algorithms. Nobody argues that Tomahawks raise an autonomous weapons ethics problem, because a human being selected the target coordinates before launch. LUCAS works on the same principle: a human being, a military planner or targeting officer, designates the objective. The drone then finds its way there and detonates on arrival without further human input. The autonomy is in the navigation and the terminal guidance, not in the selection of what to destroy.

Where the policy becomes genuinely unsettled is in swarm scenarios. When 50 LUCAS drones launch together and use the MUSIC mesh network to coordinate their approach, dividing targets among themselves and adapting to defenses in real time, the targeting decisions inside the swarm are not made by a human being in the loop at that moment. They emerge from algorithms executing preprogrammed rules. Whether that constitutes lethal autonomous decision-making, or merely efficient execution of a human-made targeting plan, is a question the Department of Defense’s Directive 3000.09 on autonomous weapons was written to address and has not entirely resolved.

The honest answer is that no one knows exactly how much autonomy the LUCAS systems deployed over Iran actually exercised in their terminal phases. CENTCOM’s statements described human operators and Task Force Scorpion Strike conducting the deployment, and the system’s designers at SpektreWorks emphasized that human operators assigned targets before launch. Retired Rear Admiral Lorin Selby specified that the drones’ Starlink-enabled communication allowed “dynamic targeting while keeping humans in the loop.” But keeping humans in the loop during a multi-drone swarm operating at machine speed in a contested electronic environment is a statement that deserves scrutiny.

This question matters not just for Iran. If the US has established that swarms of autonomous drones can be deployed against military targets in a high-intensity conflict, that precedent shapes what China, Russia, and every other military power believes is permissible in their own doctrines. The US has long argued that certain autonomous lethal capabilities cross lines that should be internationally constrained. Using LUCAS in Iran, without any specific legal framework governing the autonomy embedded in its coordination algorithms, complicates those arguments.

The Broader Doctrinal Shift

What Operation Epic Fury demonstrated at scale had been developing in American military thinking for years. The experience of watching Russia deploy Shahed-136 drones against Ukraine by the thousands, and watching Iran supply Houthi forces in Yemen with similar systems that repeatedly stressed US naval air defense budgets, produced a consensus in the Defense Department that the United States needed its own version of affordable mass firepower. Secretary Hegseth’s Drone Dominance memo explicitly named this concept: having plenty of relatively cheap weapons at the ready, rather than fewer exquisite and expensive ones.

The Replicator program, launched in 2023 under the Biden administration, aimed to field thousands of autonomous weapons by July 2025. It built institutional momentum for what the Trump administration then accelerated. LUCAS was the most visible result, but the MUSIC mesh network enabling LUCAS swarms, the multi-vendor production model, and the procurement speed achieved through APFIT were all systemic changes that predated any specific adversary or conflict.

This shift has implications beyond Iran. The Pacific, where the distances, the density of potential targets, and the likely defensive capabilities of any adversary would tax both US missile stockpiles and US pilot availability, is the conflict scenario that US defense planners spend the most time gaming. The lessons of Epic Fury, including the rate at which Tomahawk stocks were consumed and the rate at which LUCAS units could be committed without strategic regret at $35,000 each, will directly shape future investment decisions in weapons procurement.

The cost-exchange problem has been one of the defining tensions in US military strategy for a decade. A single Patriot interceptor missile costs approximately $3 to $4 million. Intercepting one Shahed drone, at $20,000 to $50,000 per unit, represents a negative cost exchange that Iran and its proxies have been exploiting through sheer volume. LUCAS, deployed offensively at scale, attempts to flip that problem: send enough cheap drones to force the defender to exhaust expensive interceptors before the real strike package arrives. The US military learned that lesson from watching its adversaries, and Epic Fury was the first test of whether American industry and doctrine could execute the same playbook.

There is also a manufacturing competition embedded in this shift that will unfold over years. SpektreWorks going from public debut to combat in seven months was remarkable. Whether that pace can be sustained as the company scales, whether the multi-vendor model Hegseth specified produces genuine competition or simply distributes the same contracts across more firms, and whether the $1 billion multiyear procurement Hegseth announced will be structured to reward performance rather than relationships: all of these questions will determine whether LUCAS represents a genuine inflection point in US weapons acquisition or a one-time sprint that the acquisition bureaucracy eventually normalizes into familiar patterns.

There is a harder question buried in all of this that the official after-action reports will probably not answer directly. Every American assessment of Operation Epic Fury’s success will be measured against the original stated objective: preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. That objective requires either the physical destruction of Iran’s nuclear capability, the political change of Iran’s government, or both. The military campaign achieved significant physical damage and removed Khamenei. Whether the regime that follows, once established, will abandon nuclear ambitions or pursue them with redoubled motivation is a question that no bomb, however precisely guided, can answer. The Defense Intelligence Agency concluded in 2025 that it would be a decade before Iran could develop missiles capable of reaching the United States; whether that timeline survived the February 2026 strikes without the political conditions for verification was, as of March 9, 2026, genuinely unknown.

Summary

Between June 2025 and March 2026, the United States conducted two distinct military campaigns against Iran using technology that in some cases had never before been used in combat. Operation Midnight Hammer deployed seven B-2 bombers on an 18-hour flight from Missouri to drop 14 GBU-57 MOP bunker-buster bombs on the Fordow and Natanz nuclear sites, alongside Tomahawk missiles against Isfahan, in the first operational use of both the MOP and the largest B-2 strike package in American history. Operation Epic Fury expanded that template into a multi-domain campaign that combined B-2s, B-1Bs, B-52s, F-22s, F-35s, carrier air wings, guided-missile destroyers, HIMARS ground rockets, MQ-9 Reaper surveillance drones, and the LUCAS one-way attack drone, making its combat debut against the same country whose design it copied.

The LUCAS story matters beyond its immediate battlefield role. It represents a procurement model, a doctrine, and an economic logic that the US military had been building toward for years and finally proved in combat. A $35,000 autonomous drone developed by an Arizona startup in seven months, reverse-engineered from a captured Iranian weapon, deployed by a task force created two months before the war began: that sequence is either the future of American warfare or a specific one-off success story depending on how well the underlying systems perform in future conflicts against adversaries with more sophisticated countermeasures than Iran’s degraded air defenses could offer in late February 2026.

The constitutional debate, the casualty count, and the intelligence disputes over what these strikes actually achieved will continue well beyond March 9, 2026. What will not be subject to revision is the hardware record. The US used more than 20 distinct weapons systems to strike over 1,700 targets in Iran between February 28 and March 5, 2026, achieving air dominance over a country of 85 million people within one week, at an estimated initial cost of $3.7 billion, with three American service members killed.

Whether the political objectives that motivated that hardware deployment can be achieved by military means alone has, throughout the history of American interventions, always been the harder question. The weapons of Operation Epic Fury are some of the most sophisticated ever used in combat. The political question they were deployed to answer is one that munitions have consistently failed to resolve definitively, from Hanoi to Baghdad to Kabul. Iran in 2026 may yet prove different. But the record of the weapons themselves, their costs, their capabilities, their debut moments, and the doctrine that fielded them is what this campaign will be studied for long after the political outcome becomes clear.

Appendix: Top 10 Questions Answered in This Article

What was Operation Midnight Hammer?

Operation Midnight Hammer was the US code name for strikes conducted on June 22, 2025, against three Iranian nuclear facilities: Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. Seven B-2 Spirit bombers departed Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri and flew an 18-hour route to Iran, dropping 14 GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bunker-buster bombs on Fordow and Natanz while a US submarine fired more than two dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles at Isfahan.

What is the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator?

The GBU-57 MOP is a 30,000-pound, 20-foot-long precision bomb designed to destroy deeply buried and heavily fortified underground facilities. Developed by Boeing since 2004, it is the only conventional weapon capable of threatening facilities such as the Fordow enrichment site, which sits 80 to 90 meters underground inside a mountain. The weapon was used in combat for the first time during Operation Midnight Hammer in June 2025.

What is Operation Epic Fury?

Operation Epic Fury is the US military’s code name for the joint American-Israeli campaign against Iran that began on February 28, 2026. The operation targeted Iranian nuclear facilities, ballistic missile infrastructure, IRGC command and control centers, air defense systems, naval assets, and the Iranian government’s leadership. Within the first 24 hours, over 1,000 targets were struck, and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed.

What is the LUCAS drone?

The Low-cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System (LUCAS) is an autonomous one-way attack drone developed by Arizona-based SpektreWorks. It is a reverse-engineered version of Iran’s Shahed-136 drone, measuring approximately 10 feet long with an 8-foot wingspan, carrying 18 kilograms of explosives, and costing around $35,000 per unit. LUCAS saw its combat debut during Operation Epic Fury on February 28, 2026.

What weapons were used in Operation Epic Fury?

CENTCOM confirmed the use of more than 20 distinct weapons systems, including B-2 Spirit, B-1B Lancer, and B-52H Stratofortress bombers; F-22 Raptor, F-35, F/A-18E/F, and A-10 fighter and attack aircraft; EA-18G Growler electronic warfare jets; MQ-9 Reaper drones; LUCAS one-way attack drones; Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from Arleigh Burke-class destroyers; HIMARS launchers firing the Precision Strike Missile and ATACMS rounds; and Patriot and THAAD missile defense batteries.

How was artificial intelligence used in the Iran strikes?

Reports from March 2026 indicated that the Pentagon used AI tools, including those from Anthropic, in targeting support and intelligence functions during Operation Epic Fury. CENTCOM acknowledged deploying undisclosed “special capabilities” without elaborating publicly. The LUCAS drone itself incorporates autonomous AI flight controls and swarm coordination capability, representing an embedded form of machine decision-making within the weapons system.

What was Iran’s military response to the US-Israeli strikes?

By March 5, 2026, Iran had fired more than 500 ballistic and naval missiles and approximately 2,000 drones at Israel and US military bases across the Middle East, including targets in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. US, Israeli, and Gulf state air defense systems intercepted the majority of incoming projectiles, though some caused damage. Three US service members were killed during the campaign.

How did the US achieve air dominance over Iran during Epic Fury?

Air dominance was achieved through a combination of Tomahawk cruise missiles and stealth aircraft strikes that destroyed Iran’s integrated air defense radar network in the opening hours of the operation, followed by sustained EA-18G Growler electronic warfare operations that jammed and suppressed remaining air defense emissions. Israeli strikes over the preceding two years had already degraded much of Iran’s air defense infrastructure, and the opening Epic Fury salvo effectively eliminated what remained.

What is the significance of the LUCAS drone’s combat debut?

LUCAS represents the US military’s first operational deployment of an autonomous one-way attack drone in combat. At $35,000 per unit, developed in seven months from public debut to combat, the system demonstrates a new procurement model emphasizing speed, low cost, and autonomous capability over the traditional years-long major defense acquisition programs. Its use also validates the “affordable mass” doctrine that envisions large numbers of cheap autonomous weapons supplementing, and in some roles replacing, expensive crewed aircraft and missiles.

What are the unresolved questions about the effectiveness of the US strikes on Iran’s nuclear program?

A preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency assessment, which the Trump administration disputed, concluded that Iran may have moved much of its enriched uranium stockpile before the February 2026 strikes and that the strikes may have set back Iran’s nuclear program by only a few months. CIA Director John Ratcliffe offered a more optimistic assessment the following day. The IAEA had already disclosed before the strikes that Iran held highly enriched uranium in a facility that survived the June 2025 attacks. The ultimate impact on Iran’s nuclear timeline remains contested and will depend on detailed post-conflict inspections that had not yet occurred as of March 9, 2026.