Adm. Brad Cooper delivered a blunt assessment to Congress on Thursday: after Operation Epic Fury, Iran’s military is no longer capable of projecting power across the Middle East the way it once did — and its navy may not recover for an entire generation.
Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, the CENTCOM commander described a devastating campaign against Iranian military infrastructure that he said shattered not only Tehran’s missile and drone capabilities, but also the industrial systems needed to rebuild them.
“I would assess that the drone and missile force will take years to reconstitute,” Cooper testified. “[Iran’s] navy likely will not get back to its previous size for a full generation.”
That is an extraordinary statement coming from the top U.S. military commander overseeing operations in the Middle East.
According to Cooper, the operation followed years of escalating attacks by Iranian-backed proxy groups throughout the region. He told lawmakers that, during the 30 months before Operation Epic Fury began, Iranian-linked forces launched approximately 350 attacks against U.S. personnel.
Now, Cooper says, Iran’s ability to wage large-scale regional warfare has been fundamentally crippled.
“They certainly cannot do it at the level of mass that we all saw, with hundreds of missiles and drones raining across the Middle East,” Cooper said when asked about Iran’s remaining capabilities.
“That doesn’t mean they don’t have any capability,” he cautioned. “But that broad power projection capability no longer exists.”
One of the most striking parts of Cooper’s testimony involved the scale of destruction allegedly inflicted on Iran’s defense industry itself. He stated that roughly 90% of Iran’s defense industrial capacity has been destroyed, severely limiting Tehran’s ability to manufacture missiles, drones, and replacement systems.
And Cooper argued the damage goes far beyond simply counting launchers or weapons stockpiles.
“What is not taken into consideration is more than just the numbers,” he said. “It’s the command and control that’s been shattered. It’s a significant degradation.”
“And it’s the lack of any ability to then produce any missiles or drones on the back end.”
That directly contradicted recent reports from outlets including The New York Times and The Washington Post, which suggested some U.S. officials believed Iran could eventually restore as much as 70% to 75% of its missile-launch capability.
Cooper flatly rejected those estimates.
“What I would say from my perspective is the numbers that I’ve seen in open source are not accurate,” he told Sen. Richard Blumenthal.
At the same time, concerns remain on Capitol Hill about the toll the conflict may have taken on America’s own military readiness.
A recent analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated the U.S. may have expended nearly half of its Patriot missile interceptors and more than half of its THAAD missile defense interceptors during operations tied to the conflict.
That sparked fears that prolonged fighting could weaken America’s preparedness for future wars.
Cooper attempted to reassure lawmakers without revealing specific stockpile numbers.
“I have all the munitions necessary to both defend our forces as well as conduct a broad range of contingencies,” he said. “Our partners also have the sufficient munitions necessary for defense.”
The hearing also highlighted how rapidly warfare itself is evolving — especially when it comes to drones.
For years, military analysts warned the United States was spending enormously expensive missile systems to shoot down relatively cheap enemy drones, creating what many viewed as an unsustainable “cost curve” problem.
Cooper argued that dynamic is changing fast.
“I’d like to use the opportunity to myth-bust on drones,” he told senators. “The days of $35,000 drones that we saw in the last couple of years, particularly in the fight against the Houthis in Yemen, those days are behind us today.”
Instead, Cooper said the U.S. military has increasingly adapted by deploying its own lower-cost drone systems offensively, essentially turning the economics of drone warfare against adversaries like Iran.
“We face an increased threat from drones that are highly sophisticated,” Cooper acknowledged. “They’re jet-powered. They have high-end sensors.”
But he insisted the military has learned from conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East and is now moving away from using expensive missile defenses against cheap aerial threats.
“What we have been doing lately is using our own low-cost drones, attacking Iran … flipping the cost curve in many ways,” Cooper said. “I like where we are in this regard.”
Taken together, Cooper’s testimony painted a picture of a dramatically weakened Iran facing years — perhaps decades — of military rebuilding, while the United States believes it has successfully adapted to a new era of drone-centered warfare without sacrificing broader military readiness.
