The United States dealt a devastating blow to Iran’s military infrastructure during Operation Epic Fury, according to CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper, who told lawmakers Thursday that Iran’s navy has effectively been crippled for an entire generation.
Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Cooper described a dramatically weakened Iranian military that has lost the ability to project large-scale regional power following months of coordinated U.S. operations.
“I would assess that the drone and missile force will take years to reconstitute,” Cooper said. “[Iran’s] navy likely will not get back to its previous size for a full generation.”
Those comments represent one of the clearest public assessments yet from a top U.S. military official regarding the scale of damage inflicted on Iran’s military capabilities.
According to Cooper, the campaign came after years of escalating aggression from Iranian-backed forces throughout the Middle East. He testified that, in the 30 months leading up to Operation Epic Fury, Iranian proxies launched approximately 350 attacks targeting American personnel and assets across the region.
Now, Cooper says, the balance has shifted dramatically.
With roughly 90% of Iran’s defense industrial capacity reportedly destroyed, the regime’s ability to manufacture missiles, drones, and other military hardware has been severely degraded.
“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 power projection capability.
“That doesn’t mean they don’t have any capability,” he cautioned. “But that broad power projection capability no longer exists.”
The testimony comes amid growing concerns in Washington about whether the conflict significantly depleted America’s own weapons stockpiles in the process. Analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies recently estimated the U.S. may have used nearly half its Patriot missile interceptors and more than half its THAAD interceptors during operations tied to the conflict.
Cooper declined to discuss exact inventory levels but pushed back strongly against concerns that the U.S. military is now dangerously unprepared for future conflicts.
“I have all the munitions necessary to both defend our forces as well as conduct a broad range of contingencies,” Cooper testified. “Our partners also have the sufficient munitions necessary for defense.”
He also disputed media reports suggesting Iran could quickly rebuild much of its missile capacity. Reports from outlets including the New York Times and Washington Post indicated some officials believed Tehran could restore as much as 70% to 75% of its missile launcher capability over time.
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.
More importantly, Cooper argued, raw missile counts fail to capture the broader destruction inflicted on Iran’s command-and-control systems and industrial production infrastructure.
“It’s more than just the numbers,” Cooper explained. “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.”
One of the more striking moments during the hearing came when Cooper addressed concerns about America’s readiness in the rapidly evolving drone warfare environment.
For years, critics warned the U.S. military was spending expensive missile defenses to shoot down relatively cheap enemy drones — an unsustainable strategy highlighted heavily during fighting in Ukraine and attacks by Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen.
Cooper insisted those concerns are increasingly outdated.
“I’d like to use the opportunity to myth-bust on drones,” he said. “The days of $35,000 drones that we saw in the last couple of years … those days are behind us today.”
Instead, Cooper said the U.S. military has adapted by developing and deploying its own lower-cost drone technologies to counter enemy systems more efficiently.
“What we have been doing lately is using our own low-cost drones, attacking Iran … flipping the cost curve in many ways,” he said. “I like where we are in this regard.”
