by Greg Roman
The Islamic Republic of Iran Is on the Cusp of Achieving a Decisive Strategic Advantage Through the Operational Deployment of Hypersonic Weapons
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The Islamic Republic of Iran, a regime rotting from within due to profound economic and social decay, is paradoxically on the cusp of achieving a decisive strategic advantage through the operational deployment of hypersonic weapons.Shutterstock |
Executive Summary
The strategic calculus of the Middle East has been irrevocably altered. The Islamic Republic of Iran, a regime rotting from within due to profound economic and social decay, is paradoxically on the cusp of achieving a decisive strategic advantage through the operational deployment of hypersonic weapons. This capability, underwritten by a burgeoning military-technical alliance with China, is designed to neutralize Israel’s strategic depth and hold its civilian population hostage. Concurrently, Israel has demonstrated a revolutionary new military doctrine of “enforcement”—a proactive, offensive strategy to dismantle threats at their source. However, this new doctrine operates against a closing window of opportunity, constrained by the finite nature of U.S. high-end interceptor stockpiles and Iran’s accelerating military reconstitution. This report argues that a passive, defensive posture is a formula for strategic defeat. The only viable path to ensuring regional stability and Israeli security is a proactive campaign of strategic strangulation, combining non-kinetic warfare with the credible and imminent threat of preemptive military action to neutralize Iran’s offensive capabilities before they reach critical mass.
The Paradox of a Failing State: Iran’s Internal Decay as a Catalyst for War
The primary driver of Iran’s external aggression is its profound internal weakness. A revolutionary regime facing an existential crisis of legitimacy and competence increasingly views foreign conflict as its only remaining tool for survival, making it more, not less, dangerous. The conventional wisdom that a weakened state is a deterred state is dangerously flawed when applied to the Islamic Republic. The confluence of economic collapse, societal revolt, and political illegitimacy creates a “perfect storm” in which the regime’s survival calculus shifts dramatically. External conflict becomes a strategic imperative, not a liability.
This economic crisis is compounded by a catastrophic failure of basic state functions, fueling widespread and nationwide protests.
The regime’s legitimacy rests on two pillars: its revolutionary ideology, defined by its anti-Western and anti-Zionist stance, and its capacity to provide basic welfare to its population. The latter has completely crumbled. Iran’s economy is in a state of freefall, with its GDP collapsing from $401 billion to a projected $341 billion. Following the reimposition of U.N. “snapback” sanctions, the country faces a widespread recession across all growth drivers. Official projections forecast negative economic growth, with inflation hovering between 38-43 percent. The national currency, the rial, has plummeted to record lows, hitting over 1,150,000 to the U.S. dollar, which has decimated the purchasing power of ordinary citizens. This economic misery is the direct result of decades of systemic corruption, mismanagement, and the regime’s deliberate prioritization of military and nuclear expenditure over public welfare.
This economic crisis is compounded by a catastrophic failure of basic state functions, fueling widespread and nationwide protests. Retirees, steelworkers, teachers, and defrauded investors have taken to the streets in coordinated movements across dozens of cities, explicitly targeting the financial empires of the regime’s elite. The public’s anger is exacerbated by crippling infrastructure collapses, leading to chronic power outages and a severe water crisis. The situation is so dire that President Masoud Pezeshkian has publicly warned that Tehran is facing “Day Zero,” a point at which drinking water could be cut off for millions, and has floated the idea of moving the nation’s capital. Land subsidence in the capital region is as high as 30 cm per year due to the depletion of groundwater. It is no surprise that internal polling indicates over 92 percent of the population is dissatisfied with the government, with many viewing the regime as “beyond repair.”
Faced with this internal collapse, the regime is politically paralyzed. The election of the so-called “reformer” Masoud Pezeshkian has done nothing to alter the state’s trajectory. He is under constant attack from hardline factions within the parliament, rendering his government incapable of enacting any meaningful economic or social reforms. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei retains ultimate control over all critical foreign and military policy, ensuring a continuity of confrontation regardless of the public face in the presidency. The regime’s only coherent response to this multifaceted crisis has been to heighten repression, with a dramatic surge in the execution of political prisoners and dissidents.
With the pillar of public welfare gone, the regime is left with only its revolutionary ideology. To re-legitimize itself in the eyes of its dwindling hardline base and to justify the existence of its brutal internal security apparatus, the regime must activate the core tenets of that ideology. A high-stakes confrontation with Israel serves multiple strategic purposes for a leadership desperate to survive. It is a powerful tool to distract the domestic population from its daily misery, an attempt to rally nationalist sentiment around the flag, and a pretext to crush all remaining dissent by labeling it a “fifth column” of the enemy. Furthermore, it represents an effort to reassert Iran’s role as the leader of the “Axis of Resistance,” a narrative that has been severely damaged by recent military setbacks and the perceived weakening of its proxies. Therefore, the likelihood of an Iranian-initiated attack increases in direct proportion to its internal decay. Such an attack would be a “desperation gambit”—a high-risk, high-reward roll of the dice to fundamentally change the strategic environment and ensure the survival of the clerical regime.
The New Arsenal: How Iranian Hypersonics Nullified Strategic Depth
While the Iranian state is failing, its military-industrial complex has achieved a strategic discontinuity that fundamentally alters the regional balance of power. The development and combat-testing of hypersonic missiles render traditional defense paradigms obsolete and annihilate the foundational concept of strategic warning. This creates a new and profoundly unstable form of deterrence in which Iran can credibly threaten a successful decapitation strike against Israel’s political and military leadership, forcing a fundamental rethink of Israel’s entire national security posture.
Iran has not only developed but has operationally deployed its hypersonic arsenal.
Iran has not only developed but has operationally deployed its hypersonic arsenal. During the conflict of June 2025, the regime used its Fattah-series (Fattah-1 and Fattah-2) hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs) in retaliatory strikes. These weapons successfully penetrated Israel’s multi-layered air defense network, striking targets in Tel Aviv and Bnei Brak and causing significant damage. The Fattah series boasts speeds of up to Mach 15 and a range of up to 1,243 miles, making all of Israel easily reachable from Iranian territory.
More alarmingly, Iran has unveiled a more advanced system: the Khorramshahr-4. This ballistic missile reportedly possesses a range of around 3,000 kilometers and can attain speeds exceeding Mach 12. Its most destabilizing feature is a payload capable of carrying up to 80 submunitions. This cluster munition design enables saturation attacks that could overwhelm even the most robust defenses. From launch in western Iran, this weapon can reach Tel Aviv in under 10 minutes, leaving virtually no time for countermeasures or evacuation.
The unique flight characteristics of these weapons present an almost insurmountable challenge to existing air defense systems. Unlike ballistic missiles, which follow a predictable, high-arching trajectory, hypersonic weapons combine extreme speed with unpredictable maneuverability within the atmosphere. They fly at altitudes between 20 km and 60 km—too low for exo-atmospheric interceptors like the U.S. Navy’s SM-3, which are designed to engage targets in the vacuum of space, and too high, fast, and erratic for most endo-atmospheric systems like Patriot and THAAD. Wargaming simulations conducted by military analysts consistently demonstrate that even advanced U.S. carrier strike groups can be overwhelmed and sunk by coordinated, saturation attacks using hypersonic missiles, highlighting the vulnerability of even the most technologically superior assets.
This technological leap compresses the entire decision-making cycle of a defending state to a point of absurdity. Israel’s traditional defense doctrine relies on a tiered system: intelligence provides early warning of launch preparations, allowing time for political deliberation and the pre-positioning of defensive assets. A weapon that covers the distance from Iran to Tel Aviv in under 10 minutes shatters this model. By the time a launch is definitively confirmed and tracked, the weapon is mere minutes from impact. Its maneuverability means its final target cannot be accurately predicted, making it impossible to evacuate leadership or concentrate defensive fire effectively. The multi-warhead capability of a system like the Khorramshahr-4 allows for a single missile to threaten multiple critical nodes simultaneously—for example, the Kirya military headquarters in Tel Aviv, the Knesset in Jerusalem, and a key air force base.
This constitutes a credible “decapitation” threat. Iran no longer needs to win a protracted war of attrition; it only needs to succeed with a single, well-aimed surprise salvo to paralyze the Israeli state’s ability to function and command its forces. This shifts the strategic dynamic from “deterrence by punishment,” where Israel’s threat of a massive retaliation prevents an attack, to “deterrence by decapitation,” where Iran’s ability to prevent that retaliation from ever being ordered becomes its primary coercive tool. This profound strategic instability makes a first strike by either side more, not less, likely.
Israel’s Doctrinal Revolution: The Shift from Containment to Enforcement
In response to this new strategic reality, Israel has undertaken a revolutionary shift in its military doctrine. The conflict of June 2025, dubbed “Operation Rising Lion,” was not an isolated operation but the first practical application of a necessary evolution from a reactive posture of containment to a proactive strategy of threat elimination. This new “enforcement” strategy redefines preemption from a high-risk political gamble to a calculated and essential act of operational self-defense.
In response to this new strategic reality, Israel has undertaken a revolutionary shift in its military doctrine.
For years, Israel’s approach to confronting Iran and its proxies was defined by the doctrine of “MABAM” (the “war between the wars”) or, more colloquially, “mowing the grass.” This strategy involved periodic, limited strikes, primarily in Syria, aimed at degrading the capabilities of proxies like Hezbollah and preventing the transfer of advanced weaponry. It was a strategy of conflict management, not conflict resolution. Security officials now indicate that Israel is explicitly moving to an “enforcement strategy,” which applies targeted strikes directly against strategic assets on Iranian soil. Defense Minister Israel Katz has stated the objective is no longer merely to contain the threat at the periphery but to systematically degrade and dismantle Iran’s core ability to develop and project power from its homeland.
“Operation Rising Lion” was the blueprint for this new doctrine. It was a sustained, multi-domain campaign that fused long-range strikes, multi-layered missile defense, intelligence operations, and cyber warfare into a single, cohesive effort. The operation demonstrated an unprecedented level of operational reach and integration, surprising Iran with the precision and scale of the blows delivered to its most critical military and nuclear infrastructure.
The key enabler of this new doctrine is the deep, multi-year fusion of intelligence and special operations forces (SOF). Analysis of the operation reveals that Israel’s Mossad spy agency spent years preparing the battlefield inside Iran. This involved pre-positioning assets, smuggling precision-guided weapons and explosive-laden drones, and establishing clandestine bases of operation, some “in the open, not far from Iran’s air defense systems.” This deep-cover preparation allowed for devastatingly precise strikes on hardened and heavily defended targets, such as the Natanz enrichment facility. It also enabled the effective decapitation of Iran’s top military leadership, including the elimination of IRGC Commander Hossein Salami and Chief of Staff Mohammad Hossein Bagheri, through targeted assassinations based on detailed intelligence dossiers.
A core component of the operation was the concept of “offensive defense.” Rather than waiting for an Iranian missile barrage and attempting to intercept it, Israel preemptively struck Iranian missile launchers and command-and-control sites to suppress Tehran’s ability to retaliate. This was achieved through an asymmetric suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD) campaign. Just moments before the main wave of Israeli Air Force jets arrived, pre-positioned SOF assets on the ground launched precision strikes against Iranian surface-to-air missile (SAM) installations, effectively dropping the country’s defenses at the most critical juncture.
This new “enforcement strategy” is the only logical military doctrine that can contend with the new reality of the hypersonic threat. A purely defensive strategy is a strategy of accepting catastrophic damage and then retaliating. For a small, densely populated country like Israel, this is an unacceptable strategic proposition. The only way to reliably defeat a hypersonic threat is to destroy it before it is launched. This requires the destruction of the launchers, the command-and-control nodes that guide them, and the industrial facilities that produce them. “Operation Rising Lion” demonstrated that Israel has developed the specific capabilities—deep intelligence penetration, in-country SOF, and long-range precision strike—to execute such a preemptive mission successfully. This makes a future Israeli-initiated preemptive strike a matter of high probability, driven by cold operational logic rather than political whim.
The American Factor: An Indispensable Ally Facing Strategic Limitations
The United States remains the indispensable cornerstone of Israeli security, yet growing constraints on American military capacity and industrial output mean that Israel must plan for a scenario in which U.S. support is powerful but time-limited. The reality of the U.S. interceptor deficit creates a new, unstated condition on the alliance: American support in a future high-intensity conflict will be immense, but finite. This strategic limitation compels Israel to adopt a warfighting strategy that prioritizes speed, surprise, and decisive outcomes, further reinforcing the logic of its preemptive “enforcement” doctrine.
The reality of the U.S. interceptor deficit creates a new, unstated condition on the alliance: American support in a future high-intensity conflict will be immense, but finite.
U.S. military support was decisive in the defensive aspects of the June 2025 war. The U.S.-led integrated air and missile defense (IAMD) effort was the backbone of the joint operation, with American assets launching over 150 THAAD “Talon” and 80 SM-3 interceptors. These 230-plus high-end interceptors accounted for approximately 70 percent of all interceptors used during the 12-day conflict, a clear demonstration of both American commitment and Israeli reliance on U.S. capacity in a large-scale missile exchange.
However, this success came at a tremendous and strategically significant cost. In just twelve days, the United States expended roughly 25 percent of its entire global THAAD interceptor stockpile. Given current production rates, replenishing this single expenditure could take an estimated 1.5 years. This episode exposed a much deeper problem: the U.S. defense industrial base is not structured for a sustained, high-intensity conventional war. Production rates for key munitions, such as the Tomahawk Land Attack Missile and the SM-series of interceptors, are lagging far behind the consumption rates seen in recent conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine. The industrial base faces systemic issues, including a lack of surge capacity, supply chain fragility, and single points of failure for critical components like solid rocket motors.
These limitations are magnified by America’s competing strategic priorities. The primary pacing challenge for the Pentagon is China. Wargames simulating a conflict over Taiwan show the United States potentially expending over 5,000 long-range missiles in just the first three weeks of fighting. The immense strain this would place on existing stockpiles necessitates a careful husbanding of resources. The need to maintain a credible deterrent posture and readiness for a potential peer conflict in the Pacific inherently limits the assets and munitions that can be dedicated to a sustained campaign in the Middle East. While the political will to support Israel remains strong, particularly under an administration that has demonstrated a readiness to apply overwhelming force to protect U.S. interests, this support is not infinite. Future U.S. intervention is likely to be powerful and swift but conditioned on achieving clear objectives within a limited timeframe to conserve strategic resources for other global contingencies.
This reality forces a critical adjustment in Israeli strategic planning. Iran’s warfighting strategy is one of attrition, aiming to overwhelm sophisticated defenses through massed salvos of relatively inexpensive missiles and drones. The U.S. and Israel cannot win a protracted war of attrition based on missile defense alone; the cost-exchange ratio and production rates heavily favor the attacker. An Israeli war plan that assumes unlimited American logistical support is therefore strategically unsound. Consequently, Israel must plan to achieve its primary strategic objectives—the neutralization of Iran’s hypersonic and nuclear threats—within the opening hours or days of a conflict, before U.S. interceptor stockpiles are critically depleted. This operational constraint makes a slow, graduated escalation an impossibility. It mandates a strategy of overwhelming force applied preemptively, as demonstrated in “Operation Rising Lion,” to cripple Iran’s offensive capacity at the outset. The limitations of the American arsenal thus become a primary driver of Israeli offensive action.
Scenarios and Signposts: Charting the Path to Renewed Conflict
The confluence of Iran’s internal desperation, its new hypersonic capabilities, Israel’s proactive enforcement doctrine, and the strategic limitations of its key ally creates a highly volatile environment in which renewed conflict is not a matter of if, but when and how. The analysis points to two primary scenarios for the initiation of hostilities, each with distinct triggers and escalation dynamics.
Scenario A: The Preemptive Imperative
In this scenario, Israel launches a large-scale preemptive campaign modeled on “Operation Rising Lion.” The trigger will be actionable intelligence indicating that Iran is nearing a critical threshold that Israel cannot tolerate. This could be the operational deployment of a new, game-changing hypersonic system like the Khorramshahr-4, the movement of components indicating a large production run of such weapons, or a definitive move by Tehran toward nuclear weaponization, such as enriching uranium to 90 percent or expelling international inspectors.
The escalation will not be gradual or “ramped up”; it will be instantly kinetic and overwhelming.
The attack will not be a surprise in the strategic sense; it will occur during a period of heightened tensions and bellicose rhetoric. However, its precise timing, scale, and methods of execution will be designed to achieve maximum operational and tactical surprise, leveraging the intelligence-SOF fusion and pre-positioned assets that characterized the previous conflict. The escalation will not be gradual or “ramped up”; it will be instantly kinetic and overwhelming. The primary objective will be the dismantlement of the specific threat infrastructure—hypersonic missile bases, nuclear facilities, and command-and-control centers. Iran will retaliate with its remaining missile arsenal and activate its proxies in Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq, but its response will be significantly degraded due to the initial Israeli blow. The United States will provide immediate and massive defensive support, forming a protective shield over Israel, but will simultaneously exert intense diplomatic pressure on Israel to conclude the main offensive phase of the conflict swiftly to conserve finite U.S. military resources for potential escalation or other contingencies.
Scenario B: The Desperation Gambit
In this scenario, the Iranian regime, facing imminent collapse from cascading internal protests and a complete economic meltdown, initiates a limited but dramatic strike against a high-value Israeli civilian or economic target. The objective would be to demonstrate capability and resolve, likely using a small number of its most advanced hypersonic weapons to guarantee penetration and media impact. A potential target could be the Haifa oil refinery or the Dimona nuclear research center. The strategic goal for Tehran would not be to win a war, but to create a regional crisis of such magnitude that it forces international intervention. By provoking a massive Israeli response, the regime would hope to rally a panicked domestic population around the flag, change the international conversation away from its internal failures, and force global powers to broker a “de-escalation” that includes sanctions relief and a political lifeline for the clerical leadership.
This scenario begins with a surprise Iranian strike. Israel’s response would be massive, immediate, and would likely target the highest echelons of the Iranian regime itself. This would lead to the same all-out conflict as in Scenario A, but with Iran having fired the first shot and Israel possessing the full political legitimacy to execute a devastating retaliatory campaign.
Intelligence Signposts for Escalation
For policymakers, tracking the path to conflict requires a structured framework of observable intelligence indicators. The following matrix provides a multi-domain view of the signposts that would precede a renewed conflict, allowing for a graduated assessment of the escalating probability of war:
A Strategy for Strategic Strangulation: Non-Kinetic Deterrence in a New Era
In the face of an imminent and potentially overwhelming hypersonic threat, passive deterrence through the threat of retaliation is no longer a viable strategy. Deterrence must become a continuous, offensive campaign designed to degrade Iran’s military capabilities and undermine the regime’s stability from within, thereby raising the cost of aggression to an intolerable level. This strategy of “strategic strangulation” must be pursued relentlessly by Israel and the United States to widen the window for non-kinetic solutions and set the conditions for success if kinetic action becomes unavoidable.
The emergence of an internally collapsing but externally aggressive Iran, armed with game-changing hypersonic weapons, has rendered passive deterrence obsolete.
The foundation of this strategy rests on exploiting Iran’s critical vulnerabilities. The first is its technological dependency, particularly on China. Iran’s military reconstitution is not an indigenous affair; it is critically dependent on Chinese supply chains. Chinese entities provide essential components like solid-fuel propellants, advanced gyroscopes and accelerometers for guidance systems, and other dual-use electronics that are the lifeblood of Iran’s missile and drone programs. This dependency is Iran’s strategic Achilles’ heel. The second vulnerability is the regime’s profound fear of its own populace. The leadership actively suppresses negative economic forecasts, blames foreign enemies for its own catastrophic failures, and views any form of popular protest as an existential threat to its rule. The chasm between the regime’s priorities—spending billions on a military buildup—and the people’s desperate needs for water, electricity, and economic stability is immense and growing.
A prescriptive strategy of strategic strangulation should be built on three pillars:
- Targeted Economic Warfare: The United States must move beyond broad sectoral sanctions and launch a focused campaign to dismantle the specific Sino-Iranian procurement networks. This requires imposing severe, punitive secondary sanctions on the Chinese banks, shipping companies, and technology firms that have been identified as enabling Iran’s missile and nuclear collaboration. These Chinese entities should not be treated as mere trade violators; they must be treated as co-belligerents in Iran’s military enterprise. The goal is to sever the technological arteries that allow Iran to build its most dangerous weapons.
- Persistent Cyber Warfare: A sustained and deniable cyber campaign should be waged to disrupt, degrade, and disable Iran’s military-industrial complex from the inside. Operations should focus on corrupting manufacturing data for critical missile components, subtly interfering with the software for guidance and navigation systems, and disrupting the secure command-and-control links between Tehran and its regional proxies. This represents the non-kinetic application of the “enforcement” doctrine, imposing costs and creating delays without firing a shot.
- Aggressive Information Warfare: A sophisticated information campaign must be launched, aimed not at negotiating with the regime, but at speaking directly to the Iranian people and the regime’s own mid-level functionaries. This campaign should relentlessly highlight the direct trade-off between the regime’s exorbitant spending on hypersonic missiles and the public’s lack of clean water and reliable electricity. It should amplify verified stories of corruption within the IRGC’s procurement networks, exposing how elites profit while the population suffers. Crucially, this effort must be paired with providing secure, uncensored communication tools and internet access for internal dissidents and protesters, turning the regime’s domestic fragility into a potent strategic vulnerability that the West can exploit. This approach weaponizes the regime’s deepest and most rational fear: its own people.
The strategic environment has changed. The emergence of an internally collapsing but externally aggressive Iran, armed with game-changing hypersonic weapons, has rendered passive deterrence obsolete. The window for Israel to act preemptively is closing, constrained by the hard realities of allied military capacity. The path forward is not to wait for an attack, but to proactively dismantle the Iranian threat through a relentless, multi-domain campaign of strategic strangulation. By targeting the regime’s financial lifelines, its technological dependencies, and its crumbling domestic legitimacy, Israel and the United States can raise the costs of war to a level that even a desperate regime in Tehran cannot afford to pay. But they must act with urgency and resolve, before the window of opportunity closes for good.
Greg Roman is the executive director of the Middle East Forum, previously
directing the Community Relations Council of the Jewish Federation of
Greater Pittsburgh. In 2014, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency named him one
of the “ten most inspiring global Jewish leaders,” and he previously
served as the political advisor to the deputy foreign minister of Israel
and worked for the Israeli Ministry of Defense. A frequent speaker on
Middle East affairs, Mr. Roman appears on international news channels
such as Fox News, i24NEWS, Al-Jazeera, BBC World News, and Israel’s
Channels 12 and 13. He studied national security and political
communications at American University and the Interdisciplinary Center
in Herzliya, and has contributed to The Hill, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, the Miami Herald, and the Jerusalem Post.
Source: https://www.meforum.org/military-and-strategic-programs/the-closing-iranian-window-preemption-and-deterrence-in-the-hypersonic-age
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