Operation Epic Fury, which ran from 28 February to 5 May 2026, consumed the United States’ guided munitions stockpile faster than its industry could replace them. Meanwhile, Iran had fully activated its vast inventories of loitering munitions and ballistic missiles to stress the air defence systems of the US and its Gulf partners to the point where, arguably, cracks began showing both from America’s technical capacity to sustain its warfighting in those moments and in the patience and confidence of its allies in the capitals of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Bahrain, and Kuwait.
Yet, despite high-level dialogues in Pakistan, and later in Switzerland, and an outline of a possible long-term deal through a memorandum of understanding (MoU), America and Iran are still fighting. Moreover, in these apparent ‘on-and-off’ confrontations, it also seems that the United States’ approach to fighting Iran is evolving by leveraging the efforts of both traditional and emergent defence industry players since the start of the Russia-Ukraine War in 2022.
On 12 July 2026, US Central Command (CENTCOM) announced that it employed three Saronic Corsair unmanned surface vessels (USV) against a submarine and ship maintenance facility at the Bandar Abbas naval base in Iran, in a wave of strikes aimed at degrading Tehran’s ability to attack commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. CENTCOM stated that the strike was the first time that US used sea drones in combat, joining two other combat debuts from this conflict – i.e., the employment of the Low-Cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System (LUCAS) and the Precision Strike Missile (PrSM).
Between USVs, an analogous loitering munition platform to the Shahed and Geran via the LUCAS, and the PrSM guided conventional ballistic missiles, the US has, on the surface, begun emulating the same warfighting tactics as Iran. More broadly, the US, like many other major militaries (e.g., Turkiye, Pakistan, and others), is adopting the lessons learned from and since the advent of the Russia-Ukraine War, where scalable precision-strike capacity as well as rapid, cost-effective replenishment are in demand.
The outcome of that demand has seen the rise of piston- and jet-powered loitering munitions, conventional ballistic missiles, and a new focus on low-cost cruise missiles – all of which the US has converged upon.
It is unknown at this time if there will be a ‘major’ round two in the US-Iran Conflict on the scale of Operation Epic Fury. However, these ongoing small-scale exchanges are showing that America is deftly adapting to the demands of today’s conventional state-on-state warfighting, particularly from an industrial standpoint where the US has tuned its industry to support ‘affordable mass’ doctrines.
And this shift has significant geostrategic implications. Arguably, the point of ‘affordable mass’ is not so much to accumulate a stockpile. Rather, what Russia, Ukraine, and Iran have demonstrated is that ‘affordable mass’ is the most cost-effective way to support high-tempo strike operations.
So, if the rationale is to initiate large-salvo strikes, stress enemy air defence systems and deplete their kinetic interceptors, and create cost asymmetries (e.g., using a $50,000 loitering munition to strike radars and other multi-million-dollar targets), then the user must have the ability to replenish their munition stockpiles – and rapidly. This focus, arguably, has led to the convergence of particular types of weapon systems, especially in the Russia-Ukraine theatre, such as loitering munitions, tactical ballistic missiles, low-cost cruise missiles, and both offensive and defensive drones across air, sea, and, increasingly, land.
The emphasis across all these domains is on low-cost inputs that are relatively easy to build at scale, standardization, modularization, and an acceptance of – if not a preference for – attrition. These ‘affordable mass’ weapons are meant to be used immediately and not kept but instead replenished by iterative improvements that will also be used right away.
Thus, as the US defence industry tunes itself for ‘affordable mass,’ one could argue that what the US is actually doing is creating a posture that will allow it to fight a long-haul conflict in the Middle East against Iran – and by using Iran’s own tactics no less.
