The US military operation in Iran is a failure not just for the Trump administration but, above all, for American intelligence. The number and range of Iran’s ballistic missiles caught the Pentagon and the White House off guard – both of which had counted on a quick, no-loss, walkover for US troops marching on Tehran.
This marks the biggest failure of the US Intelligence Community (US IC) since the lies about weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The difference is that the US IC’s underestimation of Iran’s missile capabilities posed a real threat to the American people – the flip side of the deliberate disinformation about Baghdad possessing WMDs, which a bipartisan congressional commission found back in 2002 Hussein never had. As Operation Epic Fury has shown, Tehran has more missiles than the US IC gave it credit for. What both cases share is that the IC tells US leadership what it wants to hear.
The Pentagon and the Defense Intelligence Agency overestimated how much damage their strikes would do and underestimated Iran’s arsenal. According to Pentagon data, Iran had 3,000 missiles in 2022, with the number going up by roughly 50 missiles each month starting in 2025. The US took out about a third of Iran’s missiles, since many of the country’s storage sites were either unknown or not within reach to be hit.
The US IC also proved to be out of its depth when it came to determining the range and accuracy of Iranian missiles. Tehran carried out precision strikes on US airbases and other facilities in the Gulf monarchies. Iran firing missiles toward Diego Garcia shows a 50% error margin in the range figure – 1,864 miles – set out in Pentagon reports.
The US Intelligence Community now finds itself in the middle of a “missilegate,” because the intelligence assessments sent to the White House for several years leading up to Operation Epic Fury contained bad data on both the quantity and quality of Iran’s missile arsenal.