In mid-February 2026, before the US military initiated the airstrikes that began Operation “Epic Fury,” the National Intelligence Council (NIC), an agency of the executive branch created to synthesize the analysis of the US’s 18 intelligence agencies, submitted to the president a classified report detailing the prospects of an attack on Iran. This assessment, first reported on in the Washington Post and subsequently confirmed by the Associated Press, painted a grim picture. It concluded that an offensive operation launched by the US military would be unlikely to dismantle the central pillars of the Iranian government. Assassinating Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei could backfire, resulting in the consolidation of Iranian military and political structures and the activation of emergency protocols the Iranians had been preparing for years. Iran’s domestic opposition was unlikely to be able to seize power in such a scenario. A limited air campaign or even a protracted war stood a serious chance of failing to achieve regime change. The NIC report was the final warning in a decades-long, documented history of US military and intelligence planners predicting grim strategic outcomes in a war with Iran. Official analysis anticipated every major failure of a potential conflict, from the brutal arithmetic of interceptor production to the possibility that Iran might close the Strait of Hormuz. In this piece, we’ll trace the public record of this analysis, and show that it was widely dispersed and understood within the American military, intelligence, and political establishments. We’ll rely on primary sources whenever possible, focusing on pre-war assessments, because failure is easy to identify in retrospect. Finally, we’ll attempt to establish the mechanism that caused these warnings to go unheeded.

An Empty Threat

First: the casus belli upon which the Trump administration has based its conflict with Iran. For nearly two decades, American intelligence has assessed, repeatedly and in public, that Iran was not actively developing a nuclear weapon. Moreover, American planners consistently rejected the notion that airstrikes could prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon in the long term. In 2007, the NIC began work on a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran. This would be the first major test of reforms within the intelligence community made in response to the disastrous intelligence failures in the NIE for Iraq’s WMD program released in 2002. These reforms mandated higher standards for intelligence sourcing, review, and the precision of predictive language. After an initial draft reaffirming the prior intelligence assessments that Iran sought nuclear weapons, the NIC started over based on new analysis. The report it finally published in late 2007 said unambiguously that the Iranians had terminated prior nuclear weapons programs and were not actively seeking the bomb. The 2007 Iran NIE ignited a political firestorm when portions were declassified that December. The Bush administration and hawks like John Bolton openly rejected its conclusions. Bush said that the US intelligence community had overcorrected for the mistakes it made in Iraq. Bolton called it “a sin of either commission or omission.” Nevertheless, the NIC and the key intelligence officials such as DIA director Ronald Burgess and DNI James Clapper defended the report and reaffirmed that position as late as 2012. No public report emerged from the NIC or any intelligence agency to supersede or correct the conclusions in the 2007 NIE.

Despite this, American military, political, and intelligence leadership continued to explore their options for ensuring the Iranians wouldn’t change their minds. While the Israelis publicly inflated the threat and engaged in saber-rattling, US military officials were consistently skeptical of the value of American military action towards Iran. Amidst increased sanctions pressure on the Iranians in 2010, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen publicly advocated for diplomacy as a superior solution to military action. In 2012, his successor, Martin Dempsey, told journalists that a military campaign would probably only delay an Iranian nuclear program, and that he didn’t want to be “complicit” if the Israelis chose to attack. He predicted that the diplomatic coalition exerting pressure on Iran could be “undone” in the event of a premature military operation. Former CIA Director Leon Panetta concurred with the JCS chairmen in 2011, warning that Iran wasn’t actively building a bomb, and strikes would only set the Iranians back “one or two years at most.” But these statements were in line with the diplomatic and sanctions efforts of the Obama administration, which meant they carried little professional risk. This was not the case with military and intelligence support for the JCPOA during the first Trump administration. The administration faced severe pushback from its advisors and the military-intelligence apparatus during its fight to decertify the agreement. National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster asserted that the Iranians were in compliance with the deal. Defense Secretary James Mattis and JCS Chairman Joseph Dunford both told Congress in 2017 that the deal was in US security interests to maintain, and withdrawal would have “unfortunate ripple effects” on American diplomacy.

The release of the 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment (WTA), an annual report produced by the US intelligence community, reprised the political controversy of the 2007 Iran NIE. The assessment concluded, in line with previous intelligence reports, that Iran was not developing a nuclear weapon, even eight months after the unilateral US withdrawal from the JCPOA. This was in direct conflict with the Trump administration’s public statements during that period. The political fallout was intense, with Trump summoning his intelligence chiefs to a meeting in the Oval Office, and the next year’s WTA fully classified to head off additional controversy. This conclusion would carry through all the way to the beginning of the 2026 war. Each annual threat assessment (which would be partially declassified again after 2020) up to 2023 restated the 2019 WTA’s conclusion. In 2024, the ODNI removed the conclusion pending a “reexamination,” but then restored it in 2025 under director Tulsi Gabbard. In 2024, CIA Director William Burns said that the intelligence community had no evidence that Khamenei had reversed his decision to block the development of nuclear weapons, and American intelligence would be able to quickly detect if he had. The historical record here is damning. American intelligence and military officials at the highest level of the power structure consistently warned four successive presidents that Iran was not developing nuclear weapons, that diplomacy was the best path for making sure they wouldn’t, and a military option could at best delay an Iranian nuclear weapons program by a year or two. These warnings helped prevent conflict, but only up until February 2026.

Attrition Arithmetic

The core issue with voluntarily entering into a protracted missile attrition war was identified by Reagan advisor Paul Nitze, who led negotiations on the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with the Soviet Union, in the mid-80s. While Nitze was focused on homeland ballistic missile defense in the event of a nuclear war, the core tenet of his argument would also apply to a scenario he never envisioned: non-nuclear conflict with a smaller, regional power heavily armed with deep stocks of conventional ballistic missiles and drones. Nitze said:

New defensive systems must also be cost effective at the margin – that is they must be cheap enough to add additional defensive capability so that the other side has no incentive to add additional offensive capability to overcome the defense. If this criterion is not met, the defensive systems could encourage a proliferation of countermeasures and additional offensive weapons to overcome deployed defenses instead of a redirection of effort from offense to defense. He later clarified: The defensive system must be able to maintain its effectiveness against the offense at less cost than it would take to develop offensive countermeasures and proliferate the ballistic missiles necessary to overcome it. [This] has valid application to other military systems as well.

Nitze believed that the American defense sector was theoretically capable of designing, eventually, ballistic missile defense solutions that were “cost-effective at the margin.” He was wrong. His prediction that the failure to create such systems would motivate prospective opponents to mass-produce “offensive capability” was, however, prescient. Due to the extreme cost and complexity of producing the US military’s core air defense systems, and Iranian strategic planning, the US would begin the 2026 war with severe asymmetries in capability with Iran. The premier systems American planners knew they would rely on in an Iranian conflict would be the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) and Standard Missile 3 (SM-3), which cost up to $15 million and $37 million (Block IIA) per interceptor, respectively. The costs of some variants of the SM-3 have more than doubled in the past five years. With Iranian missiles costing around $1-2 million to manufacture on average, the arithmetic is devastating. Both systems have multi-year lead times for order fulfillment. Government Accountability Office reports dating back to 2011 flagged consistent failures to meet production targets for THAAD interceptors.