During five intense days last month, Iran launched waves of drones and missiles at U.S. troops on three bases in Jordan, hoping to break through the formidable American air defenses.
Using advanced missiles that can suddenly change course, Iran pummeled the bases’ defensive systems, forcing the Americans to burn through scarce supplies of Patriot interceptors.
On the fifth day, the Iranians broke through.
A missile struck prefabricated housing units at one of the bases on July 17, killing three U.S. soldiers and wounding more than 100. Pentagon officials later acknowledged that scores of other troops were injured and several aircraft damaged in attacks in Jordan that week.
“We shot down almost all the missiles,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said when asked about the fatal attack. “One leaked through.”
The strikes reveal a deadly confluence of two important trends: First, Iran has become a more skilled adversary as the war has progressed, learning how to evade U.S. air defenses as it widened the battlefield to include most of the Middle East and enlisted allies like the Houthis in Yemen and militias in Iraq.
Second, the Pentagon’s supply of interceptors has quickly dwindled, with the weapons becoming more precious each day of the off-and-on conflict.
The two trends drive home a point that has slowly emerged in the months since the war started, that a global superpower with a mighty military footprint can still be held at bay by a lesser adversary willing to wage asymmetric warfare to find any advantage it can.
The Pentagon has used more than 1,500 Patriot interceptor missiles in the war and has fewer than 1,700 interceptors left, according to two people briefed on the stockpile levels who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military details. The United States produced about 600 interceptors in all of 2025.
The rapid depletion is occurring as Iranian forces study another war. In Ukraine, Russia has used combinations of ballistic and cruise missiles to distract Ukrainian air defenses, and then rushed in drones.
“The Iranians are making it more difficult on air defenses when you have a range of both missiles and drones coming in,” said Seth G. Jones, the president of the defense and security department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“They have effectively leveraged the Russian tactic,” he said, “to make it more difficult to protect across locations in the Gulf.”
On a single day during that deadly week last month, according to two U.S. officials, American forces in the Middle East fired about 50 Patriot interceptors, which cost about $4 million each.
The Pentagon has continued to face a powerful threat, which it has tried to minimize, in the months since major combat ended in early April.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters on April 8 that Iran’s missile program was “functionally destroyed,” that its launchers and missiles were “depleted and decimated and almost completely ineffective.”
Most of Iran’s missiles and launchers were stored in vast underground facilities that U.S. and Israeli forces heavily bombed during the first five weeks of the war. But Iran dug out many of those sites and resumed firing, bringing shipping in the Strait of Hormuz to a near standstill and threatening American troops in the region.
President Trump and his national security advisers assumed the fight would be short and would not jeopardize the Pentagon’s stockpiles of Patriot interceptors, said Vali Nasr, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
But Tehran, he and other Iran experts say, had been waiting for this moment since the conflict began more than five months ago. During a 12-day war in June 2025, Iran’s leaders had seen how quickly Israeli and American forces burned through ballistic missile interceptors to knock down barrages of Iranian drones and missiles.
Iran’s deadliest strikes against U.S. forces in Jordan targeted Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Azraq, a Jordanian military installation that the U.S. Air Force has increasingly used as a major hub for dozens of aircraft and several thousand service members.
Many U.S. troops previously stationed in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates were moved before and during the war to bases like Muwaffaq Salti in Jordan that were farther from Iran and deemed safer from drone and ballistic attacks.
In the days immediately after the strike on July 17, American military commanders strengthened air defenses in Jordan and elsewhere in the region, said a senior U.S. military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters but declined to provide more details.
U.S. military specialists who have also studied drone and missile attacks in Ukraine have been working with the military’s Central Command for months, sharing lessons learned from that campaign. Two of the three soldiers killed in Jordan were assigned to air defense units based in Germany that became part of that effort.
This new reality is having geopolitical consequences.
In late July, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Hegseth about the dwindling American weapons supplies, U.S. officials said, confirming reporting by The Washington Post.
The Pentagon has maintained publicly that it does not have a shortfall. “Claims of U.S. munition shortages are false,” the chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement. “When the fake news media irresponsibly amplifies these lies, the real-world consequence is clear: Our enemies are emboldened to provoke — or attack — American troops.”
Two weeks ago, Mr. Trump called off bombing raids against Iran after he said the leaders of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar had asked him to pursue diplomatic talks to end the war, which has killed an estimated 1,700 Iranian civilians.
In a phone call, Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, told Mr. Trump that major airstrikes would probably prompt Iran to retaliate against energy sites and other infrastructure in the kingdom and its neighbors, according to a Saudi official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential discussions.
With the United States running low on interceptors and Iran’s demonstrating that it could pierce those defenses, the threat of serious damage was very real, the Saudi official said. Prince Mohammed urged Mr. Trump to de-escalate, the official said.
The Jordan attack was not the first time Iran has adapted its skills and tactics in this war.
In April, Iran shot down an American F-15E fighter jet over southern Iran with a shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile. Both the pilot and the weapons officer ejected. The pilot was rescued quickly, but the weapons officer was missing for nearly two days, hiding from Iranian security forces until U.S. Special Operations forces rescued him in a daring operation.
In this case, Iran learned from Ukraine and deployed a swarm of drones in an area American fighter jets had penetrated, a senior U.S. military official said. In interviews with Pentagon officials, the crew said that the F-15E’s defensive countermeasures provided only half a second of warning before Iran hit the $60 million advanced fighter jet with a shoulder-fired missile.
American military officials concluded that the drones fed three critical pieces of information to Iranian commanders that helped them target the F-15E: its GPS location, speed and direction, one senior military official said.
Mr. Trump announced a “pause” in the fighting shortly after that incident. Military officials needed time to adjust to Iran’s new tactics, two military officials said.
Even during breaks in fighting, those tactics have continued to evolve.
When the Houthi militia in Yemen entered the war last month, experts said it signaled Iran’s intention to force the United States and its allies to defend themselves from aerial attacks from all directions. Yemen is hundreds of miles south of Iran.
International inspectors also believe that Iran is storing elements of its nuclear program in a heavily fortified underground complex in central Iran. The site, which the United States refers to as Pickaxe Mountain, is buried more than 300 feet beneath a mountain.
And Iran has sent its troops and leaders to hide-outs scattered across the country, experts said.
“Where are they?” asked Mr. Nasr, of Johns Hopkins. “It’s not like they’re sitting in a place where you can bomb them. You don’t find them.”
Jonathan Swan contributed reporting.
