The U.S. faces hurdles in conducting “battle damage assessments” of its strikes against key targets in Iran, raising questions about whether the Islamic republic’s military infrastructure has been destroyed permanently or if Tehran retains the capacity to rebuild it after the current conflict ends.
There’s no doubt that U.S. and Israeli strikes over the past four weeks have devastated Iran’s navy, its ballistic missile capabilities, its drone production facilities and other assets. But specialists say there are key distinctions between saying a particular site has been “destroyed” or merely “damaged,” and determining which definition applies in each case is difficult.
That distinction came to the forefront after last year’s Operation Midnight Hammer, the June 2025 U.S. mission that hit three key Iranian nuclear sites. President Trump repeatedly said Iran’s nuclear program had been fully “obliterated” by those strikes, but analysts, lawmakers of both parties and military insiders believed that claim to be an exaggeration.
It is widely believed that the strikes set Iran’s nuclear program back at least a year, but they did not destroy it. The Trump administration has made clear in recent days that removing stockpiles of enriched uranium from Iran should be part of any peace deal between the two sides, reflecting a tacit admission that key aspects of Iran’s nuclear program are still in play.
Assessing the damage
A battle damage assessment, known in military parlance as a BDA, is the process the military uses to determine whether it is achieving its tactical objectives. Some critical targets in Iran, such as the nuclear facilities at Fordo, Isfahan, and Natanz, which were all bombed by the U.S. last year, are buried under hundreds of feet of rock.
Rafael Mariano Grossi, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said Operation Midnight Hammer “considerably rolled back” Iran’s nuclear program.
But “a lot still has survived,” Mr. Grossi told CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on March 22.
Several major issues remain, especially the whereabouts of about 900 pounds of Iran’s highly enriched uranium inventory, Mr. Grossi said.
“Some facilities, infrastructure, [and] equipment have most probably survived the attacks,” he said. “They could be damaged, seriously damaged, but that is something that we will only be able to ascertain once our inspectors go back.”
If a BDA can’t confirm that the uranium was destroyed or at least rendered inert, the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran will persist even if the buildings are gone, analysts said.
Brad Bowman, senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank, said that when studying BDA, it’s important to decipher the terms used to describe the fight’s impact, such as “target struck,” or whether targets had been “damaged” or “destroyed.”
“If it’s ‘damaged,’ it can still be repaired; sometimes easy, sometimes hard, sometimes quick, sometimes slow. But ‘damaged’ is not ‘destroyed,’” said Mr. Bowman, a former Army officer and Senate staffer.
The public often perceives a BDA as definitive, but analysts say it can be fragmentary and shaped by the available intelligence, which is not necessarily what policymakers want to hear.
“While sensors and other remote capabilities have improved dramatically since the 1991 Gulf War, the limits of post-strike analysis, especially in politically charged environments, remain stubbornly familiar,” Brian O’Neill, who teaches strategy and intelligence at Georgia Tech, wrote in an essay for Just Security, an online national security forum.
U.S. Central Command officials said U.S. forces have struck more than 9,000 targets, including at least 140 Iranian naval vessels. The targets range from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps headquarters and intelligence sites to Iran’s integrated air defense systems, ballistic missile sites, and military communications capabilities.
“America has extraordinary satellite intelligence capabilities, and that is systematically and habitually used, in part, to do battle damage assessment. But there is a limit to what you can do with BDA from the air,” Mr. Bowman said. “When you’re in an active war zone … like Iran, putting people on the ground is very, very dangerous.”
There is also the question of whether Iran could seek to rebuild its navy or other key military assets. The Trump administration has indicated it wants limits on Tehran’s ballistic missile program as part of a peace agreement, but there are questions about whether Iran will retain some ability to reconstitute its military when the war ends.
Substitutes for ’boots on the ground’
While the U.S. doesn’t have boots on the ground inside Iran to physically confirm the aftereffects of a strike, the U.S. is conducting its BDA with a sophisticated array of drones like the MQ-9 Reaper, said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a retired U.S. Marine Corps colonel.
“They [MQ-9 Reapers] can circle a building and tell you if it is mostly intact,” he said. “They can linger around and look at it from a couple of different angles.”
Using drones for BDA only works if one side in a battle has complete aerial superiority. The U.S. has established “local air superiority” over significant portions of Iran, but other areas remain “highly contested,” analysts said.
“There are a lot of circumstances where ‘boots on the ground’ just isn’t an alternative, like where we are now in Iran,” Mr. Cancian said. “But with air superiority and a willingness to lose some drones, you can get pretty good BDA.”
