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AGENCIES

The US campaign against Iran has shown the boundaries of what air power alone can achieve, said Adam Clements, a former Pentagon official and US defence attaché in Jordan and Yemen.

“There are certain limitations of an air campaign only,” Clements told Al Jazeera.

“The US campaign probably disrupted some of [Iran’s] missile capabilities, its drone capabilities, but Iran would hide or at least reserve some of these missiles.”

He also said the effects of the war were being felt far beyond the region.

“Even South Asian states or Far East Asian states that haven’t been directly involved are still indirectly involved because of the economic impacts,” he said.

“Collectively, all of those are considerations, in addition to just the pure military terms.”

Iran is poised to fire far more long-range missiles at Israel and other Middle Eastern nations after rapidly digging out its buried arsenals – an effort that highlights the limits to US bombing strategy, experts claimed.

For weeks, strikes by the United States and Israel restricted Iran’s access to its underground missile sites by destroying roads and burying tunnel entrances.

But satellite images reviewed by CNN show how Iran has used simple equipment such as bulldozers and dump trucks to counter those costly campaigns — suggesting that Tehran’s missile capabilities can’t be destroyed just by targeting tunnel entrances, experts said.

While Iran and the US have reached a tentative agreement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, months of work remain to hammer out details.

If hostilities do resume, Iran is in position to “continue launching missiles so long as they have launchers and crews, even if production has halted,” said Sam Lair, a research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies who analyzes Iran’s missile capabilities.

“There’s nothing to prevent the launchers from being armed with the ample stockpile of missiles that the Iranians still have.”