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Sept. 25, 2026, 3:50 p.m. ET
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5 min read
Footage aired on Iranian state television pans across a long underground chamber, its tables piled high with the twisted wreckage of American military drones.
The presenter describes the collection as the “most important treasure trove of drones captured and hunted from the U.S. terrorist army” since the United States and Israel struck Iran last February. The broadcast offers a rare glimpse inside an air-defense base operated by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the force whose missiles and drones have devastated U.S. bases and targeted American allies across the Middle East.
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In an image taken from an online video, a TV presenter inspects wreckage reportedly from a downed U.S. aircraft, at an undisclosed Iranian military base.
For Tehran, the imagery serves dual propaganda purposes: it showcases the regime’s capacity to inflict heavy costs on superior adversaries through asymmetric warfare, while simultaneously warning Washington and Jerusalem against further escalation. The video’s release coincides with a discernible Iranian shift toward a more aggressive military posture against the United States.
Emboldened by battlefield performance and newfound influence over two critical Middle East energy export routes, Iranian leaders and commanders are now pursuing a first-strike strategy designed to reduce the U.S. regional footprint and deter future attacks.
Nearly seven months after the initial U.S.-Israeli strikes, analysts assess that Tehran’s strategy has evolved into a bid to restore deterrence and conclude the conflict on its own terms. For Iran, that means forcing the closure of U.S. bases in the region, raising the price of the American presence for Persian Gulf allies, lifting sanctions and a U.S. naval blockade, and cementing economic leverage over global energy chokepoints.
On Tuesday, addressing the United Nations General Assembly, U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to “annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly” if Iran refused his terms to end the war. Hours later, however, U.S. and Iranian officials held three hours of discussions. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian responded Wednesday, declaring that Mr. Trump “should know that threatening our people will make them more united and stronger.” On Thursday, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi proposed a seven-day ceasefire plan that would lift sanctions and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, mirroring an agreement signed by both presidents last June that quickly collapsed.
Threat to widen the battlefield
Signaling a harder line, a top Iranian military adviser warned Thursday that Iran would expand the war to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean if attacked again. Days earlier, the IRGC declared that any U.S. escalation would trigger the use of “new weapons with new capabilities” against new targets that would “change the geography of the war.”
Throughout the conflict, Iran has retaliated against U.S. military bases and struck military and civilian targets in Israel and across the Persian Gulf.
“Iran has been trying to push the United States further away, and also target those logistics that would be used for another round of aggression,” says Abas Aslani, a Tehran-based analyst at Iran’s Center for Middle East Strategic Studies.
“There have been costs on the U.S. side, but they seem not to be enough,” Mr. Aslani adds, noting indications of possible renewed U.S. attacks. “That’s why Iran has been talking about a new offensive strategy, departing from its traditional policy of reciprocal responses and proportionality. In the new phase, Iran is sometimes … taking the initiative in the first place.”
Mike Segar/Reuters
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian delivers defiant remarks to the United Nations General Assembly, Sept. 23, 2026.
That approach means striking U.S. bases both to retaliate and to degrade the capacity for future strikes against Iran, he says. The clearest example, analysts say, is Iran’s early September ballistic missile launches against a U.S. aircraft carrier, a destroyer, and U.S. bases in Jordan.
Iran employed sophisticated ballistic missiles with multiple-projectile warheads against Jordan. To intercept those 20 missiles, the U.S. and Jordan reportedly expended 70 Patriot interceptors and more than 12 costly THAAD interceptors, further depleting global stockpiles.
“The aim is to establish a deterrence,” says Mr. Aslani. “If the previous model was not able to do so, Iran needs to change it. And the aim is to make any new balance, any peace, more durable.”
Mr. Trump and senior U.S. officials have repeatedly claimed to have destroyed Iran’s military capability, yet a significant portion of its missile and drone arsenal remains intact. An IRGC officer told state television during a mid-August visit to an underground air base that Iran had preserved 85% of its air-defense production capacity and increased output of its most “effective” missiles by one-third.
“New military age”
Images of the collected American drone wreckage also featured this month in an IRGC documentary detailing how an Iranian Shahed drone in March destroyed one of the U.S. military’s most expensive assets: an AWACS radar platform.
“When a $20,000 Shahed drone blows up a half-billion-dollar AWACS, know it’s a new military age,” the IRGC presenter declared, describing the strike as a “turning point in regional air defense calculations.”
The IRGC has celebrated the scale of destruction inflicted on U.S. military assets, partially achieving a long-standing Iranian demand, previously little more than aspiration, that the U.S. “withdraw” from the region.
The Pentagon inspector general last week issued its first public assessment of the war’s $33.4 billion cost through June 30. The tally included $3.7 billion in “equipment losses” alone, encompassing nearly 60 aircraft. No valuation was provided for the “hundreds of buildings” at U.S. bases wrecked by Iranian strikes across eight countries.
The reconstruction costs and Iran’s demonstrated targeting range are fueling expectations in Tehran that the U.S. military presence will contract.
Early in the war, the Islamic Republic reacted more reflexively to “existential” threats, says Hamidreza Azizi, a Berlin-based senior analyst with the International Crisis Group. “This latest stage is more pinpoint, in the sense of them knowing exactly what they want, which is making U.S. forces around the region dysfunctional, in order to push the U.S. presence as far away from Iranian borders as possible.”
Yet securing such gains remains uncertain.
“They’ve been prepared for this for decades,” says Dr. Azizi. “They are confident in what they have achieved so far, but less confident in the extent to which they can preserve those achievements in the longer term.”
An Iranian researcher contributed to this report.