It is very telling what the US military’s own press releases will not say. A recent award ceremony gave a Silver Star to Lt. Col. William Parks for gallantry during missions in early 2025. The official story describes a fifteen minute life or death struggle where he performed high G maneuvers to evade missiles that were detonating feet from his aircraft. He is credited with six aerial victories and personally defending against five surface to air missile engagements, all while preventing the loss of two other US jets.
“For 15 minutes, with enemy missiles detonating mere feet from his aircraft, Parks led his flight through a serious of high-G maneuvers and countermeasure employment” and coordinated the emergency deployment of tankers, which “prevented the probable loss of two aircraft due to fuel starvation.”
Parks was “Parks has been credited with six aerial victories protecting the lives of more than 5,000 Sailors aboard the USS Harry S. Truman” carrier, and “personally defended against five deadly surface-to-air missile engagements targeting his aircraft.”
The curious part they completely omit is who he was fighting. The release does not mention Yemen, the Red Sea, Ansar Allah, or the Houthis. The only clue is that his deployment supported Operations Prosperity Guardian and Rough Rider, the twin US campaigns against Yemen.
With the APKWS counter drone and cruise missile rockets though, that’s just a laser guidance kit mounted to an unguided Hydra 70mm rocket, with a proximity fuse and cheap infrared seeker for the air to air variant. Much like how a UMPK kit turns an unguided Russian FAB bomb into a guided glide bomb, or a a JDAM kit turns a Mk 80 series unguided bomb into a guided bomb. The US has plenty of Hydra rockets already produced, the limitation on production would be on the guidance kits. Anti ballistic missile interceptors are the much bigger production bottleneck for stuff like THAAD and SM-3.
With Iran, during the last attack the US evacuated bases close by like Qatar, and attacked from areas where Iran would not attack, like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, even Greece potentially. And their aircraft carriers remained outside of the range of even Iran’s longest range anti ship ballistic missiles. This also explains all the recent “mutual defence pacts” in the Middle East, as a strategy to encircle Iran. Iran then attacked the evacuated base in Qatar as a form of symbolic retaliation. Also for a counterforce attack with conventional ballistic missiles, a high degree of accuracy over long range is required. Iran is working on that by fitting optical seekers to the maneuverable warheads of their ballistic missiles, first starting with the shorter range missiles, and expanding to the longer range ones. I think they’re up to 1200km range now. But it’s quite challenging. Some from of radar guidance/radar mapping like on the Pershing-II and potentially the Chinese DF-21 could be more feasible long term.
I mean, the US is currently having trouble ramping up stuff like artillery shell production. Even a relatively simple rocket is a far more complex thing to produce.
And that’s why I specifically noted the scenario of total war. Right now, Iran just absorbs the hits because it doesn’t want to escalate. However, if there was an open war then these bases would obviously be hit, and carriers alone aren’t a solution because they can only carry so much gear. This is really the key problem the US has in general, the logistics are vastly in favor of the adversaries. The US has to ship everything across the ocean, while Iran or Russia can just transport things by rail.