Adm. Brad Cooper told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday that America's 38-day bombing campaign against Iran had severely degraded Tehran's warfighting capacity, but warned that the threat has not been eliminated. The testimony from the head of U.S. Central Command offered the most detailed official accounting yet of what Operation Epic Fury accomplished and what it left unfinished, Military Times reported.
Cooper declared that U.S. forces had "met every military objective" under Epic Fury. He cited the destruction of 90 percent of Iran's defense industrial base and the elimination of roughly 90 percent of the country's inventory of more than 8,000 naval mines. He told lawmakers that Iran's proxy network, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, is now cut off from Tehran's weapons pipeline.
Yet the CENTCOM commander stopped short of calling the job done. Iran, he acknowledged, still holds "a very moderate, if not small, capability" to strike regional neighbors. And the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which roughly one-fifth of the world's oil flows, remains the site of a month-long stalemate between Washington and Tehran.
Cooper's testimony painted a picture of a campaign that hit hard and fast. In 38 days of combat, U.S. forces shattered Iran's command-and-control infrastructure, crippled its ability to manufacture missiles and drones, and gutted its mine warfare stockpile. The admiral framed the damage in terms that went beyond simple body counts or target lists.
As Cooper put it before the committee:
"It's more than just the numbers. It's the command and control that's been shattered. It's the significant degradation and capability. And it's the lack of any ability to then produce any missiles or drones on the backend."
The Washington Examiner reported that U.S. and Israeli forces conducted more than 13,500 strikes during the campaign, destroying more than 85 percent of Iran's ballistic missile, drone, and naval defense industrial base. Cooper told senators that Iran can no longer project power "at the previous mass scale of hundreds of missiles and drones across the Middle East."
The navy piece of the equation drew particular emphasis. The New York Post reported Cooper's assessment that Iran's navy was decimated for "a full generation." That is a blunt verdict, one that suggests Tehran will spend years rebuilding even basic maritime capabilities.
The administration has framed the broader conflict as a decisive success. President Trump has vowed to obtain Iran's enriched uranium and said the Space Force is tracking Tehran's every move, signaling that military pressure will continue even as the kinetic phase winds down.
Not everyone in Washington shares Cooper's confidence. A New York Times report published Tuesday indicated that U.S. intelligence agencies believe Iran retained about 70 percent of the missiles it possessed before the war, along with access to roughly the same proportion of its mobile launchers. If accurate, that assessment suggests the campaign's reach against Iran's dispersed missile force was far more limited than the 90-percent destruction figures Cooper cited for mines and industrial capacity.
Cooper pushed back. He told lawmakers that "open source are not accurate", a direct challenge to the intelligence leak's conclusions. He did not, however, discuss specific classified assessments in the open hearing.
The gap between CENTCOM's battlefield claims and the intelligence community's private estimates is worth watching. Cooper's 90-percent figures apply to naval mines and defense industry. The intelligence report's 70-percent retention figure applies to missiles and mobile launchers, a different category of weapon. The two claims are not necessarily contradictory, but they tell very different stories about how much punishment Iran actually absorbed.
That distinction matters. Iran's mine inventory threatened commercial shipping. Its missile and drone arsenal threatened U.S. bases, allied capitals, and Israel. If Tehran kept the bulk of its missile force intact, the strategic picture is more complicated than any single number suggests.
Cooper acknowledged that the Strait of Hormuz remains contested. Iran initially retaliated for the joint U.S.-Israeli attack on its territory by throttling traffic through the strait, partly through the threat of naval mine warfare. Some vessels were also attacked. The United States responded by imposing a blockade on all vessels entering or leaving Iranian ports.
That standoff has now lasted roughly a month, with neither side blinking. Cooper told senators that Iran's capability to stop commerce through the strait "has been dramatically degraded." But he added a caveat that deserves more attention than it received.
"But their voice is very loud, and those threats are clearly heard by the merchant industry and the insurance industry."
In plain terms: even a weakened Iran can rattle global oil markets. Shipping companies and insurers don't wait for a mine to actually detonate before rerouting tankers or jacking up premiums. The mere perception of danger in the strait, through which one-fifth of the world's crude passes, carries real economic weight.
Trump declared in April that Iran had accepted all U.S. terms, including the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and an end to uranium enrichment. Cooper's testimony suggests the military reality on the waterway has not yet caught up to that diplomatic framing.
Cooper placed Operation Epic Fury in a broader context that Washington's foreign-policy establishment has been slow to reckon with. In the 30 months before Epic Fury commenced, he said, Iran-aligned militias carried out more than 350 attacks on U.S. service members and diplomats stationed in the Middle East.
Three hundred and fifty attacks. That is not a cold peace. That is a slow-motion war waged by proxies against American personnel, one that the previous posture of deterrence failed to prevent.
Cooper told the committee that the campaign changed that equation. He stated flatly that Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis "are all cut off from Iran's weapons and support." If that holds, it represents a structural shift in the Middle East's balance of power. Iran built its so-called Axis of Resistance over decades. Severing the supply lines, even temporarily, strips Tehran of its primary tool for projecting influence without direct confrontation.
The broader foreign-policy picture has shifted on multiple fronts. Trump brokered a three-day Russia-Ukraine ceasefire tied to Victory Day earlier this month, and that ceasefire appears to have gained traction since.
Cooper summed up the campaign's strategic effect in terms that left little room for ambiguity:
"Iran has a significantly degraded threat. They no longer threaten regional partners, or the United States, in ways that they were able to do before, across every domain."
Cooper's testimony was confident, but it left real questions on the table. He did not specify what "off-ramps" from the Hormuz standoff are under discussion, or who proposed them. He declined to reconcile his battlefield claims with the intelligence community's more cautious missile-retention estimates. And he offered no timeline for when the strait might return to normal commercial traffic.
The Washington Times reported in March that U.S. Central Command said more than 5,500 targets inside Iran had been struck, including more than 60 ships. Trump told Axios the war would end "soon" and said there was "practically nothing left" to target. Cooper's Thursday testimony was more measured, he acknowledged remaining threats even as he catalogued what had been destroyed.
The political dynamics around the Iran campaign have not been simple even within the Republican Party. But Cooper's testimony gave lawmakers, and the public, the most granular military accounting yet of what 38 days of sustained strikes actually accomplished.
Iran is weaker. Its proxies are isolated. Its navy is wrecked for a generation. Its mines are largely gone.
But "diminished" is not "eliminated." And the Strait of Hormuz doesn't care about press conferences, it cares about mines, missiles, and insurance premiums. The hard part of any military campaign is not the bombing. It's making sure the results stick after the last sortie lands.