When Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth testified before the Senate last Tuesday, he came ready to defend his claim of a “historic and overwhelming victory” over Iran. His scorecard was familiar: Iran’s navy sunk, its missiles buried, its defense industrial base “almost completely destroyed,” and its military “set back not just years, but likely decades.”
Senators kept asking the obvious question: If Iran’s military had suffered such a decisive defeat, why was it still firing on US bases and commercial shipping? Whereas Hegseth measured success by the destruction accomplished, the senators saw the disruption that continued.
That gap is the puzzle at the heart of Operation Epic Fury. Traditional airpower won the air war everyone expected it to win. It destroyed much of Iran’s air force, rolled back air defenses, achieving air superiority in the high skies and striking at will. And still, for months, that air superiority could not keep the Strait of Hormuz open. Iranian drones and missiles have struck more than thirty commercial vessels, keeping both warships and merchant shipping out of a waterway the United States dominated from high above. That is the paradox for current airpower theory to explain.
Retired Lt. Gen. David Deptula, responding in these pages to our July 2 commentary, never answers that question. He changes it—from why winning the war of destruction did not reopen the Strait to whether the “air littoral” is a legitimate label. His objection comes down to one claim: that nothing about Operation Epic Fury requires rethinking the Air Force’s concepts of airpower. But the war says otherwise.
The concept he dismisses—the air littoral—answers the question he avoids. The United States controlled the high altitudes over Iran, but that control did not extend downward—and the two are not the same fight. Traditionally, winning air superiority has been a contest of destruction—find the enemy’s aircraft, radars, and air defenses, destroy or degrade them, and the integrated system collapses.
The contest for the air littoral follows a different logic. There is no integrated system to collapse, only cheap, dispersed drones and missiles in the thousands. That is why the air war over Iran never reopened the Strait: In limiting its concept of air superiority to the blue skies, the Air Force abdicated its responsibility to control the air domain for the joint force.
Instead of contending with this new operational reality, Deptula attempts to argue it away. “Renaming low-altitude airspace does not create a new domain,” Deptula writes. US doctrine already recognizes that control of the air extends “from the surface upward,” and that threats at every altitude may belong to a single coordinated attack, he notes. The air littoral, he concludes, is a “made-up division of the air domain.”
But he mistakes the concept of the air littoral for an altitude. Whether the air littoral is a separate domain is beside the point, and not an argument we made. When we introduced the term in Parameters in 2021, we defined it, drawing on the accepted maritime littoral concept, as the airspace that “must be controlled to support land and maritime operations and can be supported and defended from the air and/or the surface.” Like the maritime littoral, the air littoral does not create a new domain but names the seam where domains interact to produce distinctive operational dynamics. Deptula can reject the terminology, but he cannot ignore the facts—the seam is real.
This is more than a semantic debate. Ideas shape how services think about their primary domain, what they plan for, and ultimately what they buy. Traditional airpower built its concept of control on responsive presence—aircraft cannot permanently stay overhead, so airpower substitutes speed for persistence. From that follows a core tenet of doctrine: air superiority is temporary and local, achieved where and when it is needed rather than maintained everywhere at once. But that holds only if its advocates are right about where and when air superiority will be contested.
The war showed the consequences of being wrong. Cheap, expendable systems have moved the fight downward, into the air littoral. By treating air superiority there as unachievable, or as someone else’s problem, the Air Force failed to build and field the capabilities modern air superiority requires. Traditional airpower was right about the nature of control and wrong about its location. It prepared for the contest it knew how to win rather than the one that decides the campaign.
Today’s Air Force is beginning to recognize that seam, even if Deptula does not. Its 2025 Doctrine Advisory, Control Below the Coordinating Altitude, acknowledges that operations in low-altitude airspace present distinctive command, control, and coordination challenges. That is an important step, but Operation Epic Fury suggests that this framing understates the problem. Inexpensive drones, precision-guided munitions, advanced sensors, and increasingly autonomous systems have dramatically increased the density and persistence of military activity in that seam, and the challenge of controlling it.
The Strait of Hormuz is where that significance became undeniable. Deptula calls its closure a “joint maritime-security problem,” and says we err by attributing it to “the failure of American airpower.” The campaign was unquestionably joint. But that does not answer the central question: Did the joint force gain sufficient control of the air to restore freedom of navigation through the Strait against Iran’s drones and missiles? The answer is no—and by the Air Force’s own definition.
Air superiority is meant to enable operations across the entire joint force—not just the aircraft overhead. The continuing threat from Iranian drones and missiles kept the US Navy from escorting commercial shipping through the Strait. By that standard, the joint force lacked air superiority exactly where and when it needed it most. Whatever else the campaign was, it was also an airpower failure.
This is not the first time the traditional view of airpower has misjudged this problem. Six years ago in these pages, Deptula expected a campaign “modeled after the decisive take-down of Iraq” in 1991 to deliver “the collapse of Iran’s economy, negation of their military, denuding of their nuclear programs, and choking of their regional influence.” All of it, he promised, would come “in short order without any US boots on the ground,” so long as the US Air Force has the right mix of fifth-generation aircraft. Two months before the start of Operation Epic Fury, he wrote in Air & Space Power Journal that Israel’s 2025 campaign had “dispelled the supposition that air denial strategies render air superiority obsolete.” If he was right, Iran’s drones and missiles should not have been able to close the Strait. Yet they did.
There was no quick, decisive victory. Iran can reconstitute its nuclear program, with most of its highly enriched uranium believed to remain underground. Iran held on to as much as 70 percent of its missile stockpile. And air denial closed the Strait for months. It barely and briefly reopened after Washington accepted a framework agreement on Iran’s terms, and it is now effectively closed again. This was not for want of fifth-generation aircraft or flawed execution, but because the assumptions underlying traditional airpower ignored the seam where this war was decided.
Deptula charges us with applying a “double standard,” crediting Iran’s successes to airpower while blaming America’s failures on airpower as well. But our standard is the same for both sides. Airpower includes the drones and missiles Iran used to disrupt shipping, just as it includes the capabilities the joint force lacked to prevent that disruption. Whether those capabilities belong to the Air Force, Navy, or another service is beside the point. When US forces, including drones and Shahed clones, destroy Iranian aircraft, missile launchers, or air defenses, those are rightly celebrated as airpower successes. The same standard applies when Iranian missiles and drones deny freedom of action to the joint force.
Deptula titled his commentary “Altitude is not strategy.” On that point, he is right; we never argued otherwise. We named a seam US adversaries are exploiting—and will keep exploiting until it is closed. For most of airpower’s history, control of the air meant defeating enemy aircraft and integrated air defenses. The Air Force remains unmatched in that traditional contest. Today, however, control is also decided in the air littoral,where masses of mobile, low-cost, unmanned, and increasingly autonomous systems—modern airpower—can deny the joint force freedom of maneuver.
Operation Epic Fury forced this challenge into the open, and Deptula’s framework leaves it unanswered. To reject the air littoral, and the value of air denial, Deptula must explain how the US military can dominate the blue skies over Tehran and still lose the airspace that mattered most. The air littoral is the concept that explains that puzzle. Neither the defense secretary’s scorecard nor Deptula’s theory can account for that paradox. Both rest on a conception of airpower from a past era, when winning the blue skies was enough. For a force that has dominated the blue skies for generations, the hardest lesson may be that the decisive contest has moved below.
Maximilian K. Bremer, a retired US Air Force colonel, is a nonresident fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center and head of Mission Engineering and Strategy for Atropos Group.
Kelly Grieco is a senior fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center and adjunct professor in the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University.
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