The success of Operation Epic Fury, the U.S. air and missile campaign being waged jointly with Israel against Iran, depends on two things: precision weapons and accurate intelligence. Pentagon shortages of cutting-edge ordnance, which is expensive and inherently slower to replace than is commonly understood, are already causing concerns.

If this operation continues longer than the four weeks which President Donald Trump claims will be necessary to bring the Islamic Republic to its knees, Pentagon stockpiles will be in big trouble. The U.S. military is expending high-end missiles, including Terminal High Altitude Area Defense and Patriot interceptors, the Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile, plus ship-launched missiles such as the SM-2, SM-3, and SM-6 at an unprecedented pace. However, there’s also a real chance that the United States and Israel will run out of high-priority targets inside Iran before we expend all our modern missiles.

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Accurately assessing such complex matters requires superlative battle damage assessment. BDA, as it’s known in the trade, is fundamentally an intelligence problem. At root, BDA is about determining how much damage has been inflicted on a given target to answer the vital question: Do we need to hit this target again, or can we move on to new ones?

Answering such questions in real time during a war can be vexingly difficult. Accurate and timely BDA requires multiple sources of intelligence, carefully analyzed, while under time constraints. Also, the enemy gets a vote, as in all warfare, and we should expect that the Iranians are trying to fool our BDA efforts.

The U.S.-Israeli intelligence posture going into this war was formidable. As demonstrated during last June’s Operation Midnight Hammer, this joint force possessed a wealth of accurate targeting intelligence, based on espionage from overlapping sources. The decapitation strikes that began Operation Epic Fury........

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