New-technology laser weaponry has been deployed against Iran as part of Operation Epic Fury, marking a combat milestone for directed-energy weapons that the Pentagon has spent decades developing. Neither the US Navy nor the Israeli military has confirmed or denied the use of lasers in the operation, but the Navy said at the beginning of February it had taken out four drones in a test of HELIOS, its shipboard laser system.
The operation, which began Feb. 28, has already rewritten the scorecard. During the first 72 hours of battle, 1,700 targets were struck by US forces. Over 200 of Iran's ballistic missile launchers have been destroyed, about half of what the nation possessed. Dozens more launchers have been made inoperable. Hundreds of missiles have been destroyed.
American forces have only suffered six casualties in four days of fighting.
Before a single shot was fired, the battlefield had already been shaped, the New York Post reported. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Dan Caine confirmed that Cyber Command hit "communications and sensor networks" across Iran to "disrupt, disorient and confuse the enemy," as he said at a press conference Monday.
That means Iran's ability to detect incoming strikes, coordinate defensive responses, and communicate orders to its own military was degraded before American and Israeli ordnance ever reached its targets. The regime cut off all internet access across the nation as soon as the US attack started, a telling admission that its own networks had been compromised.
Brent David Ziarnick, a former professor in the Space Force program at Johns Hopkins University and retired officer in the US Air Force, explained the mechanics of how this collaboration works:
Space Force figures out where the radar is, then work with Cyber Command to jam it.
On what Cyber Command actually does to enemy systems, Ziarnick was blunt:
Cyber Command will try to make [Iran's] radar not work. It will involve infiltrating the system and shutting it down … or taking it over. The software goes, and the computer turns into a brick.
This is what modern American power projection looks like. Not columns of tanks rolling across a desert, but satellites pinpointing launch sites, cyber operators bricking enemy radar, and laser systems swatting drones out of the sky off the coast of Iran.
The US Space Force was established in 2019. It drew its share of late-night jokes and dismissive commentary. Operation Epic Fury is the answer to every one of them.
The Space Force's role in this conflict has been centered in the US, operating satellites that track Iranian missile launches in real time. Ziarnick described the capability: satellites equipped "with infrared sensors for finding where rockets are being fired." Those satellites spot the missiles, pinpoint where the launchers are, and feed targeting data to interceptors and ground forces simultaneously.
They can spot the missiles and pinpoint where the launchers are. The missiles can be intercepted and destroyed [often with Patriot missiles]. Field forces get notified that an attack is coming, so they can go to shelters or bunkers.
Sam Eckholm, host of "Access Granted," described the layered architecture of the early warning system:
[The] system is built to ensure, if a missile is ever launched, the United States will be the first to know about it.
Together, the three layers form one of the most advanced early warning networks in the world.
Six casualties in four days, against a nation with one of the largest ballistic missile arsenals in the Middle East. That ratio does not happen by accident. It happens because the detection, jamming, and interception architecture worked exactly as designed.
Ziarnick summed up what the Space Force has become in a single line: "It's now a force to be reckoned with."
The cyber dimension of this conflict extends well beyond American operations. Israeli cyber spies claimed Tuesday that they spent years hacking nearly every traffic camera in Tehran, giving Israeli intelligence granular, real-time visibility into movement across the Iranian capital. That kind of persistent access does not materialize overnight. It is the product of years of patient intelligence work, the kind of operation that was running long before the first strike of Epic Fury.
Israel's intelligence apparatus, widely but unofficially credited with deep penetration of Iran's security infrastructure, appears to have provided a layer of situational awareness that complemented American space and cyber capabilities. Monitoring the movements of Iranian leaders, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ahead of the mission, required exactly this kind of embedded surveillance network.
The fact that precision strikes against missile silos, nuclear facilities, and Iranian leadership have been carried out with minimal losses speaks to the quality of the intelligence feeding the operation on both sides of this partnership.
Bree Fram, formerly in Space Force and now running for Congress in Virginia, framed the broader significance of how this war is being fought:
The fact that this isn't a mass formation of troops with rifles on the ground speaks to the fact that this force is built with extreme technology and the brain power to operate it.
That observation deserves serious attention. The United States destroyed half of Iran's ballistic missile launchers, struck 1,700 targets, and degraded an entire nation's command-and-control network while keeping American casualties to single digits. This is not the kind of war Americans have grown weary of. There are no convoy ambushes on desert highways, no decade-long counterinsurgency campaigns, no nation-building PowerPoint presentations.
This is what happens when a military invests in the right capabilities and deploys them with precision rather than mass. Satellites, cyber tools, directed-energy weapons, and intelligence penetration did what hundreds of thousands of ground troops could not have done as quickly or as cleanly.
Iran's regime understood the threat well enough to kill its own internet the moment the strikes began. That is not the action of a government confident in its defenses. It is the action of a government that knows its systems have been compromised and has no better option than pulling the plug.
The uprisings against the government by Iranian civilians in January already signaled the fragility of the regime's grip. Now its military infrastructure is being systematically dismantled from orbit, from cyberspace, and from ships positioned off its coast armed with weapons that travel at the speed of light.
As Ziarnick put it: "They can reach out and touch people."
Tehran is learning what that means.
