Has Iran Broken America’s Communications Network in the Middle East?
By Matthew Parish
Sunday 25 October 2026
A recent comment by the international lawyer Philippe Sands asserted that Iran has destroyed the United States' communications network in the Middle East. Here we examine the grounds for that assertion.
Wars are increasingly fought twice. There is the war that takes place in the physical world, involving missiles, aircraft, ruined buildings and dead soldiers; and there is the second war, fought over the interpretation of what has happened. In the contemporary conflict between Iran and the United States, the second war is particularly important because neither side has much incentive to provide an accurate account of the first. Washington wishes to demonstrate overwhelming technological superiority. Tehran wishes to demonstrate that American power in the Middle East is fragile, expensive and vulnerable. Somewhere between these competing narratives lies an extraordinary development that deserves considerably more attention than it has received: Iran appears to have inflicted serious damage upon parts of the communications, surveillance and command infrastructure upon which American military supremacy in the Middle East depends.
The qualification in that sentence is important. Iran has not, on the evidence presently available, destroyed the American communications network in the Middle East. Indeed there is no single American communications network that might conveniently be destroyed. The United States military operates an immensely complicated architecture of satellites, terrestrial communications, fibre-optic connections, radio systems, radar installations, airborne command platforms and redundant military and civilian networks. Much of this infrastructure is classified, and redundancy is one of the principles upon which modern American military communications are constructed. Nevertheless, there is now compelling open-source evidence that Iran has discovered something potentially more significant than a spectacular temporary communications blackout. It has demonstrated that some of the physical nodes upon which American information superiority depends can be found, targeted and destroyed.
Satellite imagery analysed by major Western news organisations has revealed Iranian strikes against communications and radar facilities across a remarkable geographical area. The New York Times identified damage to structures associated with communications and radar systems at at least seven American military locations, including facilities in Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and elsewhere. Amongst the equipment identified were satellite communications terminals, dishes and radomes associated with long-distance military communications and missile detection. The Washington Post subsequently concluded from satellite imagery that Iranian attacks had damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment at American military sites, including radar, communications and air-defence assets. BBC Verify separately identified damage at twenty American military sites across eight Middle Eastern countries.
These numbers must be treated carefully. A destroyed radome is not the same thing as the destruction of a communications network, just as blowing up a railway station does not mean that one has destroyed a country’s railway system. Military communications are deliberately constructed with alternative routes, reserve capacity and overlapping technologies. A commander who loses one satellite terminal may communicate through another; information can be relayed through aircraft, satellites or another headquarters; and damaged equipment can eventually be replaced. The United States possesses greater technological, financial and logistical resources for doing these things than virtually any other military power on Earth.
Yet this observation can obscure the strategic importance of what Iran has apparently achieved. The traditional American method of warfare depends to an extraordinary degree upon information. The United States does not merely possess aircraft, missiles and warships. Its principal advantage is that these things are incorporated into an enormous system of intelligence gathering, surveillance, target acquisition, communications and command. A radar detects something; computers classify it; information is transmitted to commanders; satellites and aircraft contribute further intelligence; a decision is made; and another component of the system attacks the target. American military power is therefore not simply a collection of weapons. It is a network.
Iran appears to have understood this. Instead of attempting the hopeless exercise of matching the United States aircraft for aircraft and warship for warship, it has concentrated part of its retaliatory effort upon the comparatively small number of fixed installations through which the American regional military system sees, communicates and coordinates. This is a rational strategy for a substantially weaker power. One does not need to destroy the entire nervous system of a giant if one can repeatedly strike its exposed nerve endings.
The former commander of US Central Command, General Joseph Votel, made essentially this point in July when assessing the available open-source evidence. He described the damage to America’s regional basing network as “widespread” and “operationally relevant”, identifying the destruction of radars, satellite communications equipment, air-defence assets, fuel facilities and other infrastructure. His more important observation was strategic: the very system of forward bases that has enabled the United States to project enormous power throughout the Middle East has simultaneously created a collection of fixed targets against which Iran can retaliate.
This exposes a paradox in twenty-first-century military technology. Sophisticated military systems are extraordinarily powerful but they are not necessarily robust. A cheap drone need not be technologically comparable to the radar installation it destroys. A ballistic missile need not contain anything remotely approaching the sophistication of a satellite communications terminal. The attacker merely has to place sufficient explosive material in approximately the right place. The economic asymmetry can therefore become uncomfortable. An inexpensive attacking system may oblige its adversary to defend hundreds of enormously expensive installations simultaneously.
The problem becomes still more acute when air-defence systems themselves form part of the target set. BBC Verify reported Iranian damage to advanced American anti-ballistic missile systems, including THAAD equipment, while other reporting has identified damage to Patriot installations and associated radar systems. Once defensive sensors are damaged or exhausted, subsequent attacks may become easier. Communications, radar and air defence are consequently not separate subjects. They form parts of the same informational ecosystem upon which the protection of American bases depends.
There is nevertheless an important distinction between degradation and paralysis. Nothing in the publicly available evidence establishes that CENTCOM has lost the ability to command its forces, that American aircraft cannot communicate with their bases, that US naval forces cannot exchange information or that Washington has been rendered substantially blind across the Middle East. American military operations themselves demonstrate that communications capacity remains considerable. The proposition that Iran has “taken down” the American communications network therefore goes considerably beyond what the evidence supports.
What Iran may have done is more subtle. It may have reduced redundancy.
Redundancy is one of those unglamorous concepts upon which advanced civilisation depends. If an organisation possesses five ways of accomplishing something and loses three of them, everything may continue to work perfectly. To an outside observer nothing appears to have changed. Yet the system has become vastly more vulnerable because the margin for subsequent failure has diminished. Destroying a satellite terminal that has an alternative does not prevent communications. Destroying several terminals, damaging radar installations, attacking command aircraft and repeatedly forcing traffic onto alternative systems may gradually turn a resilient network into a brittle one. The decisive question is therefore not merely whether American forces can communicate today, but how much spare capacity remains after months of attrition.
We cannot answer that question from public information. Nor should we expect the Pentagon to answer it for us. Revealing which communications systems remain functional, which have been damaged and where redundancy has become thin would provide Iran with an extraordinarily useful targeting list. Operational secrecy consequently produces an epistemological problem. The more militarily important the damage, the less likely governments are to describe it accurately while hostilities continue. Satellite imagery can tell us that buildings and equipment have disappeared. It cannot necessarily tell us what traffic was passing through them, what alternative systems replaced them or how badly their loss has affected military operations.
This uncertainty explains why extravagant claims from either side should be regarded sceptically. Iranian assertions that American military power has been crippled serve an obvious propaganda purpose. American attempts to minimise the consequences of Iranian attacks would serve an equally obvious strategic purpose. Neither observation entails that either side is necessarily lying. Governments at war select truths. They emphasise the facts that reinforce deterrence and conceal those that expose vulnerability.
There is another communications system at risk, and here the distinction becomes especially important. Iran is now openly threatening the physical infrastructure of the civilian internet in the Persian Gulf. Iranian officials have described contingency plans to attack submarine communications cables if renewed American and Israeli attacks take place. Reuters reported on 23 October that two senior Iranian security officials said detailed plans had been prepared, including the possibility of obstructing repairs so that disruption persisted. An IRGC official has specifically referred to seven major cables beneath the Strait of Hormuz.
This is not evidence that Iran has already destroyed those cables. On the contrary, it is evidence that Tehran considers them a weapon it has not yet fully used. That distinction matters enormously. The current story is therefore not that Iran has already severed the American communications system in the Middle East. It is that Iran has attacked elements of American military communications infrastructure while simultaneously threatening escalation into the civilian digital infrastructure upon which Gulf economies, American companies and, indirectly, American military operations also depend.
Even here the apocalyptic interpretation should be resisted. The Strait of Hormuz is an important telecommunications corridor, but estimates cited by Reuters suggest that less than one per cent of global international bandwidth passes through it. The global internet would not disappear if those cables were cut. Traffic would be rerouted. Yet regional consequences might be severe: congestion, slower communications, interruptions to cloud services and difficulties for financial transactions could follow simultaneous cable failures, particularly if wartime conditions prevented rapid repair.
This represents a characteristically Iranian conception of asymmetric warfare. Iran cannot realistically destroy the global internet, defeat the United States in a conventional technological competition or eliminate America’s satellite constellation. It does not need to. Its strategic objective is instead to make the continued exercise of American power progressively more expensive, uncertain and politically uncomfortable. A missile striking a communications terminal in Qatar is one manifestation of that strategy. A threat against an underwater cable is another. Attacks upon air-defence radar, logistics facilities and cloud infrastructure belong to the same family of ideas.
The underlying struggle is therefore about resilience rather than simple destructive power. America remains incomparably stronger than Iran in conventional military terms. Yet great powers have always faced a peculiar problem: they possess more things that must be protected. The United States has bases, headquarters, satellites, communications facilities, data centres, aircraft, fuel depots and alliances distributed across an enormous region. Iran needs only to demonstrate that enough of these assets are vulnerable to make their defence prohibitively complicated.
There is a historical irony here. The communications revolution was supposed to make American military power increasingly omniscient. Satellites, networked sensors and instantaneous communications would produce a battlefield in which American commanders knew almost everything while their adversaries struggled in informational darkness. But every network creates nodes, every node creates dependencies and every dependency creates a target. The more elaborate the nervous system, the greater the consequences when individual nerves are severed.
Iran has therefore probably not severely damaged “the US communications network in the Middle East” if by that phrase we mean that American forces can no longer communicate effectively across the region. There is presently insufficient evidence for such a conclusion. But if the proposition is reformulated — has Iran inflicted serious damage upon important components of the communications, surveillance and command architecture supporting American military power in the Middle East? — then the evidence increasingly suggests that the answer is yes.
That distinction should not comfort Washington very much. The strategic revelation is not that the American military has suddenly become deaf and blind. It is that Iran has demonstrated an ability to identify and strike parts of the machinery by which America hears and sees. It has done so across several countries and against installations that once appeared protected by technological superiority and formidable air defences.
The most consequential result of the war may therefore be psychological as much as physical. For decades, American bases in the Gulf represented permanence. Their radomes, satellite dishes, runways and command centres were the architectural expression of an assumption that the United States could operate throughout the region from secure sanctuaries while projecting violence elsewhere. Iran has challenged that assumption. The sanctuaries themselves have become part of the battlefield.
Communications continue. American military power remains formidable. Iran herself has suffered immense destruction. Yet a strategic lesson has nevertheless emerged from the smoke surrounding damaged radar stations and satellite terminals: information superiority depends upon physical objects, and physical objects can be destroyed.
The United States has not lost its Middle Eastern nervous system. Iran has merely demonstrated that the nerves can be reached. In a prolonged war of attrition between profoundly unequal powers, that may ultimately prove the more important discovery.
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Philippe Sands has been contacted with an opportunity to respond.
