By March 5, 2026 — one week into Operation Epic Fury — Iran had fired more than 500 ballistic and naval missiles and approximately 2,000 one-way attack drones in its counter-offensive, designated Operation True Promise IV. A military source told Fars News Agency the cumulative figures on Day 5, revealing a scale of retaliation that far exceeded Iran's previous operations against Israel and dwarfed the earlier True Promise operations of 2024.
The IRGC Aerospace Force, which controlled all ballistic missile and drone operations, executed its pre-planned retaliation within hours of the coalition's opening strikes on February 28. The targets were distributed across two broad categories: approximately 40 percent directed at Israel, including both military installations and population centers triggering air raid sirens across the country, and approximately 60 percent directed at US military facilities and allied targets across the Gulf — including bases in Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The US Embassy in Riyadh was struck by drones on March 3. Al-Udeid Airbase in Qatar, a critical CENTCOM hub, was hit on March 4.
The sheer volume of Iran's response challenged the missile defense architecture across the region. While US and Israeli air defenses intercepted a significant percentage of incoming projectiles, the saturation tactics — launching waves of cheaper drones alongside faster ballistic missiles — exploited the finite capacity of Patriot, THAAD, Iron Dome, and Arrow systems. Analysts noted that the cost asymmetry was punishing: Iran's drones cost thousands of dollars each while the interceptors cost millions, creating an unsustainable economic equation for the defenders.
Iran's counter-strikes also extended the war far beyond Iran's borders, dragging Gulf states that hosted US military bases into a conflict they had not chosen. The attacks on Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Jordan — all of which had urged diplomatic resolution — demonstrated how Operation Epic Fury's architects had underestimated Iran's capacity and willingness to regionalize the conflict. The scale of True Promise IV made clear that the administration's pre-war assertions about quickly degrading Iran's offensive capability had been catastrophically wrong.