Recent commentary, published in Breaking Defense, argues that the United States won the “wrong” air war against Iran. At the center of that piece is the claim that America succeeded in a high-altitude “air war of destruction” over Iran but lost a low-altitude “air war of disruption” in and around the Strait of Hormuz. The conclusion offered is that the conflict validates the authors preferred construct of the “air littoral.”
The authors define the “air littoral” as “the airspace between ground forces and high-end fighters and bombers.” That is a made-up division of the air domain, not a new operational reality. High-end fighters and bombers can—and historically have—operated at very low altitude. Drones, cruise missiles, helicopters, loitering munitions, and short-range air defenses are genuine threats, but US doctrine already addresses them through counter-air, air and missile defense, base defense, counter-UAV operations, joint fires, electronic warfare, and integrated command and control.
That is the central flaw in the “air littoral” construct: it mistakes a physical portion of the battlespace for an organizing theory of warfare. Airpower is organized around missions and effects, not arbitrary bands of altitude. Renaming low-altitude airspace does not create a new domain, clarify responsibility, or produce a strategy — and risks creating confusion about roles and responsibilities.
US doctrine has long recognized that control of the air extends from the surface upward and that threats must be detected, tracked, engaged, and defeated across that entire vertical dimension. Defensive counterair includes active and passive measures to protect forces and critical assets from aircraft, missiles, and other airborne threats. Offensive counterair seeks to destroy or neutralize those threats before launch and to attack the systems that enable them. Joint air operations integrate surveillance, command and control, electronic warfare, suppression of enemy air defenses, interdiction, close air support, and air and missile defense. The terminology may evolve as technology changes, but the operational problem is neither new nor doctrinally orphaned.
Creating an “air littoral” label therefore adds little beyond drawing attention to a familiar and increasingly demanding set of challenges. Low-cost drones and cruise missiles can exploit terrain, clutter, small signatures, compressed engagement timelines, and unfavorable cost exchanges. Those realities require investment in persistent sensing, affordable interceptors, directed-energy and electronic-warfare options, mobile defenses, passive protection, resilient bases, and deeper magazines. They do not require the invention of a separate conceptual zone between ground forces and “high-end” aircraft.
Indeed, the construct risks making the problem harder by fragmenting the air domain into artificial compartments. Air threats do not respect conceptual boundaries — a drone flying at 300 feet, a cruise missile at 100 feet, a fighter at 30,000 feet, and a ballistic missile descending from space may all be part of the same coordinated attack. Defeating that attack demands a common operational picture, integrated authorities, layered defenses, and offensive action against launchers, command nodes, sensors, production sites, logistics, and supporting networks. Slicing the problem by altitude can obscure those relationships rather than illuminate them.
The “two air wars” narrative compounds the error. It divides Operation Epic Fury into a high-altitude war of destruction and a low-altitude war of disruption, then declares the latter more consequential. But destruction and disruption are effects, not altitude bands. Either can be produced from high or low altitude, from the surface, from the sea, through cyberspace, or from space-enabled systems. What matters is whether the effect advances the campaign’s military objectives and the political purpose it serves.
The Strait of Hormuz illustrates why the “air littoral” label is more confusing than useful.
Freedom of navigation is unquestionably vital, but maintaining it is an inherently joint and combined mission. Naval forces provide sea control, escort, mine countermeasures, maritime interception, and persistent presence. Air forces detect and strike launch networks, suppress missile and drone threats, protect friendly maritime forces, neutralize adversary maritime forces, conduct surveillance, and attack command-and-control nodes. The Army contributes ground-based air and missile defense and protection of bases and infrastructure. Space and cyber capabilities support detection, tracking, communications, targeting, and disruption. Diplomacy, economic pressure, intelligence, and commercial maritime coordination are also essential.
Calling the area above and around the Strait an “air littoral” does not clarify who commands these activities, which component owns particular missions, how authorities are delegated, or how capabilities should be integrated and resourced. It merely applies an invented label to a joint maritime-security problem. Worse, it then attributes the persistence of that joint problem to the failure of American airpower.
That framing creates a clear analytical double standard. The authors treat Iranian drones and missiles as evidence of effective “airpower” when those systems disrupt commercial shipping. Yet when the Strait remains contested, they do not assess the outcome as a shortfall in joint force operations, maritime strategy, mine warfare, base defense, or interagency integration. Instead, they assign the failure primarily to US airpower: Iranian capabilities are counted broadly as airpower when doing so supports the “air littoral” thesis, while American responsibility is defined narrowly around air forces when the desired outcome is not achieved.
Most dangerously, the logical endpoint of this argument creates a false choice between advanced airpower and defenses against low-cost threats, when the United States needs both.
It requires stealth, long-range precision strike, air superiority, electronic attack, and penetrating surveillance to defeat sophisticated adversary systems. It also requires affordable mass, mobile and layered defenses, counter-UAV capabilities, passive protection, and resilient logistics to withstand distributed attacks. These are complementary requirements. A force optimized only for the highest capable systems would be incomplete, but so would a force built primarily around defeating low-altitude drones while neglecting enemy fighters, bombers, missiles, integrated air defenses, and command networks.
A useful concept should improve decisions. It should clarify the nature of the threat, identify responsible organizations, establish command relationships, guide force design, and help commanders integrate capabilities to achieve defined objectives. The “air littoral” does none of these things. It does not identify a new domain, a new mission, or a gap that existing doctrine cannot accommodate. At most, it highlights the growing scale and affordability of low-altitude threats — an important observation, but not a basis for reorganizing how the United States thinks about airpower.
Rather than attempt to create new definitions, a better push would be to improve the execution of doctrine already in place. That means strengthening integrated air and missile defense; improving sensor coverage against small, slow, and low-observable targets; expanding electronic and non-kinetic defeat options; accelerating command-and-control decisions; protecting bases and ports; and attacking the enemy systems that generate the threat. It also means assigning responsibilities clearly across joint organizations and ensuring that air, land, sea, space, and cyber capabilities operate as a single campaign rather than as disconnected service efforts.
Operation Epic Fury may offer many lessons about force design, preparedness, maritime security, and the challenge of sustaining defenses against inexpensive weapons. Those lessons deserve careful examination.
But the core lesson is not that America fought the wrong “air war.” It is that military campaigns must be devised around clearly defined political objectives and the integration of effects across domains. Air, land, sea, space, cyber, intelligence, economic pressure, and diplomacy must be synchronized to produce the desired outcome. Dividing the air domain into fashionable subcategories does nothing to meet that requirement.
The “air littoral” is conceptual clutter where clarity is required. It applies a new label to airspace, threats, and missions that U.S. doctrine already addresses. It is no substitute for campaign design, joint integration, or a strategy planned to achieve clear political results.
Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, USAF (Ret.), is the Dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. He has been involved in planning and executing multiple major coalition air campaigns and was a Joint Task Force commander twice during his military career.