Operation Midnight Hammer – Impressive but Fragile

A year ago, Iran was enriching uranium to dangerous levels with more than 20,000 centrifuges; today the number of known high speed centrifuges enriching uranium in Iran is zero. 

Last year’s air and sea-launched attack crippled Iran’s most sensitive nuclear facilities, the deeply buried enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordow.  Seven B-2 Spirit stealth bombers delivered the 30,000-pound Massive Ordinance Penetrator munitions that damaged those facilities, the central component of more than 100 aircraft that participated in the strikes.  President Trump was absolutely correct when he posted last June that “there is not another military in the World that could have done this.” Understanding why this is the case is important if policymakers want the U.S. forces of tomorrow to maintain their unique ability to project power globally.

Aerial refueling hardly constitutes a frontier technology, yet U.S. capabilities are unmatched in this area.  The enabling diplomatic and alliance network the United States has built over the past decades is a big part of why.

The Air Force’s “Air Mobility Operations” doctrine document indicates that “access to theater airspace…throughout the world presents a major limiting factor to air mobility operations.”  It explains that “the importance of partner nation support to air mobility should not be underestimated,” specifically with respect to overflight, access, and basing, and emphasizes the importance of agreements, treaties, and status of forces agreements to the air mobility operations mission.  In a 2024 Congressional hearing, General Jacqueline D. Van Ovost, Commander of U.S. Transportation Command, elaborated on the array of agreements and work with allies necessary to deliver U.S. military equipment globally. 

The State Department’s Bureau of Political Military Affairs has responsibility for negotiating status of forces agreements, facilities access agreements, and transit and overflight arrangements with partners, with more than a dozen such negotiations underway at any given time.  The air bridge for Midnight Hammer involved pre-deployment of tankers to Spain, Germany, and other locations in Europe; overflight between Missouri and Iran could involve arrangements with a dozen partner governments – the Air Mobility Operations doctrine notes that building the support relationships needed could take years in each case. 

The AMC’s impressive ability to get the Midnight Hammer B-2s to their targets was built on a network of more than 100 status of forces agreements and military bases in more than 50 countries.  A generation of diplomacy built this network, which enables the Air Force to put gas stations in the sky anywhere the mission requires, globally.  No adversary military comes close to matching this network, an important explanation for why no other air force could have pulled off this mission.    

A second unique American advantage enabling Midnight Hammer was technological.  In addition to sophisticated precision targeting and accelerometer-powered fusing, the fact that the bombers were invisible, and therefore invulnerable, was fundamental to the mission’s success.  As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine emphasized last June, Iran’s air defenses “did not see us.” 

Israel’s prior attacks on Iran’s air defenses were undeniably important, but it is the B-2’s famous stealth technology that made it nearly invisible to radar.  Why do U.S. aircraft enjoy such an advantage in this technology?  The history of stealth provides just one example of U.S. military advantages based on a generation of U.S. research and development investment. 

Former Lockheed project director Ben Rich writes in “Skunk Works” that the equations of an obscure basic physics paper sparked a 1975 breakthrough in the stealth project, providing the key to calculating how radar would interact on contact with a plane.  A first prototype would fly less than five years later, and the B-2s that struck Iran last summer resulted from the same principles (while benefiting from significantly superior computer-aided design).  The equations were not American; Soviet academic Pyotr Ufimtsev was the paper’s author.  It is notable that the Soviet Academy of Science thought the work too basic to bother limiting its distribution.  The Air Force saw value to translating the paper into English, but translating Ufimtsev’s equations into an aircraft design required two more things.

The first was a strong defense technology ecosystem.  Rich’s team was a component of Lockheed, but it operated within the ocean of research money unleashed by the post-Sputnik 1958 National Defense Education Act, and the resulting California blend of academics and military contracts that became today’s Silicon Valley.  DARPA provided the funding to translate equations into a plane, demonstrating the bureaucratic agility to match DoD funding to good ideas quickly.  Many have attempted to mimic both DARPA and Silicon Valley, for the most part without success.

A second necessary factor to translate formulae into bombers was people.  Rich credits mathematician and radar engineer Denys Overholser for immediately recognizing the implications of Ufimtsev’s paper for stealth.  Of course the Soviet Union had many capable scientists, Ufimtsev included.  So why was Overholser, both the one to recognize the applicability of these equations and in a position to take action, in the United States and not somewhere else? 

Overholser and Rich were talented engineering graduates of the Universities of Oregon and California, both beneficiaries of the same surge in U.S. federal science funding.  U.S. research universities, still today the envy of the world, were nurtured from the 1950s with reliable (and unmatched) funding for basic research.  The resources attracted talented people, from the United States and beyond, and the people created the breakthroughs.  If the most appealing research universities were in St. Petersburg rather than California and Oregon, people like Overholser and Rich might have been working there, instead.

Neither capable scientists nor a desire for technological answers to military problems is unique to the United States, but in this case – and many others - the American research environment was able to connect the people and solutions.  Policymakers did not construct this ecosystem with stealth specifically in mind, but without those investments, structures, and decisions, stealth might have emerged somewhere else, or not at all.  The pilots of the seven B-2s that flew into Iran last June were sitting inside of the fruits of science investments made more than fifty years earlier.

Midnight Hammer’s success depended on many factors, but it would not have been possible without the unparalleled U.S. alliance network or the research ecosystem, both of which developed over decades.  Maintaining U.S. strength into the future requires taking care for the continued health of both.  The events of the second Trump Administration raise concern. 

U.S. alliances and diplomacy are in a state of challenge, from threats on Greenland to withdrawals from international organizations and staffing reductions at the State Department.  These challenges are not hypothetical but are already impacting the U.S. military’s ability to operate.  The same Spanish and British allies that hosted tankers in support of Midnight Hammer refused similar access to U.S. military a year later.

The picture with respect to science is at least as concerning.  The President’s FY2027 budget request cuts National Science Foundation funding by 55%.  NSF obligations currently stand at about 60% of their level at this point of the fiscal year from FY2021-2023.  U.S. universities, the engine for research and pipeline for scientists, are under attack.  Surveys of scientists in early 2026 showed a dramatic decrease in applications to come to U.S. institutions from overseas alongside a marked increase in U.S. scientists seeking to move abroad.  These trends represent a fundamental shift in this pillar of U.S. strength.

The unique U.S. capability to fly invisible bombers around the world to Iran was possible only because of sustained investments in an ecosystem of science and technology and a network of alliances and military partnerships that no adversary can come close to matching.  These investments were not made in pursuit of military dominance; rather, they have become fundamental to the very identity of post-war America.  If U.S. decisionmakers want future U.S. capabilities to remain at the same impressive level, they would be wise to preserve the parts of America that this power is rooted in.

Matthew Sharp served as an expert on Iran’s nuclear program at the Department of State and National Security Council.  He is currently a Senior Nuclear Fellow at MIT’s Center for Nuclear Security Policy.