The Defense Intelligence Agency chief told lawmakers that Iran still has an enormous stockpile of munitions, even after the constant bombardment throughout the war until the ceasefire.
“Iran retains thousands of missiles and one-way attack UAVs that can threaten U.S. and partner forces throughout the region, despite degradations to its capabilities from both attrition and expenditure,” Marine Lt. Gen. James Adams, told lawmakers last week.
He added that Iran’s conventional military remains hampered by aging equipment and limited training, likely pushing Tehran to lean even harder into asymmetric tactics. That includes the kind of low-cost drone threats now looming over the Strait of Hormuz, a reminder that Iran can still create outsized disruption through cheap tools.
Those tactics also include cyberattacks.
Iranians walk past a poster of Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei in a street in Tehran, Iran, April 22, 2026.
Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA/Shutterstock
“Before the current conflict, Iran largely refrained from cyberattacks against the United States, except for a handful of low level disruptive attacks,” Adams said. “However, on 11 March, we observed Iran’s first destructive cyberattack against a U.S. company since 2014, when Iranian cyberattacks conducted a data-deletion attack against a U.S. medical company. Iran almost certainly will continue using cyberattack.”
Adams was likely referring to when an Iranian-linked group hacked Stryker, a Michigan-based medical company. The day after the cyber-attack, Stryker pushed out a statement urging its tools were safe, including the Mako Surgical Robot, a robotic arm that assists in joint replacement surgeries and the LIFEPAK 35, a life support monitor/defibrillator.
Earlier this month, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned that Iran-linked cyber groups had targeted systems tied to local municipalities, as well as water and energy networks. In an advisory, the agency said organizations across multiple critical infrastructure sectors had suffered disruptions through “malicious interactions with the project files” and the manipulation of data.
Iran’s defense budget last year was $16.8 billion, which is about 4.2% of its GDP, according to Adams.
-ABC News’ Steve Beynon
