Water and vitality infrastructure have grow to be one in every of Iran’s essential levers of deterrence in opposition to america. Iranian International Minister Aragchi just lately made it clear to Gulf states that if the U.S. navy renewed large-scale strikes on Iran, their crucial infrastructure can be struck. Iranian forces’ operational historical past over the previous six months confirmed the risk’s credibility.
Kuwait first reported harm close to a desalination plant early in Operation Epic Fury, when particles from an intercepted drone struck the Doha West facility. Then, on March 7 and eight, Iran claimed a desalination facility on Qeshm Island had been attacked, and in response, struck a desalination facility in Bahrain. On March 29, an Iranian strike on a Kuwaiti energy and desalination plant killed an Indian nationwide on the website. On April 3, an unnamed Kuwaiti desalination plant was struck.
Because the ceasefire melted down right into a peace-fire, water methods got here again onto the goal listing. On July 17 and 18, Iranian strikes hit a Kuwaiti desalination plant on consecutive days, and U.S. strikes hit an Iranian electrical energy and desalination facility in Hormozgan province. By July 21, Kuwait’s electrical energy ministry reported Iranian strikes on its energy and desalination vegetation for a fourth consecutive night time.
The latest set of Iranian assaults prompted emergency operations and appeals for electrical energy conservation, however accessible official and major-news reporting doesn’t point out that Kuwait imposed formal water rationing. This time, air defenses and different resilience measures seem to have held the road in opposition to worse outcomes. It’s unclear whether or not they may achieve this in opposition to a extra sustained Iranian strike marketing campaign — as an illustration, a day by day hearth fee of fifty drones plus ballistic and cruise missiles directed at particular plant complexes.
One of the best ways to maintain water methods on-line is to shoot drones and missiles down away from the asset. Ukraine affords a counterexample: now that Ukrainian air defenders have run wanting high-end surface-to-air missiles, Russia unleashes waves of ballistic missiles and the nightly toll in individuals and property is grim.
The scarcity of U.S. and allied interceptor reloads that makes Ukraine susceptible now would additionally apply to the Gulf States (and probably Israel too) if Iran launched a sustained assault centered on water amenities (and related energy vegetation). A current report estimates U.S. forces globally possess fewer than 1,000 Patriot missiles and roughly 250 THAAD interceptor rounds. The danger of allied air defenses going Winchester within the face of a days-long Iranian water infrastructure strike siege is thus believable.
Water as a Weapon of Battle
People have weaponized water in opposition to one another all through recorded historical past and possibly longer. Examples embody the Chinese language Nationalist Military’s resolution to dynamite Yellow River levees in 1938 to disclaim entry to advancing Japanese forces, Allied bombing of Germany’s Ruhr Valley dams in World Battle II, Allied strikes on a key North Korean irrigation dam in 1953 (per U.S. Air Pressure marketing campaign information), Ukraine’s strategic flooding of areas close to Kyiv in early 2022 to impede Russian invaders’ advance, and Russia’s 2023 destruction of the Nova Kakhovka Reservoir in southern Ukraine. However these examples usually emphasised utilizing water to destroy infrastructure and deny entry to key terrain.
Iran’s strategy has extra in widespread with Julius Caesar’s Siege of Uxellodunum in 51 BC. In that marketing campaign, Caesar and his legions subjugated a Gallic garrison by exerting hearth management over entry to a close-by river after which digging a tunnel to divert the spring that sustained the insurgent fortress in what’s now France, as recounted in the eighth guide of Caesar’s Gallic Battle.
The distinction in as we speak’s period of more and more democratized long-range strike is that chopping off water provides doesn’t require Caesar’s legions, siege works, and underground galleries. A comparatively small variety of drones, every costing about as a lot as a typical new American pickup truck ($50,000 to $75,000, per the BBC), can shut down a water system supplying a whole lot of 1000’s, and even hundreds of thousands of individuals. Destruction could be achieved from distances of a whole lot of kilometers, maybe extra. Ballistic and cruise missiles now accessible to greater than two dozen state and non-state actors globally additional amplify the risk even additional.
Counting Right down to Day Zero
Water is exclusive as an instrument of coercion. Beneath even the worst-case eventualities for strikes on oil and gasoline manufacturing and export amenities, the Gulf States could be buffered for months by ample monetary reserves. Meals is comparable: Denial campaigns sometimes require weeks or months to start having full impact. For water, alternatively, disruptions may set off a significant disaster inside days, particularly if an adversary has totally mapped the water system and combines a number of rounds of kinetic strikes with cyber-attacks, each capabilities that Iran credibly possesses.
As soon as a desalination plant is knocked offline via direct bodily harm, or not directly via lack of electrical energy, water storage, pipeline connectivity, and secondary groundwater manufacturing belongings grow to be crucial. Publicly reported figures allow solely an order-of-magnitude evaluation. Qatar’s prepared storage seems per lower than one week of protection at common demand, whereas Saudi and Kuwaiti disclosures don’t allow a dependable countrywide outage-endurance calculation. Precise protection would rely upon season, usable tank quantity, community connectivity, emergency rationing, substitute groundwater, and concurrent harm to energy and distribution methods.
Injecting extra desalinated water into aquifers for storage and later restoration affords an extra resilience possibility. Abu Dhabi has constructed the Liwa/Al-Dhafra aquifer storage and restoration system, which might reportedly retailer 90 days of provide for town. Qatar has accomplished feasibility and pilot work for such a system, and the authors anticipate the Iran Battle will speed up implementation efforts.
Riyadh and Kuwait Metropolis have present groundwater manufacturing belongings that would assist preserve a portion of municipal water provides within the occasion seawater desalination amenities have been broken or destroyed. Kuwait’s groundwater useful resource is brackish and would require remedy to be totally potable, making its secondary water provide susceptible to strikes that meaningfully cut back the nation’s electrical energy provide. Saudi Arabia additionally has the choice of shifting desalinated water provides by pipeline to compensate for disruptions. It doesn’t have cross-peninsula connectivity however can reroute water on each the Gulf and Pink Sea coasts via a water pipeline community that’s greater than 14,000 km lengthy.
Resilience measures additionally don’t handle the safety of wastewater remedy amenities, which, if attacked, may set off main sanitation and public well being crises. Demonstrated threat of impairment to water provides, particularly via repeated assaults, would have large detrimental impacts on the nationwide reputations and funding attractiveness that Gulf leaderships have labored for many years to construct.
Bodily Interdependence Complicates Worldwide Legislation Evaluation
Article 54(2) of Extra Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions prohibits attacking consuming water installations when the assaults are supposed to disclaim civilians the water’s sustenance worth. The particular prohibition doesn’t apply when a water provide system is used solely to maintain enemy armed forces or in direct help of navy motion. However even the place the exception applies, no motion could also be anticipated to disclaim civilians meals and water in order to trigger hunger or pressure their motion. Guidelines governing distinction, precautions, and proportionality proceed to use even in these instances. Assessing these conditions requires a factually advanced, circumstances-dependent evaluation and is tough to determine from strike patterns alone.
Article 54 additionally lets a state destroy water infrastructure by itself territory below crucial navy necessity. An instance of an motion which may fall below the clause comes from Ukraine breaching a dam on the Irpin River to impede the motion of Russian invaders approaching Kyiv from the north in 2022.
Bodily realities make authorized assessments very advanced, as many legacy Gulf thermal desalination vegetation are built-in with energy stations. In the meantime, a really giant reverse osmosis facility can require 100 megawatts or extra of energy, in keeping with figures for Abu Dhabi’s Taweelah reverse-osmosis plant and revealed engineering analyses of desalination vitality demand: as a lot electrical energy as a hyperscale knowledge heart or a small metropolis. A strike on electrical infrastructure thus will typically disable water manufacturing as a secondary impact.
Water provide restoration requires repairing the related energy plant, developing another grid connection, or amassing ample moveable technology in a well timed method to restart and function an asset which may require 100 MW or extra of energy is an outstanding enterprise. Built-in thermal desalination vegetation seemingly wouldn’t have the ability to use momentary electrical energy provides alone as a result of they rely upon steam from the ability plant. Restoration operations would require international procurement of generators, mills, transformers, switchgear, and educated personnel in a market that’s already severely strained by datacenter-related calls for and broader electrical energy system expansions. And rebuilders must accomplish this feat earlier than water storage and substitute provides have been exhausted — seemingly a matter of days to weeks — to keep away from the worst of the impacts described above.
Conclusions
A March 2026 Battle on the Rocks evaluation co-written by one in every of this text’s authors set forth seven resilience-focused steps: hardening, stocking spare crucial parts, onsite energy technology (gasoline, wind/photo voltaic, nuclear), plant dispersion, interconnected pipelines, expanded water storage, and devoted air defenses. To this, we add an eighth crucial step: widespread civil protection coaching to bolster societal readiness for infrastructure disruptions and purchase time for governmental responses.
Cheaper, extra quite a few drone interceptors are a should — a niche that Ukrainian protection tech suppliers may seemingly fill at scale with injections of Gulf State capital into their manufacturing bases. It’s also seemingly that Saudi Arabia will contemplate a “hydrovascular grid” technique that imitates the East-West Oil Pipeline and creates true connectivity between the Gulf and Pink Sea Coasts that may enable water to be shuttled in case of serious assaults on desalination vegetation on both coast.
Capital and building capability are already being mobilized to construct vitality bypass choices across the Strait of Hormuz. Given water safety’s existential significance, it’s foreseeable that Saudi Arabia and different GCC nations may even add expansions of water pipeline networks, storage, and backup wellfields to their resilience capital funding ledgers. These measures might be costly and sure require public-private partnerships to fund them, however are far cheaper than dropping entry to water.
We’re again to the concentrating on practices of 51 B.C. however with the damaging expertise of 2026. Human beings are adaptation and survival machines, and nations within the line of fireside will discover methods to safe water provides, however the highway to that extra resilient endpoint might be bumpy. Simply as it’s within the American nationwide curiosity to work intently with our allies to stop Blackout Warfare in opposition to electrical energy grids, so too is it very important that we defend ahead to stop Desiccation Warfare in opposition to crucial water provides.
Gabriel Collins is the Baker Botts fellow in Vitality and Environmental Regulatory Affairs on the Heart for Vitality Research at Rice College’s Baker Institute for Public Coverage. He leads the Heart for Vitality Research Program on Vitality & Geopolitics in Eurasia and is an energy-water nexus thrust chief on the Rice WaTER Institute. He additionally runs The Sinews of Civilization Substack.
Morgan D. Bazilian is the director of the Payne Institute for Public Coverage and a professor on the Colorado Faculty of Mines. Beforehand, he was lead vitality specialist on the World Financial institution and has over twenty years of expertise in vitality safety, pure assets, nationwide safety, vitality poverty, and worldwide affairs.
The views expressed on this piece are completely the authors’ private assessments and don’t replicate any place of the Colorado Faculty of Mines or Rice College.
Picture: James Grellier by way of Wikimedia Commons
