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Water and energy infrastructure have become one of Iran’s main levers of deterrence against the United States. Iranian Foreign Minister Aragchi recently made it clear to Gulf states that if the U.S. military renewed large-scale strikes on Iran, their critical infrastructure would be struck. Iranian forces’ operational history over the past six months confirmed the threat’s credibility.
Kuwait first reported damage near a desalination plant early in Operation Epic Fury, when debris from an intercepted drone struck the Doha West facility. Then, on March 7 and 8, 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 power and desalination plant killed an Indian national at the site. On April 3, an unnamed Kuwaiti desalination plant was struck.
As the ceasefire melted down into a peace-fire, water systems came back onto the target list. On July 17 and 18, Iranian strikes hit a Kuwaiti desalination plant on consecutive days, and U.S. strikes hit an Iranian electricity and desalination facility in Hormozgan province. By July 21, Kuwait’s electricity ministry reported Iranian strikes on its power and desalination plants for a fourth consecutive night.
The most recent set of Iranian attacks prompted emergency operations and appeals for electricity conservation, but available official and major-news reporting does not indicate that Kuwait imposed formal water rationing. This time, air defenses and other resilience measures appear to have held the line against worse outcomes. It is unclear whether they could do so against a more sustained Iranian strike campaign — for instance, a daily fire rate of 50 drones plus ballistic and cruise missiles directed at specific plant complexes.
The best way to keep water systems online is to shoot drones and missiles down away from the asset. Ukraine offers a counterexample: now that Ukrainian air defenders have run short of high-end surface-to-air missiles, Russia unleashes waves of ballistic missiles and the nightly toll in people and property is grim.
The shortage of U.S. and allied interceptor reloads that makes Ukraine vulnerable now would also apply to the Gulf States (and potentially Israel too) if Iran launched a sustained assault focused on water facilities (and associated power plants). A recent report estimates U.S. forces globally possess fewer than 1,000 Patriot missiles and approximately 250 THAAD interceptor rounds. The risk of allied air defenses going Winchester in the face of a days-long Iranian water infrastructure strike siege is thus plausible.
Humans have weaponized water against each other throughout recorded history and probably longer. Examples include the Chinese Nationalist Army’s decision to dynamite Yellow River levees in 1938 to deny access to advancing Japanese forces, Allied bombing of Germany’s Ruhr Valley dams in World War II, Allied strikes on a key North Korean irrigation dam in 1953 (per U.S. Air Force campaign records), Ukraine’s strategic flooding of areas near Kyiv in early 2022 to impede Russian invaders’ advance, and Russia’s 2023 destruction of the Nova Kakhovka Reservoir in southern Ukraine. But these examples generally emphasized using water to destroy infrastructure and deny access to key terrain.
Iran’s approach has more in common with Julius Caesar’s Siege of Uxellodunum in 51 BC. In that campaign, Caesar and his legions subjugated a Gallic garrison by exerting fire control over access to a nearby river and then digging a tunnel to divert the spring that sustained the rebel fortress in what is now France, as recounted in the eighth book of Caesar’s Gallic War.
The difference in today’s era of increasingly democratized long-range strike is that cutting off water supplies does not require Caesar’s legions, siege works, and underground galleries. A relatively small number of drones, each costing about as much as a typical new American pickup truck ($50,000 to $75,000, per the BBC), can shut down a water system supplying hundreds of thousands, or even millions of people. Destruction can be accomplished from distances of hundreds of kilometers, perhaps more. Ballistic and cruise missiles now available to more than two dozen state and non-state actors globally further amplify the threat even further.
Water is unique as an instrument of coercion. Under even the worst-case scenarios for strikes on oil and gas production and export facilities, the Gulf States can be buffered for months by ample financial reserves. Food is similar: Denial campaigns typically require weeks or months to begin having full effect. For water, on the other hand, disruptions could trigger a major crisis within days, especially if an adversary has thoroughly mapped the water system and combines multiple rounds of kinetic strikes with cyber-attacks, both capabilities that Iran credibly possesses.
Once a desalination plant is knocked offline through direct physical damage, or indirectly through loss of electrical power, water storage, pipeline connectivity, and secondary groundwater production assets become critical. Publicly reported figures permit only an order-of-magnitude assessment. Qatar’s ready storage appears consistent with less than one week of coverage at average demand, while Saudi and Kuwaiti disclosures do not permit a reliable countrywide outage-endurance calculation. Actual coverage would depend on season, usable tank volume, network connectivity, emergency rationing, substitute groundwater, and concurrent damage to power and distribution systems.
Injecting excess desalinated water into aquifers for storage and later recovery offers an additional resilience option. Abu Dhabi has built the Liwa/Al-Dhafra aquifer storage and recovery system, which can reportedly store 90 days of supply for the city. Qatar has completed feasibility and pilot work for such a system, and the authors expect the Iran War will accelerate implementation efforts.
Riyadh and Kuwait City have existing groundwater production assets that could help maintain a portion of municipal water supplies in the event seawater desalination facilities were damaged or destroyed. Kuwait’s groundwater resource is brackish and would require treatment to be fully potable, making its secondary water supply vulnerable to strikes that meaningfully reduce the country’s electricity supply. Saudi Arabia also has the option of shifting desalinated water supplies by pipeline to compensate for disruptions. It does not have cross-peninsula connectivity but can reroute water on both the Gulf and Red Sea coasts through a water pipeline network that is more than 14,000 km long.
Resilience measures also do not address the security of wastewater treatment facilities, which, if attacked, could trigger major sanitation and public health crises. Demonstrated risk of impairment to water supplies, especially through repeated attacks, would have tremendous negative impacts on the national reputations and investment attractiveness that Gulf leaderships have worked for decades to build.
Article 54(2) of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions prohibits attacking drinking water installations when the attacks are intended to deny civilians the water’s sustenance value. The special prohibition does not apply when a water supply system is used solely to sustain enemy armed forces or in direct support of military action. But even where the exception applies, no action may be expected to deny civilians food and water so as to cause starvation or force their movement. Rules governing distinction, precautions, and proportionality continue to apply even in those cases. Assessing these situations requires a factually complex, circumstances-dependent analysis and is difficult to establish from strike patterns alone.
Article 54 also lets a state destroy water infrastructure on its own territory under imperative military necessity. An example of an action that might fall under the clause comes from Ukraine breaching a dam on the Irpin River to impede the movement of Russian invaders approaching Kyiv from the north in 2022.
Physical realities make legal assessments very complex, as many legacy Gulf thermal desalination plants are integrated with power stations. Meanwhile, a very large reverse osmosis facility can require 100 megawatts or more of power, in line with figures for Abu Dhabi’s Taweelah reverse-osmosis plant and published engineering analyses of desalination energy demand: as much electricity as a hyperscale data center or a small city. A strike on electrical infrastructure thus will often disable water production as a secondary effect.
Water supply recovery requires repairing the associated power plant, constructing an alternative grid connection, or amassing sufficient portable generation in a timely manner to restart and operate an asset that might require 100 MW or more of power is a phenomenal undertaking. Integrated thermal desalination plants likely would not be able to use temporary electricity supplies alone because they depend on steam from the power plant. Restoration operations would require global procurement of turbines, generators, transformers, switchgear, and trained personnel in a marketplace that is already severely strained by datacenter-related demands and broader electricity system expansions. And rebuilders would have to accomplish this feat before water storage and substitute supplies were exhausted — likely a matter of days to weeks — to avoid the worst of the impacts described above.
A March 2026 War on the Rocks analysis co-written by one of this article’s authors set forth seven resilience-focused steps: hardening, stocking spare critical components, onsite power generation (gas, wind/solar, nuclear), plant dispersion, interconnected pipelines, expanded water storage, and dedicated air defenses. To this, we add an eighth critical step: widespread civil defense training to bolster societal readiness for infrastructure disruptions and buy time for governmental responses.
Cheaper, more numerous drone interceptors are a must — a gap that Ukrainian defense tech providers could likely fill at scale with injections of Gulf State capital into their manufacturing bases. It is also likely that Saudi Arabia will consider a “hydrovascular grid” strategy that imitates the East-West Oil Pipeline and creates true connectivity between the Gulf and Red Sea Coasts that would allow water to be shuttled in case of significant attacks on desalination plants on either coast.
Capital and construction capacity are already being mobilized to build energy bypass options around the Strait of Hormuz. Given water security’s existential importance, it is foreseeable that Saudi Arabia and other GCC countries will also add expansions of water pipeline networks, storage, and backup wellfields to their resilience capital investment ledgers. These measures will be expensive and likely require public-private partnerships to fund them, but are far cheaper than losing access to water.
We are back to the targeting practices of 51 B.C. but with the destructive technology of 2026. Human beings are adaptation and survival machines, and countries in the line of fire will find ways to secure water supplies, but the road to that more resilient endpoint will be bumpy. Just as it is in the American national interest to work closely with our allies to prevent Blackout Warfare against electricity grids, so too is it vital that we defend forward to prevent Desiccation Warfare against critical water supplies.
Gabriel Collins is the Baker Botts fellow in Energy and Environmental Regulatory Affairs at the Center for Energy Studies at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. He leads the Center for Energy Studies Program on Energy & Geopolitics in Eurasia and is an energy-water nexus thrust leader at the Rice WaTER Institute. He also runs The Sinews of Civilization Substack.
Morgan D. Bazilian is the director of the Payne Institute for Public Policy and a professor at the Colorado School of Mines. Previously, he was lead energy specialist at the World Bank and has over two decades of experience in energy security, natural resources, national security, energy poverty, and international affairs.
The views expressed in this piece are exclusively the authors’ personal assessments and do not reflect any position of the Colorado School of Mines or Rice University.
Image: James Grellier via Wikimedia Commons
