Donald G.W.B. Trump officially attacks Iran

[Winehole23]

The historical record here is damning. American intelligence and military officials at the highest level of the power structure consistently warned four successive presidents that Iran was not developing nuclear weapons, that diplomacy was the best path for making sure they wouldn’t, and a military option could at best delay an Iranian nuclear weapons program by a year or two. These warnings helped prevent conflict, but only up until February 2026.

https://www.amerikanets.com/p/they-saw-it-coming

[Winehole23]

the missile depletion issue was clear after Operation Rough Rider against Yemen in 2025, but the decision-makers were asleep at the swtich

In January of 2025, Vice Admiral Brendan McLane, commander of Naval Surface Forces, detailed the interceptor expenditure rate for the US Navy during Operation Prosperity Guardian. The Navy had used 120 SM-2s, 80 SM-6s, and 20 Evolved Sea Sparrow Missiles and SM-3s.9 Later estimates would put the number of SM-3s expended at 12. Adding this to the 80 SM-3s that would later be expended in the 12-Day War, the USN had used 20% of the SM-3s ever produced in just a single year of limited military engagements. The situation with other Standard Missile models was just as bad, according to the US Naval Ins ute. Only 125 SMs of all types would be procured in 2025, meaning it would take the Navy two years to replace what it had used off the coast of Yemen.10

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) subsequently warned about the dangers of this rate of expenditure in 2025. CSIS is explicitly nonpartisan and one of the country’s most prominent defense think tanks. Its CEO is former chairman of the Joint Chiefs Joseph F. Dunford, who was mentioned previously in this piece. CSIS’s warning, The Depleting Missile Defense Interceptor Inventory, estimated total stocks of both systems in the mid- to low hundreds, with no THAADs having been delivered at all between 2023 and the end of 2025. The study suggested immediate efforts to ramp up production of both systems, but acknowledged that attempting to do so would face serious defense-industrial hurdles.

Admiral James Kilby, acting Chief of Naval Operations, acknowledged the scale of the problem in April of 2025, answering a question about whether the Navy had enough interceptors with a flat: 'I think we need more munitions.'11 He gave congressional testimony on the issue in summer 2025:

The Navy's current reliance on high-cost interceptors, such as SM-6 and SM-3, is unsustainable in high-tempo operations. We must shift to use lower-cost alternatives while preserving expensive defenses for strategic weapons — or risk running short when it matters most.12

[Winehole23]

Understanding the gravity of the situation, just before the war began, Chairman of the JCS Dan Caine told President Trump directly that conflict with Iran would drastically deplete stockpiles of key munitions, including air defense interceptors.13 The warning went ignored.


The Iranians had solved the air defense problem with an entirely different strategy: underground fortifications. The US defense and intelligence structure had been sounding the alarm about their inability to overcome this “passive defense” for decades. Deeply Buried Targets, a declassified 2001 report to Congress by the Department of Defense, warned:

There are no easy answers to either the HDBT [Hardened Deeply Buried Target] or WMD Agent Defeat challenges, and certainly no 'silver bullets.' … Even with the current strategy and acquisition initiatives, the United States will still not be able to hold all known or suspected HDBTs at risk for destruction, especially the deep underground facilities…Defeat of most of these facilities with conventional means—in the traditional sense of physical destruction—is impossible… The Persian Gulf War and the series of conflicts in the Balkans revealed that facility protection, by hardening, concealment, and defenses, remains an effective response to the technology advantages in intelligence and weaponry enjoyed by the United States and its allies.14

The conclusions of this report were reiterated and expanded upon in the subsequent military literature. A report by USAF Colonel Russell Hart at the Air War College published in 2012 lamented that not only had the picture not improved in the 11 years since the release of Deeply Buried Targets, rather, the strategic imbalance was getting worse:

Although the US has made significant investments to defeat hard and deeply buried targets since 1999, recent studies show that US military capabilities are becoming much less effective at holding these facilities and other underground facilities at risk. Gaps appear not only in US weapons capabilities to destroy these targets, but also in intelligence capabilities to effectively locate and characterize them.15

[Blake]

Trump just pulled our pants down in front of the world

[Winehole23]

The Iranians made rapid progress in their efforts to bury their most important military assets. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) understood fully that Iran had developed a complex and robust defensive doctrine designed from the ground up to give it an advantage in war with the United States, specifically, and said so in their assessment of Iranian military power published in 2019:16

Denial and deception (D&D) is a core component of Iranian military doctrine, and Iran uses D&D techniques extensively to reduce the vulnerability and increase the survivability of its military forces. To apply these techniques across the military, Tehran has established what it calls a “passive defense” doctrine. The effort was based on lessons learned from past military conflicts, including U.S. operations in the Middle East and the 2006 Israel-Hizballah conflict. Key Iranian passive defense measures include camouflage and concealment, force dispersals, underground facilities, and highly mobile units. For example, Iran configures some military vehicles to resemble civilian trucks….Iran has the largest underground facility (UGF) program in the Middle East. Based on the central pillars of Iran’s passive defense doctrine, Tehran has invested heavily in constructing UGFs to conceal and protect critical military and civilian infrastructure throughout the country. Iran designed and built these facilities to support various aspects of its defense industries, key nuclear infrastructure, and military forces, including naval sites, missile bases, and equipment storage.

While more could be said here about American shortages in standoff weaponry, it isn’t necessary to prove the point. The US military knew in February of 2026 that it didn’t have the air defense munitions to defend military and infrastructural assets in the region, and it knew that it would be unable to put underground Iranian assets at risk. These twin realities dramatically reduced the possibility of success in the conflict on their own.

[Winehole23]

Trump just pulled our pants down in front of the world

with two and a half more years to go

[Winehole23]

20 years ago

After the Iranians took steps to shut down traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a popular conception has emerged that American military planners failed to anticipate this. This is wrong. In 2007, Admiral William Fallon was asked directly during his confirmation hearing for the role of CENTCOM commander if he believed Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz. He declined to answer on the immediate public record, but his response was later made public in congressional transcripts:

Iran’s strategy in part centers on their ability to control and/or close the Strait of Hormuz. In addition, Iran maintains the capability to interdict sea lanes of communication throughout the Arabian Gulf and selectively target one or more Gulf countries’ off-shore infrastructure, commercial transit lanes, and anchorages throughout the region. Iran maintains a large inventory of naval mines, an expanding coastal defense force equipped with a mix of Chinese manufactured anti-ship cruise missile launchers, an extensive mix of high speed fast attack craft equipped with torpedoes and anti-ship cruise missiles and at least 3,000 smaller patrol boats equipped with a mix of heavy machine guns, rocket propelled grenade launchers, shoulder launched surface-to-air missile launchers, and anti-tank guided missiles. Iranian leaders likely realize their naval forces cannot win a conventional force-on-force naval engagement with U.S. naval forces, and have therefore developed a strategy that uses their geographic advantage to put into play a layered defense strategy that relies on waves of near-simultaneous attacks against maritime targets to overwhelm the defenses of the target. Given Iran’s current naval forces capability, Iran could attempt to temporarily close the Strait of Hormuz for a short period, principally using naval mines and coastal defense forces… Should our relationship with Iran deteriorate to the point of hostilities, we are capable of neutralizing the military threat to U.S. naval vessels and preserving access through the strait for commercial traffic.

[Winehole23]

15 years ago

Fallon’s optimism wasn’t universally shared. In 2009, the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) published Iran’s Naval Forces. The report described in detail that Iran was capable of strangling traffic through the strait, and would do so if its leadership felt seriously threatened. The ONI predicted “serious economic consequences” worldwide if this happened. Jonathan Schroden of the Center for Naval Analyses concluded that the Iranians wouldn’t necessarily need to fully close the strait to cause damage to the US economy in a 2011 paper.18 He cautioned planners that Iran could emerge from a conflict over Hormuz politically and strategically stronger, even if the strait were reopened by military force. He warned:

Strategists need to think through what "failure" might look like for the U.S. and its Coalition partners as a result of a conflict over closure of the Strait (and conversely, what "success" might look like for Iran), and how to prevent such scenarios from playing out. Simply assuming that military action is required as a response, or that tactical and operational successes will translate into strategic ones, leaves the door open for Iran to snatch a strategic win from the jaws of defeat

[Winehole23]

14 years ago

The 2012 Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) Worldwide Threat Assessment said Iran likely had the capability to close the strait. JCS Chairman Dempsey told Congress, “The simple answer is yes, they can block it,” in 2012.19 The ONI concluded Iran was “well positioned” to leverage the Strait of Hormuz in 2017, and the aforementioned 2019 WTA acknowledged “Iran continues to develop, improve, and field a range of military capabilities that enable it to target US and allied military assets in the region and disrupt traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.”20

[Winehole23]

clearly foreseen during Trump's first administration

That Iran might retaliate against Gulf oil infrastructure in response to being attacked was also anticipated, both by the Congressional Research Service and the DIA. The 2019 attack by Ansar Allah on Saudi oil infrastructure in Abqaiq set a clear precedent that American air defenses, which failed to intercept the attack, could struggle to protect economically crucial sites. Shortly afterward, Dunford told Congress that no single system could defend against such a threat, though a layered system 'could mitigate' it. The CRS noted, “Iran and/or its allies have the capability to cause significant damage to U.S. allies and to U.S. regional and global economic and strategic interests.”

[Winehole23]

vulnerability of US bases was clearly foreseen

If American planners knew they couldn’t protect Gulf oil infrastructure, they understood even better, and were much more concerned with, their inability to defend their own bases in the region. The USAF had been aware of this issue for decades. It commissioned a RAND study analyzing the vulnerability of American air bases to cruise and ballistic missile attacks in 1997.21 RAND imagined a theoretical war with Iran in 2007, and even though the Iranian ballistic missile program was in a state of relative infancy at the time it was written, the paper explicitly treated Iranian missiles as a major threat to American assets in the region. It said Iran would engage in large-scale, repeated missile and UAV attacks on American bases. RAND projected the future state of Iranian missile technology and calculated that it would be within their capabilities to inflict massive losses of airframes and personnel with a “surprisingly small” number of submunition warhead cruise and ballistic missiles. Air defense radars and fire control systems for air defense systems would be targeted, and fixed assets could be located using commercially available satellite imagery and human intelligence from locals friendly to Iran. Unless serious steps were taken to mitigate this threat, the USAF would be forced to “abandon bases within reach of enemy missiles.” This applied to all bases along the southern edge of the Persian Gulf and most in Saudi Arabia.

[Winehole23]

Trump made de-basification a fact

Attacking Iran wrecked our security infrastructure in the Persian Gulf, as predicted by US intelligence and military brass

American strategists understood that US forces in the region were overextended. In 2022, CENTCOM commander General Frank McKenzie proposed to the Biden administration that plans be drawn up to move USAF basing to Israel and Egypt in the event of war with Iran, but the idea was rejected.24 In July, once the Iran War was already well underway, McKenzie said in a JINSA webinar “No one in their right mind would ever put the Centcom forward headquarters, you know, 100 miles away from Iran, [in Qatar], yet that’s where it is.” McKenzie wrote an op-ed in 2024 where he stated the issue plainly, “In a full-blown war with Iran, these existing bases will be rendered unusable by sustained Iranian attack. The Iranians can see this and have created a large and very capable missile and drone force in part to exploit this situation.

[Winehole23]

Pete the war-fighter didn't study war before attacking

Fortune may favor the bold, but it doesn't favor stupidity

Retrospective studies of Operation Allied Force, NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign against Serbia, took a dim view of limited air campaigns. A report by Admiral James Ellis admitted that even though the NATO force executed 38,000 combat missions, it never fully brought down the Serbian air defense network.27 Aircraft operated above 15,000 feet to reduce the risk of shootdowns. RAND noted that the Serbs kept their SAMs dispersed and only switched their radars on briefly, and NATO’s efforts to locate these SAMs and other Serbian ground targets were “largely unsuccessful.”28 A planned 72-hour campaign ballooned to 79 days as a result.


Even the 1991 Gulf War, often identified as the prime example of the strength of air power, wasn’t a clear-cut success. RAND’s 1994 critical review on Air Power in the Gulf War asserted that Desert Storm featured multiple “major disappointments” in the air domain, including a failure to “locate and destroy mobile SCUD launchers.”


The USAF’s ACE doctrine admitted the shifting balance, though it limited this to “peer conflicts”:

In future peer conflicts, the US should not expect to achieve the air supremacy it enjoyed in recent low intensity operations. Rather, it is more likely that every domain will be contested and characterized by fluctuating levels of superiority.

But even if air supremacy could be achieved, the Pentagon knew that air power alone would be unlikely to force Iranian capitulation. This subject had been studied extensively throughout the previous two decades. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson took a dim view of air power when testifying before Congress on the prospect of war with Iran in 2007: “The more widespread strikes, while devastating—and they would be—would solidify a nation of 70-plus million people… the uniting factor would be nationalism and a visceral hatred for America.”29 In the same hearing, Colonel Samuel Gardiner, USAF (ret), said:

The Revolutionary Guard units we don’t hear much talked about is they are prepared for an air strike. They are heavily bunkered and heavily re-vetted [in revetments]. It would be very difficult to put punishment on them.

[Winehole23]

2023 and 2025 offered lessons that were ignored

Prosperity Guardian showed that even a relatively resource-poor and weak military force could shut down a crucial maritime chokepoint with standoff munitions, and that an American naval force would be unable to stop it. Poseidon Archer and Rough Rider proved that a limited air campaign could fail to suppress the launches of those standoff munitions. Despite these three operations costing billions, they didn’t restore commercial confidence in shipping in the Red Sea, which was still down 60% from pre-2023 levels at the beginning of 2026.30 A post-mortem on the Red Sea Crisis published by West Point in June 2025 offered a blunt description of the failure of every option available to two successive presidential administrations:

This was the menu of options that the Biden administration had in November 2023, and it was largely the same menu that the Trump administration had in March 2025. Over the past year and a half, the United States has either attempted or threatened nearly all of these options, with little success.

The lesson for a prospective war with Iran was obvious. If the US couldn’t do it in Yemen, it wouldn’t be able to suppress Iranian drone and missile launches in the Persian Gulf or reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

[Winehole23]

Israel failed to degrade Iran's capabilities too, and we knew it

The two major Israeli air operations against Iran in 2024 and 2025, “Days of Repentance” and “Rising Lion,” respectively, showed that even massive air attacks on Iran would fail to seriously degrade Iranian missile and drone launch capability. Video evidence of dozens of Iranian missiles striking targets in Israel proved that the Iranians were capable of penetrating the US/Israeli missile defense system at long range. Air Force findings from two decades earlier on the impossibility of destroying deeply buried targets held, as evidence slowly emerged that the Fordow site struck by the US in the closing days of the 12-Day War hadn’t been “obliterated,” as the Trump administration claimed, with the centrifuges there “largely intact,” according to the DIA.32


Israeli narratives that they had achieved freedom of movement in Iran’s skies were later thrown into question as disclosures revealed many of their supposed airstrikes had been drone and ground-based missile launches from within Iran itself.

[Winehole23]

we also knew leadership decapitation was a long shot

In 2019, the DIA outlined how the Iranian state had restructured itself specifically to survive internal threats, and said its opponents were disorganized, writing, “Iranian political and ethnic opposition groups are largely localized and lack unity, posing little threat to the regime.” In the weeks leading up to the war, American planners recognized that the latest wave of protests had failed. The CRS found that “even so-called moderates have backed the crackdown against what the regime has characterized as a US and Israeli-backed plot” and that there had been no “widespread defections from within Iran’s military, security forces, or political elite.”35


The USAF’s doctrinal publication Strategic Attack identified the limitations of decapitation strikes:

Leadership attack is a specific form of attrition that removes enemy leadership by direct attack when members of that leadership cons ute lawful targets…. Leadership attack is most effective when an enemy is led by a single charismatic and authoritarian figure who cannot be easily replaced. It is also effective against organizations with rigid, hierarchical leadership structures, since US forces can identify, locate, and remove those leaders and their replacements… As a matter of practice, US forces have often avoided attacks on the national leadership of an enemy State based on comity.36

American planners knew that Iran, with its complex, parallel political, clerical, and military structures, was a poor target for a leadership attack. The NIC told the Trump administration this in mid-February, just weeks before the war began. Iran’s military and political structure had “pre-arranged protocols” in place in the event of Khamenei’s assassination, the report said. It was “unlikely” that even a large, prolonged military campaign would result in regime change, “even if the current leadership was killed.”37
The NIC was entirely correct. The mass protests failed, just as they had in the past, and Iran’s power structure rapidly adapted to the US/Israeli assassination campaign.

[Winehole23]

Israel bamboozled Trump on the chances of overthrowing the Iranian regime

In the lead-up to the war, every assessment made by the Pentagon and US intelligence apparatus was directly contradicted by competing assessments made by Israeli planners and presented directly to the Trump administration. Mossad chief David Barnea traveled to Washington in mid-January and delivered a comprehensive plan to assassinate the Iranian leadership and stir mass protests to accomplish regime change.38 The Israelis also presented a supporting plan to invade Iran with Kurdish proxy forces, but American strategists had already identified that the Kurds were too dispersed and disorganized to be used for this purpose, and doing so would strain relations with Turkey. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu heavily lobbied the Trump administration to convince them the plan was achievable. Throughout this process, US military and intelligence officials fought fiercely to convince the administration that the plan would fail, but were overruled.

On the 11th of February, Trump held a situation room meeting with Rubio, Hegseth, General Caine, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, and Netanyahu.39 Barnea and other Israeli officials attended virtually. The meeting lasted more than an hour, and the Israelis made their final case for the war. They said Iran’s ballistic missile program could be destroyed in a few weeks, Iran would be too weak to block the Strait of Hormuz, airstrikes would inspire the Iranian people to rise up against the government, Kurdish forces would bog Artesh down in Western Iran, and exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi would be on standby to seize power at the opportune moment. After Netanyahu’s presentation, President Trump responded, “Sounds good to me.” When others present brought up potential risks, Netanyahu told them inaction was a greater risk than action.

The American military and intelligence structure scrambled to present a rebuttal to the Israeli plan, and produced a comprehensive response the next day in an American-only meeting. They agreed that they could kill Khamenei and degrade Iran’s ability to project power, but triggering a popular uprising and achieving regime change were “detached from reality.”

When Mr. Trump joined the meeting, Mr. Ratcliffe briefed him on the assessment. The C.I.A. director used one word to describe the Israeli prime minister’s regime change scenarios: “farcical.”

Trump asked Caine directly what he thought:

“Sir, this is, in my experience, standard operating procedure for the Israelis. They oversell, and their plans are not always well-developed. They know they need us, and that’s why they’re hard-selling.”

Caine specifically told Trump that Iran would likely close Hormuz, and the US force in the region would have difficulty unblocking it. JD Vance tried to change Trump’s mind, warning him the operation would unleash chaos in the region, and cited the munition shortage explicitly. But Trump had already made up his mind, and both Vance and Caine demurred from taking more serious action to stop the war from proceeding. Vance told Trump that even though he thought it was a bad idea, he would support the president’s decision. Decades of Israeli efforts had culminated in an incredible triumph of influence without any precedent. The US military would deliberately enter into a war of aggression it knew it would lose.

[Winehole23]

then we used diplomacy as a cloak for attack

Days later, the Israelis presented Trump with intelligence that Khamenei would be meeting on the 28th of February with high level Iranian officials above ground, where they could attack him. When the American group met again on the 26th, the plan was in place. Caine told Trump that if he ordered the operation, the military would execute it. The next day, Trump gave the green light, and the rest, as they say, is history.

https://www.amerikanets.com/p/they-saw-it-coming

[Winehole23]

Trump's Iran war is an omnishambles

Trump and Whiskey Pete got good advice from intelligence and military brass, they just ignored it, and the whole world is worse off for it

[Winehole23]

no greater threat to US international credibility and prestige exists than the Trump administration

that's the track record so far

[Winehole23]

There are currently 1500 users online. (1 members and 1499 guests)

[Blake]

with two and a half more years to go

Can't even imagine how much lower this country is going to sink in that time frame

[Winehole23]

robust demand signal, but it will take up to 5 years to ramp up production to replenish stocks, let alone to support high-intensity conflict

After two wars — Ukraine and the 2026 conflict with Iran — burned through interceptor stockpiles at a rate no peacetime industrial base was built to sustain, the Pentagon is moving with unusual speed and unusual money in an attempt to rapidly rebuild its most important air-defense munition. In late July, the U.S. Army awarded Lockheed Martin a multiyear PAC-3 production contract reported at roughly $53.9 billion, part of a framework meant to lift annual output of the PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement (MSE) interceptor from about 600 missiles to 2,000 by 2030. It is one of the largest missile-production commitments in American history.

There is only one tiny problem that the contract cannot fix with money alone — The PAC-3’s guidance system — the part that makes a hit-to-kill interceptor actually hit — depends on two rare-earth inputs whose supply is almost entirely controlled by China. Washington is pressing its defense primes to more than triple output of a weapon whose most irreplaceable components sit at the far end of a supply chain that runs through Beijing. The ambition and the vulnerability are growing at the same time, and they are on a collision course.

rare materials for guided missiles are approximately 100% controlled by Beijing

That is exactly what makes the material vulnerability so dangerous. You cannot triple the output of a weapon if you cannot secure the handful of grams of specialty magnet material that each unit requires — and that is precisely the input the United States does not control.

Samarium and yttrium are the two rare earths at the heart of this story, and on both, China’s grip is close to total.

Yttrium is stark: between 2020 and 2023, China supplied 93% of US yttrium imports. Samarium is worse in a subtler way — the issue is not the raw ore but the separation and refining of heavy rare earths into usable material, and there China’s dominance approaches a monopoly. Until 2023, China accounted for roughly 99% of global heavy rare-earth processing; the one meaningful compe or, a refinery in Vietnam, has been idled by a tax dispute, effectively leaving China as the sole source. The United States currently has essentially no domestic heavy rare-earth separation capacity at all, and is assessed by US government and academic sources as 100% net-import-dependent on finished rare-earth magnets.

Both samarium and yttrium are on China’s export-control list — added in the April 2025 tranche of seven medium and heavy rare earths, and reinforced in January 2026 when Beijing tightened controls specifically on samarium compounds. This is the paradox in a sentence: the government is ordering a threefold surge in a weapon whose guidance and radar depend on two elements that a strategic compe or can restrict at will.

https://larrycjohnson.substack.com/p...t-interceptors

[Winehole23]

The numbers are stark. Crude exports through the Strait have collapsed to 2.2 million barrels per day from 8.5 million a month ago. Pre-war flows of roughly 20 million barrels per day are now a distant memory. Gulf states’ alternative export routes are also under attack — Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea pipeline hit by Houthi strikes, Egypt’s Damietta port struck by drones.

https://x.com/HormuzReport/status/2087187630505284075

[Winehole23]

could be bull , but it's plausible

An Iran-linked group took responsibility for cyberattacks that hit Minnesota water systems at the end of July, proclaiming that the hacks on dozens of communities were conducted “only to warn” of their broader capabilities to strike U.S. critical infrastructure.

CyberAv3ngers, which is affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, was suspected to be behind the July 26-27 attacks and said in a July 31 statement posted on their Telegram channel that the group “has carried out attacks on U.S. infrastructure, and we warn America to back down.” That statement did not specifically mention Minnesota, or any of the dozen states reporting recent cyberattacks on water systems.

https://threatbeat.com/attacks-and-i...esponsibility/