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Others have taken the meat of your post to respond to already, so I'm going to reply with a tangent: who cares?
What utility does knowing Iran's population matter? What relevance is the specific number of Iranians to any American interests? They're a far group whose only relevance is how much they might endanger our investments in the Middle East with their constant terrorism funding and sabber-rattling. There could be ten million, twenty, one hundred, it'd change no calculus.
The population of a minor nation across the sea is trivia. It's not important knowledge, and not knowing it shouldn't be taken as significant. It's like not knowing what Burkina Faso is the capital of.
If you're considering replacing its government by force, the size population you'll end up administering (at best) or fighting seems quite relevant.
Why? We're not looking to nation build there, last I checked, we're looking to nation destroy so they don't develop nuclear weapons.
Israel has already moved their goals from “destroy nuclear sites” to “destroy ballistic missile capabilities”. But it isn’t easy to destroy all of Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities, perpetually. This is something that Cruz would know if he had even a passing curiosity in the country which his funders want destroyed. A 1 minute YouTube short would inform someone that it has a topography uniquely suited for hiding missile development and launch sites, with 370,000 square miles of mountainous terrain.
The “Iran is almost out of missile launchers” is eerily similar to “Russia is almost out of missiles” of 2022. Except the difficult part of launching hypersonic missiles is not the launchers, it’s the missiles, and they already have those in abundance.
So keep bombing them. Kill all their scientists, all their engineers. Transform the mountains into infernos. Let them all die to defend their ambitions.
I really think you're delusional/mistaken about how powerful the US air force is at that kind of thing. It's built for precision strikes, not mass destruction (unless nukes). "kill every single scientist and engineer" and "transform mountains into infernos" is just not what they do. Israel wants them to use this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GBU-57A/B_MOP on Iran's mountain nuke research facility, but there's only 20 of them in existance and that's basically the only weapon capable of penetrating (maybe?) deep into a mountain. And Iran has a lot more than 20 mountains.
Yes, the USAF is built for precision strikes, but the US builds guided bombs the way the Russians build artillery shells. We've made over half a million JDAM kits (although of course we've used a lot of them). Assuming a stockpile of around 200,000, we have roughly one precision guided-bomb for every squad in the Iranian military. That's without getting tapping our inventories of cruise missiles, guided missiles, guided and unguided rockets, or cannon ammo at all.
The MOP is a bespoke weapon designed to fill a small niche, and the fact that it has been procured in small numbers doesn't reflect on the broader state of the USAF's procurement of guided weapons.
One way of looking at that is that Iran is 600,000 square miles, much of it mountainous, so there's roughly 1 bomb per 3 square miles. So not nearly enough to destroy the country with bombs alone.
Another way of looking at is is that Russia has been firing something like 10,000 shells a day for years on a country less than half the size of Iran, and it's still been a slow grinding war of attrition.
I'm pretty sure no one in the air force would claim they have the capability to destroy Iran with air power alone like what's being discussed here. Not to mention that Iran has spent decades building up its defenses against such an attack.
I just want to highlight this here – 1 bomb per 3 square miles of a country larger than Alaska is a lot of bombs (and again recall that this is just JDAM kits!)
Now – what does "destroy Iran" mean? If it means "turn the country into literal molten lava" then no, the USAF does not have the firepower to do this.
If it means "knock out their power grid, obliterate their armed forces, wreck their transportation infrastructure, decapitate their leadership and generally render them incapable of performing the functions expected of a state" then yes, the US has the firepower to do this – the density of "Iranian military/government/dual use facilities/equipment" is not going to be denser than 1 every 3 square miles.
Perhaps the user you are replying to literally means "kill all Iranians" when he says "Let them all die to defend their ambitions." But if, in context of "Kill all their scientists, all their engineers" he's advocating for eliminating the Iranian leadership and personnel responsible for developing nuclear weapons, the US doesn't lack the firepower to do this. Since we've proven capable of building upwards of 100 JDAM kits per day, we might be able to kill upwards of 30,000 Iranian scientists, engineers, and assorted staff per year assuming each guided bomb only kills one (a silly assumption) without even denting our stockpile.
The main problem for the US would be getting the intelligence on where the personnel are (and clearing the Iranian defenses). But those are primarily problems of intelligence procurement, not problems from not having enough firepower.
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