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I don't really see what the failure case is here. Trump's unlikely to send in ground troops, so the most probably worst case outcome from the US' POV is that a heavily degraded IRGC maintains control of the country. That's not any worse for the US than the status quo.
The failure case is that the US spend a bunch of money and depletes materiel stockpiles (not to mention reputation) to bump off a decrepit and ultimately replaceable theocrat while losing any chance of a negotiated solution to Iran developing nukes. If the US isn't going to mount a ground invasion, we're left hoping that either a revolution finally succeeds or that they can keep the IRI nuclear program in check forever with nothing but air raids.
The time to bomb Iran was a month and a half ago, but we were too busy with Operation Caribbean Shakedown.
How much in the way of resources does the US realistically stand to lose here? I'm definitely not a military expert, but it looks like the Iranians seem to have little ability to attack anything of significant military value. They've set a hotel in Dubai on fire and killed one Israeli AFAIK. And I don't particularly buy the Iranian line that they're holding back, but next time they'll really retaliate.
I also disagree on the reputational front. Striking when the protests were at their peak would of course have been ideal, but carrying out a strike now after having moved so many military assets into the region and having made so many threats seem strictly better for the US' reputation at this point than not doing anything at all and demonstrating that none of the threats or posturing had any credibility from the start. I also do think that demonstrating that the US isn't afraid to eliminate the leaders of actively hostile states does affect the behaviour of these leaders even if it by itself doesn't revolutionise the state in question.
Basically ammunition stocks. Which is a weird "bad situation", but there are major concerns about the US ammo stockpiles. They haven't been great for a whille, and while Ukraine was an excuse to ramp up production and supply chains, but I think they're still well behind on that front.
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There's always the off chance that, e.g., an Iranian drifting mine sinks an aircraft carrier, but I think the big-time failure case here is that the US expends 500 interceptors swatting Iranian SRBMs and then China rolls Taiwan because we can't keep them from plastering Guam with reentry vehicles twice daily.
That's fair enough. Do we have a sense of Iran's likely missile capabilities? My sense was that Israel destroyed/absorbed a huge chunk of this during the Summer, and given that the Iranians don't seem to have managed to fire off much that's hit anything of strategic importance over the last 24 hours, I assume they haven't managed to replenish their stocks. Or has the US been spending its interceptors already?
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