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Notes -
Judging the Iran War on its initial goals:
There has been so much talk about the Straight of Hormuz, that people are forgetting this was never an initial goal of the war. It's easy to forget that the Straight of Hormuz was open and not tolled by Iran before the war. So by definition, how could a war aim be to something that you already have. This would be like the US declaring War on Canada and saying one of the aims is to take New York.
So looking back, it's important to see what they initially said. This is straight from the White House itself [https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2026/04/president-trumps-clear-and-unchanging-objectives-drive-decisive-success-against-iranian-regime/](This is straight from the White House itself:)
Tonight, @POTUS will address the nation on Operation Epic Fury.
From day one, the objectives have been clear: obliterate Iran’s missiles and production, annihilate its navy, sever its support for terrorist proxies, and ensure it never acquires a nuclear weapon.
Trump:
President Trump (March 2): “Our objectives are clear. First, we’re destroying Iran’s missile capabilities… and their capacity to produce brand new ones — pretty good ones they make. Second, we’re annihilating their navy… Third, we’re ensuring that the world’s number one sponsor of terror can never obtain a nuclear weapon… And finally, we’re ensuring that the Iranian regime cannot continue to arm, fund, and direct terrorist armies outside of their borders.”
Vice President JD Vance (March 2): “Whatever happens with the regime in one form or another, it’s incidental to the President’s primary objective here — which is to make sure the Iranian terrorist regime does not build a nuclear bomb.”
Secretary Rubio (March 3): “Our objectives remain, as they’ve been identified from the beginning and the President laid out clearly yesterday. Iran can never have a nuclear weapon and we will not allow Iran to hide behind the immunity of a massive short-term ballistic missile inventory, or the ability to make them or launch them… As well as the destruction of their navy.”
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (March 4): “The mission is laser-focused: obliterate Iran’s missiles and drones and facilities that produce them, annihilate its navy and critical security infrastructure, and sever their pathway to nuclear weapons. Iran will never possess a nuclear bomb.”
It's obvious from these statements there were four goals:
The Straight of Hormuz is a red herring. The fact that we are even talking about it at all means we have gone backwards. The US has accomplished only one of its war aims and that was to destroy their Navy. The rest are not done and at best are TBD. If you had said 6 months ago that the war would still be ongoing that only one goal would be accomplished, what would you have said about the status of the war?
To me, and this is just my opinion, people would have said the war is not going well. Based on those four goals explicitly laid out by Trump, I don't see how you can say we are close to a victory.
[https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5ydld0gykpo](By the way, Trump himself says that the war will continue until at least November.)
Here he again explicitly mentions the nuclear weapons as a warm aim (that is not accomplished yet). Personally, I don't see this war ending any time soon. At this point, the Iran government has shown it is resilient and it is in a literal fight for its life. They can't back down now. Meanwhile, I don't see any way the US can accomplish its war aims without staying until the regime collapses. How long that takes I think is anyone's guess.
Meanwhile, stocks of crude oil in the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve fell to 285 million barrels last week, the lowest level since November 1982, according to data from the Department of Energy.
Why are you in such a hurry?
All of those objectives are being accomplished. Their main navy is sunk, their missile boats are being hunted down, their missile production sites are being bombed, their nuclear program has been halted, and their terrorist proxies are being destroyed. Not to mention that most of their leadership is dead- I notice that you never mentioned who the current decision makers are in Iran, because no one really knows at this point.
Before the war, there was endless gloom and doom about what a disaster it would be to fight Iran. They would destroy cities with ICBMs, they would sink aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf, they would shut down all our infrastructure with cyber attacks, and launch terrorist attacks all over the world. The entire world would plunge into some sort of Mad-Max style anarchy as we ran out of oil. Etc.
Instead we've been... mildly inconvenienced? The price of oil has gone up, but not enough to cause a recession- the economy is still growing. (Edit: 18-20) servicemen have died, and that's a shame, but that's also a very small number in historical terms- every military person knows the risks when they sign up. Iran's neighbors have suffered more, but most of them have hated Iran a long time, and this only makes them hate Iran more- they're doubling own on their alliance with the US to get rid of the local menace.
This isn't a game or a sports match, so there's no particular time limit on this. The US and its allies can keep this up for as long as it takes. As long as we're there, Iran doesn't get a nuke or ICBM program, so all objectives accomplishd, and they're rapidly running out of money. It would be nice to find a permanent solution so we can leave the middle east forever, but I'm not exactly holding my breath on that. I know that you'll bring up elections and say things like "Trumpt must end this before the midterms" or whatever, but that's not actually true, he can do whatever he wants. The bigger time pressure might be on allied nations that depend on oil imports, like Korea, which is now considering joining the war.
Of course, it's possible that Democrats will sieze power, and then they'll give in. Give the IRGC money, give them terrorist proxies, give them nukes, give them whatever they want. That would be a huge disaster, but it's not the result of this current war, it's just Democrats being idiots. The JCPOA was basically that, with Obama giving Iran a lot of cash while they pretended to not develop nukes or missiles but kept working on them anyway, not to mention massacring anyone who protested the rule of the Ayatollahs.
So my advice to you is: relax, these things take time. The IRGC is getting the shit kicked out of it, so all they can do is spin up propaganda on the internet. I'm about to go on a long road trip, which I can do easily because gasoline is still cheap and unlimited- not what it would be if the US was actually losing this war.
Because every day we burn multi-million dollar missiles and interceptors to shoot down or blow up the launchers of weapons that cost tens of thousands or, at most, hundreds of thousands of dollars. I don't want to pay to throw weapons we'd need to defend Taiwan into the trash for the possibility of some distant payoff. Every single day this dynamic continues is a day Iran gets the best of us attritionally.
China's capabilities are far exceeding those of Iran, so if our stockpiles are truly being completely depleted by a 2-bit dictatorship, then they never stood a chance against China.
If anything, if this is true, then it should be a wake up call that we need to buy some new weapons that are suitable for 21st century warfare.
I'd agree! I think if there is any lesson we should be learning from the new ubiquity of drones in warfare, and our own history of what actually won us the one real war we were tested in (WW2), it's that our weapons must be ruthlessly economically efficient. I don't really have an answer yet as to how you economically defend a target as big and vulnerable as a base or a ship from a remotely pilotable bomb that costs $20,000-$50,000, and is buildable in a garage.
The vast majority, by an order of magnitude, of what Iran is shooting at us is drones. Mostly Shahed variants. What we use to shoot it down depends on whether it's a boat or a land target, but at sea we're mostly using the SM-2 (approx. $2.1 million) and ESSM ($1.8 million). The workhorse for land is Patriot PAC-3 (approx. $3.7 million). That is a bad trade.
For what it's worth, the US military already has some very effective drones. Most notably the Lucas, which was based on the Shahed. They're also using the B-52 to drop cheap (but still guided) bombs, and the A-10 to do gun runs. They have no problem doing mass, economical attacks.
People have a misconception that the only way to defend against drones is to shoot them down with expensive interceptor missiles. For one thing there are cheaper ways (like using rocket pods from an A-10). But the best way is to just blow them up on the ground before they get a chance to launch, or blow up their command and control so they can't coordinate an effective launch. We're seeing the attacks from Iran become less and less as this war goes on, and the IRGC who launch them have to pretty much hide in the ground all the time for fear of being bombed the second they launch. This puts the cost burden on the enemy- now they're the ones who have to protect their expensive missiles and drone factories against cheap, ubiquitious bombs and drones. And what we've seen is that they can't, there's no way a paramilitary force like the IRGC can keep up with the operational tempo or equipment of the US military. They're losing major, expensive assets every single day. You just don't hear about it in the news much because it's so common that it's not interesting any more, they only ever report if the US loses something.
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