America hit Iran last night, taking out a couple launchers and radar aiming at ships the US is trying to get out of the Strait. Iran responded by hitting a US base in Jordan.
Today, around 8pm Iranian time, the US hit a variety of targets, some civilian (a fish powder plant?) and some military. Iran has now started its retaliation, which includes a lot of anti-ship missiles going after US naval vessels.
launched its attack on U.S. bases in response to an American strike on Iranian naval facilities, which caused multiple casualties. The reported expenditure of more than 80 PAC-3 interceptors in a single engagement by some estimates represents more than ten percent of the entire American arsenal, at a time when interceptors are in very short supply across the Western world primarily due to mass use against Iran, but also due to mass donations to Ukraine. While U.S. government sources claimed that there was no damage to facilities from Iranian strikes, footage from the ground and satellite imagery has confirmed damage, compounding longstanding concerns regarding the Patriot’s limited effectiveness.
This comes back to what I said day one of the war: that the math favors Iran—the US and Israel will run out of interceptors long before Iran runs out of missiles and drones.
Both sides have been degrading the other sides radar (the US was late on this, but is now hitting the hard), but both sides still have satellite imagery to work from. (I’m 99% sure that China, Russia or both are providing real time feeds to Iran.) Loss of radars degrades defense more than offense, so more attacks can be expected to get thru on both sides, but, of course, Iran never had a lot of AD to begin with so this effects the US more.
Today’s attacks seem to mostly be tomahawks launched from US naval vessels, which are also in short supply.
just yesterday, the U.S. Secretary of the Army AND the U.S. Deputy Undersecretary of the Army both reportedly resigned from their roles, leaving the United States without the Army’s number one and number three man.
Three of the remaining five regional commanders also gave Hegseth a non-concur on the plans, which means “we’ll do it because it’s a legal order, but we think it’s stupid.”
After the second set of American attacks Trump bloviated:
Once again, America can’t do this without indiscriminate use of nukes. Those nukes would not take out Iran’s missiles, which are deep in mountains, and Iranian commanders would then take out Israel, which yeah, they can do. Probably effectively destroy the physical economy of every US vassal within range and those regimes would not survive the fallout. Saudi Arabia is already in enough trouble that they’re negotiating an 8 billion dollar loan.
Iran was willing to let the war drag out because their calculation was that they could take the economic pain for longer than the US, and it avoided a lot of damage to Iran. But that doesn’t mean they can’t win a hot war, by my calculations they can, will and in fact, really already have except that Trump (unlike most of his generals) won’t admit that America has lost.
We’ll see if this keeps going. I don’t really see how it should, given American weaknesses, but Trump isn’t a rational actor. though I’d guess he really wants the war over before the midterms.
As for Iran, they’re digging their heels in hard, saying that peace only happens if Trump and Israel obey the MOU (which includes an end to Israeli attacks in Lebanon, where they are bulldozing entire towns that have existed for thousands of years.)
Since Trump can’t or won’t rein in Israel, if Iran’s serious, this is going to go on until Israel is begging for peace.
And folks? You’re living thru a war which will be studies by historians for ages as the war that marked the end of America as a superpower.
Update: interceptor depletion is real
Where are the air defenses of the US and Jordanian child-killing regimes? pic.twitter.com/ZpuwRy6GtY
— Seyed Mohammad Marandi (@s_m_marandi) September 1, 2026
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j
Something just occurred to me, which in hindsight should have been obvious to me a long time ago.
When has the US ever admitted it has lost a war, this president, or that? Off the top of my head it always takes years. Nothing special about Trump in this regard then.
Ian Welsh
The usual strategy is to declare victory and leave, but they can’t do that this time because Iran has its hand around the throat of oil supplies and if they just quit, Iran could take Israel apart.
cc
If even more top US commanders resign or give non-concurs that could have even more effect on the midterm elections in 9 1/2 weeks.
But hey there will be a new Trump ballroom.
Gulf of America, Lake America, Strait of America.
Trump depicted as Jesus.
“the war that marked the end of America as a superpower.”
If so, perhaps The Global Majority (the 7/8th of the world) – as opposed to the West, aka the Golden Billion, that is the richest 1/8th minority of the world – should see Trump as the savior and liberator?
Apparently in China they half-jokingly already see him as a nation-builder (in the sense of helping their country) and perhaps the same can be said here in Canada (as I believe Ian has pointed out as well, https://www.ianwelsh.net/yes-canadians-did-did-think-america-was-a-friend-yes-trump-is-good-for-canada/)
Mark Level
This all really comes down to primate dominance behavior, and with Trump’s tiny, miserable Ego, no real Superego, & an insanely baked Id. Then look at the Cult that is his inner circle, with sickos like Loomer, Stephen Miller, Hegseth, etc.
It could be a “Lion in Winter” thing. Now Trump was never an actual brawler, but he had Mafiosi training from his (gay) mentor Roy Cohn, then presumably picked up some tips on rape and minors from his sometime buddy Epstein.
Given the preceding and that it seems there is nobody who can restrain him, and what Ian spells out viz the possibility of burning the whole Middle East down, that seems increasingly the more likely outcome, would hazard to guess.
It seems too late to use the 25th Amendment, and it seems there is a plan (sketchy at best, like anything coming from these clowns) to federalize and then steal the Midterms.
If he does this, it’ll be (a) up to the ‘Murican people to rebel, do a multi-day General Strike, well not very likely, ain’t many Working Class Heroes since my youth in the 1970s. Or (b), the gas shortages, power outages in 4-6 weeks get bad enough to force people onto the streets. Or (c) an immediate mass Draft (UK went there, why not its bad mutated offspring?)
The Dimmies won’t do shit, or even Shinola. They’re pro-War all the way. Trump is the ultimate accelerationist. The old story among the few actual Lefties in the US was that the Car of State is headed over the cliff at 90 mph, the Dimmies might (or not) go over the cliff at 70 . . .
Glad I’m not there now. Things not going super-great here at the moment. I’d suffered from an attempt at Identity theft and had to wait 2 solid weeks for a replacement card, got it & it works, good news of the day.
My bad news is US-based. Yesterday on the phone for nearly 2 hours, I got hooked up with a good agency to call a real estate agent and view a place. But my phone was useless for in Mexico calls. 4th guy at Verizon finally got me going again. It’s in my plan that I can make “roaming” calls in Canada & Mexico, no extra charges.
Talked to my real estate contact, Ileana, in a.m., supposed to meet her 5:40 pm. Then my phone refused to make ANY calls within Mexico (still have full US access.) Verizon is supposedly fixing it, we might escalate to the “Engineers” being involved soon. No problems calling U$A.
Hope y’all stay safe; at least all the Canadians on here aren’t in such danger, and Finster could always flee North if it comes to that. Guy just asked me where I was, a tech, I shared. Very far North in Yucatan peninsula. I looked at a map again, pleased to see even Google Maps called the area North of me the Gulf of Mexico. So maybe there’s hope?
Carborundum
I am dubious of the notion that Iran could destroy Israel via its rocketry forces. It’s been demonstrated time and again that airpower alone doesn’t win wars, so what makes rockets so magical?
For context, the total throw weight of Iran’s ballistic missile forces is about equal to one night of what RAF Bomber Command could muster until the latter days of the war and somewhere between one and two percent of has been dropped on Gaza. Destructive, yes – country-killing I don’t see how. (Quite apart from this, if Iran were to launch extended counter-value strikes, that would be one of the situations where the Israelis would use special weapons.)
mago
Got jack to add about this shit show.
What Mark Level said subtracted from his personal woes.
By the way, when traveling below the 45th parallel, I’d often claim to be Canadian and put a maple leaf sticker on my pack.
What a world.
Interesting times and all that.
Ian Welsh
1) hit the de-salination plants.
2) hit the nuclear reactor.
3) build a dirty bomb (they have enough enrich uranium for a few), stick it on missile and hit Tel-Aviv. Add winds, and Israel is uninhabitable.
So yeah, if nukes are used on Iran, Israel will die.
Also missiles are a LOT more accurate than dumb bombs. I read a report on the effect of bombing in WWII many years ago and the accuracy was absolute garbage in most cases. Drop in the general area, pray.
Feral Finster
“Once again, America can’t do this without indiscriminate use of nukes.”
That is coming.
Feral Finster
“The Dimmies won’t do shit, or even Shinola. They’re pro-War all the way. Trump is the ultimate accelerationist.”
And yes, Virginia, Team D is all-in. They like it when Trump does their dirty work.
https://www.savageminds.co/p/jared-moskowitz
Carborundum
My point was about the destructive potential of the tonnage dropped – it just isn’t enough to achieve a country-killing scale of effects. Take the tonnage, distribute it equally across every built-up area and I still don’t see how one gets there.
Iranian ballistic missiles have CEPs measured in the low hundreds of metres. I absolutely agree that this is better than WWII strategic bombing, but it isn’t so much more accurate that their throw weight suddenly achieves big things. For context, what they currently muster is about two to three times the CEP that good tactical bombing could achieve during the Vietnam war (and we saw how that worked out). Going from a CEP measured in a few hundreds of metres to the low tens is a big game changer, but they’re not there. Combine the CEP with the tonnage, and I don’t see how one gets to killing a country.
One *can* produce ballistic warheads that are in the tens of metres range, but we have seen nothing indicative of the Iranians fielding systems with those capabilities. (The CEPs on their cruise missiles are materially much better and are probably actually in this range, but these are a *lot* harder to get to target at the ranges we’re talking about than ballistic systems.)
The net assessment is that all of the targets you mention are a lot more difficult to service with the systems Iran has than we might think (and certainly more difficult than Iranian statements would wish us to believe) and any systematic attempt to go after them is likely to eat a real (i.e., not dirty) nuclear weapon. I don’t see the Iranians expending their top strategic chips in this sort of strategy unless they are really back to the wall. Personally, I don’t buy the Twelver death seeker propaganda – my experience, just about everyone chooses to fight another day if they have a visible way out and these guys look to have one.
Bukko Boomeranger
Carbo, how can you opine that Iranian missiles have a circular error probability of “low hundreds of metres”? Haven’t you seen photos of how the Persians have popped specific radomes at Amerikan military bases, with the burn and blast marks ONLY at that spot, not everywhere else? Ditto for other battle damage assessment pics I’ve seen in Jordan, nazIsrael and other countries. It looks like the Persians can precisely plink whatever they want.
I recall an episode from earlier in the war when the Iranians blasted two of Qatar’s 14 liquefied natural gas “trains” (connected methane extraction and cooling facilities) which were owned by Amerikan companies. They skipped the ones owned by the Qatari government and other corporations, while giving a warning to “back off from attacking us or yours are going to go next.”
People who read Ian’s blog strike me as better-informed than your average bears. Sometimes I wonder why they have not seen as much as a nondescript Internetizen like me.
Bob
Very interesting all this. It just seems like the Iranians are confident they can wear the US down by waiting and then responding in kind to US aggression. I am inclined to think that this is a challenge they can’t lose. How long it takes and how painful will it be? That’s scary to contemplate.
Mark Level
Well, it seems Israel and the Jerusalem Post in particular are feeling very concerned about their existential future. See here–
https://x.com/WeimarWillhelm/status/2094784360494899387?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2094784360494899387%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nakedcapitalism.com%2F2026%2F09%2Firan-war-us-lashes-out-at-civilian-targets-with-iran-claiming-us-military-deaths-in-disproportionate-retaliation-on-us-bases-servicemembers-becoming-demoralized-with-lack-of-strategy-no-win-situat.html
The above share is from a Naked Capitalism piece on the failure of the attempt to Regime-Change Iran. How to cope? Well, so many ‘Muricans are enslaved by debt and close to homelessness (a good thing, the JP assures us) that Trump’s 2 big failures in “the narrative war” and impossible “Recruitment numbers” that it is currently a non-starter to conscript the “between 750 thousand and 1.5 million (Goy) American troops” needed “for a successful ground campaign against Iran’s 31 provincial commands.”
The Master stroke suggested: A federal”enlistment through a debt forgiveness program” of an age 18-34 demographic who on average carry “more than $40 thousand in non-mortgage debt across student loans, credit-card balances, auto loans, and personal loans”, additionally many are in debt up to $100 thousand!!
Via debt, Uncle Shmuely could own from 750,000 to 1.5 million mainly Goyim bodies to feed into a woodchipper for the Zionist Apartheid Entity. Makes sense, right? The Israeli Jewish Supremacist population is coincidentally usually quoted at 7.5 million, one tenth of the minimum suggested by the Jerusalem Post writer. So in the most pessimistic iteration of the suggestion, 1 Goyim could be forcibly owned to fight for every 10 existing Israeli Supremacists, more optimistically 4.5 for every 10 precious, superior Jewish Israeli life.
Brilliant, or cartoonishly evil? I know what I think. I haven’t seen wishcasting this insane even for Ukraine to “defeat” Russia. Kudos to the great intellectuals in the Zionist Apartheid Entity for their brilliance, and for the open acknowledgement of the worthlessness of the American sponsors of Greater Israel. Debt Slaves make great cannon fodder, why not? I’m sure the families and friends are down for this as much as Trump, Huckabee, etc. I don’t think it will come to pass, but what chutzpah to dictate American forced enlistment so openly.
Carborundum
Bukko, those targets were hit with Shahed “drones” (really very cheap cruise missiles), not ballistic missiles that can range Israel. Big difference.
Here’s how the current calculus works, near as I can tell: Iran can range Israel with both Shaheds and various ballistic missile systems.
For ballistic missile attacks, Israel is in a severely depleted state with regard to its interceptors and is probably at the point where it can only launch its high Pk [kill probability] systems at incoming vehicles that it assesses as high threat – it probably still has enough low Pk systems that it can expend them on the faint chance they’ll achieve something and to make it look like they’re doing something against threats.
Iran was thought pre-February to have a few thousand low quality ballistic missiles with CEPs measured in the low thousands of metres and low hundreds of high quality ballistic missiles with CEPs measured in the low hundreds of metres. The latter are the significant threat and Iranian deployment is thought to be to launch many of the low quality missiles to mask a few of the more accurate systems that they intend to do the real damage with.
It is critical to understand that the relative mix of ballistic missiles could change as they are apparently building at a rapid rate (or had been in the interim between June of last year and February of this year). Tactically, the rate limiting factors for the Iranians are the number of TELs (Transporter Erector Launchers) they can deploy simultaneously, whether they have to launch from pre-surveyed locations, and how long their dwell time at their launch points is. What we’ve seen so far suggests to me this isn’t as good as they would hope – they don’t seem to be able to muster very large mass attacks when operating under contested airspace. US and Israeli forces say they have significantly attrited Iranian forces, but I think the high numbers they were citing included a high fraction of effects kills rather than reporting hard kills (i.e., they were counting systems they had taken off line by collapsing launch complex entries, rather than missiles and TELs they had actually destroyed).
For cruise missiles / drones, the Iranians look to have many thousands of systems and are thought to be capable of significant force regeneration (i.e., they can build them at a pace that materially lengthens how long they can keep shooting – the Iranians say they’re at 1:1 replacement, but I have my doubts). As I said above, these systems are much more accurate than the ballistic missiles and look to have done most of the real damage. Pretty much everything that I’ve seen imagery for the terminal effects of, hitting anything significant, looks to me to have been a cruise missile strike (for the Bahrain domes specifically, we have oblique imagery of the vehicles in terminal dive attack).
The challenge for Iran is that these weapons are countered with much, much cheaper and more widespread systems. Generally, if one ends up launching a Patriot on one of these things, it means something has gone very wrong – fighters and helos are doing most of the intercept work here and the bulk of the munitions they are using are cheap like borscht. Israel, in particular, is positioned very well against these systems. They have a lot of depth to work with and appear to be working in coordination with US and neighbouring forces to defend. The folks taking the real damage are the countries in the immediate region – they don’t have anything like the standoff distance of Israel and Iran does look to be able to launch saturation attacks that do manage to get warheads to target.
Bottom line, with this mix of systems I don’t think Iran can do enough damage to Israel such that they aren’t better off husbanding their capabilities. Right now, they look to be in a position where they can or soon will be able to reconstitute their ballistic missile forces, probably with higher quality vehicles. If they continue up the escalation chain against Israel, I don’t think they necessarily achieve much and they risk drawing a response that does real damage to their capabilities. My view, the only things that they can do that would do real damage to Israel are mass counter-value attacks (i.e., hitting built up areas just to do damage) that are much too likely to draw a special weapons (i.e., nuclear) response.
In combination with this limited capability against Israel, Iran has very, very significant capability in the immediate region – which is far more relevant. If I’m doing their strategy and my leadership wants to keep tilting against Israel and risking our pretty strong hand against the neighbours and the Great Satan, leadership can find a new strategist.
DMC
It should be noted that Pakistan has warned that it is prepared to launch nuclear retaliation if Israel uses nukes against Iran. If I was running Iran, I’d be looking hard at hacking into the Zionist defensive infrastructure. Say, their nuclear equipped missile systems. Perhaps arranging for them to explode in their silos upon being given their launch codes. Living in the networked world offers whole vistas in unconventional warfare.
different clue
Here is a talky liberal head named Farron Balanced with an interesting video about a leak from within the military itself to the Washington Post about a memo from military people to Hegseth warning that the ongoing Iran war would degrade military readiness and functionality down to zero if not quickly exited from. FarBal notes that it is not “normal” for a leaker within the military to leak something to get a war wound up or stopped. So the campers must be very unhappy. He then goes on to describe the Hegsethian response to all this. Its only about 4 minutes and seemed reasonably interesting to me.
Panic At The Pentagon After Embarrassing Memo Leaks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGIeqpbB1gE
A non-subhuman non-cuck DemPrez in 2028 would fire every single DOD member brought in or promoted by Trumpseth as part of a broader decontrumpination of the Executive Branch of government. What are the chances of a non-subhuman non-cuck DemPrez?
different clue
Here is a Belle of the Ranch video called:
Let’s talk about Hegseth destroying Army leadership and ignoring advice….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-a1sHqaJR0Q
She begins it by noting that Hegseth has “decapitated” the entire uppest ranks of our military, something which NO foreign enemy was ever able to do. She will go on from there but I have to get back to work.
( Hegseth did this decapitation on purpose as stage one of his plan to Christianazify the Armed Forces and transform them all into a strictly Whites only Christian Nationalist neo-Crusader force for waging holy war against non Whites abroad and then against non Whitey-Whites at home . . . what Tucker Carlson calls ” non-Heritage Americans”. Luckily Hegseth was not smart enough to get all his Christianazi support pillars in place before tearing all the Legacy aMERican support pillars out. Pray Hegseth is turned into road kill when the House of Iron Cards falls on him, which hopefully it does.)