Even if all this information is accurate, it does not logically follow that America’s only option then is a humiliating retreat.
It would be one thing if, even on the rarest of occasions, we were privy to a leak from the most sensitive quarters of the U.S. military and intelligence communities that indicated something was going right for the United States. Instead, the leaks — and there have been many of them — all lean in the same direction.
One mordantly comical unauthorized leak via CNN on Monday indicated that CENTCOM’s intelligence outfit was crowdsourcing ideas for “new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran.” At least there’s grim humor to be found in that. Most of the leaks along these lines have been far darker.
Washington Post reporter Dan Lamothe’s sources let him know that the United States lacks the naval forces necessary to defend Israel against an Iranian ballistic missile bombardment. Not to say that the Israelis required it or that the Iranians were intent on attacking Israel again (they have not, conspicuously enough, even after the April ceasefire collapsed). The point of this reportage was only to stress that the U.S. Navy “has been particularly taxed.”
The United States is critically low on defensive munitions — high-end ballistic missile interceptors, in particular. One U.S. official revealed to CBS News reporters that “the U.S. cannot sustain the rate at which it expended precision munitions early in the campaign against Iran” without “raising broader concerns about America’s readiness for a potential conflict in the Indo-Pacific.” America’s defensive munitions shortages are so grave that, according to the U.S. officials who talked to NBC News, military commanders are allowing Iranian incoming to slip through their defenses.
Not only does America not have the wherewithal to continue prosecuting the war with Iran, it never had the material capabilities necessary to wage this war in the first place.
According to the leakers, the United States did only cosmetic damage to the Iranian nuclear program over the course of Operations Midnight Hammer and Epic Fury. The Islamic Republic is already digging out its nuclear weapons facilities in places like Isfahan. Tehran’s long- and short-range ballistic missile stockpiles are largely intact. And, of course, the battle-hardened and impassive Iranian regime can withstand the economic pressures imposed on it by Trump’s blockade of Iranian ports.
It is possible that all these leaks are designed to dissuade the president from ordering the resumption of high-tempo combat operations on Iranian targets, as some suspect. They may also constitute entirely legitimate admonitions about the state of American readiness from sources with the purest of intentions. Either way, the policy these leaks should beget isn’t one of retreat but, to borrow a phrase, maximum pressure.
Iran’s missile stockpiles may be “largely” intact today. But we can say with certainty that they were 100 percent intact at the start of Operation Epic Fury. Iran’s launches dwindled to a trickle by March because U.S. forces were burying those missiles in their caches and attacking their launch vehicles. Iran may be digging out its nuclear program, but that progress can be swiftly reversed from the air. The Iranians can “outlast” the U.S. only if the U.S. has the stomach for a 90 – 120-day blockade (as the assessment published eighty-eight days ago contended). But what if the president and the public had the patience for something more sustained – a campaign augmented by periodic bouts of kinetic activity designed to rob Iran of its power projection capabilities?
The leaks are, by any objective measure, highly undesirable. Some of this information does not belong with the general public, and release of it provides the Iranian regime’s hardliners with the logical basis to resist American demands. But even if all this information is accurate, it does not logically follow that America’s only option then is a humiliating retreat.