The US-Israeli strategy against Iran is working. Here is why

[SVPete]

The US-Israeli strategy against Iran is working. Here is why

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/3/16/the-us-israeli-strategy-against-iran-is-working-here-is-why

Two weeks into Operation Epic Fury, the dominant narrative has settled into a comfortable groove: The United States and Israel stumbled into a war without a plan. Iran is retaliating across the region. Oil prices are surging, and the world is facing another Middle Eastern quagmire. US senators have called it a blunder. Cable news has tallied the crises. Commentators have warned of a long war.
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But this narrative is wrong. Not because the costs are imaginary, but because the critics are measuring the wrong things. They are cataloguing the price of the campaign while ignoring the strategic ledger.

When you look at what has actually happened to Iran’s principal instruments of power – its ballistic missile arsenal, its nuclear infrastructure, its air defences, its navy and its proxy command architecture – the picture is not one of US failure. It is one of systematic, phased degradation of a threat that previous administrations allowed to grow for four decades.
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Iranian ballistic missile launches have fallen by more than 90 percent from 350 on February 28 to roughly 25 by March 14, according to publicly available data. Drone launches tell the same story: from more than 800 on Day 1 to about 75 on Day 15.
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Iran’s naval assets, fast-attack craft, midget submarines and mine-laying capabilities are being liquidated. Its air defences have been suppressed to the point at which the US is now flying nonstealth B-1 bombers over Iranian airspace, a decision that signals near-total confidence in air dominance.
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Iran now faces a strategic dilemma that tightens every day. If it fires its remaining missiles, it exposes launchers that are promptly destroyed. If it conserves them, it forfeits the ability to impose costs of the war. Missile and drone launch data suggest Iran is rationing its remaining capacity for politically timed salvoes rather than sustaining operational tempo.

This is a force managing decline, not projecting strength.
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Reasonable people can disagree about whether diplomatic alternatives were fully exhausted, the Omani-mediated negotiations in February showed real progress, and there are legitimate questions about whether Washington walked away too soon.

But the critics’ implicit alternative, continued restraint while Iran inched towards a nuclear weapon, is the policy that produced the crisis in the first place. Every year of strategic patience added centrifuges to the enrichment halls and kilogrammes to the stockpile.
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... Every day the (Strait of Hormuz) blockade continues, Iran severs its own economic lifeline and alienates the one major power that has consistently shielded it at the United Nations. The closure does not just hurt the global economy; it accelerates Iran’s isolation.

Meanwhile, the naval assets Iran needs to sustain the blockade – fast-attack boats, drones, mines, shore-based antiship missiles – are being degraded daily. Its naval bases at Bandar Abbas and Chahbahar have been severely damaged.

The question is not whether the strait reopens but when and whether Iran retains any naval capacity to contest it. Critics compare the challenge of escorting a hundred tankers daily to an impossible logistical burden. But you do not need to escort tankers through a strait if the adversary no longer has the means to threaten them. That is the operational trajectory.
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But the critics are making a different error: They are treating the costs of action as if the costs of inaction were zero. They were not. They were measured in the slow accretion of a threat that, left unchecked, would have produced exactly the crisis everyone claims to fear: a nuclear-armed Iran capable of closing the Strait of Hormuz at will, surrounded by proxy forces that could hold the entire region hostage indefinitely.

I do not normally look to Al Jazeera for insight or wisdom, but this professor is saying, clearly, what Dems and their MSM parrots claim they do not see - plan and progress.

[ADsOutburst]

Its air defences have been suppressed to the point at which the US is now flying nonstealth B-1 bombers over Iranian airspace, a decision that signals near-total confidence in air dominance.

It's fun to reflect on the claims I've seen over the years that Russian-built air defense systems would shoot down American stealth aircraft.

[SVPete]

It's fun to reflect on the claims I've seen over the years that Russian-built air defense systems would shoot down American stealth aircraft.

In the first few days. F-22s, F-35s, and B-2s were used, and among other things they took out Iran's Russian SAM defenses. So, yeah those Russian SAM systems didn't "see" US stealth aircraft. Those first few days should have been, "Holy @#$%!" moments for the Russians. The Russian SAM defenses have not fared too well against Ukrainian drones, either.