7:44 p.m. Eastern Time.
Tonight.
“It’s the first thing I read every morning.” — David Barboza, founder of WireScreen and former Shanghai Bureau Chief for The New York Times.
1. The Washington Post:
A surge of additional U.S. forces to the Middle East and President Donald Trump’s threat to “obliterate” Iran’s energy infrastructure have set the stage for what U.S. and Israeli security officials increasingly see as the war’s possible endgame: a battle for control of the Strait of Hormuz and key energy installations.
Reopening the strait — a critical conduit for global energy supplies — has emerged as perhaps the paramount objective of a war that security officials now believe is unlikely to achieve goals that briefly seemed possible at the outset of the U.S.-Israeli military operation, including overthrowing Iran’s theocratic regime and putting a nuclear weapon permanently out of Tehran’s reach.
Instead, breaking Iran’s stranglehold on the strait could enable Trump to wind down the war while claiming victory, halt an expanding global energy crisis and deprive Iran of a potent deterrent against future strikes — which senior Israeli officials described as inevitable if Tehran resumes ballistic missile production or moves to develop a nuclear weapon.
In Israel, Trump’s online threats have raised expectations that a new phase of the war could soon get underway with the arrival of additional U.S. firepower. (Source: washingtonpost.com)
2. President Trump’s 48-hour ultimatum to “fully open” the vital (Strait of Hormuz) — a conduit for about a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas exports — expires at 7:44 p.m. eastern time today, after which he’s threatened strikes on Iran’s power plants. Should such an attack occur, Iran has threatened to hit power and water plants across the region. One senior Iranian official said on social media that the headquarters and assets of financial entities that buy US Treasury bonds are “legitimate targets.” (Source: bloomberg.com)
3. Eurointelligence.com:
As US and Israeli officials tout their success in degrading Iran’s senior leadership and military infrastructure, the regime itself remains intact. Its resilience in the face of numerous high-profile assassinations since 28 February can be attributed in part to the regime’s strategy of ‘mosaic defense’.
This doctrine organizes the IRGC into regionally based, semi-autonomous units capable of operating independently in wartime. These units have the authority to call upon Basij forces, while relying on their own intelligence, weapons stockpiles, and command structures – effectively giving each unit its own self-contained military capacity. Designed to decentralize authority to lower-ranking commanders, the strategy makes the IRGC resilient to decapitation strikes and quick to respond to emerging threats. Mosaic defense can thus be seen as one pillar of Iran’s broader military strategy alongside asymmetric and proxy warfare, and ballistic missiles.
For now, the model seems to be working. The IRGC has continued to respond to the US-Israeli air campaign, firing waves of missiles and drones at Israel, US military and diplomatic sites across the Middle East, and key energy infrastructure in the Persian Gulf. Although the pace of Iran’s attacks has slowed since the start of the war, their persistence suggests that the regime’s command-and-control system continues to function under pressure. (Source: eurointelligence.com)
