Whatever It Takes.
Material older than the sun.
“The first news summary of the morning —the most comprehensive I’ll receive all day— and the last thing I read before going on air.” — Hugh Hewitt, host of The Hugh Hewitt Show.
1. President Trump said the US would keep up its military offensive against Iran for as long as it takes, outlining for the first time a set of four objectives he hopes to accomplish toward reducing the threat he said is posed by Tehran. “We projected four to five weeks, but we have capability to go far longer than that,” Trump said at a White House event on Monday about the timeline he foresaw for the campaign. “Whatever the time is, it’s OK. Whatever it takes.” The president has faced mounting pressure to better define the goals of his extraordinary military intervention on Iran, after days of sending mixed signals about what he wanted to achieve. Trump said that the effort, which launched on Saturday, aims to eliminate Iran’s missile capabilities, destroy the country’s navy, cut off its path to a nuclear weapon and ensure that the government “cannot continue to arm, fund and direct terrorist armies outside of their borders.” Notably, the president did not mention regime change as one of the campaign’s goals. (Source: bloomberg.com)
2. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio revealed Monday that Washington launched major strikes against Iran over the weekend because it received intelligence that its assets in the region would be targeted in response to an Israeli attack. Speaking to reporters before holding a classified briefing with Congressional leaders, Rubio was asked to clarify the “imminent threat” posed by Iran that American officials have been citing in recent days to justify the US launch of Operation Epic Fury on Saturday. “The imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked — and we believed they would be attacked — they would immediately come after us,” Rubio said. “We were aware of Israeli intentions… and understood what that would mean for us and had to be prepared to act as a result of it.” (Source: timesofisrael.com)
3. The New York Times:
Iran was expanding its retaliatory attacks on American targets in the Gulf region early Tuesday, hours after President Trump and other top officials in his administration signaled that the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran could intensify and continue for weeks or more.
Iranian leaders have said the attacks are targeting U.S. assets. Explosions were reported on Monday in several countries hosting American military bases, including Iraq, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. The U.S. Embassy in Riyadh was closed on Tuesday after Saudi Arabia’s Defense Ministry said an attack by two drones started a fire and caused minor damage.
A drone also struck the American Embassy compound in Kuwait on Monday, according to two U.S. officials who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. The United Arab Emirates said on Tuesday that its air defenses were “dealing with a barrage of ballistic missiles” from Iran.
There have also been attacks against Dubai’s international airport, hotels and other civilian and economic infrastructure. Amazon’s cloud computing business said two of its facilities in the United Arab Emirates had been hit by drones and remained “significantly impaired” early Tuesday. (Source: nytimes.com)
4. US-made Patriot air-defense missiles have been largely successful in stopping the Iranian Shaheds and other ballistic missiles, with interception rates over 90%, according to the UAE. But using $4 million missiles to destroy $20,000 drones illustrates a problem that has haunted Western military planners since early in the Ukraine war: The cheap weapons can chew up resources meant for much more complex threats. The result is that both Iran and the US may run low on weapons in a matter of days or weeks. Whoever can last longer will gain a serious advantage. “Attrition strategy makes operational sense from Iran’s perspective,” said Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center think-tank. “They are calculating the defenders will exhaust their interceptors and the political will of Gulf states will crack and put pressure on the US and Israel to cease operations before they run out of missiles and drones.” Qatar’s stocks of Patriot interceptor missiles will last four days at the current rate of use, according to an internal analysis seen by Bloomberg News. Doha has been privately urging a swift end to the conflict. (Source: bloomberg.com. Italics mine.)
