The mainstream narrative has consistently centred US and Israeli agency in this war. What are the US and Israel doing? What is President Trump saying?
What bombing raids have they carried out? What targets have they hit within Iran?
What we haven’t been hearing is what Iran has been doing.
So far, US losses have been remarkably downplayed. The same is all the more true for Israel, which has prohibited social media-based on-ground reporting of the aftermath of Iranian strikes.
Yet the US has already suffered significant losses to its Middle East positions. As of 9 April, the Pentagon reports 341 servicemen and 45 servicewomen killed or wounded.
At the outset of the war, there were 13 US military bases in the Gulf states. All are now either “badly damaged or destroyed” due to Iranian attacks.
It is emerging that last Friday’s “rescue” of a US Air Force pilot within Iran was a disaster for the US Air Force. An F-15, and two Black Hawk helicopters were apparently lost. Other reports mention an additional two lost HC-130J planes.
Elsewhere on the same day, an A-10 attack aircraft was shot down over Iran. The US has not lost so many aircraft in a single day since back in Iran itself in 1980, when it sought to rescue hostages from the US embassy in Tehran.
In February, the movement of E-3 Sentry AWACS radar planes to the Middle East was a tell that a major US operation was being planned. One of these planes was destroyed and another seriously damaged in an Iranian strike on a Saudi air-base on 27 March.
The US only has 16 of these E-3’s in total. Only four of them are now operational in the Middle East.
One report has US $2.8 billion in total US Air Force equipment losses.
These losses fit an longue durée narrative that cheap manufacturing of computer-guided weaponry (rockets, missiles and drones) would change global military power.
The US is the legacy power. Its military assets are increasingly dated and its forward posture was won on the back of historic strength, the relevance of which in the present day is uncertain.
For instance, the US has the most powerful navy on earth, with a full seven aircraft carriers in service. Yet in the age of drones and hypersonic missiles, those carriers cannot approach Iran. The closest two US aircraft carriers to Iran are currently in the Indian Ocean and off the coast of Croatia.
Iran is demanding that the US withdraw all of its military forces from the Middle East entirely. If the war continues, that may be the outcome by default.
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