Behnam Ben Taleblu

The U.S.

and Israel are trying to attrite the military capacity and capability of the Islamic Republic, whereas the Islamic Republic itself is trying to attrite the resolve of America, Israel, and the West, in particular by going against the region, the Arab world, critical infrastructure, energy, oil shipping, you name it.

So there is a war.

The tools of the war, the weapons of the war, the targets of the war are quite different.

And we're now past the one month marker.

I still think Uncle Sam needs a bit more time to even win on points, to even win on a technicality, which is this defanging and degrading and destruction mission.

against the regime's missile and drone forces and against the whole host of military industries that support them.

But nonetheless, that's the one where I see the president most clearly being able to hang his hat on for a military victory.

And I think the Islamic Republic is keen to prevent us from getting a political victory.

Well, the challenge is unless you count local sources, Persian language government sources, Western English language reporting, and of course, commercially available satellite imagery.

And even with that cocktail, you get some different answers.

Unless you count all of that stuff and weighed heavily against the silence from USG on the numbers, the number of launchers, the number of medium range ballistic missiles versus short range, the various rationales for the drops in Iranian firepower, the various rationales where despite

really losing senior figures in terms of command and control, why the IRGC is still able to shoot and still shoot effectively, I might say.

You don't really get to be able to answer that question honestly or thoroughly or as I would like.

You get really a jigsaw puzzle approach to it instead.

So I do think that there is success.

There's been quite a bit of military success.

It's just hard to measure at this point in time because even, for example, the number of how many ballistic missiles does Iran have or did Iran have?

has been such a political football ever since former CENTCOM Chief General McKinsey entered the number 3,000 into the public domain about five, six years ago.

There's debates over how much does an Iranian ballistic missile cost, anywhere from $200,000 to $3 million.