Behnam Ben Taleblu

There's been debates about how many launchers Iran has versus how much they rebuilt post the 12-day war.

The Israelis said for the 400 plus launchers Iran had that they took about a third of them in the 12-day war.

Now they're saying about two-thirds of them.

The US government is relatively silent on the number of launchers, but the videos they put out had to show them striking a heck of a lot of launchers.

There's a lot more questions than answers here when it comes to the numbers.

And what we have to do as open source watchers

is piece together those four things, local Iranian sources, Persian language government sources, Western English language reporting, and commercial satellite imagery to be able to get a good sense.

I think the best thing that we can point to in terms of targeting by Washington

has been two things.

One, missile facilities, depending on the commercially available satellite imagery you use and the reporting you use, anywhere from 19 to 22 to potentially even 27 missile sites have been targeted.

But targeting is not the same as destroyed because some of those that have been targeted have been able to resume fire, I think, within just a matter of days.

so that means that these facilities have not been collapsed it's just the doorways that have been collapsed or the infrastructure uh has been you know targeted but the the subterranean facility still stands that's one and two is ballistic missile production you know sites like hojir shahwood maybe parchin uh the hakimia complex those have definitely been struck and struck in a way

that Israel had not struck in October 2024 or June 2025.

So there is evidence to support what these U.S.

officials are saying, but there's not sufficient evidence in terms of numbers to take the victory lap right now.

Well, I think they're going to want, let me just put a footnote of what you said right before, which is if we're looking at the decline in the number of launches, you know, this is not to get all political science-y for a second, but I think this is a situation of equifinality, which is many reasons for one cause.

Certainly, the predominant cause, if we're making a cocktail together here, the main ingredient to that cocktail is the success of the US and Israeli strikes, particularly against the launchers, because that's one of the main bottlenecks in terms of this Iranian missile infrastructure.

You could have 5 million missiles, but if you have only two launchers, that really does impact your rate of fire, and that makes you vulnerable to the kind of strikes and the successes that America and Israel have had.

But on the flip side, the logic that we're seeing from even just Iranian military

commanders in the field, even if you pretend there is zero command and control and everything is totally localized, it's all intonation rather than coordination, if they see less missile teams coming back, if they see less TELs coming back from the field, because they have to go out of the mountain, fire the projectile, drive back to the mountain, load up the missiles, and every time they see less and less returning or they get different insight from the men who do choose to return and come back and it's fear and it's hesitation and agitation,