Dr. Bradley Thayer

strikes has been successful at destroying any fixed launcher, but also finding what they call the TELs, the Transporter Erector Launcher, vehicles that would actually carry ballistic missiles.

But that's an ongoing campaign, and it's quite reasonable to suspect that Iran is husbanding some ballistic missiles.

They launched a lot at the outset of the war, and then you see a fall off.

because of the success of the air campaign, but also because of Iran's desire strategically to keep some of those ballistic missiles and their TELs in reserve so that they can be launched to lengthen the war, to draw out the war, and for Israel and the United States never to be sure that we've been able to destroy all of their ballistic missiles.

Likewise, the air war, their air defenses seem to be greatly weakened as a result of the cyber actions that we've likely taken in conjunction with Israel and the kinetic actions that we've taken with Israel and the US.

But we always worry about essentially a surface-to-air missile

an ambush of an aircraft.

The ground war, Steve, we worry about that a lot because of the possibility if you're using Kurds, that's going to cause a Persian nationalist reaction.

If you're using Kurds to break down the door on the ground and to seize a chunk of Iran, the Persian people

are going to react to that, I would suspect, vociferously.

And that's going to feed support for the regime.

And that's not an outcome that we want.

And then, of course, the proxy front will be ongoing as long as this war is, right?

We will always be worried about a terrorist attack in the United States on American soil or against U.S.

military targets abroad.

or against allies, of course, as well.

I think it's a key element of the war.

I think what Iran has done, it has escalated the war horizontally by attacking the Gulf Sheikhdoms in Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan and many other states as well.

Their effort is to undermine support for the U.S.

There's a logic for what they're doing, a military logic, strategic logic for what they're doing.