Dr. Bradley Thayer

The ground front would be purportedly led by the Kurds.

potentially with backing from the US intelligence community, from Israel's intelligence community, and potentially other actors as well, to serve as the boots on the ground, to serve as a ground force that would be able to seize and hold territory within Iran.

that might be used as bastions or that might be used to project additional ground attacks against Iran.

And then the fifth and final would be, the fifth front is proxies.

The fact that the war is expanding, and this is shown most clearly in Lebanon,

where you have a proxy war between Hezbollah and Israel, although with Iran's strong support for terrorism, we can see that proxy attacks occur.

For example, the attack in Austin, Texas that we've had, that we might see other attacks and sustained attacks due to the fact that there are Iranian sleeper cells operating in the United States.

So when we think about the war, the kinetic aspect of the war, leaving aside the economic aspect of it, leaving aside the political aspect of it, we see those five fronts going on simultaneously today.

And there's variation in success.

The U.S.

has been very successful in sinking Iran's navy.

and keeping Hormuz open.

We can see that the Fifth Fleet, though, is gonna be tasked with a very great responsibility to ensure that civilian traffic is able to transit the strait.

The missile campaign, again, as a result of Iranian launches,

and Israeli-U.S.

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.