Dr. Bradley Thayer

So they want to husband their capabilities as they do their ballistic missiles, their drones and UAVs.

They want to keep the fight going, but they don't want to use up all of their capabilities because they want to draw out the fight.

So it's difficult to assert whether, and of course, our choice is to treat them as rapidly as possible, to find them by whatever means and destroy them.

And that's the entire chain, where they're being produced, how they're being transported, how they're being generated, and then how they're being fired.

So we need to keep that in mind.

So what comes out of Hegseth's remarks and Admiral Cooper's remarks, to my mind, are three things.

First,

Hegseth stressed the will is ironclad, right?

One thing that he repeated time and again was that the United States is in this to stay as long as it takes.

Secondly, as he stressed, of course, again repeatedly,

more forces, more capabilities are going to flow to the region.

Iran hasn't seen, just to paraphrase, but Iran hasn't seen all of U.S.

capabilities and allied capabilities.

So again, that's important.

Third, both Hegseth and Cooper

uh independently of course stress that we have the means right that we have the offensive and defensive capabilities to sustain uh the fight so um that's a very important point to keep in mind but steve if we take a step back i i think when we think through the war as attritional we need to understand that that attrition is taking place really in five fronts

First front is going to be the missile war, if you will.

That's the ballistic missiles, the cruise missiles, the UAVs and the drones.

The second front is going to be the air war, as Brandon was describing.

A third front is the naval war, now largely fought in the Gulf.