Phil Stewart

could actually have to feel the need to escalate.

And it's that escalation ladder that a lot of military analysts have always warned about when engaging with Iran, because they have a far greater ability to counterattack than adversaries that the U.S.

has attacked before, say the Taliban or Al-Qaeda or Islamic State.

This is nothing like any of those.

What we've learned is that this planning is incredibly granular, and it includes now potentially targeting individual Iranian leaders, as well as options ranging all the way up to full regime change.

And so we don't know exactly what the order of battle, as they call it in the military, would be.

But we reported a week ago that the U.S.

military was planning for a potentially weeks-long sustained operation against Iran.

And if you talk to experts and analysts, what that really means is that there's going to be kind of an exchange of blows.

And the Iranians are far more capable than what the United States had to deal with in Iraq and far more capable than what the United States had to deal with when they fought the Taliban.

And so you are talking about potentially an actual conflict.

So the Iranians have lots of options, right?

They control the waters off their coast, or at least they would seek to control them.

And one way they could do that is by mining the strait.

Now, they've always threatened that if their regime were threatened or if their ability to export oil were threatened, then nobody would be able to export oil and they would have to mine the strait.

And of course, that is quite problematic for global oil markets.

What we're talking about here is something fundamentally different than what we saw last summer.

And what I mean by that is, you know, you had seen a pretty stunning operation by US fighter pilots, bombers, basically, who flew all the way from the United States over Iranian airspace and destroyed Iran's nuclear facilities.

And what you're talking about now could be something fundamentally different, where the United States either attacks any range of targets in Iran, and then the Iranians retaliate, and then there's a back and forth.

What U.S.