Suzanne Maloney

They've also expended some of the rest of their missiles in their own strikes.

But we believe that they still have both the missiles, the launchers.

And again, even if the production facilities have been destroyed, they have the capability to rebuild at some point in time.

We have seen the Israelis in particular take wider strikes, clearly aimed at undermining the larger economic infrastructure in Iran, whether it was at the South Pars gas field or the more recently the steel manufacturing plants around the country.

I think that's all intended to make the road harder and longer toward reconstituting Iran.

a really industrial scale ballistic missile program.

But the Iranians have also been very calculated in how they've used those missiles.

They appear to be improving their accuracy over the course of this war.

And they still have the capability to both strike their neighbors and Israel with ballistic missiles.

And they have an even larger and probably more flexible capability when it comes to drone construction.

We have destroyed a lot of Iranian capabilities, but they have more than we fully appreciated.

And they've also been able to both hide and reconstitute some of those capabilities that were already hit.

I think that kind of resilience was something that was not fully appreciated by the Trump administration or by the war planners, that this is a regime that has seen the worst before.

I often point to the first several years of the Islamic Republic when there were tribal revolts, there was urban street fighting, there was intense factionalism and terrorist attacks on the leadership and severe economic constraints.

And then the Iraqi invasion in September 1980.

And the presumption was that Iran would simply collapse.

That didn't happen.

They fought back.

And I think what we're seeing now is that same resilience, that same determination to push forward even when the odds seem tremendously negative.

And we discounted their ability to do exactly what they have done in the past.