Chapter 1: What recent developments have occurred in the Iran conflict?
Early this morning, President Trump wrote on Truth Social that the war in Iran has taken a turn.
I am pleased to report that the United States of America and the country of Iran have had, over the last two days, very good and productive conversations regarding a complete and total resolution of our hostilities in the Middle East.
Later, a senior official in Iran's foreign ministry says that never happened. Mr. President, Iran's foreign ministry says you're not telling the truth when it comes to productive conversations to end the war.
Well, they're going to have to get themselves better public relations people.
Oh, OK. Coming up on today's plane from Vox, how the war in Iran might end. What if the will to fight is there, but the weapons aren't?
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Chapter 2: How are drones changing the nature of warfare?
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Vox's Josh Keating, you wrote that this war isn't just a question of will, it's a question of means.
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Chapter 3: What challenges does the U.S. face with its munitions supply?
It's very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere.
And so what we have is a kind of math problem on both sides. Iran has a certain number of projectiles that can fire at its enemies throughout the region. And it's burning through them fast. And a lot of them have been destroyed by U.S. and Israeli airstrikes.
Ballistic missile attacks against our forces. Down 90% since the start of the conflict. Same with one-way attack UAVs.
But where there is an acute shortage are on the interceptors. So these are basically sort of smaller projectiles that shoot down the missiles and drones that are fired by Iran. And so those are pretty expensive, pretty advanced systems, and we don't make a lot of them.
President Trump said there's an unlimited supply of missiles and interceptors and munitions, and that's simply not the case.
The U.S. is using anti-missile interceptors that cost millions.
Each interceptor can reportedly cost anywhere between $500,000 to $4 million.
And so just because of the quantity of stuff that Iran is basically hurling all across the Middle East, we're burning through the global stockpiles pretty fast. And that's a problem in this war, and it may be a problem for the U.S. in other theaters as well.
I assume the interceptors are being used for missiles on their way into Israel. Where else are they being used?
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Chapter 4: How does Iran utilize its drone technology in conflicts?
And, you know, a Patriot Interceptor, which is kind of the top end, those missiles, they cost about $4 million each. It's not something you want to fire at, you know, a jury-rigged drone that you bought off of Costco and, like, attached a grenade to, which is something we've seen in the war in Ukraine. If you think about what these are, it's basically shooting down a bullet with another bullet.
And so... The fact that we have the technology to do that is pretty amazing, but these are pricey items. The U.S. reportedly burned through an estimated $2.4 billion worth of Patriot interceptors in just the first five days of this war. There's another system called THAAD, which are these advanced mobile missile batteries. And during the war in June, the U.S.
burned through about a quarter of its stock of them. You know, so this is an even more intense missile war now. So this is sort of a tough story to cover because every actor in it has incentive not to give you the latest and most accurate numbers. But, you know, we can assume that they're feeling the strain.
OK, so if I'm Iran, I'm thinking, let's just wait for the U.S. to run out of interceptors. That's a good way to win this war. How long can Iran keep going?
This is kind of the million-dollar question, or maybe I should say the $4 billion question. You know, so early in this conflict, it looked like there was a real risk of that. I mean, there was a report in Qatar, for instance, a U.S.
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of interceptors in modern warfare?
ally that hosts a major military base was only a few days away from running out of interceptors entirely. The shortage is a little less acute now, and that's mainly because just the number of Iranian launches has dropped. They're firing... According to the Pentagon's number, 90% fewer missiles, something around 80% fewer drones.
That means the supplies can probably hold up a lot longer just because they're using fewer of them. And sort of the question becomes, is Iran firing fewer missiles because...
It's running out of them, but it also is quite possible the Iranians are holding something in reserve, that they know this could be a long conflict and they are kind of, you know, drizzling them out, so to speak, just using a few at a time just so they can continue to fight this war as long as possible and continue fighting.
to impose costs, you know, the calculation being that Trump's pain tolerance is just a lot lower than theirs and that sooner or later the president will, you know, get sick of this war and move on to other things.
Is there evidence that Iran is holding back some of its weapons in order to surprise the U.S. later on?
You know, they certainly want to give that impression. If you look at another actor in this conflict, Hezbollah, which is the Lebanese militia, one of Israel's staunchest enemies, they fired like a handful of rockets into Israel, like maybe half a dozen. And I think a lot of analysts, reporters looked at that and were like, oh, you know, Hezbollah's spent.
Like they've been fighting Israel for two years. They just don't have it. And then a few days ago, they launched 200 into Israel, and that indicates they were holding back. So the Iranians may be doing the same. So my guess is it's a combination of the two, that there is a deliberate strategy where they're sort of parceling these out and they don't want to run out. This is an asymmetric fight.
I don't think anyone was ever under any illusions that Iran was going to sort of defeat Israel.
the US and Israel in a conventional military sense, what they can do is they're willing to absorb a lot more punishment up to and including the death of the Supreme Leader while continuing to impose costs on the US, on Israel, on the wider region that might just be, you know, more than this US government can tolerate at a time of, you know, rising gas prices, lowering poll numbers, impending midterms, you know, pick your factor at work here.
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Chapter 6: How does the cost of military technology impact U.S. defense strategies?
The US only has three of those at sea at any one given time. We've now moved two of them to the Middle East, one of which, the Ford, is badly in need of maintenance to the point that they just had a terrible fire on that ship. Its deployment's been extended several times. I think what both these stories really underline is that even with the sheer scale of money that the U.S.
spends on its military, even with the advanced technology it has with our ability to strike targets all over the world, seemingly at will, that there really are still material constraints on the projection of U.S. power and the ability to shift on a dime from fighting one war in Venezuela one month to the Middle East the next month.
There are real issues with the number of munitions and interceptors we have. It takes time to move an aircraft carrier all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. We still do live in a real world with real physical constraints and that we have to remember that if we're going to be getting into a new military conflict every month.
That was Vox's Josh Keating. Coming up, Attack of the Drones. Support for the show comes from Delete Me. Delete Me makes it easy, quick, and safe to remove your personal data online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. Have you Googled yourself? Have you Googled yourself? In creative ways, some weird stuff can come up.
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Chapter 7: What lessons can be learned from Ukraine's defense against drones?
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Chapter 8: How might the future of warfare evolve due to these conflicts?
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And thank you. Mm-hmm. It's Today Explained. We're back. All right. So President Trump says the U.S. and Israel have destroyed 100 percent of Iran's military capability. That's not true. It's not true. The U.S. has done damage to Iran's missile sites and military bases. But Iran still has cheap, easy to assemble drones that pose a real threat on the battlefield.
Michael Horowitz, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Tell us about them drones. So today, these one-way attack drones like the Shaheed 136 are used essentially as a substitute for a cruise missile. So if you imagine something like the U.S. Tomahawk missile, if you think like way, way back for someone like old like me to the first Gulf War.
A perfect example was the Tomahawk cruise missile. 333 cruise missiles were launched during the war against heavily defended targets such as air defense headquarters, key radar facilities, and major communication centers.
When we would see these images of missiles sort of hitting a building, and the idea that you could, if you were the United States, target not just a neighborhood, but a building, and not just a building, but the third floor, and not just the third floor, but the second window from the left, These drones are capable of that almost exact same level of accuracy.
And so Iran is using them to do things like target American air defense radars, which are necessary to find other drones and shoot them down. Iran is using them to target government buildings, like embassies. Iran is using them to target critical infrastructure.
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