That’s the title of Patricia Marins’ new post. I’ll paste it in with some comments. Before I do so …

I’ve seen claims that the IRGC says it hit the USS Lincoln. However, other posts suggest that what happened—and I saw this reported last night—is that a remote operated resupply ship associated with the Lincoln’s CSG was taken out of action. For now I’d go with the earlier report.

Here’s Marins:



Patricia Marins @pati_marins64

1h

Asymmetric Wars Are Different

You don’t measure an asymmetric war by saying you need to assassinate leaders to gain any advantage, especially when that includes opposition leaders. A war needs to be won on the theater of operations, not through political assassinations.

You don’t measure a war by the number of bombings. They need to be efficient enough to inhibit asymmetric actions, and that’s far from happening due to Iran’s size, the capillarity of its operations, and the scale of its arsenal.

Regarding “the capillarity of [Iran’s] operations,” Iran publicly made a point of mentioning before the war started that all commanders had replacements. Araghchi today also mentioned the decentralized nature of Iranian military operations. They knew that the US/Israel would strike at central command nodes, so they prepared for that. This directly militates against Trump’s hoped for “short war.”

How can we talk about air superiority at this point? Iran’s MiGs, despite being outdated, are all intact, and certainly many air defense units are still operating, which is why no one has entered Iranian airspace.

No B-2 will penetrate Iran with MiG-29s in operation. And locating and neutralizing these MiGs, which can operate from any highway, takes some time.

There are reports of a corvette sunk and a frigate damaged, but Iran still operates dozens of ships (corvettes, frigates, catamarans and robust patrol boats).

It’s too early to talk about the end of the war. Knowing what posture the Iranian navy will take is crucial for calculating the conflict’s duration.

The photos I’ve seen—and readers probably have to—show the destroyed ships sitting at docks. That strongly suggests that Iran knew those larger surface ships wouldn’t be defensible at sea, so they were left in the harbor. The smaller fast boats and sub-surface assets appear to be still operational.

The advantage in military power in an asymmetric war against Iran will always be with Israel-US, and that shouldn’t be the parameter for calculating the conflict’s duration, but rather Iran’s capacity to sustain operations while wearing down a much larger power than its own.

That is, once again, Iran’s strategy. It worked in June and it appears to be working again.

And we have to measure that capacity day by day, as Iran operates many underground bases it calls missile cities, replete with missiles and many silos across various cities.

It’s estimated that Iran still possesses 25 missile cities with up to 60 silos and launch points each, plus dozens of bunkers and tunnels also used for launches. Degrading Iran’s capacity will be a gradual and exhausting task, with high costs for US-Israel.

And it’s not enough to bomb the surface structure, blocking the tunnels of these Iranian bunkers.

At night, they reopen the entrances with internal machinery and carry out launches quickly.

At the second day, the attacks with penetrating munitions on hangars is what Israel is doing, but at this stage of the war, I don’t believe the planes are staying in hangars.

The situation is much more complex and takes more time than that. It requires hundreds of drones rotating and monitoring all these installations 24/7, which doesn’t exist yet.

This is the point, which I mentioned earlier, of Iran touting how many drones it has shot down. Off the top of my head, I believe the number cited was 22.

After four years, the Russians haven’t been able to stop the Ukrainians from operating aircraft, and Iran is three times larger than Ukraine.

Yesterday, Iran shot down a Hermes 900 drone. Even monitoring activities must be done in a way that avoids losing assets.

The Hermes 900 is the most advanced, but there are others that have been used.

There’s a lot of fog of war in the air, giving the impression of the conflict’s end when it’s just at its beginning.

We’ll be talking about the final phase when Israeli and American planes are flying over Tehran and American ships are in the Strait of Hormuz. Now the question is about who will run out ammo,

…

I would say that if, within the next 3-4 days, the number of Iranian missile launches is not substantially reduced, the munitions situation will begin to seriously concern the US–Israel coalition.

There is no American operation against Iran today. Israel remains the protagonist in the action, employing far more aircraft and intelligence assets and getting support from US.

As we noted in an earlier post, the US is already concerned about the munitions situation. Alastair Crooke maintains that Iran is in the drivers seat vs. Trump’s goal of a short war victory.