Three U.S. F-15s downed by friendly fire; Trump boasts about new White House drapes

In what we can only hope is not a metaphor for the rest of Trump's new war, three American F-15 fighter jets were shot down on Sunday in the worst friendly fire incident the U.S. Air Force has ever seen. The jets were shot down by Kuwaiti air defenses, and while each crew reportedly ejected from their planes and survived, the replacement costs for the three jets are somewhere around a quarter billion dollars.

Nor are the United States and its regional hosts coming out unscathed from the first days of war, as Iranian drones and ballistic missile barrages occasionally evade air defense systems, striking U.S. bases, Saudi oil infrastructure, a posh Bahraini hotel, and other targets.

So far, there is suspiciously little reporting on the extent of the damage, either inside Iran or outside of it. We can get a rough sense of the scope of the Iranian counterattacks from this report inside the United Arab Emerates:

Air defenses in the United Arab Emirates successfully intercepted nine ballistic missiles, six cruise missiles, and 148 drones over the past day, according to a statement from the country’s defense ministry.

The authorities said they had intercepted 161 of 174 ballistic missiles and 645 of 689 drones launched since Iran began retaliatory strikes on Saturday. The authorities said the drones and missiles that struck within the country’s territory caused some damage to civilian property.

That works out to a 92-94% interception rate, which is both very good and not good enough to avoid significant damage. UAE is not the only nation facing fire; strikes have also hit Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. Images show heavy damage at the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet headquarters in Manama, Bahrain.

A drone also struck a British air force base in Cyprus soon after Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced he would allow the U.S. to use British bases to launch some air strikes.

Simultaneously, Israel is aggressively striking targets inside Lebanon as it targets Hezbollah leadership. And there is at least one world leader who appears giddy over the widening regional conflict: Far-right Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu, presently under indictment in his own country and subject to an international arrest warrant for alleged crimes against humanity, has repeatedly heaped praise on Trump, who he appears to regard as a useful idiot. It's a striking contrast from the public scorn Netanyahu has had for Democratic presidents; Netanyahu has been a constant voice for maximum Middle East belligerence since even before the Iraq War began.

Trump himself continues to be evasive about both the justifications and the goals of the war, possibly because he is a dementia-addled and perpetually ignorant dumbass who has no coherent vision of either. After monitoring the war over the weekend from a curtained-off public space inside Mar-a-Lago—a task Trump took on while simultaneously hosting a $1 million per plate private party:

... he returned to the White House, where his attempts to justify the war while "honoring" new Medal of Honor recipients were repeatedly thwarted by his own short attention span.

The closest we have come to learning the objectives of what allegedly will be a "four week" war is an extremely terse (and vague) assertion Trump made previously: he suggested that the operation was meant to destroy Iranian missile capabilities, its navy, its nuclear ambitions and its regime's ability to fund proxy militias elsewhere in the Middle East.

Given U.S. power, destroying the Iranian navy will likely be a trivial exercise. Future nuclear weapons programs can be delayed, though it will take considerably more firepower than the United States has previously used in its attempts to penetrate Iranian underground bunkers. The goal of "regime change" is particularly abstract, with Trump admitting that the most likely candidates for a new government were also targeted in the strikes.

Yes, Trump's war against Iran may be unquestionably illegal—but it also appears to be almost entirely unplanned.

Despite Trump's own vague preferences, it remains more likely than not (see: history) that the current Iranian regime will be replaced with hardliners, rather than reformers. There are also few credible observers who think the war will result in less terrorism against the U.S. and its allies, not when anti-American sentiments have been rekindled not just inside Iran but throughout the Middle East.

Of the various alleged objectives, we should presume the destruction of Iranian missile and drone manufacturing capabilities to be the primary military goal being pursued here, though Trump himself appears to be only vaguely aware of that. But this, too, is not achievable through a "four week" war.

In the medium and long term, it's likely a majority of Iranian weapons stockpiles can be identified and destroyed—but that, in turn, gives Iran's military even more reason to fire off as many of those weapons as can be managed now, rather than letting them be destroyed at their launch sites.

We appear to be seeing that dynamic play out. The United States first targeted Iranian air defenses and leadership; incapable of consequential air or naval defenses, Iran responded by firing hundreds of drones and ballistic missiles at U.S. bases, at Israel, and at U.S. regional allies in attempts to overwhelm U.S. air defense and do whatever damage can be done before the U.S. can establish complete air dominance.

After degrading the Iranian ability to launch those large-scale barrages, the U.S. will spend the remaining weeks of the "four week" war targeting drone and missile stockpiles and manufacturing plants as Iranian units opportunistically launch still-hidden weapons as they can. Oil tankers will be among the easiest targets for those hidden weapons, so ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is not likely to resume for some time. And the U.S. military cannot count on the full air superiority it had during the Iraq war: Insurgent-level drone operations have gotten increasingly sophisticated in the last few years, posing new and significant risks to U.S. air missions.

So the one thing we can be assured of is that this will be no "four week" war. Blocking Iranian attempts to rebuild its missile and drone production capabilities will require a long-term military commitment. Providing enough security for civilian shipping to risk sailing to and from the gulf will require constant air operations for the indefinite future.

And all of it will require the U.S. to draw down its own weapons stockpiles to a possibly dangerous extent, the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned late last month.

Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed his concerns at a White House meeting last week with Trump and his top aides, these people said, cautioning that any major operation against Iran will face challenges because the U.S. munitions stockpile has been significantly depleted by Washington’s ongoing defense of Israel and support for Ukraine. Caine’s remarks at the White House meeting have not been previously reported.

Separately, in Pentagon meetings this month, Caine also has raised concerns about the scale of any Iran campaign, its inherent complexity and the possibility of U.S. casualties, one person said. The general has said that any operation would be made all the more difficult by a lack of allied support, this person said, speaking like others on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

We can presume Trump will use that shortage as reason to further curtail U.S. arms shipments to Ukraine—yet another windfall for Russia, which will also benefit from spiking oil prices as Middle Eastern oil shipments become scarcer.

What we do not have, in any of this? A plausible reason to believe that the outcome of these operations can possibly justify their enormous human, economic, and diplomatic costs. There has been no such argument; it has not even been attempted.

It is a war based on a single decaying man's fetish for strongman-styled violence, and on his desire to bury an unending stream of scandals here at home, most of them originating from his thoroughly encrookened Department of Justice.