Guest Post by John Helmer
Why do so many CIA and MI6 officers (retired) know and say so much about the damage Israel and the US have inflicted on Iran since they began their war on June 13, but so little about the damage Iran has inflicted on Israel (lead image)?
“As you know,” President Donald Trump said last night, following the NATO summit meeting in The Netherlands, “last weekend the United States successfully carried out a massive precision strike on Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities. And it was very, very successful. It was called obliteration. No other military on earth could have done it. And now this incredible exercise of American strength has paved the way for peace with a historic ceasefire agreement late Monday.”
He then asked his Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth to clarify how to interpret the military intelligence reporting from “the group [Defense Intelligence Agency] that’s run by this gentleman, in fact, he may want to talk about it for a second.” Hegseth: “somebody somewhere is trying to leak something to say — oh, with low confidence – [that] we think maybe it’s moderate. Those that drop the bombs precisely in the right place know exactly what happened when that exploded. And you know who else knows? Iran. That’s why they came to the table right away because their nuclear capabilities have been set back — back beyond what they thought were [sic] possible because of the courage of a commander in chief who led our troops, despite what the fake news wants to say.”
By this intelligence reporting standard, escalation of force by the US has compelled Iran to negotiate terms of capitulation which it was refusing to accept before June 13. But what, according to this intelligence standard, has been motivating Israel to accept Trump’s ceasefire?
The answer to that is the most classified secret the Trump Administration, the Israeli government, and the Jewish financiers of Trump’s election campaigns are keeping. This is also a secret so sensitive that not one of the US media Trump is attacking dares to publish it.
The secret is simple: Israel was desperate to have Trump call the ceasefire in order to obtain emergency resupply of US air defence missiles. And Trump was in just as much hurry because the cost which Iran’s war has imposed on the US defence budget is more money than Trump currently has the legal authorization to spend.
According to this painstaking analysis of the available intelligence, “between the start of the war on June 13 and the announcement of a ceasefire on June 23, a race was under way. The Israelis were racing to destroy Iranian missiles and launchers before the Iranians launched enough missile salvos to deplete the Israeli interceptor magazine. Considering estimates placed Iranian ballistic missile stocks at about 2,000-3,000 before the war started, the Iranians would eventually exhaust Israeli interceptors if they weren’t attrited, making the left-of-launch or missile-defeat element of the Israeli strategy critical. If the Iranians had the missiles and launchers available to continue generating salvos against Israel, there would have come an inflection point in the amount of damage they were able to do, and that inflection point would have arrived once Israel ran out of interceptors.”
This is the intelligence assessment for Israel which Trump and Hegseth are not acknowledging: “a lot of interceptors have [been] fired in less than two weeks. 39 THAAD interceptors in nearly the full loadout of a 6 launcher THAAD battery without a reload, 48, so that system may be close to being out of interceptors. It seems likely it was deployed with reloads based on the satellite imagery, but considering the number of Iranian strikes missing from Abbadi’s videos, I think this is a fair judgement. Similarly, 34 Arrow-3s is a lot, nearly double the number used in October. While there is little insight into how deep Israel’s Arrow-3 magazine is, the presence of THAAD in Israel suggests it may not be much deeper. Nevertheless, based on the [Wall Street Journal ] reporting and this data, it seems likely that Israel and the U.S. THAAD battery are hurting for interceptors.”
That last phrase means Trump was compelled to announce his ceasefire on June 23 to save Israel from running out of interceptors as Iran accelerated its strikes, according to the rope-a-dope strategy reported here.
Trump and Hegseth also needed the ceasefire because they were running out of budget money to pay for re-supply to Israel. “According to the FY 2025 Missile Defense Agency budget, each THAAD interceptor costs approximately $12.7 million. The minimum of 39 THAAD interceptors therefore cost over $495 million. The budget projects only 32 THAADs will be procured in FY 2026, so more than an entire year’s worth of interceptors were fired in twelve days (The production rate in FY 2025 was only 12 interceptors.) Arrow-3 costs are more difficult to estimate. The $4 million price-tag often mentioned is probably not quite right. While the exact cost is unclear, the 34 Arrow-3s cost at least more than $100 million. Considering these numbers…it is fair to say that more than a billion dollars was spent on interceptors during the twelve-day conflict.”
In today’s Gorilla Radio discussion, Chris Cook also reports that the Iranian campaign has been so effective, it has triggered an unprecedented exodus of Israeli refugees to Cyprus and Greece, and then to the Jewish homelands – the US, Canada, UK, Germany, and Australia.
The official Israeli state admission is that almost 90,000 Israelis fled the country through December 31, 2024. The exodus this year, accelerating from June 13, is “Dunkerkian”, Cook says. For Israel and the Jewish diaspora, this war damage inflicted by Iran has reversed the national ideology of the Aliyah – that the Zionist state is the safe refuge for Jews. This is a regime-changing outcome for Israel, not for Iran.
“It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change’,” Trump tweeted on June 22. “But if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!” What is proving politically impossible for Trump to say now is that he is being forced to MIGA — MAKE ISRAEL GREAT AGAIN!!! — and lacks both the money and the weapons to succeed.
This is the lesson President Vladimir Putin and his advisors are learning before deciding on their next negotiating and fighting steps in the Ukraine war.
The lesson is also a chancy one, as Wellington acknowledged after defeating Napoleon at Waterloo – “the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life”, he ruefully admitted. Wishful thinking is the way this US intelligence assessment concludes: “Once Israel ran out of interceptors, it is difficult to tell how close that inflection point was before the ceasefire started, especially given the more limited information coming out of Iran and the restrictions placed by the Israeli government on media coverage of the missile attacks. In the day before the ceasefire Iran was still generating strikes of over 10 missiles while Israel was still intercepting most of them. U.S. efforts to replenish the THAAD interceptors could have also prolonged that process and pushed the inflection point back. Hopefully the ceasefire holds and we never find out how close it was.”
PARTIAL COUNT OF ISRAELI-US MISSILE INTERCEPTIONS, JUNE 13-23
Source: https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/1220527/exhaustion-and-inflection-estimating-interceptor-expenditures-in-the-israel-iran-conflict/
“It
is likely that many more interceptors have been used since not all the
Iranian strikes were recorded in the videos. But these estimates provide
an open-source baseline… Additionally, the U.S. has been aiding Israel
in intercepting Iranian strikes. The U.S. Navy has reportedly been
contributing and SM-3 interceptor debris has been spotted,”
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Administrator
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, https://www.theburningplatform.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.
