Iran regime running low on missiles with "widespread desertions"

Iranian missile strikes have dropped to their "lowest number" yet over the past 24 hours, as Operation Epic Fury sparks "widespread desertions" among Tehran's fighting force, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said on Tuesday morning.

"The last 24 hours saw the lowest number of enemy missiles and drones fired by Iran," Hegseth told reporters at the Pentagon. "Our strikes are damaging the morale of the Iranian military, leading to widespread desertions, key personnel shortages, and causing frustrations amongst senior leaders."

"They will go underground, but we will find them," Hegseth said of the Islamic Republic’s remaining leadership. "We recently destroyed another one of their command bunkers. Leaders forced to flee, no water, no power, no oxygen, no command and control. Their faith in their caves diminishing."

The chaos and confusion inside the regime has allowed U.S. forces to penetrate deeper into Iran, hitting missile systems and other targets based on real-time intelligence. The United States conducted some 200 dynamic strikes through Monday evening, with fighter pilots being fed updated targeting information mid-air. These types of attacks have allowed the U.S. military to take out Iran’s mobile missile launchers and troop formations while they move into place.

"A dynamic target is one that changes while you're in the air because of improved intelligence, 200 dynamic strikes alone, in addition to the pre-planned targets," Hegseth said, confirming that among the targets was an ammunition depot inside Iran’s Esfahan nuclear complex. Trump posted a video of the strike Monday evening on Truth Social, showing 2,000 pound bunker busters hammering the military site.

"The upcoming days will be decisive," Hegseth said. "Iran knows that, and there's almost nothing they can militarily do about it. Yes, they will still shoot some missiles, but we will shoot them down."

Hegseth said that Iran’s remaining leadership would be wise to strike a deal with Trump while the offer remains on the table.

"The new Iranian regime should know that by now this new regime, because regime change has occurred, should be wiser than the last," he said. "President Trump will make a deal, he is willing, and the terms of the deal are known to them. If Iran is not willing, then the United States War Department will continue with even more intensity."

The U.S. military has struck more than 11,000 targets over the past 30 days and is now conducting the first "overland missions" with B-52 bomber planes, according to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine, who spoke alongside Hegseth. These missions have allowed U.S. troops "to get on top of the enemy," pressuring regime assets as they move across the battlefield.

Attack helicopters have also joined the fight, bringing "close air support assets into the naval domain," Caine said. These operations have helped sink more than 150 Iranian ships, including all of the Islamic Republic’s advanced Jamaran class frigates, which are designed to destroy submarines from long distances.

"We continue to prosecute our campaign against their defense industrial base at scale," Caine said. "This includes factories, warehouses, nuclear weapons, research and development labs, and the associated infrastructure required for Iran to reconstitute its combat capability."

Hegseth said in the press conference that the United States remains focused on opening the Strait of Hormuz but noted that the issue "is not just the United States of America’s problem set."Trump, in a Tuesday morning Truth Social post, said that Western allies like the United Kingdom need to "build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT. You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us. Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil!"

Trump has also recently floated the possibility of seizing Iran’s main oil hub, Kharg Island, and Hegseth indicated those plans could be put into action soon.

"Our adversary right now thinks there are 15 different ways we could come at them with boots on the ground," Hegseth said. "And guess what: There are."

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Khamenei cardboard cutout may have gotten caught in the rain: it's missing

"Supreme Leader, say hello to all your followers"

Who knew Amazon ships to Iran? The missing cut-and-pasted Ayatollah Junior, and Iran's Supreme Leader for Life, Mojtaba Khamenei has been out of sight recently. He hasn't been seen in public since getting his new gig after his dad, Ali, got to meet his virgins resulting from U.S.-Israeli strikes.

According to Israeli journalist Amit Segal, organizers hauled the life-size stand-in onto the stage, where the faithful hailed it and swore allegiance like it was the real deal. The thing looked crudely slapped together with strips of tape, because apparently that's the level of production value the mullahs are working with these days.

Mojtaba [aka Mo] has been AWOL from public view or any statements since Sunday, when he was tapped as Iran's new top dog. An Iranian official told Reuters on Wednesday that the new supreme leader was "lightly injured" in the strikes, with reports specifying leg damage from day one of the action. Others say he is in a coma, while others, such as President Trump, say that he may be dead like his dad.

The regime has been stingy with details but keeps insisting he's running things from behind the scenes. In fact, the regime is currently working on engineering the face cut-out to make the mouth moveable when he allegedly speaks. They are close to solving the problem.

Segal nailed it when he wrote that the injuries "must be quite serious if a cardboard ayatollah cuts a more commanding figure than a wheelchair-bound Khamenei."

Ya think?

Over on this side of the world, President Trump wasn't thrilled about the regime's personnel choice. He told Fox News on Tuesday that he was "not happy" with the pick but stopped short of confirming whether the U.S. or Israel might take another swing at the guy. "I don’t believe he can live in peace," Trump said.

Trump also praised the results of Operation Epic Fury as "way beyond expectation." The U.S. military has sent more than 50 Iranian naval ships to the bottom and pounded over 5,000 targets inside the country, including dozens of those 2,000-pound GPS-guided bombs raining down across the Islamic Republic, according to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine on Tuesday.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth summed it up nicely on Tuesday: "We’re crushing the enemy in an overwhelming display of technical skill and military force. We will not relent until the enemy is totally and decisively defeated."

The whole cardboard supreme leader routine is the kind of farce that only a crumbling dictatorship could stage with a straight face. 

When your new boss is better represented by duct tape and corrugated board than by showing up himself, maybe it's time to admit the revolution has jumped the shark. Or at least limped offstage on injured legs and possibly worse things missing from that area below his equator.

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Trump’s Iran Strike Claims Under Fire: Leaked Report Questions “Total Obliteration” of Nuclear Sites

The Trump administration is scrambling to spin a leaked Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report that pours cold water on President Donald Trump’s bold claim that U.S. airstrikes “completely and totally obliterated” three Iranian nuclear facilities, like never before in the history of airstrikes. The report, splashed across CNN and The New York Times, suggests the strikes, part of Operation Midnight Hammer, only set Iran’s nuclear program back by a few months, not the knockout blow Trump touted.

In a national address right after the strikes, Trump didn’t hold back, [does he ever?] declaring the sites at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan “completely and totally obliterated.” He doubled down Saturday, calling the operation “very successful” and insisting Iran’s nuclear enrichment capabilities were toast. But the DIA’s assessment, based on a U.S. Central Command battle damage report, says otherwise, claiming Iran’s stash of enriched uranium survived the onslaught, according to seven sources briefed on the findings.

The administration is now in full damage-control mode, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth dismissing the DIA report as “low confidence.” That’s Pentagon-speak for “we don’t have enough data to be sure,” a point echoed by experts. 

“Low confidence means the analyst is not sure of the accuracy of their assessment,” said retired Navy Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, now a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. “This is frequent with a Quick Look 24-hour assessment like this one.”

Montgomery’s colleague, piled on, noting that “low confidence assessments are usually issued when key facts have yet to be verified, which certainly applies in this case.” Translation: the DIA report might be more of a rough draft than a definitive verdict.

But the skepticism isn’t just coming from the leaked report. Experts are cautioning against snap judgments, both optimistic or pessimistic. 

Dan Shapiro, former U.S. ambassador to Israel and now with the Atlantic Council, told Fox News Digital that early assessments, like the DIA’s, likely rely on satellite imagery alone. “That’s one piece of the puzzle of how you would really make this assessment,” Shapiro said. “You’d really want to have to test all the other streams of intelligence, from signals intelligence, human intelligence, other forms of monitoring the site, potentially visits by International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors, potentially visits by other people. So that’s going to take days to weeks to get a real assessment.”

Still, Shapiro’s not entirely bearish. “But I think it’s likely that if the munitions performed as expected, that significant damage was done, and would set back the program significantly,” he added.

Gen. Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, tried to thread the needle Sunday, saying initial battle damage assessments showed “all three sites sustained extremely severe damage and destruction” but admitted a final verdict would “take some time.” That’s a far cry from Trump’s chest-thumping.

The strikes, which followed escalating Israel-Iran tensions, dropped serious firepower, over 14 30,000-lb. bombs, according to Rob Greenway, a former Trump National Security Council deputy assistant now at The Heritage Foundation. 

Greenway says the sheer volume of ordnance means the facilities are likely “no longer serviceable.” “We were putting twice the amount of ordnance required to achieve the desired effect, just to make sure that we didn’t have to go back,” he told Fox News Digital. “There’s virtually no mathematical probability in which either facility can be used again by Iran for the intended purpose, if at all, which again means that everything now is within Israel’s capability to strike if that’s required.”

But assessing the damage isn’t straightforward. Greenway noted the strikes targeted underground facilities, which complicates things. “Each of these are one piece of a much larger puzzle, and you’re trying to gauge the ultimate effect of the entirety of the puzzle, not just one particular strike,” he said. Add in Israel’s prior strikes on the same sites, and it’s a messy intelligence jigsaw puzzle that could take “one or two months” to piece together with higher confidence.

Michael Allen, a former National Security Council senior director under George W. Bush, said the intelligence picture will get “richer” soon. “Stuff is pouring in, and we’re out there collecting it, and they’re trying to hustle it to the White House as soon as possible,” he said.

Meanwhile, the White House is as angry as a bag of cats about the leak. 

Press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the leaker “irresponsible” and vowed the FBI would hunt them down. “That person was irresponsible with it,” Leavitt told reporters Thursday. “And we need to get to the bottom of it. And we need to strengthen that process to protect our national security and protect the American public.”

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, weighing in on Fox News’ Special Report, outlined the broader impact of Operation Midnight Hammer on the Middle East, but the real question is whether Trump’s victory lap was premature. For now, the administration’s battling a narrative that its big win might not be as big as advertised, and it’s got a leaked report to thank for the headache.

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