As signals of a 'massive' US attack mount, experts skeptical it will break Iran
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As President Trump threatens a major escalation in Iran, signs are mounting that the U.S. military is preparing for a potential return to major military operations.
But experts are skeptical that an intensified air strike campaign — even if it takes out bridges, water facilities and electricity plants — will break Tehran or force tough concessions at the negotiating table.
“I don’t think it will change Iran’s calculation in any way, because from Iran’s perspective, this is when they said it publicly, that this is a war of survival for them. So bombing from the air is not going to change Iran’s calculation, even if the U.S. intensifies it,” said Sina Azodi, the director of the Middle East Studies Program at George Washington University.
“The only thing that will happen is that, first of all, the entire region is going to suffer more. The Iranians have made it very clear,” he said, adding, “I think it destroys any chance of diplomacy.”
President Trump held a Friday afternoon meeting at the White House with his national security team to discuss military options against Iran, a source familiar with the meeting, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss national security matters, told The Hill on Friday.
Trump told reporters on Friday that the U.S. is still talking with Iran, but warned the U.S. military is prepared to act if he gives the green light.
“We’re talking to them. So, you know, maybe there won’t be a tipping point, and maybe there will. We’re ready to go. Look, we’re locked and loaded,” he said.
Azodi said a better path for the administration would be to go back to the implementation of a revised Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).
“You can’t just do a ceasefire. You need a comprehensive agreement that it’s language is no longer open to interpretation,” he said. “And quite frankly, U.S. has to, when it makes a commitment, it needs to abide by it.”
A former senior U.S. intelligence official, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, said regardless of how much the U.S. increases the air bombing campaign, without collectively enforcing the naval blockade, securing to some degree the traffic going through the Strait of Hormuz and absorbing some of the international economic cost as a long-term strategy, it will be difficult to see progress.
“But you’re not going to bomb yourself into a ceasefire; I think you’ve got to be able to put the economic instrument of power just as make it just as significant as what you’re doing military,” the ex-senior intelligence official said.
A new U.S. intelligence assessment drew a similar conclusion, according to The Washington Post, assessing that Iran is unlikely to soften its negotiating stance as a result of intensified strikes.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan Caine, hinted at the constraint of airpower during a Senate congressional hearing earlier this week.
“Sir, I think academically, as you look across the totality of history, air power’s got limits, and we always have to be mindful of those. I think where America’s area of exclusivity is, is when we bring the totality of the diplomatic, informational, economic and pair that with the military and there’s a lot of that work going on, sir,” Caine told Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.).
Michael “Mick” Mulroy, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East, said it is “unclear” if a more muscular air strikes campaign will bring Iran to the table, but noted that the U.S.’s options “aren’t good.” He said Washington cannot ease up on Iran without reopening the Strait of Hormuz and securing commitments on Iran’s nuclear program.
“If we allow them to sell their oil, if we unfreeze assets, they’re going to use it to rebuild those capacities potentially faster than we really rebuild the precision munitions and interceptors that we use during a conflict, and we have to get into a new nuclear agreement,” Mulroy said in an interview with The Hill on Friday.
“If we don’t, then this, at least from the nuclear side, would be a perpetual conflict, because the other way of preventing them from ever getting a nuclear weapon is to periodically target the facilities that are making the potential nuclear weapon,” Mulroy, who is now a Distinguished Military Fellow at the Middle East Institute. said. “So the options are not good.”
The U.S. and U.K. officials are planning a major conference next week to discuss protecting ships attempting to transit the Strait of Hormuz, a White House official told The Hill. Axios earlier reported on the meeting. Caine may be among the officials representing the U.S., another source told The Hill.
Saeid Golkar, an expert on Iranian security services who teaches political science at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, said the difficulty for the U.S. now is that it’s running out of targets, while Iran has become more effective at hiding what military assets remain.
“Most of these targets are not very important, or not very strategic, or not very impactful in a way that we want to see the change,” Golkar said of daily U.S. strikes over the past two weeks.
He said killing Ahmad Vahidi, the commander in chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the parliament and the country’s chief negotiator, would move the needle if a diplomatic deal is the goal.
“Again, the whole idea is, if you want even to have a deal more impactful, you have to remove all of these hardliners from power,” said Golkar, a non-resident Senior Fellow on Middle East Policy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
The recent U.S. strikes have targeted Iranian military command centers, communication networks, drone and missile storage facilities, coastal surveillance sites and maritime capabilities. U.S. forces have also destroyed or damaged several bridges in Iranian coastal cities.
Since July 7, Iran has retaliated by launching ballistic and cruise missiles and one-way attack drones at Jordan, Kuwait and Bahrain. While many of those strikes have been repelled, Iran successfully hit a power and water plant in Jordan, while another attack killed three U.S. service members at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base.
With an uptick in hostilities, a number of U.S. missions in the region, including in Bahrain, Lebanon, Kuwait, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan, have put out security alerts telling Americans to reconsider travel to and through the region.
At the same time, the Pentagon has continued to surge firepower in the theater, sending stealthy F-35s from the U.K. and F-16 fighter jets from Germany to the region in recent weeks, along with transport military aircraft. Over 150 medics recently arrived at Germany’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, a U.S. Army post near Ramstein Air Base, The Hill previously reported. There are over 50,000 U.S. service members stationed in the region.
The U.S. has continued to enforce the blockade on the Strait of Hormuz, which resumed last week. Centcom forces have redirected 12 commercial vessels and disabled two to bar ships from entering or departing Iranian ports or coastal areas.
The U.S. military disabled an M/T Lavine tanker after firing into its engine room on Friday in the Gulf of Oman after the vessel attempted to run the U.S. naval blockade at least four times, a Centcom spokesperson, Navy Captain Tim Hawkins, told The Hill on Friday.
“The ship is no longer transiting to Iran,” Hawkins said.
Roughly 20 U.S. warships are in the Centcom theater helping enforce the naval blockade.
Mulroy, a retired CIA Paramilitary Operations Officer, said the U.S. military might look at infrastructure targets that have a “strong nexus” to the IRGC and those that allow the armed forces to sell energy, such as railways.
He said the president would also be well advised to focus on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Trump has discussed hitting Pickaxe Mountain, located near the damaged Natanz uranium enrichment facility.
Due to the depth, experts have argued that the U.S. most powerful bunker buster bombs are unlikely to penetrate it, as the site is buried up to 2,000 feet below granite and believed to house uranium enrichment capabilities.
That means a ground campaign may be necessary to destroy the nuclear facilities or seize enriched uranium, which Mulroy said would mean troops coming under heavy fire. Another risk would be staying there long enough to either get the highly enriched uranium out, or destroy the centrifuges, or both. U.S. would likely need to build an airstrip.
“If it’s already damaged, then you have the additional problem of needing excavation, right,” he said. “It could be the most complicated special operation mission in history.”
Trump has not ruled out deploying ground troops, while also suggesting other countries should be willing to take up the fight.
A U.S. official told The Hill the military is prepared for intensified action if the president orders one. U.S. Central Command said late Wednesday U.S. forces “remain highly vigilant, focused, lethal and ready.”
Copyright 2026 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Read the full story at Axios ↗ · The Hill ↗
As President Trump threatens a major escalation in Iran, signs are mounting that the U.S. military is preparing for a potential return to major military operations. But experts…
This lens runs the verified story through Cinnamon's AI — wired in the next step.
Skip to content
As President Trump threatens a major escalation in Iran, signs are mounting that the U.S. military is preparing for a potential return to major military operations.
But experts are skeptical that an intensified air strike campaign — even if it takes out bridges, water facilities and electricity plants — will break Tehran or force tough concessions at the negotiating table.
“I don’t think it will change Iran’s calculation in any way, because from Iran’s perspective, this is when they said it publicly, that this is a war of survival for them. So bombing from the air is not going to change Iran’s calculation, even if the U.S. intensifies it,” said Sina Azodi, the director of the Middle East Studies Program at George Washington University.
“The only thing that will happen is that, first of all, the entire region is going to suffer more. The Iranians have made it very clear,” he said, adding, “I think it destroys any chance of diplomacy.”
President Trump held a Friday afternoon meeting at the White House with his national security team to discuss military options against Iran, a source familiar with the meeting, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss national security matters, told The Hill on Friday.
Trump told reporters on Friday that the U.S. is still talking with Iran, but warned the U.S. military is prepared to act if he gives the green light.
“We’re talking to them. So, you know, maybe there won’t be a tipping point, and maybe there will. We’re ready to go. Look, we’re locked and loaded,” he said.
Azodi said a better path for the administration would be to go back to the implementation of a revised Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).
“You can’t just do a ceasefire. You need a comprehensive agreement that it’s language is no longer open to interpretation,” he said. “And quite frankly, U.S. has to, when it makes a commitment, it needs to abide by it.”
A former senior U.S. intelligence official, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, said regardless of how much the U.S. increases the air bombing campaign, without collectively enforcing the naval blockade, securing to some degree the traffic going through the Strait of Hormuz and absorbing some of the international economic cost as a long-term strategy, it will be difficult to see progress.
“But you’re not going to bomb yourself into a ceasefire; I think you’ve got to be able to put the economic instrument of power just as make it just as significant as what you’re doing military,” the ex-senior intelligence official said.
A new U.S. intelligence assessment drew a similar conclusion, according to The Washington Post, assessing that Iran is unlikely to soften its negotiating stance as a result of intensified strikes.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan Caine, hinted at the constraint of airpower during a Senate congressional hearing earlier this week.
“Sir, I think academically, as you look across the totality of history, air power’s got limits, and we always have to be mindful of those. I think where America’s area of exclusivity is, is when we bring the totality of the diplomatic, informational, economic and pair that with the military and there’s a lot of that work going on, sir,” Caine told Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.).
Michael “Mick” Mulroy, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East, said it is “unclear” if a more muscular air strikes campaign will bring Iran to the table, but noted that the U.S.’s options “aren’t good.” He said Washington cannot ease up on Iran without reopening the Strait of Hormuz and securing commitments on Iran’s nuclear program.
“If we allow them to sell their oil, if we unfreeze assets, they’re going to use it to rebuild those capacities potentially faster than we really rebuild the precision munitions and interceptors that we use during a conflict, and we have to get into a new nuclear agreement,” Mulroy said in an interview with The Hill on Friday.
“If we don’t, then this, at least from the nuclear side, would be a perpetual conflict, because the other way of preventing them from ever getting a nuclear weapon is to periodically target the facilities that are making the potential nuclear weapon,” Mulroy, who is now a Distinguished Military Fellow at the Middle East Institute. said. “So the options are not good.”
The U.S. and U.K. officials are planning a major conference next week to discuss protecting ships attempting to transit the Strait of Hormuz, a White House official told The Hill. Axios earlier reported on the meeting. Caine may be among the officials representing the U.S., another source told The Hill.
Saeid Golkar, an expert on Iranian security services who teaches political science at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, said the difficulty for the U.S. now is that it’s running out of targets, while Iran has become more effective at hiding what military assets remain.
“Most of these targets are not very important, or not very strategic, or not very impactful in a way that we want to see the change,” Golkar said of daily U.S. strikes over the past two weeks.
He said killing Ahmad Vahidi, the commander in chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the parliament and the country’s chief negotiator, would move the needle if a diplomatic deal is the goal.
“Again, the whole idea is, if you want even to have a deal more impactful, you have to remove all of these hardliners from power,” said Golkar, a non-resident Senior Fellow on Middle East Policy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
The recent U.S. strikes have targeted Iranian military command centers, communication networks, drone and missile storage facilities, coastal surveillance sites and maritime capabilities. U.S. forces have also destroyed or damaged several bridges in Iranian coastal cities.
Since July 7, Iran has retaliated by launching ballistic and cruise missiles and one-way attack drones at Jordan, Kuwait and Bahrain. While many of those strikes have been repelled, Iran successfully hit a power and water plant in Jordan, while another attack killed three U.S. service members at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base.
With an uptick in hostilities, a number of U.S. missions in the region, including in Bahrain, Lebanon, Kuwait, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan, have put out security alerts telling Americans to reconsider travel to and through the region.
At the same time, the Pentagon has continued to surge firepower in the theater, sending stealthy F-35s from the U.K. and F-16 fighter jets from Germany to the region in recent weeks, along with transport military aircraft. Over 150 medics recently arrived at Germany’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, a U.S. Army post near Ramstein Air Base, The Hill previously reported. There are over 50,000 U.S. service members stationed in the region.
The U.S. has continued to enforce the blockade on the Strait of Hormuz, which resumed last week. Centcom forces have redirected 12 commercial vessels and disabled two to bar ships from entering or departing Iranian ports or coastal areas.
The U.S. military disabled an M/T Lavine tanker after firing into its engine room on Friday in the Gulf of Oman after the vessel attempted to run the U.S. naval blockade at least four times, a Centcom spokesperson, Navy Captain Tim Hawkins, told The Hill on Friday.
“The ship is no longer transiting to Iran,” Hawkins said.
Roughly 20 U.S. warships are in the Centcom theater helping enforce the naval blockade.
Mulroy, a retired CIA Paramilitary Operations Officer, said the U.S. military might look at infrastructure targets that have a “strong nexus” to the IRGC and those that allow the armed forces to sell energy, such as railways.
He said the president would also be well advised to focus on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Trump has discussed hitting Pickaxe Mountain, located near the damaged Natanz uranium enrichment facility.
Due to the depth, experts have argued that the U.S. most powerful bunker buster bombs are unlikely to penetrate it, as the site is buried up to 2,000 feet below granite and believed to house uranium enrichment capabilities.
That means a ground campaign may be necessary to destroy the nuclear facilities or seize enriched uranium, which Mulroy said would mean troops coming under heavy fire. Another risk would be staying there long enough to either get the highly enriched uranium out, or destroy the centrifuges, or both. U.S. would likely need to build an airstrip.
“If it’s already damaged, then you have the additional problem of needing excavation, right,” he said. “It could be the most complicated special operation mission in history.”
Trump has not ruled out deploying ground troops, while also suggesting other countries should be willing to take up the fight.
A U.S. official told The Hill the military is prepared for intensified action if the president orders one. U.S. Central Command said late Wednesday U.S. forces “remain highly vigilant, focused, lethal and ready.”
Copyright 2026 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Read the full story at Axios ↗ · The Hill ↗
Skip to content
As President Trump threatens a major escalation in Iran, signs are mounting that the U.S. military is preparing for a potential return to major military operations.
But experts are skeptical that an intensified air strike campaign — even if it takes out bridges, water facilities and electricity plants — will break Tehran or force tough concessions at the negotiating table.
“I don’t think it will change Iran’s calculation in any way, because from Iran’s perspective, this is when they said it publicly, that this is a war of survival for them. So bombing from the air is not going to change Iran’s calculation, even if the U.S. intensifies it,” said Sina Azodi, the director of the Middle East Studies Program at George Washington University.
“The only thing that will happen is that, first of all, the entire region is going to suffer more. The Iranians have made it very clear,” he said, adding, “I think it destroys any chance of diplomacy.”
President Trump held a Friday afternoon meeting at the White House with his national security team to discuss military options against Iran, a source familiar with the meeting, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss national security matters, told The Hill on Friday.
Trump told reporters on Friday that the U.S. is still talking with Iran, but warned the U.S. military is prepared to act if he gives the green light.
“We’re talking to them. So, you know, maybe there won’t be a tipping point, and maybe there will. We’re ready to go. Look, we’re locked and loaded,” he said.
Azodi said a better path for the administration would be to go back to the implementation of a revised Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).
“You can’t just do a ceasefire. You need a comprehensive agreement that it’s language is no longer open to interpretation,” he said. “And quite frankly, U.S. has to, when it makes a commitment, it needs to abide by it.”
A former senior U.S. intelligence official, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, said regardless of how much the U.S. increases the air bombing campaign, without collectively enforcing the naval blockade, securing to some degree the traffic going through the Strait of Hormuz and absorbing some of the international economic cost as a long-term strategy, it will be difficult to see progress.
“But you’re not going to bomb yourself into a ceasefire; I think you’ve got to be able to put the economic instrument of power just as make it just as significant as what you’re doing military,” the ex-senior intelligence official said.
A new U.S. intelligence assessment drew a similar conclusion, according to The Washington Post, assessing that Iran is unlikely to soften its negotiating stance as a result of intensified strikes.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan Caine, hinted at the constraint of airpower during a Senate congressional hearing earlier this week.
“Sir, I think academically, as you look across the totality of history, air power’s got limits, and we always have to be mindful of those. I think where America’s area of exclusivity is, is when we bring the totality of the diplomatic, informational, economic and pair that with the military and there’s a lot of that work going on, sir,” Caine told Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.).
Michael “Mick” Mulroy, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East, said it is “unclear” if a more muscular air strikes campaign will bring Iran to the table, but noted that the U.S.’s options “aren’t good.” He said Washington cannot ease up on Iran without reopening the Strait of Hormuz and securing commitments on Iran’s nuclear program.
“If we allow them to sell their oil, if we unfreeze assets, they’re going to use it to rebuild those capacities potentially faster than we really rebuild the precision munitions and interceptors that we use during a conflict, and we have to get into a new nuclear agreement,” Mulroy said in an interview with The Hill on Friday.
“If we don’t, then this, at least from the nuclear side, would be a perpetual conflict, because the other way of preventing them from ever getting a nuclear weapon is to periodically target the facilities that are making the potential nuclear weapon,” Mulroy, who is now a Distinguished Military Fellow at the Middle East Institute. said. “So the options are not good.”
The U.S. and U.K. officials are planning a major conference next week to discuss protecting ships attempting to transit the Strait of Hormuz, a White House official told The Hill. Axios earlier reported on the meeting. Caine may be among the officials representing the U.S., another source told The Hill.
Saeid Golkar, an expert on Iranian security services who teaches political science at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, said the difficulty for the U.S. now is that it’s running out of targets, while Iran has become more effective at hiding what military assets remain.
“Most of these targets are not very important, or not very strategic, or not very impactful in a way that we want to see the change,” Golkar said of daily U.S. strikes over the past two weeks.
He said killing Ahmad Vahidi, the commander in chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the parliament and the country’s chief negotiator, would move the needle if a diplomatic deal is the goal.
“Again, the whole idea is, if you want even to have a deal more impactful, you have to remove all of these hardliners from power,” said Golkar, a non-resident Senior Fellow on Middle East Policy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
The recent U.S. strikes have targeted Iranian military command centers, communication networks, drone and missile storage facilities, coastal surveillance sites and maritime capabilities. U.S. forces have also destroyed or damaged several bridges in Iranian coastal cities.
Since July 7, Iran has retaliated by launching ballistic and cruise missiles and one-way attack drones at Jordan, Kuwait and Bahrain. While many of those strikes have been repelled, Iran successfully hit a power and water plant in Jordan, while another attack killed three U.S. service members at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base.
With an uptick in hostilities, a number of U.S. missions in the region, including in Bahrain, Lebanon, Kuwait, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan, have put out security alerts telling Americans to reconsider travel to and through the region.
At the same time, the Pentagon has continued to surge firepower in the theater, sending stealthy F-35s from the U.K. and F-16 fighter jets from Germany to the region in recent weeks, along with transport military aircraft. Over 150 medics recently arrived at Germany’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, a U.S. Army post near Ramstein Air Base, The Hill previously reported. There are over 50,000 U.S. service members stationed in the region.
The U.S. has continued to enforce the blockade on the Strait of Hormuz, which resumed last week. Centcom forces have redirected 12 commercial vessels and disabled two to bar ships from entering or departing Iranian ports or coastal areas.
The U.S. military disabled an M/T Lavine tanker after firing into its engine room on Friday in the Gulf of Oman after the vessel attempted to run the U.S. naval blockade at least four times, a Centcom spokesperson, Navy Captain Tim Hawkins, told The Hill on Friday.
“The ship is no longer transiting to Iran,” Hawkins said.
Roughly 20 U.S. warships are in the Centcom theater helping enforce the naval blockade.
Mulroy, a retired CIA Paramilitary Operations Officer, said the U.S. military might look at infrastructure targets that have a “strong nexus” to the IRGC and those that allow the armed forces to sell energy, such as railways.
He said the president would also be well advised to focus on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Trump has discussed hitting Pickaxe Mountain, located near the damaged Natanz uranium enrichment facility.
Due to the depth, experts have argued that the U.S. most powerful bunker buster bombs are unlikely to penetrate it, as the site is buried up to 2,000 feet below granite and believed to house uranium enrichment capabilities.
That means a ground campaign may be necessary to destroy the nuclear facilities or seize enriched uranium, which Mulroy said would mean troops coming under heavy fire. Another risk would be staying there long enough to either get the highly enriched uranium out, or destroy the centrifuges, or both. U.S. would likely need to build an airstrip.
“If it’s already damaged, then you have the additional problem of needing excavation, right,” he said. “It could be the most complicated special operation mission in history.”
Trump has not ruled out deploying ground troops, while also suggesting other countries should be willing to take up the fight.
A U.S. official told The Hill the military is prepared for intensified action if the president orders one. U.S. Central Command said late Wednesday U.S. forces “remain highly vigilant, focused, lethal and ready.”
Copyright 2026 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Read the full story at Axios ↗ · The Hill ↗
This lens runs the verified story through Cinnamon's AI — wired in the next step.
- As President Trump threatens a major escalation in Iran, signs are mounting that the U.S.
- military is preparing for a potential return to major military operations.