The biggest mistake people make when looking at war is assuming the objective is to hit the enemy’s capital as quickly as possible. That’s political theater, not military strategy.

If you look at the strike map, Iran isn’t behaving like a country trying to maximize headlines but like a military attempting to shape the battlespace.

The targets are not random or insignificant. Iran is dismantling the entire American military ecosystem in the region:

Early warning radar sites. Air defense systems. Aviation facilities and hangars. Logistics hubs. Fuel and ammunition storage. Forward operating bases. CENTCOM support infrastructure. Bases supporting operations in Syria and Iraq. Naval and maritime surveillance assets. Intelligence collection and communications nodes.

Look at Jordan as an example. Most people couldn’t point to Tower 22 or Muwaffaq Salti Air Base on a map, yet they’re arguably more important militarily than firing a few missiles at downtown Tel Aviv.

Tower 22 supports operations at Al-Tanf. Muwaffaq Salti hosts American aircraft and coalition operations. Erbil supports intelligence and special operations. Bahrain hosts the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters. Kuwait is a massive logistics and staging area. Qatar hosts the forward headquarters of CENTCOM and the largest U.S. air base in the Middle East. These are the eyes, ears, and connective tissue of American power projection in the region.

From a military perspective, you don’t begin by punching the strongest part of your opponent. You isolate him.

There are several principles of warfare being applied here:

Suppression of enemy support infrastructure.

Degradation of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities.

Attrition of air defense and interceptor inventories.

Disruption of logistics and sustainment.

Political pressure on host nations.

Shaping the operational environment before attempting anything larger.

The United States does not fight Middle Eastern wars from Washington or even from aircraft carriers alone. It fights them from an interconnected network of bases stretching from Jordan to Qatar to Kuwait to Bahrain. If that network becomes degraded, every sortie, every intelligence feed, every resupply mission, and every interceptor launch becomes more difficult and more expensive.

People screaming “just bomb Tel Aviv” fundamentally misunderstand what modern warfare looks like. Destroying a radar site that enables coalition air operations can be militarily more valuable than causing superficial damage to a symbolic target.

There’s another aspect people are missing: INTERCEPTOR ECONOMICS.

Every Patriot interceptor fired costs millions of dollars. Air defense inventories are finite. Sustained operational tempo places enormous strain on maintenance crews, missile stockpiles, and logistics chains. If an adversary can force you to defend a dozen locations simultaneously, you’ve already begun winning the resource allocation battle.

Historically, successful military campaigns begin with degrading command-and-control, communications, air defenses, and logistics before moving to decisive operations.

Whether one agrees with Iran politically is irrelevant to the military analysis. What we’re witnessing is not random retaliation, it is a deliberate campaign aimed at systematically degrading the regional architecture that allows the United States and its allies to project military power across the Middle East.

Jordan is the key, the last & most important layer defending Israel.

The increasing rate of direct hits is a direct result of Radars & other U.S. equipment destroyed in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar ... added to the depletion of air defense interceptors, something that couldn't have been achieved in a few days.

During 20 years CENTCOM turned Arab countries into a dome protecting Israel, and Iran is now methodically dismantling it.

https://xcancel.com/DD_Geopolitics/status/2079271166972166234