1000 Bombs Versus 1: Which Is Strategically More Effective?
the US and Israel are launching massive attacks every night and Iran can launch very few. Ipso facto the US and Israel are “winning”.
If only it were so easy. The metrics do not actually tell you what Hegseth and Caine want them to.
What we see is that Iran does not need to match the US and Israel, indeed it cannot hope to do so. All Iran needs to do is convince the world’s shipping bodies, insurance companies, and markets, that it can successfully launch one bomb—and that alone seems enough for them to fight their war for now.
And last night the Iranians launched one such bomb to put the world on notice.
In comparison to massive US and Israeli fires, Iran had one hit last night—though that one hit arguably has the same strategic effect of all the bombs dropped by the US and Israel at the same time. The Iranians sent one of their simple drones and it hit a oil tanker off the coast of Dubai.
The vessel hit was a tanker called Al Salmi, and it was fully laden with 2 million barrels of fuel for export. With oil hovering just at or over $100 a barrel, that load alone was worth approximately $200,000,000—and the ship itself was worth almost as much. Building a new supertanker, classified as a Very Large Crude Carrier (VLCC) costs about $130,000,000 these days. Buying won already built can cost even more as there is demand—some are being listed at almost $150,000,000.
So the load that the Iranians hit with that one bomb was valued somewhere close to $350,000,000. If oil prices continue to rise, it could be considerably more than this.
If the Iranians launched three successful attacks per night on VLCCs, that would be around $1 billion in ships and cargo damaged. At present, btw, there are somewhere between 200-300 tankers stuck in the Gulf (with many more that would have liked to get in and get there loads). So we are talking about a traffic worth hundreds of billions of dollars a day, trillions over weeks and months. If that traffic cannot be insured and protected, it cannot sail.
So that is the dilemma that the US faces. It does not need to simply bomb Iran. It needs to be able to stop the Iranians from threatening world shipping in the Gulf. So far, for all of its air superiority, it cannot do that. And if that dynamic does not change, Iran has a stranglehold over much of the world economy—no matter how many golden statues of victory Donald Trump builds of himself.
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