No. of Recommendations: 20
This is serious Come on, man territory.No, it's not. Because, again, it's not about how many missiles you shoot down, but whether any get through.
One successful attack -
one! - at Qatar's Ras Laffan ended up knocking out 17% of their gas production. It will take them between 3-5 years to repair the damage, and they will end up losing about $20 billion
per year in revenue apart from the cost of reconstruction. It triggered
force majeure clauses worldwide and precipitated a massive spike in gas costs.
So no, this isn't
Come on, man territory. Iran can flood the zone with missiles that cost $1-2M each (and drones that cost even less), and cause $50 billion worth of damage? It doesn't matter if you have a 99% success rate in knocking them down. They win that exchange.
This is
exactly the disconnect, BTW. You keep mistaking operational or tactical success with achieving any kind of
strategic success. Tactically, the U.S. did great - we shot down
so many of their missiles. Strategically, Iran succeeded - they showed that even though the U.S. can shoot down a ton of their missiles, if they flood the zone they can get some through and cause devastating impacts.
What "massive damage" have they caused to the "energy infrastructure"? You mean the Saudis' Red Sea pipeline? This one?No, this one:
Iranian attacks have knocked out 17% of Qatar's liquefied natural gas (LNG) export capacity, causing an estimated $20 billion in lost annual revenue and threatening supplies to Europe and Asia, QatarEnergy's CEO and state minister for energy affairs told Reuters on Thursday.
Saad al-Kaabi said two of Qatar's 14 LNG trains and one of its two gas-to-liquids (GTL) facilities were damaged in the unprecedented strikes. The repairs will sideline 12.8 million tons per year of LNG for three to five years, he said in an interview.https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/iran-attac...For a more comprehensive picture:
https://energynow.com/wp-content/uploads/Energy-Di...and
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/15/iran-war-energy-fa...To put that in perspective, almost all of that damage took place within only about two weeks. Iran didn't start attacking regional energy infrastructure until Israel bombed South Pars on March 18th. In response to that escalation, Iran escalated - hitting a number of regional energy targets starting the next day.
I suppose we should just surrender to the Iranians now. Might save us the trouble later.I know you're being flippant, but it's entirely possible for us to fail to achieve most of our strategic goals without that being a surrender. Hurting Iran further doesn't necessarily mean we're achieving anything materially worthwhile. We could blow up more of their bridges, more of their missiles - and it won't necessarily bring us any closer to any of our own strategic objectives. It might indeed end up being in our best interests to enter into an agreement with them now, rather than endure the further disruption of global energy markets and the consumption of our own military resources that continued prosecution of the war will involve.
