On the menu today: It might seem like more of the same — Iranian strikes, American counterstrikes — but the past week has brought five extraordinary events to the Middle East. Read on.

Where Things Stand with Iran

Since last Friday, five extraordinary things have occurred in the Middle East.

One: Sunday night, Iran fired “nearly 30 ballistic missiles” at Israel. Now, in the fog of war, no one knows precisely how big Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal is, or how many it has remaining, or how quickly the regime can build new ones. The Congressional Research Service wrote March 5:

Israeli and U.S. officials have stated varying estimates of Iran’s ballistic missile production capacity. On March 1, the Israeli military estimated Iran was producing “dozens of ballistic missiles per month.” On March 2, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Iran had been producing “over 100” such missiles a month. U.S. officials reportedly said, prior to June 2025, Iran was producing 50 missiles per month.

A Turkish think-tank researcher estimated that before the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign, Iran had “an industrial base capable of producing several hundred missiles per month.”

Obviously, the U.S. and Israel have targeted Iran’s remaining missile stockpiles, launchers, production facilities, and key places in its supply chain. In mid-May, Admiral Brad Cooper of U.S. Central Command told the Senate Armed Services Committee that more than 1,450 strikes hit weapons manufacturing facilities alone.

President Donald Trump sat down for his interview with NBC News’ Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker on Friday, June 5, and said of Iran’s remaining ballistic missiles:

I know almost to the number. And we know where they are too. And we know where their drones are. And we know where their drone factories are. Most of the drone factories have been knocked out, most of the launching pads have been knocked out and most of the missile manufacturing areas have been knocked out. But they still have capacity. They have some missiles. They have some drones. I would say, percentage-wise, maybe 21, 22 percent of their missiles. It’s a lot of missiles. But it’s not what it was when we first attacked.

For what it is worth, MS NOW reported in May that “Iran has restored access to 30 of the 33 missile sites it controls along the Strait of Hormuz” since the start of the “cease-fire” — pardon the scare quotes, but you probably noticed that no one has ceased firing — on April 8.

No doubt, the U.S. and Israel have greatly reduced Iran’s arsenal of ballistic missiles. But as of Sunday, Iran had “nearly 30 of them,” and launched them at Israel.

What’s more, Iran launched another round of attacks Tuesday night, using a combination of missiles and drones:

The strikes targeted 21 sites at U.S. bases across the region, Iranian semiofficial media outlet Tasnim reported, including those operated by the U.S. Fifth Fleet based in Bahrain, Ali al-Salem base in Kuwait and a U.S. air base in Jordan.

U.S. Central Command did not immediately confirm the attacks, but Kuwait’s military reported intercepting aerial attacks and Jordan’s armed forces said they intercepted five missiles from Iran. Bahrain’s military also said it had intercepted an unspecified number of Iranian missiles and drones. No deaths were reported.

If some of the American objectives of this war were to eliminate the threat from Iran’s ballistic missile and drone programs, those objectives have not been achieved yet. And while those threats are no doubt reduced . . . the question is, how reduced? And how reduced does that arsenal need to be for us to feel like we’ve done what we needed to do?

Two, on Monday, an Iranian Shahed drone took down a U.S. Army Apache helicopter gunship patrolling the Strait of Hormuz, off the coast of Oman. Thankfully, the two pilots* were rescued, and we’ll talk more about the rescue in a moment.

When communicating to the American public during a war, it does not help to have a president with a propensity for sweeping, hyperbolic statements. In the Meet the Press interview, Trump said, “We have totally destroyed their military.”

On March 14, Trump posted on Truth Social, “The United States of America has beaten and completely decimated Iran, both Militarily, Economically, and in every other way,” On March 16, Trump said, “They have been literally obliterated. The Air Force is gone, the navy is gone. Many, many ships have been sunk, their war-fighting ships, but I guess they didn’t know how to use them. And, uh, anti-aircraft is decimated. Their radar is gone, and their leaders are gone.”

This morning, President Trump posted on Truth Social:

Iran’s Military is a complete and total mess. Much of it, like their Navy and Air Force, doesn’t even exist anymore — They have been completely defeated. Iran is all talk and no action. The Bully of the Middle East is DEAD!!!

Maybe the drone that hit the Apache was a lucky shot; clearly, the U.S. and Israel have undoubtedly inflicted serious damage upon Iran’s military overall. But that does not mean the Iranian military is “totally destroyed,” that it has been “completely defeated,” or that they cannot shoot down U.S. aircraft.

No doubt, one of the reasons the American public feels so negatively about the war against Iran is because the president is regularly giving them assurances that turn out to be false.

Three: U.S. used an unmanned drone to rescue the two pilots, a first in wartime:

The American military deployed an autonomous Corsair maritime drone built by Saronic to find and recover two soldiers who were stranded near the Strait of Hormuz on Monday after their Army AH-64 Apache helicopter crashed during a patrol operation, U.S. Central Command spokesperson Capt. Tim Hawkins told DefenseScoop.

In that rescue operation, he told DefenseScoop, the maritime drone picked the two pilots up “and transported them to another location on the water where they were then hoisted up to a helicopter for further transport.”

The Corsair is a 24-foot autonomous surface vessel (ASV) that’s designed for rugged, long-duration missions. The drones can operate at speeds greater than 35 knots and carry up to 1,000 lbs over 1,000 nautical miles, according to Saronic’s product specifications.

The ASVs are equipped with sensors that provide 360-degree passive sensing capabilities for day and night operations, which likely helped in locating the two soldiers off the coast of Oman after their helicopter went down.

Early in the film Top Gun: Maverick, the titular hero is confronted by a rear admiral who tells him that the era of manned combat aircraft is coming to an end:

These planes you’ve been testing, Captain, one day, sooner or later, they won’t need pilots at all. Pilots that need to sleep, eat, take a piss. Pilots that disobey orders. All you did was buy some time for those men out there. The future is coming, and you’re not in it. . . . The end is inevitable, Maverick. Your kind is headed for extinction.

Maverick confidently replies, “Maybe so, sir. But not today.” And we in the audience smile because we like Maverick, and we like fighter pilots. But the rear admiral in that scene is correct. Unmanned aircraft, seacraft, and ground drones are reaching the point where they can do everything human beings do, without risk to life and limb, and without the possibility of flag-draped caskets. It doesn’t matter whether anyone likes or dislikes this development; it’s happening either way.

Four: Tuesday morning, President Trump told a Wall Street Journal reporter that the Iranian downing of the Apache “wasn’t a big deal”:

Trump hadn’t been convinced of the need to retaliate against Iran earlier in the day, U.S. officials said. In a phone call Tuesday morning with The Wall Street Journal, he played down the incident — repeatedly saying that it “wasn’t a big deal” — and stressed that the pilots weren’t seriously injured.

He changed his mind after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine recommended military action during a briefing at the White House, the officials said. Hegseth and Caine provided Trump with updated information about the Iranian Shahed drone that struck the U.S. helicopter. When asked for comment, the Pentagon said in a statement that it didn’t discuss internal deliberations involving the president and his military advisers.

By Tuesday evening, the downing of the Apache was a big enough deal for the U.S. to launch retaliatory airstrikes at Iranian targets.

Five: The U.S. Central Command statement about Tuesday night’s strikes declared, “CENTCOM forces struck Iranian air defense, ground control stations, and surveillance radar sites near the Strait of Hormuz with precision munitions from U.S. Air Force and Navy fighter jets. The operation was a proportional response to recent attacks on U.S. forces and international commercial ships transiting regional waters.”

They buried the lede, as they say in the news business; Iran still has or has rebuilt some “air defense, ground control stations, and surveillance radar sites near the Strait of Hormuz” to hit in retaliation. You might think that remaining intact Iranian military targets would be few and far between by now; over the course of 38 days, the U.S. and Israel conducted “more than 10,200 sorties and over 13,500 strikes.”

Of course, the new Iranian air defense systems didn’t seem to work any better than the old Iranian air defense systems. But it is a reminder that the Iranian regime hasn’t been sitting on its hands during this cease-fire-in-name-only. The moment the U.S. stopped bombing, the Iranians got started on rebuilding their destroyed defense systems. A mid-May report from CNN quoted a U.S. intelligence source as saying some “estimates indicate Iran could fully reconstitute its drone attack capability in as soon as six months.” Another CNN report at the end of May examined satellite images:

Since the ceasefire more than seven weeks ago, Iranian efforts to excavate the bases have accelerated significantly.

CNN found that Iran has now unblocked 50 out of the 69 tunnel entrances struck by the US and Israel at 18 underground missile facilities.

Iran has repaired other parts of the bases as well, including roads that the US and Israel bombed to prevent missile launchers from using them. Satellite images show almost all these craters have now been filled, and at two sites, even repaved.

Iran’s missile program is being rebuilt with the help of the People’s Republic of China; even during the war, China sent five ships worth of sodium perchlorate, a chemical that Iran uses to manufacture solid rocket propellant for its ballistic missile arsenal.

You will recall that at their summit in Beijing in May, President Trump kept emphasizing what a good friend Xi Jinping was to him.

There are those who would argue that starting the war was a mistake. But choosing to end the U.S. bombing and declare a “cease-fire” that the Iranians violate with metronomic regularity has compounded the mistake. Frustrated Iran hawks have tried to tell the administration that the Iranian mullahs were never going to change, and were stalling for time in the negotiations with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, two specialists in Manhattan real estate. The administration had no interest in listening.

It is very difficult to see a path to clear and lasting victory in this war with a president this erratic and negotiators this naïve.

*While one crewman is the pilot and the other is the co-pilot/gunner, “both crew members are certified to fly the Apache, and there are redundant controls in both crew positions.”

ADDENDUM: Ruh-roh! Inflation hit 4.2 percent in May. You may recall the president claiming, erroneously, that inflation was at 1.7 percent before the war; it was not. It was 2.4 percent in February, 2.4 percent in January, 2.7 percent in December, and, if you want to go back further, 2.7 percent in November, not recorded in October because of the government shutdown, and 3 percent in September.

In other news, the president turns 80 years old on Sunday.