The American and Israeli air campaign against Iran has surpassed the scale of both previous Persian Gulf wars while operating under the thinnest civilian-protection framework the Pentagon has maintained in a generation. The gap between the volume of strikes and the capacity to prevent mistakes is wider than at any point in modern American warfare.
As "Hvylya" reports, citing an investigation by The Economist, the two allies are thought to have conducted more offensive sorties on February 28 alone than the United States managed on the first day of serious fighting in either 1991 or 2003 - roughly 1,300 in each of those wars, with much larger deployed forces. Five days into the campaign, Pete Hegseth, America's secretary of war, declared that "Operation Epic Fury has delivered twice the air power of shock and awe of Iraq in 2003."
This extraordinary tempo is made possible by AI-powered targeting systems that can generate and match targets to weapons at industrial speed. But the oversight apparatus has moved in the opposite direction. Hegseth has slashed the Pentagon's civilian-harm assessment staff by 90%. The CENTCOM civilian-harm team operates at one-third of its pre-Hegseth strength, with the deepest cuts hitting planners and strike-cell personnel - those best positioned to catch outdated intelligence before a missile is launched.
The collision of these two trends produced its first visible catastrophe on the opening day. A girls' school in Minab, southern Iran, was hit by what was likely an American Tomahawk cruise missile, killing 175 people, most of them children. The Pentagon later attributed the strike to a targeting error - the school site had once been part of a nearby naval base. Almost 1,800 people have been killed in Iran so far, most of them civilians, according to HRANA, a Washington-based human-rights monitor. The campaign's four years of joint preparation did not, it appears, include adequate safeguards for rapidly changing ground conditions.
Hegseth has shown no inclination to recalibrate. He has fired military lawyers, loosened rules of engagement and openly favored killing power over legal caution. On March 8, CENTCOM told Iranians to stay home to avoid being killed, accusing the Iranian regime of putting civilians at risk by placing weapons in populated areas. The regime, CENTCOM said, "blatantly disregards the safety of innocent people." Meanwhile, questions about the administration's broader war doctrine continue to mount.
Also read: Petraeus Warns of "Missile Math" Problem as Iran Campaign Stretches On.