US-Israeli war on Iran, day 5: The global economy is still slipping as the war proceeds against Iran, with oil tankers stuck in the Strait of Hormuz as markets in Asia are getting hit particularly hard today. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump ordered the U.S. to underwrite risk insurance for commercial vessels transiting the Middle East, where many firms have changed course and routed tankers away from the conflict at increased cost.
Latest: NATO air defenses downed an Iranian ballistic missile headed for Turkey, Ankara’s defense ministry announced on Twitter Wednesday. It’s unclear just yet what shot down the missile. France on Tuesday ordered its aircraft carrier from the Baltics to the Mediterranean Sea, citing a drone strike Monday on a British air force base in Cyprus. The Associated Press has more.
New: A U.S. Navy submarine sank an Iranian warship with a torpedo in the Indian Ocean, Sri Lankan officials told Reuters on Wednesday. Nearly three dozen people were rescued from that incident, and at least 80 people died in that attack, the wire service reported a few hours later. Pentagon officials confirmed the sinking of the warship, saying it was the first for an American submarine since World War II.
The warship is among 20 Iranian vessels the U.S. military says it has sunk as of Wednesday morning Eastern time. The BBC verified 11 of those sunken vessels in satellite imagery, reporting Wednesday.
Developing: Trump is considering ordering the U.S. Navy to escort tankers through the Strait of Hormuz in order to “ensure the FREE FLOW of ENERGY to the WORLD,” he announced Tuesday on social media. The insurance and naval-escort plans followed a meeting with his treasury and energy secretaries Tuesday at the White House. “U.S. support for tanker insurance is not unprecedented,” Reuters explained Tuesday. “After the September 11, 2001, attacks, the U.S. issued insurance policies to keep shipping moving amid elevated war-risk premiums,” and “During the Iran-Iraq conflict in the s, Washington reflagged tankers and provided naval escorts when private insurers withdrew coverage.”
But some experts doubt this plan will have a large impact. “Given concerns about the safety of crews and vessels moving through the Strait,” Evercore analysts wrote in a note Tuesday, Trump’s plan “will likely not be sufficient to meaningfully increase traffic” at least in part because “the heavy use of drones and potential for sea mines have changed the calculus for many.” (h/t Carl Quintanilla of CNBC)
Coverage continues below…
Welcome to this Wednesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so we’d like to take a moment to thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 2002, U.S. special operators fought the Battle of Roberts Ridge, one of the fiercest engagements of the war in Afghanistan.
Update: Four of the six American service members killed so far have been identified by the Defense Department. “All soldiers were assigned to the 103rd Sustainment Command, Des Moines, Iowa,” officials said in a statement Tuesday. They include:
- Capt. Cody A. Khork, 35, of Winter Haven, Fla.;
- Sgt. 1st Class Noah L. Tietjens, 42, of Bellevue, Neb.;
- Sgt. 1st Class Nicole M. Amor, 39, of White Bear Lake, Minn.;
- Sgt. Declan J. Coady, 20, of West Des Moines, Iowa.
The four perished on March 1 when a drone struck their makeshift facility in Port Shuaiba, Kuwait, roughly a dozen miles south of the large U.S. base at Camp Arifjan, as CBS News reported Tuesday.
Sgt. 1st Class Amor “was just a few days away from coming home to her husband and two children when she was killed,” the Associated Press reports.
“Amor was moved off-base to a shipping container-style building a week before the drone attack. The building had no defenses,” her husband told AP. “They were dispersing because they were in fear that the base they were on was going to get attacked and they felt it was safer in smaller groups in separate places,” he said.
Expert reax: “No reason to have a makeshift operations center in a war where you determine D-day,” said Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. “Those service members would still be alive if there had been a basic effort by their leaders at hardening/passive defense.”
Contrasting solemnity: Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine opened his remarks Wednesday before reporters saying, “First, it’s with profound sadness and gratitude that I share the names of four of our six fallen heroes.” Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, on the other hand, began by asserting, “America is winning—decisively, devastatingly and without mercy. Under the direct command of President Trump…”
Hegseth also promised to begin using “500-pound, 1,000-pound and 2,000-pound GPS-and-laser-guided precision gravity bombs, which we have a nearly unlimited stockpile,” he told reporters Wednesday. “More bombers, fighters are arriving just today,” he added.
He also promised “in under a week, the two most powerful air forces in the world will have complete control of Iranian skies.” That’s a notably different picture from what Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent painted when he told CNBC Wednesday morning, “Everything is going magnificently. The execution of Epic Fury is proceeding and doing better than planned. I believe last night we took full control of the Iranian skies, along with the Israeli air force. So the two most powerful air forces in the world now have complete control of the Iranian sky.”
- Defense One’s Meghann Myers has more from Hegseth’s press conference, including some numbers of targets hit and missiles fired, here.
Developing: Many U.S. troops were told Trump’s Iran war is for “Armageddon” and the return of Jesus, which would seem to violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice, according to a flood of complaints from more than 40 different units spread across at least 30 military installations, journalist Jonathan Larson reported Monday, citing data from the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.
According to one of the complaints, their commander “urged us to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’ and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ.”
One related problem for troops: “If you’re being proselytized to by your superior, you can’t say, ‘Get out of my face.’ Under the military’s criminal code of justice, insubordination is considered a felony,” Mikey Weinstein, founder and president of MRFF, told HuffPost on Tuesday. Read more from Larson’s initial reporting, here.
The CIA’s station in Riyadh was allegedly hit in a drone attack Monday, the Washington Post reports. The attack caused “structural damage” and “collapsed” part of the embassy’s roof, according to a State Department alert obtained by WaPo, which added, “No CIA personnel were wounded,” and embassy personnel are sheltering in place.
The U.S. consulate in Dubai was struck Tuesday and temporarily erupted in flames, CNN reported. “Videos geolocated and verified by CNN show a black plume of smoke rising over the consulate building, visible from a considerable distance.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed a drone hit the “parking lot adjacent to the chancellery building,” but everyone was accounted for afterward.
For Americans stranded in the Middle East, Trump wrote a social media post Tuesday promoting the State Department’s evacuation planning and coordination website. “We are already chartering flights, free of charge, and booking commercial options, which we expect will become increasingly available as time goes on,” he said.
Trump was asked Tuesday, “Why wasn’t there an evacuation plan?” He replied, “Because it happened all very quickly.”
Related reading: “Dubai evacuation costs rise as high as $250,000 as more families flee,” the Financial Times reported Wednesday.
The U.S. military base al-Udeid, in Qatar, was hit with a ballistic missile Tuesday, Qatar’s defense ministry confirmed in a statement. The attack didn’t cause any casualties, the officials said.
Alert: Iran managed to strike the largest radar operated by the U.S. in the Middle East, located in Qatar: Space Force’s AN/FPS-132 Ballistic Missile Early Warning Radar System, which has an estimated cost of around $1 billion. Sam Lair of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies shared satellite imagery from Planet of the strike’s aftermath, noting, “It’s unclear how extensive the damage is,” however, “Debris from the damaged face has fallen on the roof of the main building and there is water runoff from the firefighting effort.” (To see more damage from the ongoing conflict, Lair is flagging multiple additional locations attacked across Iran, including missile bases and related production facilities.)
Rewind: “Trump Promises to Defend Qatar, a Reassurance After Israel’s Strike,” the New York Times reported in October.
Strategic consideration: Given the great deal of concern in recent years about China’s missile stocks, and the associated threats those missiles pose to naval forces, officials in Beijing may be “looking at Iran’s failure to achieve political objectives via missile coercion and rethinking some assumptions/discussions they’ve been having about their war planning,” observed analyst Decker Eveleth, writing Tuesday on social media. (One particularly notable difference, of course, is China’s known nuclear stockpile compared to Iran’s reported lack of a single nuclear weapon.)
Trump’s CIA is reportedly banking on Kurdish forces to “spark an uprising in Iran” and help topple the country’s leadership, CNN reported Tuesday. (Reuters had similar reporting a bit later.) “Iranian Kurdish armed groups have thousands of forces operating along the Iraq-Iran border,” and “are expected to take part in a ground operation in Western Iran, in the coming days,” a senior Iranian Kurdish official told CNN. “The idea would be for Kurdish armed forces to take on the Iranian security forces and pin them down to make it easier for unarmed Iranians in the major cities to turn out without getting massacred again as they were during unrest in January.”
“Another US official said the Kurds could help sow chaos in the region and stretch the Iranian regime’s military resources thin,” five journalists for CNN write. “Still other ideas have centered around whether the Kurds could take and hold territory in the northern part of Iran that would create a buffer zone for Israel.”
Expert reax: “Count me extremely skeptical that this’ll prove a good idea—for (a) intra-Kurdish, (b) regional geopolitical and (c) internal Iranian reasons,” Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute wrote Tuesday on social media. He added that “it’s this policy pillar that’s generating concern about [likely undeclared] U.S. boots on the ground in Iran.”
Rewind:
Trump lashed out at Spain during a meeting Tuesday at the White House with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. “We’re going to cut off all trade with Spain,” Trump said after Spain refused use of its airfields for the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran.
“They said we can’t use their bases. We could use their bases if we want,” Trump alleged Tuesday. “We could just fly in and use it. Nobody is gonna tell us not to use it.”
AP notes: “It is unclear how Trump would cut off trade with Spain, given that Spain is under the umbrella of the European Union. The EU negotiates trade deals on behalf of all 27 member countries.”
The view from Madrid: “We are not going to be accomplices to something that is bad for the world, simply because of fear of reprisals from some,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said in a televised speech Wednesday. “It’s not even clear what the goals are of those who launched the first attack,” he added.
Context: “For Mr. Sánchez, in office since 2018, an assertion of independence was also a political necessity,” the New York Times reports. “His anti-Trump positions give his Socialist party a chance to shore up their base and ward off challenges from far-left rivals.”
Developing: Cuba may be next in Trump’s sights, if activists in Florida get their way, Politico reported Monday. It’s not that far-fetched either, since the Wall Street Journal in January reported the Trump administration “is searching for Cuban government insiders who can help cut a deal to push out the Communist regime by the end of the year.”
“The president is feeling like, ‘I’m on a roll’; like, ‘This is working,’” an administration official told Vivian Salama of The Atlantic on Sunday. However, Salama cautioned, “A Cuba in turmoil could cause an influx of refugees to the United States at a time when the administration is trying to reverse immigration flows. A military campaign might set the stage for a revolt, but there is little organized opposition in the country after almost seven decades of repressive rule.”
The White House is threatening Venezuela’s interim leader again as “Federal prosecutors have put together possible corruption and money laundering charges” against Delcy Rodriguez “unless she continues to comply with Trump’s demands,” Reuters reported Wednesday. “The probe focuses on Rodriguez’s alleged involvement in laundering of funds from Venezuela’s state oil company PDVSA” between 2021 and 2025.
Related reading:
Around the Defense Department
The U.S. military just carried out a joint operation against alleged drug traffickers in Ecuador, officials at Southern Command announced Tuesday on social media. Special operators are helping plan missions in what the New York Times wrote “appeared to be a major expansion of the U.S. military’s unilateral strikes against boats in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific. More, here.
The Army just launched an open call for industry ideas. “The Army is looking to stretch its limited research and development dollars by teaming up with private industry to develop projects that can be used by the service as well as commercial customers,” reports Defense One’s Myers, here.
Pentagon’s war on Anthropic based on ‘dubious’ legal thinking’ and ideology, not real risk, according to legal experts and officials who spoke with Defense One’s Patrick Tucker. Read their takes, here.
Related reading:
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