U.S. moves Patriot defenses to Middle East with dozens of C-17 flights
The U.S. military shifted a Patriot battalion from the Indo-Pacific to the Middle East, requiring at least 73 flights, according to one commander.
Why it matters: The air defenses are a high-profile resource, capable of intercepting missiles and aircraft. They arrive at a volatile moment.
Further, the number of C-17 flights conducted underscores just how stressful materiel moves can be. The Boeing-made aircraft can transport hefty equipment, like tanks.
Context: Indo-Pacific Command boss Adm. Samuel Paparo disclosed the details in a congressional hearing Thursday. He was accompanied by Gen. Xavier Brunson, the commander of U.S. Forces Korea.
Paparo told senators U.S. "lift requirements must be paid attention to." Sustainment, he added, "won World War II."
What they're saying: "The airlift is essential to protect key U.S. bases and partners in the Middle East, which otherwise are much more vulnerable than Israel to Iran's shorter-range missiles," Jonathan Ruhe, director of foreign policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, told Axios.
Zoom out: The move comes amid a buildup across U.S. Central Command.
The Carl Vinson aircraft carrier joined the Harry S. Truman in the region. The command on Thursday shared footage of aircraft launching from the decks.
Satellite images show a handful of B-2 bombers dispatched to Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean. Hans Kristensen at the Federation of American Scientists described the grouping as "unusually large."
Meanwhile, airstrikes in Yemen have killed dozens of people, including Houthi drone experts. An initial wave in March hit 30-plus targets, according to the Pentagon.
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Boston Globe
an hour ago
- Boston Globe
Satellite images undermine Trump's claim Iran's atomic sites destroyed
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Trump dispatched B-2 stealth jets laden with Massive Ordnance Penetrators, known as GBU-57 bombs, to attempt to destroy Iran's underground uranium-enrichment sites in Natanz and Fordow. Advertisement Bloomberg Satellite images taken on Sunday of Fordow and distributed by Maxar Technologies show new craters, possible collapsed tunnel entrances and holes on top of a mountain ridge. They also show that a large support building on the Fordow site, which operators may use to control ventilation for the underground enrichment halls, remained undamaged. There were no radiation releases from the site, the IAEA reported. New pictures of Natanz show a new crater about 5.5 meters (18 feet) in diameter. Maxar said in a statement that the new hole was visible in the dirt directly over a part of the underground enrichment facility. The image doesn't offer conclusive evidence that the attack breached the underground site, buried 40 meters under ground and reinforced with an 8-meter think concrete and steel shell. Advertisement In an image provided by Maxar Technologies, a crater is visible over the underground Natanz Enrichment Facility after it was hit by United States airstrikes, near Natanz, Iran, on Sunday, June 22, 2025. SATELLITE IMAGE ©2025 MAXAR TEC/NYT US Air Force General Dan Caine told a news conference earlier on Sunday that an assessment of 'final battle damage will take some time.' IAEA inspectors, meanwhile, haven't been able to verify the location of the Persian Gulf country's stockpile of near-bomb-grade uranium for more than a week. Iranian officials acknowledged breaking IAEA seals and moving it to an undisclosed location. Indeed, there's just a slim possibility that the US entering the war will convince Iran to increase IAEA cooperation, said Darya Dolzikova, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank. 'The more likely scenario is that they convince Iran that cooperation and transparency don't work and that building deeper facilities and ones not declared openly is more sensible to avoid similar targeting in future,' she said. Sign up for our breaking news alerts for the latest developments on the Israel-Iran war. The IAEA called on a cessation of hostilities in order to address the situation. Its 35-nation board will convene on Monday in Vienna, Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said. Before the US intervention, images showed Israeli forces alone had met with limited success four days after the bombing began. Damage to the central facility in Natanz, located 300 kilometers (186 miles) south of Tehran, was primarily limited to electricity switch yards and transformers. The US also joined in attacking the Isfahan Nuclear Technology and Research Center, located 450 kilometers south of Tehran. That was after the IAEA re-assessed the level of damage Israel had dealt to the facility. Based on satellite images and communications with Iranian counterparts Isfahan appeared 'extensively damaged,' the agency wrote late on Saturday. Advertisement Images now show extensive new damage after the US bombing, including to a large cluster of industrial buildings identified by Bloomberg last week. The IAEA reported earlier that the destruction may result in 'radioactive and chemical contamination within the facilities that were hit.' The IAEA's central mission is to account for gram-levels of uranium around the world and to ensure it isn't used for nuclear weapons. The latest bombing now complicates tracking Iranian uranium even further, said Tariq Rauf, the former head of the IAEA's nuclear-verification policy. 'It will now be very difficult for the IAEA to establish a material balance for the nearly 9,000 kilograms of enriched uranium, especially the nearly 410 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium,' he said. Last week, inspectors had already acknowledged they'd lost track of the location of Iran's highly enriched uranium stockpile because Israel's ongoing military assaults are preventing its inspectors from doing their work. That uranium inventory — enough to make 10 nuclear warheads at a clandestine location — was seen at Isfahan by IAEA inspectors. But the material, which could fit in as few as 16 small containers, may have already been spirited off site. 'Questions remain as to where Iran may be storing its already enriched stocks,' Dozikova said. 'These will have almost certainly been moved to hardened and undisclosed locations, out of the way of potential Israeli or US strikes.' Iran's ambitions to make the fuel needed for nuclear power plants and weapons involve heavily fortified infrastructure across the country with thousands of scientists and engineers working at dozens of sites. Advertisement Even as military analysts await more images before determining the success of Trump's mission, nuclear safeguards analysts have reached the conclusion that their work is about to become significantly harder. By bombing Iran's sites, Israel and the US haven't just disrupted the IAEA's accountancy of Iran's nuclear stockpile, they've also degraded the tools that monitors will be able to use, said Robert Kelley, who led inspections of Iraq and Libya as an IAEA director. That includes the forensic method used to detect the potential diversion of uranium. 'Now that sites have been bombed and all classes of materials have been scattered everywhere the IAEA will never again be able to use environmental sampling,' he said. 'Particles of every isotopic description have infinite half-lives for forensic purposes and it will be impossible to sort out their origin.'
Miami Herald
an hour ago
- Miami Herald
US attack against Iran hinged on misdirection and decoys
The U.S. strikes that targeted Iran's nuclear sites involved a decoy mission aimed at drawing attention from flight trackers while the largest-ever deployment of B-2 stealth bombers delivered 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs for the first time in combat. The operation - dubbed "Midnight Hammer" - was detailed by top Pentagon officials on Sunday morning. They described an extensive operation that included 125 aircraft overall, strikes by Tomahawk missiles launched from a U.S. submarine, and the use of 14 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs. The heart of the 37-hour operation was a feint in which a group of B-2 bombers flew west across the Pacific Ocean as decoys to maintain tactical surprise, according to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. News reports on Saturday morning that picked up on flight-tracker data suggested those planes were being deployed as a way to strong-arm Iran into fresh talks on its nuclear program. While those planes got all the attention, another group of B-2s flew east carrying the bunker-busters. The officials said dozens of air-refueling tankers, a guided missile submarine, and fourth- and fifth-generation fighters were involved in the attack, which struck nuclear strikes at Fordow, Isfahan and Natanz. The briefing helped explain other data points that emerged in recent days, including a massive move by midair refueling tankers last week that was widely reported at the time. The White House had promised on Thursday that President Donald Trump would make a decision on a strike "within two weeks," suggesting there might be more time. In the end, the Saturday night operation was deemed a success by the Pentagon. No U.S. servicemembers were lost, and Iran didn't fire at any of the U.S. military assets, according to the officials. Hegseth said members of Congress were only notified after the planes were out of danger, contradicting earlier reports that Trump had informed Republican congressional leadership beforehand. The flights to deliver the targets amounted to the second-longest flights in the B-2's operational history, according to Hegseth and Air Force General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The longest was a 40-hour round trip in October 2001 in the initial phase of the Afghanistan war. "This is a plan that took months and weeks of positioning and preparation, so that we could be ready when the president of the United States called," Hegseth said. "It took a great deal of precision. It involved misdirection and the highest of operational security." The officials said 75 precision-guided weapons were used and the operation involved some 125 aircraft. Caine said the battle damage would take time to assess but "all three sites sustained extremely severe damage and destruction." Prior to the B-2 strikes on Fordow, a submarine with the Carl Vinson Carrier Strike Group in the Arabian Sea fired 24 Tomahawk cruise missiles, according to Caine and a graphic released by the Pentagon. Addressing the nation late Saturday, Trump said Iran's "key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated." "It would not be a surprise to me if, after an assessment period, we went back in and re-struck some of these targets to make sure that we achieved the effect," said Joseph Votel, a former commander of the U.S. Central Command and now a fellow at the Middle East Institute. "That actually is a normal part of our military targeting process, is to strike, assess, and then if necessary, strike again to achieve the results that we're looking for." Hegseth said the mission was focused on destroying Iran's nuclear program and not regime change in Tehran. "The mission was not, has not, been about regime change," he said. But Secretary of State Marco Rubio made clear that Iran needs to clearly abandon its nuclear weapons ambitions. "At the end of the day, if Iran is committed to becoming a nuclear weapons power, I do think it puts the regime at risk," Rubio said Sunday on Fox News. "I really do. I think it would be the end of the regime if they tried to do that." While the damage assessments are still coming in, U.S. Vice President JD Vance said he's confident the U.S. strikes on Iranian sites "have substantially delayed their development of a nuclear weapon - and that was the goal of this attack." Iran's nuclear program has been pushed back "by a very long time," he said in an interview with NBC's "Meet the Press." "I think that it's going to be many, many years before the Iranians are able to develop a nuclear weapon." _____ (With assistance from Eric Martin, María Paula Mijares Torres and Natalia Drozdiak.) _____ Copyright (C) 2025, Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Portions copyrighted by the respective providers.
Miami Herald
an hour ago
- Miami Herald
Satellite images undermine Trump's claim atomic sites destroyed
President Donald Trump's decision to order U.S. forces to attack three key Iranian nuclear installations may have sabotaged the Islamic Republic's known atomic capabilities, but it's also created a monumental new challenge to work out what's left and where. Trump said heavily fortified sites were "totally obliterated" late Saturday, but independent analysis has yet to verify that claim. Rather than yielding a quick win, the strikes have complicated the task of tracking uranium and ensuring Iran doesn't build a weapon, according to three people who follow the country's nuclear program. International Atomic Energy Agency monitors remain in Iran and were inspecting more than one site a day before Israel started the bombing campaign on June 13. They are still trying to assess the extent of damage, and while military action might be able to destroy Iran's declared facilities, it also provides an incentive for Iran to take its program underground. Trump dispatched B-2 stealth jets laden with Massive Ordnance Penetrators, known as GBU-57 bombs, to attempt to destroy Iran's underground uranium-enrichment sites in Natanz and Fordow. Satellite images taken on Sunday of Fordow and distributed by Maxar Technologies show new craters, possible collapsed tunnel entrances and holes on top of a mountain ridge. They also show that a large support building on the Fordow site, which operators may use to control ventilation for the underground enrichment halls, remained undamaged. There were no radiation releases from the site, the IAEA reported. U.S. Air Force General Dan Caine told a news conference on Sunday that an assessment of "final battle damage will take some time." IAEA inspectors, meanwhile, haven't been able to verify the location of the Persian Gulf country's stockpile of near-bomb-grade uranium for more than a week. Iranian officials acknowledged breaking IAEA seals and moving it to an undisclosed location. Indeed, there's just a slim possibility that the U.S. entering the war will convince Iran to increase IAEA cooperation, said Darya Dolzikova, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank. "The more likely scenario is that they convince Iran that cooperation and transparency don't work and that building deeper facilities and ones not declared openly is more sensible to avoid similar targeting in future," she said. The IAEA called on a cessation of hostilities in order to address the situation. Its 35-nation board will convene on Monday in Vienna, Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said. Before the U.S. intervention, images showed Israeli forces alone had met with limited success four days after the bombing began. Damage to the central facility in Natanz, located 300 kilometers (186 miles) south of Tehran, was primarily limited to electricity switch yards and transformers. The U.S. also joined in attacking the Isfahan Nuclear Technology and Research Center, located 450 kilometers south of Tehran. That was after the IAEA re-assessed the level of damage Israel had dealt to facility. Based on satellite images and communications with Iranian counterparts Isfahan appeared "extensively damaged," the agency wrote late on Saturday. The IAEA's central mission is to account for gram-levels of uranium around the world and to ensure it isn't used for nuclear weapons. The latest bombing now complicates tracking Iranian uranium even further, said Tariq Rauf, the former head of the IAEA's nuclear-verification policy. "It will now be very difficult for the IAEA to establish a material balance for the nearly 9,000 kilograms of enriched uranium, especially the nearly 410 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium," he said. Last week, inspectors had already acknowledged they'd lost track of the location of Iran's highly enriched uranium stockpile because Israel's ongoing military assaults are preventing its inspectors from doing their work. That uranium inventory - enough to make 10 nuclear warheads at a clandestine location - was seen at Isfahan by IAEA inspectors. But the material, which could fit in as few as 16 small containers, may have already been spirited off site. "Questions remain as to where Iran may be storing its already enriched stocks," Dozikova said. "These will have almost certainly been moved to hardened and undisclosed locations, out of the way of potential Israeli or U.S. strikes." Far from being just static points on a map, Iran's ambitions to make the fuel needed for nuclear power plants and weapons are embedded in a heavily fortified infrastructure nationwide. Thousands of scientists and engineers work at dozens of sites. Even as military analysts await new satellite images before determining the success of Trump's mission, nuclear safeguards analysts have reached the conclusion that their work is about to become significantly harder. By bombing Iran's sites, Israel and the U.S. haven't just disrupted the IAEA's accountancy of Iran's nuclear stockpile, they've also degraded the tools that monitors will be able to use, said Robert Kelley, who led inspections of Iraq and Libya as an IAEA director. That includes the forensic method used to detect the potential diversion of uranium. "Now that sites have been bombed and all classes of materials have been scattered everywhere the IAEA will never again be able to use environmental sampling," he said. "Particles of every isotopic description have infinite half-lives for forensic purposes and it will be impossible to sort out their origin." _____ Copyright (C) 2025, Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Portions copyrighted by the respective providers.
