President Donald Trump vowed a strong military response against Iran for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ surprise attack on U.S. troops in Jordan on Tuesday.“We’re going to beat the f***ing s*** out of them,” Trump told Fox News on Wednesday morning. “We’ll be hitting them hard. They’re going to get a beating.”U.S. forces successfully intercepted all of the ballistic missiles Iran launched on Tuesday, according to U.S. Central Command.
The U.S. military has not carried out an attack on Iran since Thursday. U.S. forces had carried out thirteen straight days of bombings that primarily targeted Iran’s ability to threaten shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, and Trump had discussed escalating the conflict during that time but held off.U.S. and Saudi forces jointly targeted an Iranian-backed militia in Iraq on Tuesday. CENTCOM said U.S. and Saudi fighter aircraft “struck multiple terrorist logistics and weapons sites across eastern Iraq in a strong response to over 30 IRGC-directed aerial drone attacks in the last 72 hours.”In total, there were more than 600 attempted attacks on U.S. personnel and facilities by Iranian-backed militias in Iraq from February through April 2026. During the nearly two-week period of daily U.S. strikes, Iran countered with several attacks of their own against Gulf countries, sometimes targeting U.S. bases in those countries.An Iranian attack at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, a U.S. military base in Jordan, on July 17 resulted in the deaths of three American service members: 1st Lt. Tyler James Feehan, 25, Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, and Sgt. Angel Rampersad, 28. Another service member, Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton, 30, was killed two days later during a controlled detonation of a downed Iranian drone at Erbil Air Base in Iraq.Two hundred twenty-five service members have been injured since July 7, according to the Defense Casualty Analysis System, a Pentagon-run casualty database for the military.There have been questions raised about the department’s transparency on U.S. casualties due to discrepancies with the DCAS. Initially, a Pentagon spokesperson said the errors were due to “anomalies,” but the department has opted to bifurcate the conflict in the DCAS into two separate wars: Operation Epic Fury, which was the first one, and a second that began after the ceasefire collapsed.TRUMP’S THREATS TO EXPAND IRAN STRIKES COME AS CONCERNS OVER TRANSPARENCY ESCALATEAnother subject of intrigue about the war is U.S. stockpiles of critical munitions. The Pentagon and Trump administration are adamant that there is no shortfall following several months of a sustained conflict, even though they are also simultaneously pushing the defense industrial base to massively expand its production capacity. Any significant resumption of the war would further decrease U.S. stockpiles.The Trump administration requested $95 billion in the FY 2027 defense budget for munitions and $21 billion more in the war supplemental.
