By Friday, March 13, the U.S.-Iran war looked markedly different from the conflict The Debrief described in last week’s update. What had appeared to be a campaign centered on crushing Iran’s missile and drone infrastructure has broadened into a larger contest over endurance, regional escalation, and one of the most important maritime choke points on Earth.
Throughout the week, U.S. and Israeli airstrikes intensified inside Iran even as Tehran widened its response outward—toward Gulf bases, commercial shipping, and energy infrastructure—pushing the Strait of Hormuz to the center of the war.
The war now appears to be operating on two levels at once. On one level, Washington and Jerusalem are still trying to degrade Iran’s ability to launch missiles, build replacements, and regenerate strategic capability.
On the other hand, Iran is trying to prove that even under punishing air attacks, it can still impose costs by choking shipping, raising oil prices, threatening neighboring states that host U.S. forces, and keeping multiple fronts active.
In effect, phase two has not disappeared since last Friday’s reporting—it has expanded into a harder, messier struggle over logistics, geography, and political staying power.
On Tuesday, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar suggested the coalition was not seeking a prolonged campaign, while also indicating the conflict would continue until Israel and the United States decide it should end.
“We are not seeking an endless war,” Saar said at a press briefing alongside his German counterpart in Jerusalem. “We will continue until the minute that we, and our partners, think that it is appropriate to stop.”
President Donald Trump, by contrast, has offered a far less consistent picture of how long the war might continue. Over the course of the week, the president alternated between suggesting the campaign was nearing its end, calling it a “short-term excursion,” to warning that it could continue for some time.
On Monday, March 9, Iran elevated Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei as its new supreme leader following the death of his father. Analysts and regional governments largely viewed the move as a sign that Tehran was digging in rather than looking for a way out.
Khamenei’s first public comments on Thursday did little to suggest any interest in de-escalation. In a statement read on state television rather than delivered in person, Iran’s new supreme leader signaled that Tehran intended to keep fighting, endorsed using the threat of closing the Strait of Hormuz as leverage against the United States and Israel, and warned that neighboring countries hosting U.S. military bases could continue to face attack.
He also praised what Iran calls the “Resistance Front,” reinforcing the impression that the new leadership is framing the war not as a crisis to be contained, but as a broader regional struggle it is prepared to sustain.
Iran’s retaliatory strategy has come into sharper focus over the course of the week. Unable to match the United States and Israel in a symmetrical air war, Tehran has increasingly turned to targets that can impose wider economic and political costs. Iranian attacks struck the world’s busiest international airport and targeted commercial shipping, with at least 16 civilian vessels reportedly attacked in and around the Gulf and Strait of Hormuz by Friday.
The economic effects were immediate. On Monday, March 9, a new wave of strikes hit Tehran and Isfahan, briefly pushing oil prices to near $120 a barrel. Prices later eased as markets bet President Trump was still seeking to keep the conflict relatively short. By the morning of March 13, however, Brent crude had climbed back above $100 a barrel, underscoring just how volatile energy markets remained as the war continued.
The broader disruption has only deepened. The International Energy Agency now describes the crisis as the largest oil supply disruption in history, with global supply in March expected to fall by 8 million barrels per day and member states agreeing to release a record 400 million barrels from strategic stockpiles. Iraq’s oil ports halted operations, while reports indicated that shipping through the Strait of Hormuz had fallen by 97% since the war began.
That appears to be the core of Iran’s logic. Tehran may be unable to win a direct contest in the air, but it can still raise the cost of war by turning maritime insecurity, soaring insurance rates, and supply disruptions into pressure on Washington, Jerusalem, and the wider global economy.
Tuesday, March 10, brought the week’s most obvious military escalation. The Pentagon and Iranians on the ground described it as the most intense day of strikes yet. Meanwhile, Iran fired at the U.S.-operated Al Udeid base in Qatar and the Al Harir base in Iraq’s Kurdistan region, followed by drone attacks targeting Al Dhafra in the UAE and Juffair in Bahrain.
The same day, the U.S. military said it had eliminated 16 Iranian mine-laying vessels near the Strait of Hormuz. This was part of a broader campaign that U.S. Central Command says has now destroyed more than 30 Iranian minelayers.
However, destroying Iranian minelayers has not resolved the Strait of Hormuz crisis. Commercial traffic through the waterway has remained severely disrupted, allied governments are still searching for ways to protect shipping, and Iran has sought to tighten its grip by requiring vessels to coordinate passage with its navy.
The challenge for Washington is that Hormuz is not a target that can be simply bombed open. Its narrow geography leaves shipping vulnerable to missiles, drones, mines, and fast-attack craft, making any return to normal traffic slow and dangerous.
The rapid collapse in transit has also sharpened questions over whether U.S. officials fully anticipated how aggressively Tehran would move to weaponize the strait.
As for the U.S.-Israeli offensive operations, the expected focus this week was on the machinery of Iran’s long war-making capacity: missile production, naval assets, and nuclear-linked infrastructure.
Publicly, the Pentagon has continued to describe the U.S. objective as destroying Iran’s offensive missiles, missile-production base, and navy while preventing Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Israeli officials have framed the campaign similarly, saying it is meant to eliminate the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
However, the strikes have not been limited to factories, launchers, and strategic sites. This week, Israel said it also struck checkpoints in Tehran operated by the Basij, the IRGC-linked paramilitary force often used to crush protests inside Iran, explicitly describing the attacks as part of an effort to weaken clerical rule.
That is notable because it points beyond simple military degradation and toward pressure on the regime’s internal coercive apparatus. Netanyahu has been unusually open about that logic, saying Israel wants to create the conditions for Iranians to overthrow their rulers, even while acknowledging there has so far been no sign of organized unrest and no certainty that the government will fall.
In other words, while Washington has publicly emphasized limited military aims, this week’s strikes suggest that at least some elements of the U.S.-Israeli campaign still carry a broader political hope that sustained attacks on the regime’s security backbone could help open space for internal dissent or even a future uprising.
On Thursday, March 12, Israel said it had targeted the Taleghan 2 site at the Parchin military complex. While not one of Iran’s main enrichment hubs, Taleghan 2 is significant because Western officials have long linked it to weapons-related research, and Israel said the compound had been used for activities connected to Iran’s nuclear program—suggesting that at least part of this week’s campaign may be widening beyond missile forces and internal-security targets to include the regime’s suspected weaponization infrastructure.
At the same time, Iran’s most important nuclear sites do not appear to have been the central focus of operations this week. Earlier in the war, the IAEA said it initially did not indicate that nuclear facilities had been hit, though satellite imagery later indicated fresh damage to access buildings at Natanz.
IAEA chief Rafael Grossi said this week that much of Iran’s near-bomb-grade uranium is still likely underground at Isfahan. In that sense, the Taleghan 2 strike looks less like the start of a full-scale assault on Iran’s core nuclear complex than a reminder that the nuclear file has not been set aside—even if the hardest and most consequential targets remain largely unresolved.
The human cost of the conflict on the U.S. side has become harder to ignore. The Pentagon said roughly 140 U.S. service members had been wounded in the war, including eight severely, though 108 had already returned to duty.
The toll rose again after a U.S. KC-135 refueling aircraft went down in western Iraq on March 12. By Friday, CENTCOM said four of the six crew members had been confirmed dead, while stressing that the loss was not caused by hostile fire or friendly fire. Their deaths bring the total number of U.S. personnel killed during the campaign to 11.
The financial and material costs are rising. According to reports, White House officials told members of Congress during a closed-door briefing that the first six days of fighting had already cost at least $11.3 billion, with $5.6 billion in munitions used in the first two days alone.
For a war still being publicly described in shifting, and often limited, terms, those are not minor numbers. They point to the kind of industrial and readiness pressures that The Debrief has repeatedly flagged in modern missile-heavy warfare.
As the conflict enters week three, it is clear that the war is no longer defined simply by how many launchers, drones, or missile factories can be destroyed from the air. It is increasingly shaped by endurance, the vulnerability of global shipping lanes, and the political assumptions driving both sides.
The United States and Israel are still inflicting serious damage on Iran’s military infrastructure, but Tehran continues to show defiance and is banking that it does not need to win in the air to keep raising the cost of the conflict. It only needs to keep enough pressure on oil flows, commercial shipping, regional bases, and political nerves to make the war harder to contain.
This makes the coming phases of the war so uncertain. If Washington and Jerusalem continue broadening the target set, they may further weaken Iran’s ability to regenerate militarily.
However, they also risk deepening the same regional and economic shock they are trying to manage. And if Tehran cannot reverse its military losses directly, it can still try to drag the conflict into a longer contest of disruption and escalation, where the battlefield extends far beyond Iran itself.
The biggest unanswered question is the one that has hovered over the war from the beginning: what does success actually look like?
If the aim is to destroy Iran’s missile forces, nuclear potential, and ability to threaten the region, that is already proving to be a larger and more open-ended task than early rhetoric suggested.
If the hope is that military pressure could also destabilize the regime from within, this week offered hints that such thinking has not entirely disappeared, even if there is still little to no evidence of an imminent internal collapse.
As of now, Friday, March 13, the war has not reached a clear endgame. Instead, it has entered a more dangerous stage—one in which battlefield momentum, economic coercion, and political ambition are colliding at the same time.
What happens next may depend less on military strikes and more on who can absorb the growing costs of a conflict that is becoming broader, riskier, and harder to control.
Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan. Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com