As is well known, after the US-Israeli airstrikes on Iran's nuclear facilities last year, Trump had confidently claimed that Iran's nuclear program was "completely destroyed." However, when the US and Israel once again launched attacks against Iran this year, Trump unsurprisingly contradicted himself again.

On the 11th, the US "The War Zone" website noticed that an underground nuclear facility in Iran named "Talegan-2" may have been attacked by a US巨型钻地弹 (GBU-57/B).

The US is now bombing anything it finds...

Satellite images show three large and precise impact points on the top of the facility, which are similar in shape to the effects of the US attack on Iran's nuclear facilities during the "Midnight Hammer" operation last year, indicating that the B-2 bomber likely took part again.

As of now, the US Central Command has not commented on The War Zone's findings. However, US media pointed out that the actual effectiveness of this second US airstrike on Iran's nuclear facilities is likely questionable.

The reason is that earlier satellite photos already showed that after being hit by the US-Israeli joint strike last year, Iran clearly learned its lesson and quickly reinforced its nuclear facilities. Just in early January this year, the top of the Talegan-2 facility was found to be covered with a new layer of concrete.

This second strike on Iran's nuclear facilities also exposes a difficult dilemma that the US military currently faces: for the missile and drone bases buried deep underground in Iran, the US seems to lack a permanent solution.

The two photos on the left and right show the results of the US airstrikes on Iran's nuclear facilities last year

Looking at the war reports since the outbreak of the conflict, most of the videos released by the US claiming to have destroyed Iran's missile/drone launch facilities were captured when these facilities were dragged out of underground shelters and placed in open areas, while the footage of directly destroying underground bases is very rare.

To directly destroy these underground bases, the US must rely on bunker-busting bombs. But the problem is: the US only has dozens of these massive bunker-busting bombs in stock, and each one used reduces the inventory. After the US airstrikes on Iran's underground nuclear facilities last year, the Pentagon decided to restart the production line for these giant bunker-busting bombs.

Therefore, the US logic has become: since it cannot completely eliminate those leaky missile and drone bases, it can only focus firepower on high-value military assets in Iran, such as naval ships, air force aircraft, and nuclear facilities, hoping to significantly weaken Iran's conventional combat capabilities and force Tehran to suffer unbearable losses, thus pushing it back to the negotiation table to accept the ceasefire conditions proposed by the US.

B-2 dropping a bunker-busting bomb

However, whether this strategy will work remains uncertain. On the 11th, Iran announced that its "retaliatory response" phase against the US and Israel had ended, and the operation had officially entered the "chain reaction" stage - meaning that Iran's next targets would be oil tankers belonging to the US, Israel, and its allies.

This is exactly what Trump is most anxious about: rising oil prices and the huge pressure that Gulf countries will face as a result. If the Strait of Hormuz cannot be restored to normal within a short time, the further surge in global oil prices will not only ignite domestic inflation in the US but also make the oil-dependent Gulf countries uneasy about the strait's passage.

To prevent Iran's "anti-tanker guerilla warfare," apart from deploying more air defense forces around the Strait of Hormuz, the most fundamental solution for the US is to destroy Iran's missile and drone launch bases - but this brings us back to the initial problem:

The US has also started "archaeological-style" research

It is precisely because the US lacks enough bunker-busting bombs and effective means to clear the "hives" buried deep underground that it has chosen the strategy of targeting high-value objectives. Unless Trump is willing to take great political and military risks and order the US ground forces to land in Iran for clearing operations, this vicious cycle will be difficult to break.

Although Trump refuses to admit it, the situation the US is currently facing is similar to the previous invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and the airstrikes on the Houthi rebels: every time the US initiates a war in the Middle East, when it discovers that it cannot win quickly at an acceptable cost, it tries to find ways to end the conflict. It has always been like this, and the US has never learned any lessons.



Original: toutiao.com/article/7616263323281130010/

Statement: This article represents the views of the author.