Jon Elmer with The Resistance Report on Day 1,049

Jon Elmer: All right. You are watching and listening to the Electronic Intifada. I am Jon Elmer. This is The Resistance Report on Day 1,049 of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Day 174 of the U.S.-Israeli War with Iran. The 60-day memorandum of understanding cease-fire framework deadline passed just the other day so that 60 days has passed.

There has been a pause in large-scale fighting in the month of August, but that follows on July, which saw a significant exchange of fire, the most that we had seen since the early-June memorandum was signed. 

So this war of choice started by the U.S. and Israel has no end in sight. They’re losing the war they started.

And that’s something that is even starting to penetrate into the corporate press in the United States, which will take a quick look at some of that reporting won’t dwell too long on it. 

We’ll also be covering Iran’s hollowing out of the United States Air Force’s MQ-9 Reaper drone fleet, the workhorse of the U.S. Air Force’s hunter-killer drones.

But we’re going to start, as always, in Strait of Hormuz, the key chokepoint into the Persian Gulf, from which 20% of the world’s oil, before the war, flowed. 

So just to give you that sense, Iran has stated clearly that the Strait of Hormuz will never go back to the pre-war status, and it will not be open unless the U.S. adheres to the memorandum of understanding, including to stop threatening in any language whatsoever the genocidal threats of Trump, ‘erasing a civilization.’

She said the other day that they were going to carry out the largest attack since WWII. He said that just a couple of days or maybe the day after the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bombs by the U.S. and Japan. 

So that kind of language is clearly stated in the memorandum of understanding, not to be continued, but also the ending of the war on all the fronts on Iran and its allies, Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen, and Iraq; the lifting of the naval blockade and withdrawing of its naval force, U.S. naval forces and Air Force from the vicinity of Iran; the paying of reparations for the two aggressive and imposed wars on Iran.

Lifting the unjust and illegal sanctions imposed on the Iranian people and releasing unconditionally the frozen stolen assets of the Iranian people. This is all clearly stated out in the memorandum of understanding.

But let’s take a look at the U.S. bases in the region, the 17 core bases in the region. The United States is going to have to grapple with the future in the Middle East of this security architecture, because repairing these bases is something that under the current situation, of no end in sight of this war, is not something that can happen without a comprehensive settlement of the Iran-U.S. war.

But also you can see each of those countries: Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE—particularly Qatar, Bahrain and the UAE. They claim they were not consulted on this war in the first place, this war of choice by Netanyahu and Trump. 

And they continue to appeal to Trump to not return to war because as Iran promised before the war started, it would be a regional war.

And all of these countries hosting U.S. bases would be the targets of attacks. And should the U.S. attacks expand, the targeting inside those countries would expand as well. 

So the IRGC said that all 17 of these bases were targeted during the July exchange of fire. Just making it clear from Iran’s point of view that this will always be a regional war and it will always be escalating from the previous point.

We’re not going back to square one on this war. Strategically, Iran understands that the Strait of Hormuz is under their control and there’s absolutely nothing that the United States can do about it except send out idiotic tweets and AI videos on their official White House accounts, none of which we will show you here, because you are all above that.

Those U.S. bases are in constant threat from Iranian ballistic missiles and the degradation of the radar apparatuses of the United States throughout the region have been destroyed by Iranian attacks and leaves them more vulnerable today than at any point in the war.

And that is the case going forward with each step of this war. The right-wing American Enterprise Institute released a report just the other day that they estimated that the cost to rebuild the bases in the Middle East would be more than $5 billion, which I will say is a wildly conservative undercount considering the loss of the facilities.

Maybe they’re just talking facilities and not the billion-dollar radars, hundreds of millions of dollars, radars that need to be replaced as well. But you can see that this war has pressed the U.S. security architecture into the Middle East into a point where pulling up stakes and leaving the region is not a pipe dream.

It is probably an economically prudent thing for the United States to do. It’s obvious that all of these countries don’t feel protected by the U.S. security architecture. And should this war escalate into targeting wholesale, like Trump promised infrastructure and industry, that these Gulf states don’t stand a chance in that war.

And of course, how close those countries are to the shores of Iran, giving Iran all the tools at its disposal to fight.

Ships are being targeted if they go on that pretty dangerous Omani route through shallow water. Normally 20 million barrels a day are passing through the Strait of Hormuz, 20% of the world’s oil, and industry analysts expected a shock, right?

We thought $150 plus for barrels of oil, that the price would skyrocket, that there would be a global recession that the World Bank said was going to happen, Trump said it was going to happen, too. 

He didn’t want to be Herbert Hoover, he said, who was the president going into the Depression.

There’s a couple reasons why this has been delayed but not prevented in any way. It’s simply been kicked down the road. And that is because of the massive drawdown of strategic reserves in the United States and in Japan as well.

But the key to this all has been China, who cut their imports by 50% in the period that we’re talking about of this Iran War. So from early 2026, and that’s roughly 5% of the global demand. And China was able to do this through massive energy stockpiling that has happened over the past 12 months. And their strategic reserves are more than 1 billion barrels.

But again, these are ways to pause, to postpone, to push down the line, the problems that are simply not sustainable. This war cannot go on indefinitely without a significant global impact. Oman and Iran are in negotiations about the transit scheme through the Strait of Hormuz, but Iran has said that those negotiations do not equal the opening of the Strait of Hormuz.

All of the previous things that the U.S. has to do, demands on the U.S. that they agreed to have to be upheld before the Strait of Hormuz will see normal traffic.

Previous to the war, 140 ships crossed through the Strait of Hormuz. The United States does not have the resources in any way to continue to press this blockade, militarily.

And that’s why we have seen over the past few days, the talk from the White House is about an economic war on Iran. So something Iran has already experienced for the last 45 years or so. But yeah, they are more than ready for economic warfare. And the fact is that when the U.S. is moving to that, they’re admitting defeat on the military front. Diesel prices this week went over $100 a barrel. 

The American Automotive Association said that gas is up 30%, diesel is up 50%, jet fuel is up 70%. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, said that a typical household in the United States has already paid $1,000 because of this war, most of that in gasoline prices.

The rest of the knock-on effects will come later, to that. And he described that as the absolute floor of the cost to each family. So the cost of military failure is passed on to the American public. It’s also passed on to American soldiers and sailors. The sailors aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln have been trying to jump overboard amid their extended deployment.

They have been at sea for more than 200 without a port call. Trump mocked that and said they should be at sea for longer, and the reason why they are at sea is because the Iranians have prevented traffic from the U.S. into the Gulf, which is where they would fill up and restock their ships.

So they’re blocked from that, through the Iranian blockade, through the Iranian military capacity to block the strait. The United States knows that. And that’s why there was only one instance of sneaking ships through, to try to rescue one of the ships that was inside there.

But they’re not doing anything like this to get ships through the strait. And they were fired on repeatedly as they did that. And they’re not going to be, I don’t think, doing those trips much, if at all.

So the reason why these carriers are in such dire conditions is because they’re constantly being fired on. They can’t go on to shore because they’re blocked from their resupply bases, their multibillion dollar resupply bases like the one in Bahrain, the naval support base in Bahrain.

So the 5,000 sailors and Marines that are on the USS Abraham Lincoln have been sending messages to their families. And the Centcom Central Command, the U.S. military command responsible for the Middle East, has confirmed that one sailor went overboard and was saved.

This is from Navy Times. But in a separate incident aboard the Lincoln, a sailor on watch saw a shipmate preparing to go overboard, and he intervened. According to the sailor’s wife, her husband called out to the sailor before reaching the individual and grabbing their arms and pulling them back onto the deck. Her husband told her the sailor had not yet gone over the side.

When he got there, other sailors heard the commotion and came running. And to this all, Trump has said that 266 straight days at sea because you’re cut off from your supply lines by military failure, is not long enough out at sea. So literally throwing troops under the bus, throwing them overboard in this case.

So these are just stories that have penetrated into the corporate media, into the military media, about the situation of this war now 175 days on, because, they also don’t have any missiles. 

It’s a now-known fact that the U.S. has used virtually all of its long-range precision missiles during this war. So that’s tactical ballistic missiles that it’s firing from all of the countries in the region who are asking them not to fire from there because it brings attacks on them.

In any case, this doesn’t seem to be much of a problem anymore because their $1 million missiles are virtually out of stock. And Reuters said that there was a framework deal between Raytheon, the parent company of the Tomahawk cruise missile, to boost to 1,000 units a year from their current rate of 60 per year.

So 60 per year since this war started in 2023, they’ve made 120 Tomahawk cruise missiles and fired those off within hours of the first day of the war. So not looking good on the weapons front.

The Washington Post remarked on an empty arsenal in the first month of the war, the U.S. fired off more than 850 Tomahawk cruise missiles and more than 1,000 Patriot and THAD interceptors. 

The U.S. used more than 1,300 of the Army’s tactical ballistic missiles in the initial weeks of fighting. And as I reported, as of last week, the global inventory of Patriot missiles has fallen from 2,200 before the war to 827, while the THAD missiles have gone from 452 to 278.

So this 50 days of war, plus a little bit of tit-for-tat during the MOU, means that the United States cannot even fight another 50-day war because they’re well below half on all of these munitions. 

The U.S. missile defense agency’s maximum production rate is 96 interceptors per year, but they didn’t deliver that in the last year and a half.

But the Pentagon is seeking now 857 of them in the next year’s defense budget, and almost 2,600 over the next five years. According to the U.S. Missile Defense Agency’s maximum production rate, it would require approximately 27 years to fulfill those requests.

So this is not something that is being fixed soon. It’s not something that’s being fixed in Trump’s presidency. This is a long-term issue. It’s a three- to five-year production line for all of these missiles. Effectively, they’re handmade, these missiles. These are not on massive, mechanical lines like a truck factory.

These are very precise engineering feats and they use extremely expensive rare earth minerals and all kinds of electronics. They need skilled workers that the United States currently doesn’t have, and an industrial base that has been really hollowed out in the United States.

So these are real significant issues of fighting capacity for the United States and the fact that this is out in the media, you know, these numbers are conservative.

So it’s a worse situation than what this indicates, but let’s take a look at the drones, because this story came out this week from the Washington Post, which cited a Air Force officer saying that the Iranians had knocked out at least 45 of the United States Reaper drone arsenal, which comes out to more than 25%.

Again, these are conservative numbers on something that is an absolute because the MQ-9 Reaper production line has been halted and it has been halted for more than two years. They’re not making these drones anymore. Every loss is an absolute loss.

And it’s even unclear if this 45 tally—which quickly became 46, because the Iranians shot another one down the other day—if that tally includes the seven Reaper drones that Iran shot down in July. 

We watched many of those on this program crashed to the ground. So you can see where this math is going and it’s not going in the direction for the United States. The Air Force said unprecedented levels of destruction of their fleet is proof of how useful that fleet is.

But in actual fact, these drones were built for uncontested skies, while Yemen and Iran are very much contested. and these lumbering aircraft that have massive radar signatures, the radar bounces around between the vehicle and the weapons pylons, that are shiny metal, hanging off the wings.

They’re just very easy to shoot down, particularly with a 358 missile that Iran and the Yemenis have both used. The Yemenis themselves have taken down twenty five Reaper drones. So you add that to the at least 45, and the U.S. is admitting 70 of their drones. 

Going into this war before 2023, the maximum number of MQ-9 drones that the U.S. had was 200. The Senate Armed Services Committee, an Air Force officer said that they have 135 left right now. And like I said, the production line ended two years ago, which means that they’re not replacing these.

They’re actually still at the brainstorming stage in the Pentagon of what kind of drone is going to replace the Reaper for its hunter / killer capacities. This is both the surveillance drone, but as we know well in Afghanistan and Iraq, there also are drones that carry out airstrikes.

And it is their primary workhorse for that. So before even before the Iran war, the Yemenis had knocked out more than 10% of the drone fleet just in the battle of the Red Sea that started in October 2023 in solidarity with Gaza and the IDF. For their part, they admitted early in the war that, ‘dozens of comparable drones were shot down by Iran.’

They won’t say the actual number, and we know that several more were shot down by Hezbollah air defenses that have destroyed Elbit Hermes and Heron drones in the air. 

Again, all things that you have watched on the resistance report. If you take the numbers that I just read to you of the losses, the U.S. is operating at less than 50% of their drone capacity.

And if these numbers are conservative, then it’s an even worse situation. And this is again, to reiterate, this is fighting for basically 50 days and then some sporadic fighting during the memorandum of understanding.

This absolutely cannot be sustained if you simply say that the war is going to continue for 60 more days, you would have emptied out the entire Reaper fleet.

So this is a real issue for the United States. It’s a real issue for their force posture. And it’s an issue that is going to certainly mean that they lose this war with Iran, which has been known, I think, for a long time. 

We have verification from the early stages of the war of at least a dozen of these high profile and very expensive, some of them very expensive, the FPS-132 early warning radar that was destroyed in Kuwait, a $1 billion radar. 

There was two THAD radars that were destroyed. These are $800 million radars. One was located at Muwaffaq Salti in Jordan, that we broke down on this show as well. 

And also at least a dozen tactical theater radars as well, so we’re talking now in dozens of these having been knocked out. 

This has been The Resistance Report on day 1,049 of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.

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