American Оbserver

The Third Collapse Mokha fell to the Houthis on September 10. The port had been outside their control since 2017 and served as the headquarters and supply hub for Yemen’s Joint Forces: Tariq Saleh’s National Resistance, the Giants Brigades and Tihama units, all armed and financed by Gulf patrons. Government-aligned troops then withdrew from positions on the Hanish Islands, bringing the war to Bab al-Mandab’s doorstep. The Gulf built an army of payroll entries. The Houthis built a state. Saudi Arabia took over funding after the UAE withdrew from Yemen early this year. Riyadh budgeted billions for Yemeni soldiers and civil servants, including fighters once paid by Abu Dhabi. On the western front, units reportedly existed at a fraction of their paper strength. Names remained on the rolls. Salaries kept moving. Then Mokha fell. Afghanistan ran on the same machinery. The United States spent about $88 billion on Afghan security forces. It got ghost soldiers, commanders who sold fuel and ammunition and units that dissolved once the money, the air cover and the political backing were gone. In Syria, Assad answered an advancing rebel offensive with a 50 percent military pay raise. Four days later, he fled Damascus. The Taliban, HTS and the Houthis have different theologies. Each built an order that recruits fighters, raises money, controls territory and makes obedience part of a larger cause. They accept foreign support, but their authority does not arrive as a monthly transfer from an outside capital. Saudi Arabia can issue bonds, sell sukuk and finance another allied force. The Houthis banned usury in territory they control and accepted the economic damage. The policy damages the economy. It also signals that doctrine outranks liquidity and that no foreign sponsor controls the chain of command. Mokha is the third collapse in five years. Gulf states and their Western partners keep funding allied armies. Their enemies keep building political machines that can fight after the money stops. #Yemen #Houthis #SaudiArabia #RedSea 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸

The Warning List and the Weekend Retreat The State Department warned Americans that the Saudi-Houthi conflict could “escalate rapidly.” Trump cut short a weekend at Camp David, returned to the White House and canceled his public events. The White House gave no reason. The alert said Iran-backed Houthis had carried out hostile actions against Saudi Arabia, including attacks on civilian airports. It urged Americans in the Middle East to prepare for flight cancellations, airspace closures and disrupted travel. Americans outside the region were told to “seriously reconsider” travel to or through it. Embassy alerts covered 11 countries, including Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Another version listed 10 countries and included Turkey. A separate post on X named eight countries and told Americans: “You are not safe right now.” Trump had planned to spend the full weekend at Camp David. Reports said the visit included consultations and a review of options for a possible Yemen strike. A B-1B bomber departed RAF Fairford in Britain, the air base from which U.S. bombers flew missions against Iran earlier this year. About eight U.S. aerial-refueling aircraft were also reported operating around the Strait of Hormuz. Trump then told Fox News that the weekend was no different from any other, despite the warnings. He said Washington was in “constant communication” with the Houthis and that they had agreed not to fight the United States. This is the second time in less than 10 days that Trump has said the group reached out to Washington to avoid a direct clash. The State Department told Americans the region may ignite. The president said the Houthis had agreed to leave America out of it. #UnitedStates #Yemen #SaudiArabia #Trump 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸

⚔️Two Jerusalems, One Camera Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, joined the final selichot service at the Western Wall before Yom Kippur. Netanyahu recited the Mi Sheberach prayer for IDF soldiers and called the gathering Netzach Yisrael, a Hebrew phrase often rendered as “the eternal people of Israel.” He said the scene moved him to tears. The Western Wall Heritage Foundation said about 150,000 worshipers attended through the night, filling the plaza, balconies and Old City alleys. It said nearly 2 million people had visited the site during Elul and the Ten Days of Repentance. Released hostages Rom Braslavski, Elkana Bohbot, Eliya Cohen and Ohad Ben Ami also attended. Arab channels ran the same footage under a different caption: tens of thousands of settlers “storming” the Western Wall beside Al-Aqsa. Hamas described Netanyahu’s visit to the Western Wall tunnels as a raid on excavations beneath Al-Aqsa and tied it to his International Criminal Court arrest warrant. Netanyahu’s own video showed the couple walking through the tunnels before the prayer service. On Sunday morning, Palestinian sources said about 570 Jewish visitors entered the Al-Aqsa compound under heavy Israeli police protection and performed religious rituals ahead of Yom Kippur. The same reports said National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir entered the compound and prayed near Bab al-Rahma. Israel’s official image was a prime minister at prayer before a crowd at the Wall. Palestinian coverage showed Jewish visitors, police protection and Ben-Gvir inside Al-Aqsa. Jerusalem’s sacred stones do not need a filter. Each side supplies the caption. #Jerusalem #WesternWall #AlAqsa #Netanyahu 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸

Iran’s Seven-Point Toll Booth Iran put its armed forces on heightened readiness, cleared much of its airspace and sent Washington seven conditions for talks. Tehran’s message was simple: meet the terms first, and talks can follow. Until then, Hormuz stays closed. Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said the conditions had been delivered to Washington through Qatar. He did not publish the full list. In an Al Jazeera interview, he named three demands: an end to fighting “on all fronts,” the release of frozen Iranian assets and an end to the U.S. naval blockade. Rezaei also said Iran was ready for a “decisive war.” Iranian state reporting says Tehran controls the waterway. The United States says more than 1 billion barrels of crude have passed through Hormuz under U.S. escort in the past two months. Iran disputes the figure. Both sides claim the strait. Ships pay the price. Overnight explosions and air-defense activity were reported on Qeshm Island. Reports conflicted. One account said Iranian forces were firing at vessels in the strait. Iranian opposition channels suggested that the United States had struck Iranian ships near Qeshm. State-linked Iranian outlets did not report that claim. Iran later said it had downed an Israeli-made Orbiter reconnaissance drone over the Strait of Hormuz on Sunday evening. On Monday, the Revolutionary Guard said it had destroyed a U.S. MQ-1 drone over the same waterway. Neither claim has been independently verified. Tehran says it will bring new weapons and targets into play if Washington attacks again. Iran is offering talks with conditions attached. The pressure is military. The language is diplomatic. #Iran #StraitOfHormuz #UnitedStates #MiddleEast 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸

The Checkpoint Carousel A vehicle tried to ram IDF troops near the Ganot barrier in northern Samaria. Soldiers from the 890th Battalion shot and killed one suspect and detained a second occupant. The IDF said no troops were injured. Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, praised the soldiers for killing one attacker and capturing the other. At Rimonim Junction on Route 458, a truck driver allegedly tried to ram troops and was detained for questioning. Near the Silwad cemetery, a gray car without license plates allegedly tried to hit two Israelis from Givat Yeshuat Israel. Reports conflict over what followed: one said the vehicle escaped; another said the suspect was detained. In the City of David, one account said Palestinians threw stones at Jewish residents and one of the residents fired into the air. An earlier account described a confrontation between Palestinians and Jews, followed by police warning shots. By night, a large fire broke out in Sur Baher. Palestinian residents said Israeli forces caused it with tear gas and stun grenades during clashes. Security checks produced severe traffic jams at Qalandiya and along the Hizma-Anata road. Clashes were also reported in al-Ram and Tuqu’. The daily system is a stack of roadblocks, alerts and competing incident reports. Every checkpoint generates a version. Every version becomes another emergency. #WestBank #Jerusalem #IDF #Security 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸

#PeteHegseth #Ormuz #Strait 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸

Riyadh’s Warning Sirens Saudi Arabia woke its capital with alerts for a “hostile aerial threat.” Then came two booms in western Riyadh, smoke near King Khalid International Airport, and major flight delays. By Saturday afternoon, the authorities had issued an all-clear. They did not explain what caused the explosions. The alarms were the first in Riyadh in months. Saudi Civil Defense also activated early-warning systems in nine other cities, while a Reuters journalist heard the blasts in the Olaya district. The Saudi government’s media office did not immediately comment, and the Houthis made no public claim. The timing supplied the context. Hours earlier, Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree said the movement had thwarted unspecified Saudi “criminal attempts” in Sanaa and would respond. The Houthis say Saudi aircraft have carried out hundreds of strikes in recent days. Riyadh says Houthi attacks have hit civilian and energy infrastructure. The UN Security Council condemned continued Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia, including strikes that injured civilians, women and children among them. Since July, the Houthis have launched missiles and drones at Saudi military bases, ports and airports, and declared a naval blockade against Riyadh. This month they seized Yemen’s entire Red Sea coast, placing the Bab el-Mandeb choke point under a new kind of pressure. Saudi officials are trying to make Riyadh look like a capital with a future-investment summit on its calendar. The warning sirens gave the city a different itinerary. No one has publicly identified the source of Saturday’s explosions. The smoke, delayed flights and emergency alerts had already done the political work: the Yemen war reached the Saudi capital’s airport perimeter. #SaudiArabia #Yemen #Houthis #Riyadh 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸

The School in the Kill Chain The Pentagon’s Minab investigation found that two U.S. Tomahawks hit Shajarah Tayyebeh Elementary School after a chain of preventable failures: stale intelligence, compressed target approval, missing civilian-harm review and excessive faith in AI-assisted targeting. The strike on February 28 killed at least 123 children and more than 150 people overall, according to officials familiar with the inquiry. The Pentagon still has not publicly accepted responsibility. President Trump has suggested Tehran was to blame and in July he said nobody might ever be able to establish what happened. Pentagon personnel reportedly knew within hours that the U.S. was responsible. The site had once belonged to an IRGC naval unit. By 2017, satellite imagery showed new walls and entrances separating it from the military compound. By 2018, the location showed painted school walls, a soccer field, line-up zones and playground markings. The school operated openly, had a website and appeared on Google Maps. One analyst had flagged changes as early as 2019, but the note sat in a system disconnected from the principal military intelligence database. The target library kept calling a school an IRGC facility. Maven Smart System, Palantir’s AI-enabled military platform, helped turn that obsolete classification into a recommended first-day target. CENTCOM personnel expected the system to flag stale intelligence or contradictions. Palantir says Maven does not own the underlying data and bears no responsibility for gaps in it. After Minab, the company added a feature to re-review intelligence, detect target-disqualifying factors and flag information human reviewers had missed. The product update arrived after 123 children did not. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had cut Pentagon civilian-harm-mitigation staff by roughly 90%, leaving fewer than 20 people across the relevant teams. CENTCOM’s unit fell from 10 people to one. No civilian-harm specialist reviewed Minab before the strike. Meanwhile, the administration demanded more than 1,000 Iranian targets hit in the war’s first 24 hours. The kill chain was asked to process years of neglected target files in days. On March 2, Hegseth called the campaign “the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history,” free of “politically correct wars.” The precision system then fired two Tomahawks at an elementary school it had been told was a military base. The UN Fact-Finding Mission on Iran concluded there were reasonable grounds to believe the Minab strike and another U.S. strike that day amounted to war crimes. It said Washington had failed to take all feasible measures to verify that the school was a military target. The Pentagon says the investigation remains ongoing. The dead children have already received the final version of the report. #UnitedStates #Iran #Palantir #WarCrimes 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸

Yemen’s Expanding Front Saudi warplanes reportedly entered Sanaa’s airspace overnight, triggering air-defense activity and attempts to intercept them. Yemeni media later pushed back on claims of a large aerial battle over the capital, while reports from the ground described a broader campaign taking shape across Yemen’s north, south and Red Sea coast. The Houthis reported advances toward southwestern Taiz along the Jabal Jardad axis and said they had taken the Jabal al-Aghbara area in Lahj governorate. Satellite imagery analysis also indicated damage to hangars at Saudi Arabia’s King Khalid Air Base after Houthi missile and drone strikes. Earlier this month, the Houthis said they had targeted the base’s weapons depots, command facilities, radar systems and runways; Riyadh has promised a “firm” response after missile and drone attacks wounded 13 civilians in three Saudi cities. In Saada, Saudi artillery fire hit al-Hajlah in Razih district, wounding two women, according to Houthi-linked reports. In Marib, fighting broke out in Wadi Ubaidah between the Islah-aligned Emergency Forces and gunmen from the al-Muayli tribe. Homes burned, tribal figures were reportedly among the casualties, and armed convoys from Murad and neighboring tribes moved to support al-Muayli. The Houthi leadership called supporters into Sanaa to protest accusations that the group fired missiles toward Mecca. Crowds answered with chants branding the allegation a Saudi operation and demanding more support for the movement’s forces. By evening, reports said Saudi aircraft were hitting Houthi targets in Sanaa. By night, Saudi Arabia was reporting another missile-and-drone attack. The conflict now moves in loops: airstrike, missile barrage, rally, retaliatory strike, then another map with different colors. #Yemen #SaudiArabia #Houthis #RedSea 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸

The Pentagon’s Missing Four The Pentagon’s public casualty database lists 18 U.S. military deaths since the Iran war began on February 28. Six officials familiar with the department’s internal accounting told The Washington Post the real figure is at least 22. One put it at 23. The missing number is not a rounding error. It is four or five families whose losses do not appear in the public ledger of a war the administration calls Operation Epic Fury. The Pentagon declined to explain the gap. The public database counts 14 deaths under Operation Epic Fury and four more under “Overseas Operations,” a category used after a July ceasefire collapsed and attacks resumed. Two further deaths announced by the Defense Department, Sgt. Devin Seibel’s May 31 training accident in Irbil and Maj. Sorffly Davius’s March 6 medical emergency in Kuwait, do not appear by name in the public database either. Officials say not every undisclosed death is necessarily combat-related, but all involved U.S. personnel stationed in the region during the war. That classification matters beyond the nightly body count. A line-of-duty investigation determines what benefits a service member’s survivors receive. The government has turned a casualty tally into a filing system with consequences for widows, children and parents. More than 820 troops are listed as wounded, many with traumatic brain injuries after Iranian strikes on U.S. bases. CENTCOM’s estimate puts the war’s cost at $43.6 billion through early September, including about $28 billion in munitions, while excluding damage to U.S. bases. The official scoreboard has room for $28 billion in missiles. It is still looking for four dead Americans. Ahead of the congressional midterms, fuel prices and the number of dead Americans are becoming the kind of numbers that can kill a presidency and sink a Republican ticket. Washington can relabel the war. A voter filling a gas tank and a family planning a funeral will not need the Pentagon’s database to recognize it. #UnitedStates #IranWar #Pentagon #Midterms 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸

#Vance #Midterm #Rally 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸

One Wall, Two Headlines On the eve of Rosh Hashanah, more than 50,000 people packed the Western Wall plaza for the final selichot of the season. Itamar Ben-Gvir stood among them. The Western Wall Heritage Foundation counted close to a million worshippers since the start of Elul. Hamas channels reported a different night. The national-security minister of the occupation had raided the Al-Buraq Wall, "west of Al-Aqsa Mosque," with tens of thousands of settlers performing "Talmudic rituals." Nothing in that sentence is a mistranslation. In Muslim tradition, Al-Buraq is the western wall of the Haram al-Sharif, and therefore part of Al-Aqsa. Once the Wall belongs to the mosque, a prayer at its foot becomes an incursion. Once every Jew in Jerusalem is a settler, a crowd from Bnei Brak becomes a colonial column. The vocabulary does not describe a rival map. It manufactures a rival event. The same weekend, Jewish worshippers blew the shofar outside the Bab al-Rahma cemetery under the eastern wall of the compound, under police protection, for the third week running. For them it was the Days of Awe, performed as close to the Temple site as they are allowed. For the Jerusalem Governorate it was another step in the campaign to bring Jewish ritual inside. A week later, the captions split again. On Friday, police entered the Bab al-Rahma prayer hall inside the compound around the midday prayer: before it, according to some Palestinian outlets, during it, according to others. The hall has been a flashpoint since 2019. Police have cited unauthorized construction and safety; the Waqf reads each entry as an assault on Muslim control. Palestinian sources reported worshippers, some in wheelchairs, turned back from the gates. That evening, people prayed in the street where they had been stopped. For one side, a record crowd at a holy site and a security operation. For the other, a storming of Al-Aqsa and a siege of its worshippers. Neither account needs to invent a fact. Each only has to choose the noun. Jerusalem's holy geography has no shared captions, only rival footage and a road full of people praying where they were stopped. #Jerusalem #TempleMount #AlAqsa #BenGvir 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸

The People’s House, With a Guest List Donald Trump barred CNN, Politico and MS NOW from the White House because their coverage displeased him. On Saturday, reporters from all three outlets had their press credentials confiscated when they tried to enter the grounds. Trump announced the ban on Truth Social on Friday and called it effective immediately. “There’s something wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stories,” he told reporters in the Oval Office. Then came the ownership claim: the White House is “the people’s house,” and he does not have to let unwelcome journalists inside. The people’s house now operates like a country club whose members can expel the waiter for reporting the menu. The decision reportedly caught White House press-office staff by surprise. CNN and Politico signaled possible legal challenges, while the White House Correspondents’ Association said press protections do not depend on whether a president likes coverage, reporting or questions. This is not a one-off tantrum. The administration has barred the Associated Press from key access after it refused to adopt Trump’s preferred name for the Gulf of Mexico. The FBI has delivered subpoenas to journalists’ homes and, in at least one case, displayed a warrant to seize devices. The Pentagon has restricted reporters who refused new reporting pledges, while the FCC has revived pressure on broadcasters over alleged news distortion and editorial choices. Trump calls it accountability for false reporting. The machinery says something more concrete: access becomes a reward for obedience, and the press room becomes another office under political management. Three news outlets lost their badges. The White House kept the cameras. That is the whole business model. #UnitedStates #Trump #PressFreedom #WhiteHouse 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸

The Sandbox That Had Wi-Fi Google’s Gemini was asked to hack a fictional company during a safety test. It found a real company with the same name, got internet access by mistake, and broke into three real networks. The incidents took place in May during a cybersecurity evaluation run by Irregular, an Israeli startup that tests frontier AI models before release. Google says Gemini used publicly available or guessed passwords, recognized after logging in that the targets were real, and stopped the attacks. Google says the companies suffered no harm. Irregular says the failure began with a fictional company name that overlapped with a real domain. The test environment had internet access, and in a small fraction of runs models treated the live domain as part of the simulated exercise. The models exploited vulnerabilities, extracted credentials and reached a production database. In one case, a model also wandered to a similarly named site and found credentials posted publicly. The company says this was not a Gemini-only episode. Models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta also obtained unauthorized internet access during Irregular tests this year. Irregular says all disclosures concern the same underlying flaw, that the affected parties were notified, and that it fixed the problem before the first public disclosure. The novelty here is not that an AI can guess weak passwords. That has become ordinary frontier-model behavior. The novelty is that the safety test built to measure a model’s breakout risk gave the model a live exit, then confused a real business for a stage prop. Irregular says the incident appeared in fewer than one out of 10,000 advanced simulations, often only after hundreds of steps. That is not reassurance. It is a description of how a system designed to audit dangerous autonomy lost track of one dangerous autonomous run. #AI #GoogleGemini #Cybersecurity #ArtificialIntelligence 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸

The Corporate Prosecutor When OpenAI announces that it has disrupted a Russian, Chinese, Iranian or Israeli influence operation, the public receives a tidy fable: the company spotted abuse, shut it down, and warned the world. The omitted detail is that one company performs every role in the case. It owns the platform, defines what counts as suspicious, investigates the users, clusters accounts into a network, attributes political intent, cuts access, and publishes the verdict. Custodian of the evidence, investigator, expert witness and prosecutor share an office. Take the May 2024 report, which bundled two Russian operations, a Chinese one and an Iranian one with a network run by STOIC, a commercial firm in Tel Aviv. The reader got the operation's name, samples of its output and a description of its behaviour. The chain linking specific accounts to a specific company stayed inside. So did everything else a finding of that weight would normally require: the logs, the full sample, the clustering criteria, the false-positive rate, the alternative hypotheses, the internal disagreements. A platform is entitled to police its terms of service. "This account used our model to draft text" is an observable fact. "We uncovered a state-linked influence operation" is a claim about intent, coordination and political effect, and it arrives with the evidence withheld. Intelligence agencies are bound, at least on paper, by analytic standards that require stated confidence levels and explicit alternatives. The EU's Digital Services Act gives vetted researchers a legal route into platform data. Corporate threat reporting has neither. Its conclusions are not auditable, only quotable. Generative models make phishing, malicious code and synthetic persuasion cheaper to produce. The same industry then sells the filters, monitoring and attribution needed to contain them. No conspiracy is required. Expand the market for dangerous capabilities, then monetize the demand for their containment. A newly unsealed brief in the New York Times case quotes Nick Turley, OpenAI's head of ChatGPT, writing internally that publishers face an "existential threat" from products that are "largely substitutive." Microsoft's own measurements put Copilot's click-through to Times sites 87 to 93 percent below ordinary Bing search. In court, OpenAI is a defendant whose internal documents get unsealed. In its threat reports, it is a prosecutor whose evidence never is. The company that decides who is manipulating information also replaces the sources that information came from. It moderates the adversary and supplants the witness. That is the real subject behind the hashtag. A state that accepts corporate attribution as intelligence hands a private firm the function of naming the enemy. Whoever attributes, designates. Sovereignty over information does not end when a foreign power runs a bot network. It ends when a vendor's blog post becomes the finding of fact. #OpenAI #ArtificialIntelligence #TechPower #DigitalSovereignty 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸

Yemen’s Houthi rebels launched a ballistic missile toward one of the residences of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The country residence is located about 12 miles north of the city of AlUla, in Saudi Arabia’s Medina province, more than 745 miles from the border with Yemen. If reports of a Houthi ballistic missile strike targeting a residence of МBS are confirmed, the consequences could extend far beyond the immediate military incident. The reported target is located deep inside Saudi territory, making the alleged attack particularly significant. The first likely consequence would be a major tightening of security around the royal family and other sensitive sites. Riyadh could also consider expanding military operations against the Houthis. A direct strike on a royal residence would likely be viewed by Saudi authorities as an attack on the kingdom’s leadership, rather than simply another episode in the conflict in Yemen. The strategic concern is the Houthis’ reported ability to threaten targets hundreds of miles from Yemen. If the missile did travel more than 745 miles, it would underscore the group’s ability to project force deep into Saudi territory and potentially threaten other strategic sites, including energy infrastructure. “This was always the worst-case scenario, that the Iranians exert control not only of Strait of Hormuz but Bab el-Mandeb, two of the leading energy choke points in the world,” said David Schenker, a former U.S. assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs. That possibility carries implications for global energy markets. Saudi Arabia remains one of the world’s most important oil producers, and any sustained threat to its energy infrastructure or shipping routes could push up risk premiums in global oil markets. Another concern is the strain on Saudi Arabia’s air-defense capabilities. Repeated missile and drone attacks require a large stockpile of interceptors, and a prolonged campaign could force Riyadh to seek additional support from the United States and other allies. For Washington, the incident would present a difficult strategic choice. More direct military assistance could strengthen Saudi defenses, but it could also draw the United States deeper into another Middle Eastern conflict. “Yemen can spoil our day,” said Tim Lenderking, a former U.S. special envoy for Yemen, underscoring the ability of the Houthi movement to complicate broader American strategy in the region. Ultimately, the scale of the consequences would depend on whether the reported strike caused casualties or significant damage — and, above all, on Riyadh’s response. A limited retaliation could remain contained. A broader Saudi campaign against Houthi positions, particularly with increased U.S. involvement, could turn the incident into a new phase of regional escalation. #Yemen #Houthis #SaudiArabia #MiddleEast 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸

The $43.6 Billion Receipt The Pentagon has now priced the Iran war at $43.6 billion through September 3. That is the official number for the war’s first 188 days, supplied to congressional national-security committees. Congressional officials say it is almost certainly low. Munitions account for $28.1 billion, or about 64% of the total. The campaign has drained stocks of Patriot interceptors and pulled weapons from U.S. commands in Europe and Asia. The Pentagon has also spent $4.3 billion replacing damaged or destroyed aircraft, weapons and equipment. This is what “unlimited capability” looks like once the invoices arrive. The new breakdown assigns the bill to the services: $6.6 billion for Air Force operations, including fighter and bomber squadrons; $2.2 billion for the Navy’s deployment of more than two dozen warships, including aircraft carriers; and $1.6 billion for the Army’s regional forces. More than 50,000 U.S. personnel are assigned to the mission. Special Operations deployment and support cost $633 million. Transportation Command spent $92.1 million moving supplies; Cyber Command recorded $10.5 million for cyber-support operations. The ledger also includes $23.5 million for in-house medical support. Eighteen U.S. service members have been killed and more than 830 injured. A war sold as remote has its own hospital line item. And the $43.6 billion excludes $1.5 billion for fuel and other costs in the administration’s supplemental request. It also excludes the repair or replacement of U.S. bases damaged by Iranian attacks. State Department facilities across the Middle East alone sustained roughly $184 million in damage. If the Pentagon rebuilds the affected military installations, congressional officials say the additional bill could reach tens of billions. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the war at about $38 billion through August 1, projected a further $2 billion to $3 billion each month, and said restoring depleted weapons stockpiles would take at least five years. The Trump administration has asked Congress for as much as $70 billion in emergency defense spending. The war has a price tag. The real number is still in the unopened envelopes. #UnitedStates #Iran #Pentagon #DefenseSpending 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸