Bigger Than Epic Fury

Bigger Than Epic Fury

The President has named his measuring stick. The option on his desk, he told Axios, is “a massive attack. Bigger than ever before.” Bigger, that is, than the campaign that opened this war by striking 1,700 targets in 72 hours. Two officials say no order has been given. But the staging tells its own story: bombers tracked out of Fairford, fighters forward from Lakenheath, fifty thousand Americans in theater, and 150 trauma medics surged to the hospital that receives the wounded. You do not stage trauma teams for a bluff.

Good afternoon. The 13th consecutive night of strikes concluded at 9 PM ET yesterday. The American ceasefire proposal, reportedly 15 points, died in Tehran hours earlier, rejected because it left the question of Hormuz control unresolved. And Secretary Rubio compressed the American position into five words: the President’s approach is “a head for an eye.”

This edition does what the Forum does: reads capabilities, not rhetoric. The surge reporting, the strike releases, the tanker tracks, and the trackers watching a B-1’s transponder over the Atlantic all point the same direction.

And because Gregg asked the archives a question this week, the Special Feature answers it: the Forum’s paper trail on ending containment, written before the policy had a name, and what the coercion scholarship says about campaigns that break capability instead of punishing populations. Read the board.

Gregg Roman · July 24, 2026

In this brief:

• The measuring stick: what “bigger than Epic Fury” actually means
• The staging: bombers, medics, and fifty thousand Americans in theater
• The mechanical work: night 13, the bridges, and the nuclear file
• Special Feature: the paper trail, from the Forum’s archives to the coercion scholarship
• The region under fire: Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the sea lanes

What “bigger than Epic Fury” actually means.

The President put his yardstick on the record in Thursday’s Axios interview: “I am considering a massive attack. Bigger than ever before. I am close to making a decision. We are all set for it.” Israel, he said, “would join in two minutes if I ask them to,” though “we don’t need anybody,” and Israeli participation would carry “consequences” (Axios, The Hill). Two US officials say no final decision has been made and no new orders issued.

“Bigger than ever before” has a specific referent. Operation Epic Fury opened this war on February 28 under the President’s direct order, striking 1,700 targets in its first 72 hours and more than 10,000 by late March, including command and control centers, missile production, and the Iranian navy (Fox News, CRS). Secretary Hegseth’s mission statement was “laser-focused: Destroy Iranian offensive missiles, destroy Iranian missile production, destroy their navy and other security infrastructure,” with the coda that Iran “will never have nuclear weapons” (War Dept). The President’s own February 28 formulation: “We’re going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground... We’re going to annihilate their navy” (PBS).

The current CENTCOM commander’s assessment of what that bought, delivered to Congress in May: “In OEF, we set back Iran’s conventional military for years” (Adm. Brad Cooper, posture statement). The question on the President’s desk is whether to spend that dividend on a second, larger installment.

His week of declarations priced the options in public, one post at a time. Wednesday, the red line: “From this point forward, any time the Islamic Republic of Iran shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, whether it be by Missile, Rocket, Drone, or any other device or weapon, the United States will bomb and destroy ONE BRIDGE OR POWER PLANT, including those located next to, or in, the Capital City of Tehran” (AP via PBS). Thursday, after the Houthi tanker attack, the proxy clause: “major military punishment will be inflicted upon Iran and, of course, the Houthis, themselves” (CNBC). And Thursday evening, the invoice: “Any and all damages done to Ships, Cargo, or anything related thereto, will be paid for by Iranian Money that the United States has in its possession, and controls... These damages may be very substantial but, nevertheless, this is the fair and equitable thing to do” (Sky News). Tehran holds roughly $100 billion in frozen assets abroad.

The diplomacy died on schedule. Iran on Thursday rejected the reportedly 15-point US ceasefire proposal carried to Tehran by Iraqi Prime Minister al-Zaidi, with Iranian officials saying they would not accept a temporary deal that left the question of control over the Strait of Hormuz unresolved (TIME). Foreign Minister Araghchi answered the asset post Friday morning: seizing funds “to pay for unrelated future claims is an incendiary precedent... Ensuing chaos will not be pretty or peaceful.” Secretary Rubio compressed the American position into five words: the President’s approach is “a head for an eye” (CNBC).

The Reciprocity Standard requires the next blow to be priced and visible before it lands, and this week the President published the entire price list: a bridge or power plant per ship, punishment for proxies, damages paid from frozen funds. That is coercion conducted in public, and its credibility now rests on one question, whether “bigger than Epic Fury” is an option or an inevitability. Note what Tehran rejected: not the ceasefire, but any version of it that surrenders the Hormuz card. The regime has told you what it values; the Hormuz Mandate says take them at their word and price the card out of their hands.

Bombers, medics, and fifty thousand Americans in theater.

The Wall Street Journal’s surge reporting reads like a mobilization order in the passive voice: “In the past week, special-operations forces have deployed to the region from their U.S. bases, according to flight-tracking data and U.S. officials. Squadrons of jet fighters have been staged across the Middle East, and bomber aircraft at bases in the U.S. and U.K. are on high alert to ramp up operations” (WSJ). CBS has reported hundreds of special operations forces in the region since spring, Navy SEALs and Army Rangers among them. The fighters are coming forward from Europe, F-16s from Spangdahlem in Germany and F-35s from the 48th Fighter Wing at RAF Lakenheath (Air & Space Forces Magazine).

The bomber file got granular. Axios revealed the war’s first B-1 mission since fighting resumed, flown Tuesday against IRGC targets from a British airbase (Axios). The trackers filled in the rest: OSINT monitors logged B-1B 86-0108, callsign HEINZ23, departing RAF Fairford for the mission with a second Lancer as air spare, though the same trackers report HEINZ23 later declared an in-flight emergency after refueling and returned to Fairford, and CENTCOM has not said which airframe delivered the strike (itamilradar, The War Zone). What the platform brings is not in dispute: 75,000 pounds of ordnance per aircraft, up to 24 two-thousand-pound JDAMs or 24 JASSM standoff missiles (USAF fact sheet).

Tehran noticed. The IRGC declared Fairford a “legitimate target” and branded Britain an “accomplice”; London says it is ready to defend itself, and two EA-37B Compass Call electronic-attack jets landed at Fairford Thursday morning (CNBC, The War Zone). NATO’s rear is thickening too: Bulgaria cleared up to eight KC-135 tankers and 250 US personnel into Bezmer air base from today through October 1, and Washington is preparing to send dozens of additional refueling tankers to Israel, reversing a drawdown that had ordered more than a dozen tankers off Ben Gurion’s ramps (Israel Hayom/Axios, The War Zone).

Then there is the indicator that does not posture. More than 150 additional medics have arrived at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, the receiving hospital for America’s wounded, and preparations are underway to take more patients at Walter Reed (WSJ via i24, CBS via Iran International). Nearly a dozen seriously wounded troops were flown to Landstuhl this month; roughly 550 Americans have been wounded in this war, and 18 killed. The four most recent came home through Dover on Wednesday: three killed in Iranian ballistic-missile strikes on Muwaffaq Salti in Jordan, one of which hit troop housing, one killed at Erbil during the controlled disposal of a downed Iranian drone (WSJ, Military Times).

CENTCOM put the theater total on the record in last night’s strike release: more than 50,000 US service members are currently operating across the Middle East. Former CENTCOM commander Joseph Votel’s caution, offered to the Journal, is that the buildup buys the President flexibility rather than signaling that a major operation is certain. Both readings fit the same facts. That is the point of staging.

Read the surge the way the Forum reads everything, capabilities first. Fighters can be theater management and bombers can be signaling, but trauma surgeons are neither: the 150 medics at Landstuhl are the one deployment in this package that only makes sense if someone is planning for the price of a bigger war. The honest caveat cuts the other way too. Votel is right that staging is optionality, not decision, and a President who spent the week publishing price lists is plainly still in the coercion phase. The Reciprocity Standard’s message to Tehran is precise: the capability argument is over, and the only question left is the order.

Night 13, the bridges, and the nuclear file.

The metronome did not miss. CENTCOM completed the 13th consecutive night at 9 PM ET Thursday, targeting “Iranian military command centers, drone storage facilities, communication networks, coastal surveillance sites, and maritime capabilities to further diminish the threat Iran poses to civilian mariners and commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz.” The release adds a claim and a number: “The international waterway remains open for transit,” and more than 50,000 US service members are operating across the Middle East (CENTCOM, Reuters). Iranian officials say four people were killed near Ahvaz (per IRNA via NBC).

Open and used are different words. Lloyd’s List Intelligence counted 53 Hormuz transits in the week to July 20 against 157 the week before, a 66 percent drop, with only eight vessels entering the Gulf all week, roughly 70 percent of remaining tanker transits running dark, and total traffic down about 90 percent year on year; Kpler logged as few as eight transits in a single day last week (USNI News, CNBC). Both facts are true at once: the US Navy keeps the water open, and Iran’s threat keeps most of the world’s tankers out of it.

The campaign’s inner logic is logistics. The Journal reported the US striking bridges around Bandar Abbas on July 16 in a deliberate bid to choke the regime’s supply routes (WSJ); Iran International counts bridges, a road tunnel, and rail links severed across Hormozgan, six bridges in Khamir county alone (Iran International). The counting has to be done honestly: the famous single-night totals, more than 80 targets and more than 60 IRGC small boats struck “in and near the strait to degrade Iran’s ability to continue attacking international commerce,” date to July 7, and the cumulative campaign since July 8 runs past 300 strikes (CENTCOM via Washington Examiner, The National).

The nuclear file sharpened on both ends. Tehran says the US struck the Darkhovin nuclear plant site in Khuzestan on July 19, a claim Washington has not confirmed; the IAEA said it is “looking into reports” and that “the facility is in the very early stages of construction and contained no nuclear material when last visited by the IAEA,” with Director General Grossi repeating his call for restraint around nuclear sites (Nuclear Engineering International). The forward-leaning signaling is the President’s, not CENTCOM’s: “Any site where they’re even thinking about nuclear, we’ll be hitting it very, very powerfully” (Iran International), and, on July 13, “We’re going to take out Pickaxe Mountain. Tell the Iranians to be ready” (Reuters).

Pickaxe Mountain is where the file gets hard. Israeli intelligence shared with Washington, per the Journal, assesses that Iran moved thousands of centrifuges or their components into the tunnels under Kuh-e Kolang Gaz La, two kilometers from Natanz, after the June 2025 war (DW). The Institute for Science and International Security puts the complex at 100 meters deep or more, not yet operational, and offers the sentence that should organize the targeting debate: “the site, in its present condition, would be more suitable for ground forces to attack or sabotage” (ISIS). Only the B-2 carries America’s deepest-penetrating bomb, and analysts doubt even that weapon reaches these depths. ISW’s read of Tehran’s counter-pressure is equally plain: “Iran continues to conduct attacks on US military facilities in the region and Gulf civilian infrastructure, likely to deter the United States from further expanding its strike campaign in Iran” (ISW).

Thirteen nights in, this is no longer a reprisal series; it is a disassembly line, working through command nodes, coastal sensors, small-boat fleets, and now the bridges that move the war machine’s parts. The Hormuz Mandate’s test is mechanical, not rhetorical: when the regime’s ability to shoot at a tanker is gone, the strait is open, and not before. Two honest cautions belong on the record. ISW is right that Iran’s answer is horizontal escalation against Gulf civilians rather than capitulation, and the hardest target in the country is a mountain that the best engineering assessment says favors sabotage over airpower. A campaign built on denial should not talk itself into believing every problem is a bomb-shaped one.

The Forum called this doctrine before it had a name.

We checked the archives, and here is the record. In June 2025, in the opening days of the twelve-day war, MEF’s Eric Navarro wrote the sentence this week’s policy caught up to: “America must not blink. Tehran already staggers. Strike its strategic nerve center. Support the forces that will rise in its absence. And make clear that the era of patient containment has ended” (MEF). He had already pronounced the diagnosis in August 2024: “Certainly, U.S. strategy to contain Iran has failed,” and “Nothing short of the removal of the Iranian regime, the greatest threat to Middle East stability, should suffice” (MEF).

The Forum’s journal made the operational case before the war did. In the Spring 2025 Middle East Quarterly, 30-year CIA veteran Colin Winston argued for “decisive military action against Iran’s nuclear program, ideally through a coordinated and joint strike,” warning that Iran was “on the verge of producing enough weapons-grade uranium to build several bombs,” so close that “relying on a timely warning from U.S. or Israeli intelligence of Iran’s imminent ‘breakout’ may no longer be a reliable strategy” (MEQ). And on February 28, the day Epic Fury began, this newsletter’s author published the Forum’s day-one scenario report with the line that named the campaign’s nature: “This is not a punitive strike. It is a regime disruption campaign” (MEF Reports). Even the Houthi front was called: Navarro’s Fall 2025 MEQ blueprint declared “the time of half-measures is over” and warned that “the Houthis respond only to force” (MEQ).

The outside world has caught up. CFR’s Max Boot describes June’s collapsed deal as “widely criticized as an act of appeasement on Trump’s part after failing to reopen the waterway by military force” (CFR); Foreign Affairs’ new coercion retrospective puts it flatly: “after his economic ‘maximum pressure’ campaign failed to coerce Iran into making concessions on its ballistic missile and nuclear programs, Trump turned to outright warfare” (Foreign Affairs).

The scholarship explains why the mechanical version can work where the rhetorical one failed. Robert Pape’s classic dataset, revisited in Political Science Quarterly, found wartime airpower succeeded in 82 percent of cases when it pursued military denial, destroying the target’s capability to fight, against 50 percent when it pursued civilian punishment (Scholar Gateway: Art & Greenhill 2018). The same literature carries the warnings a serious strategist keeps taped to the wall: wartime compellence overall succeeds only about 36 to 40 percent of the time, naval blockades have historically broken great powers in barely one case in nine, and demands amounting to regime change are the hardest of all to coerce. Newer work adds the domestic clock: presidents under electoral pressure systematically reach for high-tech, low-casualty force (Scholar Gateway: Chávez & Gannon 2025), and battlefield casualties measurably raise public demand for war termination, with media coverage the transmission belt (Scholar Gateway: Fetzer et al. 2024).

Strategy is also arithmetic about someone else’s attention. The CENTCOM commander’s posture statement lists three priorities, and the third is “Preserving America’s advantage and position of strength relative to China” (Cooper, May 2026); his predecessor told Congress in pre-war posture testimony that “Seventy-two percent of all Chinese oil is imported,” and in any conflict “we could end up holding a lot of their economy at risk in the CENTCOM region.” A demonstrated ability to dismantle a chokepoint-extortion regime is a lesson Beijing reads too.

The paper trail matters because it establishes that this week’s posture is a doctrine, not a mood. The Forum argued for ending containment when containment was the consensus, and the scholarship’s verdict sits on our side of the argument: denial beats punishment in the historical record. But the same books say the clock is the campaign’s enemy. Casualties compound into termination pressure, blockades underperform, and regime-scale demands resist coercion, which is why the Daylight Doctrine’s counsel is speed and specificity: break the machine fast, say precisely what ends the campaign, and let the Iranian people, who lost patience with this regime before the first missile flew, handle the part no bomber can.

Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the sea lanes.

The allied air-defense picture sharpened. Jordan’s armed forces intercepted four Iranian missiles and six drones over 24 hours through Thursday, reporting “no casualties or material damage” and forces at the highest operational readiness (Jordan Times/Petra); Iran’s Friday claims of strikes on the Azraq base have no Jordanian confirmation (AP). Kuwait’s damage is confirmed and real: Iranian strikes hit a power-and-desalination plant July 17 and a second desalination facility July 18, and Kuwait Petroleum reported “significant material damage” and injuries at a vital oil-sector site, prompting Kuwait’s Article 51 letter to the UN (AP, Iran International). Bahrain’s defense force said Friday it intercepted “several Iranian aerial attacks targeting civilians”; the IRGC’s claims of hits on Sheikh Isa air base and, memorably, an Amazon data center remain unconfirmed by anyone but the IRGC (AP). US-led forces downed five drones over Erbil this morning.

The sea lanes are repricing in real time. Southern Red Sea war-risk premiums doubled past 1 percent of hull value this week, with Saudi-linked ships quoted as high as 3 percent (Reuters via Insurance Journal). Tankers that loaded Saudi crude at Yanbu have U-turned rather than run Bab el-Mandeb, at least six by midweek per Kpler, with more reversing Wednesday, and Aramco is offering additional cargoes from Sidi Kerir on the Mediterranean, fed by the SUMED pipeline, the northabout route that adds weeks to every voyage (Kpler via Straits Times). The airlines voted with their schedules in mid-July: Lufthansa’s group has suspended eight regional cities including Erbil, Dammam, and Riyadh into late October, British Airways has cut Bahrain, Dubai, Amman, and Tel Aviv into the fall and dropped Jeddah outright, and Finnair has parked Doha until October (Reuters).

The Houthi front held its breath overnight: no new attack after the Encelia, whose strike UKMTO logged as an “unknown projectile” 70 nautical miles southwest of Al Shuqaiq, and no confirmation of the claimed second tanker, the Layla, whose transponder, per the maritime AI firm Windward, has been dark since July 17 (Windward). The Iranian hand is documented if not dispositive: Reuters reports a July 13 Mahan Air flight ferried IRGC commanders, missile and drone equipment, and gold to the Houthis, with Yemen’s information minister saying their mission is “to strengthen the militias’ military capabilities and prepare them to threaten international maritime security in the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab Strait”; the Houthis themselves cast the blockade as retaliation for the Saudi “siege.” CSIS’s Mark Cancian offers the countervailing math: “The U.S. blockade is not 100% effective but it is highly effective. As a result, the Houthis may be hard pressed to continue a campaign for long” (Reuters via Al-Monitor).

Parliament Speaker Ghalibaf supplied the week’s epigraph from Tehran, posted Wednesday: “The equation of this war is clear: either everyone or no one” (Iran International). The rial traded near 1,934,000 to the dollar this morning, and Iranian authorities put the toll since late June at 53 dead and 592 wounded, figures we carry as theirs.

Watch three items through the weekend. In New York at 3 PM ET today, ICC member states cast the first prosecutor-removal vote in the court’s history, 63 of 125 needed by secret ballot, a vote about Karim Khan’s conduct, not about Israel (The National). In Washington, the House adopted a war-powers resolution 214-208 Thursday, the first chamber to do so this round, hours before the Senate turned back its companion, 47 in favor and 49 against (CBS). And in Jerusalem, Netanyahu convened his restricted security cabinet today amid intelligence assessments that Tehran may try to pull Israel into the war; Defense Minister Katz promised a “crushing blow” if it tries (JNS), while Finance Minister Smotrich states the standing consensus: “The State of Israel has no interest in joining the conflict between Iran and the US; maintaining the status quo is our best option” (JPost). On the Saudi nuclear deal, Riyadh has still said nothing about the President’s Abraham Accords condition; Netanyahu’s office called prospective Saudi accession “an historic leap forward for peace in the Middle East. Peace through Strength” (NBC).

The Accords Logic was always an insurance policy, and this is the week the premiums came due: Jordan is intercepting, Kuwait is absorbing, Bahrain is defending the Fifth Fleet’s home, and the coalition of the shot-at is holding without a single defection toward Tehran. That cohesion is an asset the next phase must not squander. The Carthage point about Israel is quieter but real: the deterrent is working precisely because Jerusalem has not yet been needed, and Tehran’s debate about dragging Israel in is a confession that it is running out of rungs on its own escalation options. When the enemy’s remaining move is widening the war he is losing, the strategy is working; the task is to finish it before his desperation finds a soft target.

More than 50,000 US service members are currently operating across the Middle East, by CENTCOM’s own count in last night’s release announcing the 13th consecutive night of strikes. It is the number that turns this week’s staging stories, the bombers at Fairford, the fighters from Lakenheath, the medics at Landstuhl, into a single fact: the force for something bigger than Epic Fury is already in place, waiting on one man’s order. (Source: CENTCOM.)

• Ali Almrayatee, Why Washington’s Current Sanctions Regime Fails to Curb Iraq’s Parallel Economy (Observer, July 24): “So long as Iraqi institutions continue to finance, license, and contract with sanctioned entities, U.S. pressure will remain incomplete”
• Michael Rubin, Deliberate Blindness Undercuts U.S. Diplomacy in Libya (Observer, July 24, second consecutive dispatch from Benghazi): nearly 14 years after Chris Stevens’s murder, Benghazi “is a completely different city: tolerant, militia-free, secure,” and Washington alone is absent
• Jim Hanson, President Trump Makes a Civilian Nuclear Deal with Saudi Arabia (MEF Online, July 22): the Forum’s chief strategist on FOX Business, calling the deal “a game-changer” and walking through the Pickaxe Mountain option

Forum in the news: Hanson’s Varney segment continues to circulate as the sharpest television read of the Saudi deal, and the Forum’s July 20 analysis of the Araghchi interview remains the source of record for the “Code 110” storyline now standard in war coverage.

Two favors this Friday. Forward this issue to one person who still thinks “maximum pressure” refers to a sanctions policy, and if you want the Forum reading the posture statements, the strike releases, and the archives every day, support the work directly. The archives, as this issue shows, were right early.

That is the board for Friday. Reply and tell me: if the order comes, should the target set be the war machine or the regime itself? I read every answer.

Middle East Insider · From Gregg Roman, Executive Director, Middle East Forum

You are receiving this because you subscribed at mef.beehiiv.com. Unsubscribe