The President said in March that 100 percent of Iran’s military capability had been destroyed. A nine-person office is responsible for keeping that figure where he left it.
WASHINGTON—Responding to a sixth consecutive night of Iranian missile and drone fire on American positions across the Gulf, U.S. Central Command said Saturday it had struck dozens of targets belonging to the destroyed Iranian military, a force the President described in March as eliminated in full and which the Pentagon continues to describe that way, according to three defense officials familiar with the accounting.
“The destruction figure describes a completed action,” said one senior official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the methodology has not been released. “What lands on Jordan on a Thursday is a separate matter. We are not going to revise a finished number on the basis of ongoing events.”
How the Destroyed Iranian Military Is Kept Destroyed
The reconciliation is handled by the Office of Force Status Accounting, a nine-person unit operating out of a converted classified reading room on the Pentagon’s second floor, E Ring. Under its 41-page methodology, the destruction of an adversary force is recorded once, on the date the determination is made, and is not adjusted afterward. Iranian launches occurring after that date are logged as residual expenditure and carried in a separate column that does not feed the primary figure.
Deputy Director Halloran S. Prewitt-Vance, 58, told a Thursday briefing that the office had processed 1,184 residual events since March and that none of them had required a change to the top line. Two of the columns have never been reconciled to each other, he said, because reconciling them was never the point of having two.
What the Destroyed Iranian Military Fired This Week
The residual column had a heavy week. Iran struck Jordan, Qatar, Kuwait, and Oman, wounding a child in Doha with shrapnel from an intercepted missile and damaging a desalination plant in Kuwait. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed attacks on U.S. forces in Bahrain and Syria and said the Strait of Hormuz would stay closed. Nine fighters of an Iranian Kurdish group were killed in Iraq.
On March 14 the President wrote on Truth Social that “we have already destroyed 100% of Iran’s Military capability,” adding in the same sentence that it remained easy for Iran to send a drone or two, drop a mine, or deliver a close range missile into the waterway, no matter how badly defeated they are. The office regards that sentence as the founding document of its method. Both halves are operative, the senior official said. One is the figure and one is the column.
The Twenty-One Percent
In a June interview the President said the Iranian military had been totally destroyed and had roughly 21 percent of its missile capacity left. Asked how a force at 21 percent squares with a force at zero, the official said the two numbers measure different things and that the office is not aware of any requirement that they agree.
Classified assessments reported in May found Iran had regained access to 30 of the 33 missile sites it controls along the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway where the Treasury Department has begun billing commercial carriers for safe passage. The office does not dispute the assessments. Recovered sites belong to the force as it exists, officials said, and the figure describes the force as it was determined.
Asked what would happen to the destruction figure if Iran were to destroy an American vessel, the official said the question had been raised internally and that the office had concluded it would be logged.
Developing.
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