Donald Trump Republicans cannot prove damage caused by the bunker busting attack on Iran without evidence

 Will Trump's Bombing Raid on Iran Prove Not Just a Bust, But a Disaster?

A longtime military and intelligence insider explains why the failure to destroy Iran’s nuclear bunkers may have weakened U.S. power far beyond the Middle East. Published in the Washington Montly Newsletter, by Paul Glastris.

Where is the Iranian enriched uranium?

Yesterday, June 24, CNN broke the news (an exclusive reportt) about a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) preliminary report showing that the Iranian nuclear programs at underground facilities targeted by U.S. airstrikes over the weekend were not “completely and fully obliterated,” as Donald Trump claimed, but instead were likely set back a matter of months. 

To get a better sense of that report and what it means, Paul Glastris spoke with a source who has had a decades-long career in the U.S. military and the intelligence community, serving both in and out of government. The source requested anonymity to speak freely. The following is an edited version of our conversation:

Are you surprised that this DIA report was leaked?  Not at all. The results would be of high interest. Hundreds of folks at least would be on the distribution list or have access to the report.

How reliable is this report?  Time will tell. But, the DIA is the key intelligence agency that does these kinds of after-action damage assessments. That’s their traditional role and they’re very good at it. Their assessments are typically based on a combination of imagery, signals intelligence largely provided by the NSA, and human intelligence that comes from the CIA, the Israelis, and other sources. The DIA would have pulled these strings together to come up with their assessment of the damage. These nuclear sites have been the focus of the United States and Israel for decades and we’ve built up considerable sources over the years. The Israelis have clearly penetrated Iran at the highest levels. So presumably, in addition to what we can see from satellites, we are hearing chatter from within the Iranian national security bureaucracies. We will see. This is only a preliminary report, but it is not encouraging.

Are you surprised at what seems to be the limited degree of damage to these facilities? No, the United States military has been toiling for several decades to develop weapons capable of destroying underground facilities. These complexes are called “Hard and Deeply Buried Targets” (HDBT). These efforts started all the way back in the Clinton administration when the Secretary of Defense was looking at options for taking out Libya’s underground chemical weapons complex at Tarhuna. At the time, none of the options on the table were palatable, so the quest began to develop air delivered munitions that could take out these targets. It proved far more difficult than anyone would have imagined. The government established a test facility, a mock underground chemical and nuclear production facility, out in the western US and bombed it literally for years. Every type of bomb or combination of bombs were used, rarely did it cause any more than superficial damage to the facility. So, this latest weapon, long in development but never deployed, has demonstrated once again that if an adversary simply digs deeply enough, the laws of physics are on their side. So, these results were disappointing, but by no means surprising, following a long history of failure against this type of target. That’s a major reason why previous administrations have been resistant to using them.

If this initial report proves true, what are the consequences? The consequences are terrible. As long as we didn’t use them, Iran didn’t know for sure how damaging they could be. That gave us leverage with them. Now, the situation is reversed. We’ve revealed or confirmed that our most fearsome weapon, or the most fearsome we’re willing to use—we could drop nukes or send in the 82nd Airborne, but that’s not going to happen—can collapse the entrances of tunnels but not destroy facilities buried deeply in a mountain. Going into any negotiations with them, they know our limits. 

That doesn’t mean Iran is in a strong position. Israel has decimated its military, and its economy is in ruins because of sanctions. In any negotiations with Trump, it’s the sanctions they want lifted. But now they’re in a much better position to get what they want than they were before this bombing run, especially considering other intel suggesting that the regime removed some or all its highly enriched uranium and centrifuges out these facilities before the attack.

And not just Iran. Every other adversarial regime now knows these weapons are essentially duds. That weakens our leverage considerably with all of them. I am sure Kim Jung Un is happy in North Korea today.

What do you make of the fact that Trump is continuing to insist that the facilities were totally destroyed? I’d say that’s not going to fly. If I’m the Iranians, I’m going to clear the rubble from the entrances of those facilities and then invite CNN and Al Jazeera to bring their cameras into the tunnels and show that they’re still there, still functional.

Paul Glastris is the editor in chief of the Washington Monthly