Operation Midnight Hammer: The $6 Billion Empty Hole

As Trump’s cartoonish Iran strike unravels, America stumbles from world leader to Netanyahu’s punch-drunk bouncer, while Xi Jinping waits for his next desperate phone call.

In the span of seventy-two hours, the Trump administration has managed to simultaneously bomb Iran, fracture its own political coalition, humiliate itself on the global stage, and vaporize billions of dollars in advanced munitions, all while declaring victory. It takes a certain kind of brilliance to orchestrate a fiasco this comprehensive.

We begin with what Trump insists on calling a “complete and total obliteration” of Iran’s nuclear capabilities. The centerpiece of this spectacle, code-named “Operation Midnight Hammer” (a name that would embarrass even a Michael Bay film), involved seven B-2 Spirit bombers dropping a dozen 30,000-pound bunker-busting Massive Ordnance Penetrators on Iran’s Fordo facility. Each of these bombs reportedly costs upwards of $500 million, and with twelve dropped, we are staring at $6 billion in ordnance expended on just one target. Add in cruise missile salvos, submarine deployments, the logistics of moving B-2s halfway across the world, and the surrounding military build-up of 40,000 American troops now sitting well within Iranian missile range, and you’re easily looking at a multi-billion dollar operation. That’s just for this single round of strikes.

But it gets better. Despite the chest-thumping at the Pentagon press conference, the damage assessment tells a different story. Satellite imagery reviewed by multiple independent experts suggests that while substantial above-ground damage occurred, Fordo’s deeply buried enrichment halls may have survived. Observers saw trucks moving materials out of Fordo and Natanz in the days before the attacks, strongly suggesting that Iran moved its highly enriched uranium, enough for multiple bombs, to a safe location beforehand. In short, Trump may have spent billions of dollars successfully bombing empty tunnels.

Iran, of course, wasted no time signaling that its program remains intact, with foreign ministry officials implying that enrichment could continue elsewhere, including at the much deeper, and as-yet-unstruck Pickaxe Mountain site. Israel’s own Channel 13 military analysts admit the program could not be destroyed with airstrikes alone, even if this operation continued for another year. The phrase “mission accomplished” hovers over this charade like a ghost from George W. Bush’s deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln.

And yet, while Trump boasts of obliteration, his own Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth were dispatched to Sunday talk shows to offer a far more modest take: no, this was not about regime change; no, Iran’s stockpiles were not fully destroyed; yes, this simply “set back” their program. But then, like clockwork, Trump himself detonates his own talking points by hopping onto Truth Social to declare that regime change is now exactly what he’s after: “Why wouldn’t there be regime change?” he mused, in between bizarre tirades against Thomas Massie and spelling his own name wrong as “DONA KDJ Trump.”

This sudden turn toward regime change prompted some awkward silence within MAGA world. Populist allies who once cheered Trump’s anti-interventionist rhetoric are now visibly squirming. Even Thomas Massie, long a reliable libertarian foot soldier, found himself publicly attacked by Trump for opposing what is clearly an unconstitutional act of war. The anti-war isolationist mask has slipped; what remains is raw imperial hubris wrapped in cheap populist theater.

And yet, the contradictions keep piling up. Trump, who famously promised to disentangle America from Middle East wars, now finds himself on the phone, figuratively, if not literally, begging Xi Jinping to help keep the Strait of Hormuz open as Iran threatens to choke off global oil shipping lanes in retaliation. The great self-proclaimed dealmaker, who once mocked Joe Biden as weak, now stands humiliated, forced to rely on Beijing to prevent his own reckless adventure from igniting an oil price shock that could crater the world economy. In a particularly bitter irony, while Trump rules by tantrum and impulsive fiat, Iran’s leadership, though authoritarian, shares its decision-making through institutional consensus among multiple power centers. The mullahs, the Revolutionary Guard, and the civilian government consult, maneuver, and adapt with remarkable cohesion, while Washington’s policy process resembles little more than Trump’s late-night social media stream-of-consciousness.

Meanwhile, Iran has already begun coordinating with Russia, with its foreign minister flying to Moscow to bolster defense ties. For all of Trump’s bluster about maximum pressure, he has driven Tehran deeper into the very axis he once claimed his deal-making would disrupt.

Of course, no international disaster is complete without the moral voice of the Vatican weighing in, and here Pope Leo delivered what may be the most devastating condemnation of all. In his Sunday address, the Pope linked Trump’s Iran strikes directly to Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza, calling it a cynical diversion from atrocities unfolding there. “War does not solve problems,” Pope Leo declared. “It amplifies them.” He went further, condemning leaders who wage war without risking their own children, a not-so-subtle jab at Trump and his family, none of whom will be dodging Iranian missiles in the days ahead. The irony was almost too on-the-nose when, during Trump’s lavish parade the tiny audience was treated to sound of “Fortunate Son”, that iconic Vietnam-era anthem railing against draft-dodging elites who send others to die while their own privileged offspring stay safely at home. It was, unintentionally, the most honest soundtrack imaginable for a president who skipped Vietnam, ducked every fight of his life, and now orders young Americans into harm’s way from the comfort of his fortified golf resorts.

And if the moral indictment weren’t enough, there is the strategic blunder to consider. Trita Parsi, one of the sharpest analysts of the Iran file, compared Trump’s strike to Israel’s infamous 1981 Osirak raid, which ultimately accelerated Iraq’s nuclear ambitions rather than quashing them. Parsi predicts the same dynamic now: Trump may have guaranteed that within 5 to 10 years, Iran will go nuclear, both as a deterrent and as a nationalistic response to U.S.-Israeli aggression. Once again, we have bombed our way into proliferation.

Perhaps most damning of all is the complete collapse of process. Trump, increasingly isolated within his own administration, ignored his intelligence agencies (led at one point by Tulsi Gabbard before she was uninvited to the table), disregarded congressional war powers, and conducted military strikes absent any serious National Security Council deliberation. The decision-making process was instead driven by a tight inner circle of Fox News veterans, MAGA loyalists, and Netanyahu emissaries, with John Ratcliffe feeding Trump Israeli intelligence to override his own agencies. The result is less a functional presidency than a rogue operation wrapped in Christian nationalist cosplay.

For all the expensive hardware, the precision-guided bombs, and the absurdly costly stealth bombers circling the skies, what Trump has purchased here is not victory but escalation. The United States now finds itself exposed to retaliation, its credibility weakened, its global alliances further fractured, and its own domestic constitutional order once again shredded under the weight of one man’s boundless ego.

And yet, the grift rolls on. Even as missiles fall, Trump’s surrogates are busy pumping out pro-war merchandise, MAGA influencers are scrambling to update their talking points, and the base is left to awkwardly explain how their anti-war avatar just launched the war they spent eight years promising to prevent. In the end, perhaps Pope Leo said it best: “No armed victory can compensate for the pain of mothers, fear of children, the stolen future.”

What’s most remarkable is not simply that Trump has pushed America into an undeclared war, or that $6 billion in high-tech ordnance may have accomplished little. It’s that, in the wreckage of America’s strategic credibility, we now see the full descent into something cruder and more dangerous: a great power reduced to subcontracted muscle, drunkenly swinging its fists at the behest of smaller client states, while China, Russia, and Iran carefully redraw the maps behind its back.

The United States once led the world. Now it lurches behind Israel’s shadow, like a punch drunk barroom bouncer, throwing billion-dollar tantrums that leave its allies uneasy, its adversaries emboldened, and its citizens staring down another quagmire they never voted for.