General Caine

General Dan Caine warned Trump privately that continued strikes risked depleting US munitions stockpiles, a message that halted bombing across Iran from 25 July . The Pentagon rejected any present shortage on the record, insisting it still held "a deep arsenal of capabilities", a statement issued unprompted and addressed to Caine's forward-looking risk warning rather than to current stock levels. The episode showed Caine's own operational judgement, not White House policy, setting the campaign's tempo.

Trump repeated that pattern on 2 August, scrapping a planned Sunday strike after Gulf lobbying rather than any fresh Caine assessment . For Caine, it shows his tempo judgements now sit alongside diplomatic pressure from Riyadh, Doha and Abu Dhabi as a brake on the war, not munitions arithmetic alone.

On 19 March, Caine and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth disclosed that US forces had struck more than 7,000 targets in Iran since 28 February, a pace of roughly 370 strikes per day . Caine acknowledged continued use of 5,000-pound penetrator weapons against underground missile storage, without setting any end date for the campaign.

Twelve days later, CENTCOM began flying B-52 Stratofortress bombers on overland missions inside Iran as US troop numbers reached 50,000 . Caine's own figures remain the clearest public marker of how fast and how FAR the air campaign has grown.