CENTCOM (US Central Command) struck Iranian air-defence, radar and ground-control sites at Qeshm Island, Bandar Abbas, Sirik and Jask between 22:00 GMT on Tuesday 9 June and 01:00 GMT on Wednesday 10 June, at Donald Trump's direct order 1. For 100 days the US-Iran front had been sanctions and the Strait of Hormuz blockade while Israel did the kinetic work; this was the first American ordnance on Iranian soil since the war began 2. CENTCOM called it a "proportional response" and "self-defence", citing Iran's downing of a US AH-64 Apache helicopter, the aircraft logged "cause unknown" a day earlier and now resolved .
The strike package hit four named sites, yet Al Jazeera, citing Iranian accounts, reported the damage ran to a single telecoms tower at Sirik and two water tanks 3. The kinetic footprint stayed small while the political signal ran large. A target set of coastal air-defence and radar, not Fordow or Natanz, reads as a deliberately survivable strike: Washington demonstrated reach without forcing the all-out nuclear exchange that hitting an enrichment site would compel.
Trump had told reporters on 9 June that an Iran deal was in its "final throes" ; he ordered missiles onto Iranian territory within hours of saying it. The president who signed nothing across 100 days, no AUMF, no Article 51 notice, no nuclear memorandum, answered a stalled negotiation with ordnance rather than paper. What closed the war's defining action-versus-words gap was a missile order, not a signature, which means every legal instrument remains unsigned even now.
