Good post. Thank you.

I am of the opinion that Iran is currently pushing to establish its national security. That will require, at minimum, driving out any military installation that can be used to attack it or neutralize it. This will be a difficult task, but it appears that this been under careful strategic and tactical analysis for a long time, possibly 2 decades.

It requires speed. The boundary between Iran's force projection and the empire's force projection, a sort of Iranosphere, needs to expand far enough to ensure that imperial force projection is costly, obvious, and detectable early.

Working against this is the empire's two pronged attempt to neutralize Iran. First by destroying their force projection capabilities - launchers, launch sites, missiles and drones themselves, munitions production capacity, etc. Second by destroying society's ability to function and thus serve the functions that support the force projection - food, water, medicine, communication, leadership, planning, intelligence, etc.

So far, Iran has been moving faster than I expected. But the empire may have yet more moves available to them. We don't know. So we wait, watch, and pray.