Mark Cancian of CSIS, the man behind the depletion numbers, put the week in proportion.
During the 39-day air campaign America averaged 350 strikes a day and Iran answered with hundreds of missiles per salvo.
This week it's a few dozen strikes and a dozen missiles at a time, tit for tat at a fraction of the intensity, damaging mainly for what it proves: every American strike brings a hit on Kuwait or the Emirates, and both hosts are being squeezed toward a deal.
The real erosion is underneath.
Bahrain, the Navy's resupply hub, sits inside the Gulf and has been struck, so 20,000 sailors needing 420,000 meals and 8 million gallons of fuel a week are fed from Oman, Mombasa and Diego Garcia.
Roughly 40 percent of American destroyers can't sail, the deployed ones get every spare part, and the price is that the Western Pacific and the Caribbean now hold essentially no US warships at all.
Two more corrections to the narrative.
Economic D-Day has been something of a dud, because its sanctions land on China, Turkey and India, and Washington is holding back rather than lose them.
And Israel and Iran, by his reading, have both stepped back from each other and left this fight to Washington and Tehran.
Every strategy promised the hemisphere first.
Something always happens, and the ships are always in the wrong ocean when it does.
@MarkCancian @WeTheBrandon
