The D Brief: 6 die in tanker crash; Russia’s US-war windfall; Iran’s industry ‘functionally defeated’; Escorts for Hormuz vessels?; And a bit more.

US-Israeli war on Iran, day 14: The U.S. lost six more service members amid President Trump’s war against Iran on Thursday. All six crew members perished when their KC-135 refueling tanker aircraft went down in western Iraq after colliding with another aircraft. (An initial version of this newsletter noted the aircraft went down in western Iran; but that was a regrettable typo.)

“The incident occurred in friendly airspace during Operation Epic Fury,” military officials at Central Command said in an initial statement Thursday evening. “Two aircraft were involved in the incident. One of the aircraft went down in western Iraq, and the second landed safely. This was not due to hostile fire or friendly fire,” and the accident is under investigation, they said. 

“All six crew members aboard a U.S. KC-135 refueling aircraft that went down in western Iraq are now confirmed deceased,” CENTCOM said in a follow-up Friday morning. 

The casualties raise the U.S. death toll to 13, in addition to at least 140 injuries from retaliatory attacks by Iranian forces since Feb. 28. 

More than 1,400 Iranians have died in the war so far, as well as 15 in Israel and at least 19 in nations across the Gulf region, al-Jazeera reports. More than 2,000 Israelis have been wounded from retaliatory attacks. And an estimated 18,000 have been injured inside Iran alone, according to the country’s Ministry of Health. At least six French soldiers were also wounded in attacks on a military base in Iraq, the governor of Erbil said Thursday, according to Reuters.

More than 680 others have been killed inside Lebanon, which is Israel’s additional front in this war as it pursues Iran-backed militants around Beirut. Another 1,700 have been reportedly injured in those attacks, and 816,000 have been displaced across Lebanon since the outbreak of the war. That represents roughly 14% of the country’s population. 

Another potential casualty: U.S. influence. “Analysts say the war has left Gulf states reassessing both their security dependence on Washington and the prospect of eventually engaging Tehran on new regional security arrangements,” Reuters reported Wednesday.

Survey says: “Americans don’t see the point of this war,” CNN reported Thursday, calling it “the biggest Iran polling takeaway” so far citing at least seven recent surveys. 

Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston, Lauren C. Williams and Meghann Myers. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so we’d like to take a moment to thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1567, the Eighty Years War began in present-day Belgium; the conflict temporarily halted in 1609 before later giving way to the much-bloodier Thirty Years War, which swept across Europe until it came to an end in 1648.

New: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claims Iran’s weapons production capabilities are now “functionally defeated,” he said at a press conference Friday at the Pentagon. 

Missile attacks are down 90 percent and one-way attack drone strikes are down 95 percent since the first day of Iranian retaliation, according to Hegseth. “So we're shooting down and destroying what missiles they still have in stock, but more importantly, ensuring that they have no ability to make more—their production lines, their military plants, their defense innovation centers, defeated,” he said

Hegseth also claimed Iran’s new leader “is wounded and likely disfigured,” at least partly because Mojtaba Khamenei’s first public message Thursday was read aloud on state TV and did not include a video or photo. “Iran has plenty of cameras and voice recorders. Why a written statement? I think you know why. He is scared. He is injured. He is on the run,” Hegseth said. Defense One’s Meghann Myers has more.

Related reading: 

• “How Hegseth Came to See Moral Purpose in War as Weakness,” via Greg Jaffe writing Thursday for the New York Times;
• See also, “‘America’s mortal enemy’: Pete Hegseth expressed extreme antipathy toward Iran for years,” via the Guardian reporting Thursday using comments about Iran from Hegseth’s own books, speeches and online videos.

Eventually, the U.S. Navy may begin escorting tankers through Hormuz “as soon as ​it is militarily possible,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the UK’s Sky News on Thursday. Navy officials earlier this week reportedly declined escort requests, citing elevated risks inside the Strait, which include Iranian air and naval drones, as well as mining efforts along the ordinarily busy waterway. 

Bessent also suggested the escorts might happen “perhaps ⁠with an international coalition,” though it’s unclear just yet who might be involved in such a high-risk mission. France has ordered nearly a dozen warships to the Mediterranean and the Red Seas; but its defense minister said Thursday none will head to the Strait of Hormuz. 

Update: At least 22 civilian ships in the region have been attacked by Iran since the war began, Reuters reports in a detailed tracker published Thursday, citing data from the Institute for the Study of War and AEI Critical Threats project. That includes two tankers attacked at an Iraqi port Thursday. 

Trendspotting: U.S. and allied militaries have turned to fighter jets in their struggle to ward off Iranian drones, but former pilots say the mission is expensive, dangerous, and, ultimately, unsustainable with current tactics, Defense One’s Thomas Novelly reported Thursday. On Tuesday, Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed that U.S. and allied forces had conducted “intercepts against one-way attack drones using fighters and attack helicopters,” and said it was one reason that Iran’s use of the drones had “decreased 83 percent since the beginning of the operation.”

One former British military officer called it “using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.” Some of Iran’s drones, which cost in the low five figures, are being downed by missiles that cost twenty or forty times as much, launched from aircraft with relatively high operating costs. And the speed differential between jets and drones can pose problems in chaotic battlespaces. 

That’s at least partly why the U.S. is now seeking advice, guidance, and support from Ukraine’s military on how to counter enemy drones based on what it has learned during its four-year war with Russia. Continue reading, here. 

Putin’s big break: The U.S.-Israeli war has disrupted global energy markets so deeply that the Trump administration just lifted sanctions against the sale of Russian crude oil, the U.S. Treasury Department announced Thursday. As much as half of Russia’s annual revenue comes from petroleum sales. The sanctions were put in place after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than four years ago in flagrant violation of international law. The new U.S. authorization is initially set to last 30 days, ending April 11. 

Big picture: “The war in the Middle East is creating the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market,” the International Energy Agency announced in a new report Thursday. “The ultimate impact on oil and gas markets and the broader economy from the conflict will depend not only on the intensity of military attacks and any damage to energy assets, but also, crucially, on the duration of disruptions to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz,” the report’s authors write.  

Just last month, Russian oil sales had declined to their lowest levels since the start of Putin’s Ukraine invasion, the IEA said Thursday. “The decline ​was due to reduced exports to India—as Washington discouraged such cooperation with Russia—and to the closure of flows via the Ukrainian stretch of the Druzhba pipeline to Hungary and Slovakia at the end of January,” Reuters reports.

But Russia is now “earning as much as $150 million a day in extra budget revenues from its oil sales, making it the biggest winner from the conflict in the Middle East,” the Financial Times reported Thursday. That includes an “estimated $1.3bn-$1.9bn windfall from taxes on oil exports” since the onset of war, and it “could receive $3.3bn-$4.9bn in overall additional revenues by the end of March,” FT calculates citing industry data and analyst assessments. 

Moscow has already made more than $6.8 billion in estimated oil sales since Feb. 28, the Guardian reported citing a new analysis published Thursday by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. “Currently, Russia can balance its budget with a price of $59 a barrel,” the Wall Street Journal noted earlier this week. But the price of oil is now well above that, and has surged 40% since the war began nearly two weeks ago. 

Expert reax: The current high prices “will help Russia to meet budget indicators this quarter and even start saving some money,” Borys Dodonov, head of energy and climate studies at the Kyiv School of Economics, told FT. 

Capitol Hill reax: “Instead of squeezing Russia’s faltering economy, the President’s ill-planned war is giving Putin a windfall while American families face higher prices,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., ranking member on the Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement. 

Kyiv’s reax: “This certainly does not help peace,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said during a visit to Paris. “This easing alone by the United States could provide Russia with about $10 billion for the war,” he predicted. “Lifting sanctions only so that more drones will later be flying at you is, in my opinion, not the right decision,” he added. 

“Another beneficiary could be Iran,” the Washington Post reported Thursday, “because its government and independent militias probably own many of the tankers that make up a ‘shadow fleet’ of hundreds of vessels currently holding Russian oil. This fleet is designed specifically to evade sanctions. It is made up of older, less reliable vessels that sailed uninsured and used radar-jamming devices and other techniques to avoid detection.”

After opposing a resolution forcing Trump to seek congressional approval for the Iran war, GOP Sen. Todd Young of Indiana criticized the lack of public debate and hearings about the conflict in remarks Thursday at the Ronald Reagan Institute’s National Security Innovation Base summit in Washington, D.C. “It's consistent with our responsibilities to force hard questions, to stress test plans in development, to take our public conversations private where necessary, and dive more deeply and then move to the extent we can, with a more unified country, into military conflict,” Young said. 

“I think it's an indictment of our own party and our own institution that we didn't force some harder conversations over the last several weeks preceding military engagement,” he said eight days after joining more than 50 of his Republican colleagues in shooting down the war powers resolution. “We're now at war. We are at war, and I want the President to succeed in his stated objectives as he's brought more clarity to those and I'm going to be helpful in that regard, and I hope this ends quickly, as does he. But what incentive do future commanders in chief have to work with Congress to make their case to the American people, if there aren't a few of us piping up and indicating that ‘now we may be on board, but we're still not happy with how we got here.’”

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., voted in support of the resolution, which would have spurred more public debate. Most of what senators know about the Iran war comes “from classified hearings, and that's one of my gripes about this is that if we only get information and classified, that means we can't really answer questions that we ought to be able to answer,” Kaine said Thursday. “I've got all these Virginians who are deployed in the Ford carrier strike group, and those in the Bush strike group that are about to go out, and their families ask me questions: ‘How long? What's the end game?’ Et cetera. And as frustrating as it is to not know the answer to a question, it's even more frustrating to know an answer and yet be handcuffed and not able to say it, because thus far, the hearings have only been classified.”

After numerous reports emerged this week claiming the first week of war cost around $11 billion, Kaine said he couldn’t share exactly what he knew because related briefings have been classified, but those estimates were not far off. “I can't really tell you what I know,” he said Thursday. “It's been pretty widely reported that the daily cost is around $800 million a day. And I'll just say that that is not wildly wrong, so let me just leave it there.”

As the Iran war rages, NATO is rewriting its air-defense plans, and “This is the first time this has been done in decades,” the top commander of U.S. forces in Europe told the Senate Armed Services Committee Thursday. Those plans “should be done by this summer,” said Air Force Gen. Alex Grynkewich, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe and commander of U.S. European Command. Defense Scoop has a bit more.

Grynkewich also warned that bombing civilians during a war, as the U.S. military is reportedly alleged to have done on the first day of the conflict, can have lasting effects on the duration of fighting. Grynkewich was speaking about Russia’s war in Ukraine when he told lawmakers Thursday, “What I've observed over the course of studying air power in history is that any time you attack a civilian population, you usually end up finding that it just hardens their resolve,” he said. “We take this all the way back to the London Blitz in World War II. The Brits just had a stiff upper lip and kept on fighting, and I think that’s what we’ve seen in Ukraine, as well.”

Rewind: Experts predicted a similar effect in Iran. Air strikes “usually stiffen a government’s grip on power, not loosen it. That’s especially true in countries that have long suffered from foreign meddling, such as Iran, where the U.S.-backed ouster of Mohammed Mosaddegh in 1953 remains a source of anger, and where the war launched in 1980 by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein solidified support for the new Islamist regime,” wrote Rosemary Kelanic, who leads the Middle East Program at Defense Priorities, in January.

Additional reading: 

• “Israeli Officials Think Iran’s Regime Isn’t Likely to Fall Soon,” the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday; 
• “Hormuz oil shock cuts 8 million barrels a day globally,” Quartz reported Thursday; 
• On top of shocks to global energy markets, the “US economy expanded at sluggish 0.7% in fourth quarter, government says, downgrading first estimate,” the Associated Press reported Friday; 
• “White House turns to a familiar promise of pain for gain as oil spikes,” Semafor reported Friday; 
• And ICYMI, “Iran appears to have conducted a significant cyberattack against a U.S. company, a first since the war started,” NBC News reported Wednesday.