The reasons keep arriving, and none of them is the one being given publicly.
First it was escalation risk: the vice president and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs both raised it at Friday's meeting. Then it was ammunition: General Dan Caine warned the president that an expanded campaign could dangerously reduce the interceptors available to Central Command.
Now there is a third. Brad Cooper, the commander of Central Command, recommended halting the bombing campaign around the Strait of Hormuz unless Washington was prepared to escalate into a broader military campaign [1]. His assessment, as reported, was that the campaign had significantly degraded Iran's ability to attack ships in the strait and that the designated targets were mostly exhausted - roughly 20 percent of the Operation Epic Fury target set remained [1][2].
He briefed the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs and the White House before the Friday meeting at which the expanded campaign was shelved [1]. Two weeks of strikes had reached the limit of their effectiveness, and what was left to hit was a fifth of what there had been [2].
The public account is different. On Sunday, UN Ambassador Mike Waltz said: 'The President said we are locked and loaded. Even more assets are going into theatre, but he is giving talk some space.' Trump said the United States has 'far more munitions than anyone in the world, and far more than we need.'
Set those against what the theatre commander was telling the building. A campaign that has run out of targets and a president giving diplomacy room produce the identical quiet, and only one of them is a choice.
What the reporting describes between the two sides is not a ceasefire but an informal understanding of 'quiet for quiet' [1] - which holds exactly as long as both sides find quiet useful. The account rests on two unnamed sources, and a CENTCOM spokesman declined to comment [2].
