The Biblical Whirlwind of Death That Is About to Rain Down on the Mullahs

By Noah Rothman

Friday, February 20, 2026

 

Six weeks ago, the United States pulled off an unprecedented tactical and strategic military coup. At every level, the raid that resulted in Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro’s capture demonstrated the dazzling extent of U.S. capabilities.

 

The raid was a feat of intelligence work. The CIA laid the groundwork for it beginning last August, with the introduction of a clandestine team that tracked Maduro’s travel patterns and compromised human assets in his orbit. It was also a display of technological prowess in the digital realm. “It was dark; the lights of Caracas were largely turned off due to a certain expertise that we have,” the president said in the wake of the strike, acknowledging the previously undisclosed U.S. cyber capabilities deployed against the Venezuelan regime.

 

The raid featured an impressive use of combined arms as well. “Operation Absolute Resolve” used 150 air assets — fighter aircraft, B-1 bombers, unmanned surveillance drones, and penetrator helicopters — to neutralize Venezuela’s radar and anti-air defense network as well as to introduce and extract American special forces. Those forces (U.S. Army Delta Force commandos, to be specific) executed with precision the raid they had practiced for months at a scale replica of Maduro’s safe house.

 

Those commandos even deployed a new weapon that the president refers to only as “The Discombobulator,” a weapon that ensured that Venezuela’s defensive weapons would “not work.” In addition, reports indicate that U.S. forces deployed what’s being described as a “sonic” device that incapacitated enemy forces. “Suddenly I felt like my head was exploding from the inside,” said one of the raid’s survivors. The weapon reportedly “brought Venezuelan soldiers to their knees, ‘bleeding through the nose’ and vomiting blood.” Venezuelan and communist Cuban security forces resisted U.S. forces, but they caused no American casualties. Thirty-two of the Cubans who served in Maduro’s praetorian guard were returned to Havana in shoeboxes.

 

The American capabilities on display had a sobering effect on the audience of American adversaries watching from afar. The speedy neutralization of China’s “anti-stealth” radar systems and Russia’s S-300 anti-aircraft systems led even America’s most dogged detractors to admit that you just had to hand it to the U.S. military. “The key to the success of the mission was that the US forces held the absolute superiority in terms of military might,” the Chinese propaganda outlet Global Times confessed.

 

They ain’t seen nothing yet.

 

The amount of firepower the United States will have deployed to within striking distance of Iran by this weekend is like nothing the Middle East has seen since the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War. But to even invoke America’s Iraq War–era capabilities — as so many media outlets have, to convey to readers the scale of America’s deployment — is misleading. Iraq was a generation ago, not just in chronological terms but also in relation to the modernity of U.S. weapons systems and platforms.

 

Today, F-22 Raptors and next-generation F-35 Lightning II fighter jets, advanced command-and-control aircraft, and modern warships augment the conventional capabilities that Americans are used to seeing at work on modern battlefields. A single carrier air wing can execute over 100 bombing runs in just 24 hours. By the end of the weekend, the United States will have two carrier groups in position to execute strikes on Iranian targets.

 

If the Iranian mullahs refuse to capitulate to the president’s demands, they are about to experience a truly biblical whirlwind of death.

 

“Where previously you could do 40 or 50 strikes a day, we now have the ability to conduct hundreds of strikes a day. That in itself changes the equation completely for the regime,” retired Vice Admiral Bob Harward, a onetime deputy commander of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), told the Jerusalem Post. “I don’t think anyone really understands the scale or capacity we have because no one’s ever seen it before.”

 

If Trump green-lights strikes on Iranian targets, Harward anticipates a phased approach. First, U.S. forces (in possible coordination with Israeli forces — an acknowledgement that Iran will make no distinction between the U.S. and its allies if war breaks out) will hit Iranian military targets. Ballistic missile launchers, air-defense assets, and the Iranian proxies throughout the region that can retaliate against U.S. personnel, as well as its partners’ forces, will be neutralized at the outset. Next, “You’re going to look at infrastructure,” Harward said — “the things that enable the regime and the [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] to suppress the people.”

 

“If it does happen, this will be illuminating for everyone to understand where we have come in terms of size, scale, speed, and capacity,” Harward speculated, “be it Russia or China.”

 

There is a lot of conflicting information circulating about the scope and duration of the strikes Trump envisions. Even the objective of this mission is in doubt. For the moment, preserving ambiguity serves the president’s interests. But it is unlikely that Trump would pursue only the kind of “limited strike” he’s entertaining now for the benefit of the journalists who are expected to convey the president’s apparent trepidation to Iranian war planners. A restrained approach wouldn’t make much sense.

 

The regime in Tehran faces a use-it-or-lose-it scenario, and it may decline to hold its deterrent capabilities in reserve when the shooting starts. The wisest course would be to unleash the unimaginable might of U.S. air and naval forces at the start of hostilities, neutralizing Iran’s retaliatory capabilities and leveling the symbols of the regime’s authority in an effort to reignite the anti-regime protests the Iranian clerisy so brutally crushed in January.

 

Such a course of action would not only weaken the regime in Tehran, perhaps fatally, ridding the West of a 50-year thorn in its side. It would also prove demonstrative.

 

China is watching to see what the United States can do. How fast can it move its forces around the globe? How long can it sustain power projection? How do its air and maritime logistics bridges function under strain? How long can its munitions last given the sortie tempo that is envisioned in press accounts previewing the forthcoming strikes? How well does its alliance structure hold up under the strain of a sustained engagement with a hostile nation — an enemy that gets a vote and will attempt to retaliate against America and its allies both in the Middle East and farther afield?

 

If it comes to a fight, as it increasingly looks like it will, the American mission in the Persian Gulf will be a fraught contest. It could unfold over weeks, and the risk to U.S. service personnel and civilians is real. President Trump should level with the American people about what this campaign will entail, and he should do so soon. This will be a national project, and Americans’ participation in it must be cultivated.

 

We cannot know just how this conflict will unfold. But one thing we can be sure of is that the world has never seen what is about to be unleashed against the agents of the most malignant regime on earth. The world is about to get an eyeful.