The Strait of Hormuz war widened over the weekend, and for once the most consequential fighting was not over Iran at all. It was over Jordan, where American Patriot batteries spent part of Monday morning shooting down Iranian ballistic missiles aimed at an air base that most people outside the region have never heard of.

By Tuesday, US Central Command said its answering wave of strikes on Iran was finished, roughly five hours after it began. The targets, according to CENTCOM, were the things that let Iran reach out and touch shipping: air defence systems, command centres, and the launch sites for its drones and rockets.

What follows is a sequence worth laying out carefully, because the numbers being claimed by each side do not agree.

Larak Island, and what was on it

The immediate trigger came late on Sunday 30 August, when US forces hit two Iranian rocket launchers on Larak Island, a small Iranian island sitting almost on top of the shipping lanes at the mouth of the Gulf. According to Gulf News, the launchers were being readied to fire rockets carrying sea mines, which is about as direct a threat to tanker traffic as it is possible to assemble. Iranian state media reported two people killed and several wounded.

Mining the strait, or even credibly threatening to, is Iran's oldest lever. It does not require air superiority or a functioning air force. It requires launchers close to the water and the willingness to use them, which is exactly what the strike was meant to remove.

Thirty minutes over Azraq

Iran's answer came in the early hours of Monday, and it went to Jordan. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps fired ballistic missiles at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base near Azraq, east of Amman, and claimed to have caused heavy damage there and at a second Jordanian site.

Muwaffaq Salti is the Royal Jordanian Air Force's principal fast-jet base, home to its F-16 Fighting Falcon fleet, and it also hosts US forces. It is named after a Jordanian Hunter pilot killed in 1966, a story we told in Il pilota il cui nome è sul gate.

The counts do not match, and it is worth being honest about that. Gulf News reported 32 ballistic missiles launched, with the Jordanian army intercepting eight and a US source saying nearly all incoming missiles had been intercepted. The Swiss outlet watson reported ten intercepted by Jordanian air defence with three more falling in remote areas and no casualties. President Trump said American air defences had intercepted every Iranian missile capable of doing damage. The IRGC, predictably, claimed heavy damage.

What is not disputed is the intensity of the defensive effort. Gulf News reported that US Army crews fired somewhere between 96 and 128 PAC-3 MSE interceptors, at an estimated cost of 380 to 640 million dollars, to defend against a single night's barrage.

The arithmetic nobody likes

That interceptor bill is the story hiding inside the story. A PAC-3 MSE round costs several million dollars. A ballistic missile fired from Iran costs a fraction of that, and a one-way attack drone costs a rounding error. Every night like Monday is a trade in which the defender spends far more than the attacker, and no magazine is bottomless.

Trump also described Iran as totally defeated militarily and called it a failed nation. From Tehran, the message was noticeably less combative.

A war that keeps recruiting bystanders

The most striking feature of this round is its geographic spread. Iran claimed to have attacked Al Menhad Air Base in the United Arab Emirates with dozens of drones. Kuwait reported intercepting drones over its territory. Iranian media reported strikes against a US base in Bahrain. None of these countries is a belligerent.

Inside Iran, the IRGC reported that a wedding celebration at Sirik was hit, killing four people including a child and wounding 63. Casualty claims from either side in this conflict have been hard to verify independently, and that one is no exception, but it is the sort of report that shapes how the war is understood domestically.

CENTCOM's framing has not changed since the campaign began in May: keep the tankers moving. Roughly four months on, the method still involves flattening Iranian air defences faster than they can be rebuilt, and the geography of the retaliation keeps getting wider. The Gulf's air-defence crews are the ones absorbing that expansion, one very expensive night at a time.

Sources: Gulf News, RFE/RL, CNBC, CNN, Stars and Stripes, watson.ch