A major flu outbreak has sickened nearly 160 troops at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas less than two months after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that U.S. troops would no longer be required to be vaccinated for the flu, defense officials said. The outbreak at the base in San Antonio raced through an Air Force Basic Military Training wing, where new recruits sleep on bunk beds in open bays and share meals at large communal tables. A trainee in his sixth week of basic training died after falling ill on Friday and being taken to Brooke Army Medical Center, the Air Force said in a news release. It was not immediately clear whether the death of the trainee, Keon McDaniel, was related to the flu outbreak. A comprehensive medical review into his death is underway to determine the cause, according to the Air Force.

In the weeks since Mr. Hegseth’s vaccine policy took effect on April 21, only about 40 percent of Air Force trainees have opted to take the vaccine, which had long been mandatory, an Air Force official said. In the aftermath of the outbreak, the Air Force issued an exception to the voluntary vaccine policy, requiring that all recruits at Lackland get flu shots — part of a broader effort to stem the virus’s spread. Mr. Hegseth cast his decision to make the flu vaccine optional as a matter of religious freedom and medical autonomy. “Under the disastrous Biden administration, this Pentagon waged an unrelenting war on our warriors on many fronts, including when it came to denying them simple medical autonomy and the freedom to express their religious convictions,” he said in a video announcing his decision in April.

WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK A MILITARY IS? giving up your autonomy is kind of a key component of serving in a highly hierarchical organization. I bet this ghoul wouldn't have the same "b-but muh autonomy" take for soldiers, who, let's say, refused to murder civilians in Iran...

He described the longstanding flu vaccine requirement as an “absurd, overreaching” mandate that had served to “weaken our warfighting capabilities.” At the time, many lawmakers, including some prominent Republicans, expressed puzzlement and dismay at Mr. Hegseth’s decision. “The reason it was mandatory was to enhance readiness,” Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said shortly after the new policy was announced. “You know, you do give up certain rights when you take the oath,” said Mr. Wicker, who is an Air Force veteran. “It’s just part of it.” Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, on Thursday defended Mr. Hegseth’s handling of the vaccine policy, saying the changes were “based upon thorough risk assessments” designed to maximize the readiness and lethality of the force. Air Force officials described the recent flu outbreak as “localized” to the basic training wing and said that medical personnel were monitoring and offering antiviral medication to trainees who were in contact with those who were ill. “Once they are cleared by medical professionals, they will return to training,” an Air Force statement said.

When asked about the matter, a White House spokeswoman referred The New York Times to the Pentagon. The flu outbreak highlights the risks of Mr. Hegseth’s and the Trump administration’s broader approach to vaccines and public health. Some members of the administration, particularly those involved in public health agencies, have been critical of vaccinations broadly. While he has changed his tone since the spring, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a history of loudly questioning the safety and effectiveness of many standard vaccines. Last summer he rescinded federal recommendations for all flu vaccines containing thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that the anti-vaccine movement has falsely linked to autism. President Trump once championed the Covid vaccine, during the initial months of the pandemic while he was still president in 2020. But he soon grew resistant to the mandates related to that vaccine, particularly as his base of supporters questioned its safety. Despite his administration’s actions on both the Covid and flu vaccines, Mr. Trump received the two shots in October 2025 at Walter Reed Military Medical Center.

Since taking office, Mr. Hegseth has fought to ensure that troops who were forced to leave the military for refusing to take the Covid vaccine are able to return to service at their former rank with back pay and benefits. Roughly 8,700 active duty and reserve troops voluntarily or involuntarily left the military after refusing to get vaccinated before that mandate was rescinded in 2023. As of last summer, 13 had been reinstated. In March, Mr. Hegseth extended the deadline to apply for reinstatement to April 1, 2027. U.S. military personnel are still required to get vaccinations for diseases including measles, mumps and polio. Others, such as the anthrax vaccine, may be required depending on risk and military occupation. In April Mr. Hegseth encouraged troops to get the flu vaccine even as he was announcing the policy change to make it optional. “We will not force you because your body, your faith and your convictions are not negotiable,” he said.

A number of the powerful radars that support air and missile defense systems have been disabled or destroyed in the Middle East, and the US military has been relocating radars from other areas to provide coverage. How is that affecting our AMD capabilities not only in the Middle East, but also looking forward to a possible conflict in the Pacific?

That’s the big concern. You can’t operate a THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) battery without a TPY-2 radar. Those are scarce strategic national assets and the country is already scrambling to piece together some replacements and we want to get them out there in the field. The broader strategic context here is that the United States has been pulling stuff out of the Pacific and out of Europe to go to the Middle East. That’s an undeniable reality. It’s hard to argue that is not going to have some potential detrimental impact to our deterrence quotient. Capability is a fundamental component of deterrence. It’s not lost on our adversaries either: the number of interceptors, the number of strike missiles, and yes, the number of radars that have been expended or adversely impacted here.

If you were magically put in charge of air and missile defense and given an unlimited budget, what would be your number one priority? What would you do first and what would you do differently from what we’re doing now?

Well, an unlimited budget is quite the stipulation and thought experiment. But the first thing I would do is put on contract the things that we have said are going to be put on contract and that we know need to be put on contract. I would take a paintball gun and start tagging the companies to go to max production on each of the prioritized munitions, and then move to drone defenses, the Coyotes and the Merops and a handful of non-kinetic things so that the long-waited production ramp can begin. We have identified and admired the problem and even come up with the solutions. Now we need to implement the solutions and start to solve the problem.

US air-and-missile-defense (AMD) systems have shown their worth in the Iran conflict, intercepting wave after wave of attacks from missiles and drones.

yeah, sure

But a number of costly TPY-2 radars have been damaged or destroyed, and stockpiles of munitions components such as solid rocket motors (SRMs) are dwindling, exacerbating concerns about the capability of AMD systems to maintain effectiveness. Breaking Defense discussed the performance of AMD systems, munitions stockpile concerns and what needs to happen to ensure future deterrence capability with Tom Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

...

Let’s talk about SRMs [Solid Rocket Motors] specifically, which were the subject of a recent report by CSIS. Is it harder to replace SRMs than it is to replace other components of AMD interceptors?

The answer is yes and no, and it just depends on the round. For some things it’s more the dependent variable and in other instances it’s not. It may be the seeker, it may be the avionics, it may be the electronics in some other manner. It just depends, but these relationships are also coupled. Expectations about SRM delivery may shape expectations about seeker delivery and vice versa. The short answer here is that everybody is kind of ramping up and everybody needs to ramp up together.

How has the inconsistency of the demand signals over the last couple decades led to challenges for the industrial base to quickly ramp up SRM production?

The defense industrial base for SRMs is the defense industrial base that we paid for. We also have the defense industrial base that the government has created and curated and shaped and incentivized and disincentivized in 17 different ways. We have the industrial base that was asked for and that was manufactured by the monopsony customer over several decades. When the customer decides on a dime that they want something completely different and now they’re wagging their finger at the defense industrial base that it created, it is not surprising that it creates some difficulty.

You mentioned that everybody needs to ramp manufacturing up together, but don’t SRMs have some additional manufacturing complexities due to considerations such as safety regulations?

Well, they do. From the study interviews and site visits that we did that I don’t think safety regulations are the thing to short. SRMs are dangerous. People do die from time to time and it’s okay to spread buildings around and to have berms between buildings. Safety matters because people matter. We can’t build these things without people. So it’s not the need for regulation or the need for safety by any means. Having said that, there were some things that emerged during this process such as, for instance, the existence of redundant and contradictory regulations. In addition to the Pentagon’s fairly exhaustive and prudent regulations, there’s also the jurisdictional phenomenon that a lot of this is regulated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. That’s interesting and this creates dilemmas where you’ve got various objects that are regulated by two different agencies, very different agencies, with different rules, which is not necessarily productive. Perhaps that’s something that a future NDAA or other legislative mechanism takes up. Aren’t the DoD’s regulations good enough? Do we really need a second regulatory organization for solid rocket motor things? The question of redundancy is an interesting object of legislative scrutiny that efficiency and also just good government might be worth revisiting.

In the recent report CSIS released on SRMs for AMD, one interesting note is that the demise of the space shuttle program has created some unused manufacturing capacity for SRMs. Can you expand on that?

The shutdown on the shuttle is a part of why the demand went down. But many of the facilities exist for more capacity than they are producing today. At a number of sites we visited, we would hear from industry and see facilities that are not functioning at their max capacity. The reason for that is not that they can’t. At one facility people pointed to a building with mixing bowls that are only used two days a week. Why are they only used two days a week? Because the government demand only necessitates they’re being used two days a week. Could they be used five days a week? Yes, they could, but the government contracts are not there to use them five days a week. Could they be? If they were, the answer is yes. It really comes down to “physician, heal thyself.” The customer with this collective existence needs to have and to communicate a clear demand signal.

Now that there has been some time to look back at everything that has happened during the Iran conflict, how would you evaluate the current effectiveness of US air and missile defense?

The effectiveness has been quite good, especially in terms of the ballistic missile defense engagements. It’s been so good that we are, unfortunately, beginning to deplete our inventory. As we’ve noted in a number of CSIS reports over the years, including late last year warning of this problem, this was a problem in the 12-day war last summer. I’m in print saying at the time that we couldn’t afford to do it again. Well, we did it again, and that’s kind of a problem. It’s a problem because it is a depletion of our inventories. The good news is that few ballistic missiles have been hitting. Some have, to be sure, been getting through, but we’ve been engaging a lot. It used to be that certain folks would crow that you can’t hit a bullet with a bullet. That cottage industry has gone silent. Now the complaint is that we aren’t hitting bullets with bullets cheaply enough, and that we are running out of anti-bullet bullets. On the air defense side there’ve been hundreds and hundreds of engagements of drones, with lots of them being shot down. Unfortunately, there’s also a decent number of the Shaheds getting through. That’s not necessarily a strike on the capability of the defenses as much as it is a limitation of their capacity and the challenge of being everywhere all the time. Because these things are maneuverable on a certain trajectory, the defense problem is almost by its nature a point defense problem. Ballistic missile defense, by contrast, is an area defense problem, and it’s able to do that because ballistics have a predictable trajectory.

does he... not know about terminal maneuvering? a capability that the Iranians have demonstrated on multiple occasions? fuckin' hell, well at least we can guess that it's even worse for the empire than what even the more pessimistic think thank guys are letting on

But in the same way that it’s hard to know where an airplane is going to go until it gets there, you need to have your point defense defenses co-located with your defended asset. The corollary to that is that some of these things may be getting through because we don’t have drone defenses in the right place at the right time and that’s just the nature of things.

You say that some members of the Shahed family of drones should really be classified more as cruise missiles. What capabilities make you say that?

This is a bit of a pet peeve about what might be called a doctrinal or taxonomy problem. It wasn’t that long ago when the air defense taxonomy was fairly straightforward: it was ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft. But as I’ve written on a number of occasions, the increasing and diversifying threat spectrum has become so proliferated and has so diffused that those easy distinctions are becoming blurred. In short, we need a new taxonomy, or way of describing the threat spectrum. To take one example, there are these aircraft that we call drones or UAVs that may be either fixed-wing or rotary-wing. And some of them have substantial ranges: the Shahed-238 has a range that cannot be described as anything but a long-range cruise missile. The technological maturity, their reliability, and the availability of these things is blurring and challenging the taxonomies of the past. When something can go 2,000 kilometers and it’s got wings, one doesn’t really need to come up with fancy nomenclatures like “one-way attack UAV” or “loitering munition.” That thing deserves to be called a cruise missile.

As you said, drones are relatively easy to kill, but it’s harder to identify targets when there’s a swarm coming at you as opposed to a few missiles.

There is the large salvo problem. It’s the fact that they can hug the terrain or be below the horizon for most of their flight. That’s going to translate to shorter detection time. It’s not just detection, it’s also tracking and identification. You have to not just barely see a blip on the radar screen, but you have to have confidence that it’s not an American aircraft or an American drone.

Notably, what we do know is that a rising rate of suicide among male spouses is contributing to the overall rising numbers, accounting for nearly two-thirds of military spouse suicides. And according to DoD’s report, “the findings are significant because both the military and veterans’ populations have experienced increases in deaths by suicide in the past 25 years coinciding with the decades-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” A 20-plus-year war that is already fought can’t be somehow magically erased from post-9/11 military families’ lives, no matter how much any president, defense secretary, politician, or recruiting officer might wish to. But however uncomfortable to the modern political and analyst class the lessons of those 25 years might be, when it comes to the “Force behind the Force,” the lesson cannot be clearer. America’s military families will not again be willing to shoulder the burden of fighting America’s wars while America itself goes shopping. The wages of Donald Rumsfeld’s gamble to fight the Global War on Terror without expanding the military and multiplying the numbers of uniformed shoulders to carry it has now come due. His sleight of hand, to heavily operationalize the traditional “reserve” forces of the National Guard and Reserves instead of raising troop levels, only created a “wicked problem” with its own cascading difficult consequences that those two military components are still attempting to figure out. That extends now to the fraying, unofficial pipeline of military recruitment that the all-volunteer force has relied on for decades, the military family. And that is a part of the 251-year-long record that the U.S. Army — and the rest of the armed forces — have to contend with in practical terms, whether one fiscal year’s recruitment numbers are momentarily trending up or downward.

Today, the U.S. Army turns 251 ... But despite the Army’s reasons to celebrate, there is an aspect of today’s military that ought to give us pause: Many of America’s military families — the backbone of our armed forces — are not happy. Despite Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s triumphant announcement to this year’s West Point graduates that 2026 recruitment numbers hit their fiscal targets four months early, there’s been a steady decrease in military families’ willingness to recommend military service to their sons and daughters. In 2016, that number stood at 55 percent, according to the Blue Star Families Annual Survey; the most recent data reveals it’s now down to 37 percent. Meanwhile, the Army’s own Career Engagement Survey shows that “family” consistently ranks among the top reasons for soldiers of all ranks and designations to choose to leave the Army. Similarly, the Department of Defense’s Office of People Analytics’ most recent Active Duty Spouse Survey showed that one in three active-duty spouses favor leaving the military — the highest percentage ever recorded.

Since the end of conscription in 1973, there’s been an open secret about America’s military, and it’s twofold. First, spousal support is the prime predictor of actual member retention or staying in the military. But even before retention surfaces as a concern, initial military recruitment has been over-reliant on “legacy service members,” meaning on a repeat cadre of military families, to fill the service’s ranks.

love how the US managed to reinvent hereditary warrior-castes

While less than 1 percent of the U.S. population serves in the military today, over 60 percent of those who do come from military families. For the Army, that percentage is an astonishing 80 percent, with 25 percent having a mother or father who wore the uniform. Civil-military relations professors have been fretting about the military becoming a caste system. Their theoretical headache looks to be rather beside the point compared to the challenge military recruiters will shortly have to get even those legacy young adults to their signing desks: America is already experiencing a 13 percent projected decline in 18-year-olds. Only 23 percent of young Americans meet military eligibility requirements, while only 10 percent of young adults even have a propensity to serve — one important deciding factor in that propensity being a family tradition of service. Has the Army suddenly become unfriendly to military families? Theoretically, no. Congress assumed responsibility for military families with the passage of the Dependents Allowance Act in 1942, followed by the Department of Defense creating the Office of Family Policy in 1982, and it has increasingly accepted the reality that the well-being and readiness of military families is crucial to the strength and readiness, if not the resilience, of America’s fighting forces. The suite of programs for military families is such that in the post-9/11 years, the Pentagon bolstered the Military Families Readiness System (MFRS) to provide the support infrastructure military families need to navigate the military lifestyle’s related challenges at the level of lived daily life.

But combing through numerous studies and surveys from government, nonprofit, and advocacy groups, the Valor Institute concluded last year that it’s no wonder why the military families this system is supposed to be helping are left frustrated instead. The system in practice is messy, siloed, and fragmented, with layers of bureaucracy at every turn, and the programs’ “effectiveness is limited by a lack of coordinated monitoring and communication,” not to mention being without proper assessment measures in place to determine what is, or is not, working. Spousal unemployment, financial stress, childcare challenges, varying quality of health-care and education systems — these have been systemic concerns within military families for decades. Even prior to Congress’s authorizing the 14.5 percent junior enlisted pay raise last year, the metrics actually show active-duty and reserve spouses’ scoring better in general than their civilian counterparts for financial well-being. While that arguably only skims the surface of a much more complex situation that involves various grades of enlisted and types of officers, as the Valor Institute also acknowledges, it does throw into relief the truth that something beyond their finances is clearly going on with military families’ sense of well-being. And that something, or perhaps the sum of those somethings, is currently costing them too dearly to stay in the military community.

When military families report on the greatest stressors chipping away at their well-being, military spouse unemployment and underemployment rank high, year after year. “PCSing” — the moves every two-and-a-half years or so that the military calls Permanent Change of Station — is one culprit with many cascading effects: Around 400,000 service members PCS every year, while many of their significant others work in occupations like teaching, nursing, and cosmetology that require licenses that don’t necessarily, or easily, transcend state lines.

here we see how the imperial military eats itself alive - the need to maintain a presence all over the world means constantly juggling troops around, which they're not very happy about, especially as they age - traveling the world from base to base might seem cool and adventurous when you're 20, but not so much when you're in your 30s and are either going to be abandoning your family, or dragging them with you so they also suffer

Then there is the always thorny issue of childcare. Many military spouses are de facto single parents for extended periods of time, with 74 percent experiencing a spouse deployed for longer than 30 days. Since the military profession is a 24/7 rather than a traditional 9-to-5 job, and the military mission always comes first, the non-military spouse is forced to wear all hats on limited information and at a moment’s notice. Childcare assistance is thus not a luxury but often a stark necessity. Unemployment, finances, childcare, and difficult-to-navigate health-care and education systems cannot by themselves explain the sharp and sustained decline in family satisfaction with military life since 2012. But there may be the beginnings of an answer hiding in plain sight within another line of inquiry on the annual Blue Star Families survey: When looking at issues related to “morale, belonging, the nation’s support, and the future of service,” Blue Star Families researchers discovered that the strength of morale among active-duty service members was directly correlated with their sense of work-life balance, and that both morale and positive assessment of personal work-life balance directly correlated with the likelihood to recommend service. What a “normal” work-life balance even looks like when one’s job is fighting wars is a dissertation for another day. But the survey respondents gave a clear indication of what they meant when, months before anyone had an Operation Epic Fury in mind, 83 percent indicated “it was likely or very likely the U.S. would be involved in a major conflict in the next 3–5 years.” But it’s the following revelation that should give us pause: More than half of those active-duty respondents “did not think the general public would be prepared to support military families if the U.S. were to enter a major conflict.”

Without a strong sense of assurance bolstering their confidence that military families would receive the long-term support they would need in the event of their soldiers participating in war-level operations, military families are reluctant to remain in an already-taxing environment, let alone recommend to their military-age children embracing such a lifestyle. Lack of patriotism is hardly the contention here. The great camo-clad elephant in the base housing living room then cannot be avoided. Military families have reluctance about future conflicts because it was they and their families who shouldered the burden of a nation at war for nearly 25 years. Despite not donning the uniform themselves, the families of post-9/11 service members have already done tours of service. And all the evidence points to one understandable fact: However patriotic they might be, they are simply exhausted. Since 2015, anxiety and depression have been measurably on the rise among military spouses. Finding community, friends, and social and/or peer support is a difficulty they feel particularly keenly, according to a just-released study by the Institute of Military & Veteran Family Wellness. The rate of suicide among military spouses has also risen steadily since 2011, according to the DoD’s report released in April, and these spouses are young: More than 80 percent were under age 40. In 2023, the most recent year for which data is available, 146 military family members, including 98 spouses and 48 dependents, died by suicide. Whether or to what extent any of these were influenced by the lockdowns and strictures of the Covid-19 years remains opaque. There’s still much that we don’t know about military family suicides, with DoD’s 2023 report being the first that had enough data to even begin to examine reliably long-term trends within this demographic.

The Senate Armed Services Committee included a provision in its version of fiscal year 2027 National Defense Authorization Act that would reduce funding for Hegseth’s travel to no more than 25% until the committee receives what lawmakers describe as overdue reports and supporting documents. The committee approved its version of the NDAA last week in an 18-9 vote, sending the bill to the full Senate. House lawmakers advanced their version the week prior. The provision cuts Hegseth’s travel funding by 75% until the committee receives the civilian harm investigations for three separate 2025 Yemen strikes and the February strike on the girls’ school in Minab, Iran.

On Feb. 28, the first day of the Iran war, a school in southern Iran was struck by a U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile, killing at least 165 people, most of them schoolgirls. President Donald Trump claimed that Iran could have obtained the missile, despite questions about how Tehran would have gained access. The strike has been under investigation by the Pentagon since March. Speaking on Wednesday in France, Trump was asked about the investigation and whether anyone in the Trump administration would be held accountable. “It’s such a strange question to be asked at this state because you’re talking about a long time ago, but nobody did that on purpose,” he said in response. “Mistakes are made. War is nasty. But I know it’s under investigation, and I could have a report for you tomorrow. I would ask Pete Hegseth that question because they have it under investigation,” he concluded.

Another provision in the Senate NDAA moved to prohibit the use of military funds for the operations against Iran without congressional authorization and restricted travel funding for Hegseth’s office until lawmakers submit a report on how the Iran war has impacted readiness. The amendment failed to pass in a 13-14 vote. Unedited video of strikes conducted by U.S. Southern Command on terrorist organizations that were allegedly smuggling drugs in Latin American waters would also need to be submitted. Since September 2025, the U.S. military has conducted strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean that they alleged were carrying drugs. As of June 16, the military has disclosed 64 strikes that have killed at least 191 people. The committee is also seeking information about the Defense Department procedures for notifying Congress about sensitive military operations.

Lawmakers have previously criticized Hegseth over congressional oversight following reports that a special operations team attacked survivors of an alleged drug-smuggling vessel strike off Venezuela’s coast in September 2025. Hegseth refused to publicly release footage of the attack, instead only showing members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committee. The provision would also require the unredacted investigation by U.S. Special Operations Command into Operation Absolution Resolve, the U.S. military operation executed on Jan. 20 to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Senate lawmakers also requested a certification that shows contractor support for clandestine and intelligence activities and a report on support to Ukraine required under last year’s NDAA.

Firstly. Iran's strikes didn't carry much of a risk of expanding the war - Israel was obviously all-in from the start, and the Gulf states, while they may have publicly pretended that they were just smol beans, were also involved. Note that Iran did not strike European bases, the move that is always demanded from Russia - the Sofia airport in Bulgaria for example was used by the US and would have been in range even with the 2000km limit that had been imposed by Khamenei, and many other airports would have been in range if the Iranians decided to not abide that limit (since it was not necessarily a question of technical limitations, but political). The two notable strikes on targets outside of US/Israel/Gulf countries that risked this, on Cyprus and Diego Garcia, were never confirmed as Iranian, with Iran denying the later one as a false flag - and given that the Israelis immediately came out with a "see, they could strike European capitals with this kind of range!" statement, it may well have been exactly an attempt to compel European countries to expand the war beyond their basing support. Iran also obviously did not strike any industry in Europe or the US.

In Russia's case, direct strikes on European logistical and industrial sites would risk an expansion of the war - and given that Russia is fighting an attritional conflict, introducing a whole bunch of extra NATO troops would throw off their attritional calculus substantially. As it stands, NATO equipment gets to slowly trickle in as aid and be destroyed piece-by-piece, rather than coming in all at once.

Secondly, as far as the ability of long-range strikes (not of the "bomb all civilians" variety, but actually targeted ones like Iran has done) to defeat the enemy without the involvement of ground troops, which has seemingly been vindicated by the Iranian campaign, there is still an important caveat.

The US is at a substantial disadvantage here as an imperial aggressor waging expeditionary warfare far from home. As such, they are reliant on infrastructure from which to attack - "moving infrastructure" in the form of ships, and permanent in the form of bases. Both of these are a very limited resource - the US only has so many bases in the region, and through decades of decay the US Navy has been reduced substantially so it cannot compensate for the lack of physical bases to the same extent as it could have in the past (for example, for the Gulf War the US deployed six aircraft carriers, while for this war it barely managed two, with one of those having its deployment extended for far too long to likely disastrous effects in terms of maintenance, and that's not even counting the laundry fire... although technically I think there was a short interval where there were three at a time, after the Ford returned for a little bit after partial repairs only to eventually be sent back home for good - so they tried managing three at a time, but couldn't sustain it and had to send the third one home).

So, with this more limited set of targets, it was feasible for Iran to sufficiently damage them to degrade the Americans' ability to fight and make the continuation of the war much costlier, due to the more extensive usage of tankers and fancier munitions in order to compensate for the American planes having to fly from further away. Plus, y'know, the Strait. And in the event of defeat in some peripheral region, the empire can just... pack their bags (what's left of them anyway ) and leave. It would be humiliating and deeply politically controversial domestically, of course, and it could have various consequence for the empire down the line (given that they were presumably in the region for some concrete strategic reason), but it is materially possible.

The Ukrainian situation is different - they're on their own ground, neighboring Russia, not sustaining an expedition continents away. There's way more bases and infrastructure for the Russians to contend with, so it would require a much greater investment of resources to destroy all that (and it would have to be a continuous effort, as infrastructure can of course be repaired - as the Iranians themselves demonstrated), and since this war actually involves a ground component, unlike in Iran, one has to weigh the advantages of degrading Ukrainian performance by denying them planes and industrial capacity with the disadvantages of leaving less assets available to support one's own ground troops in their assaults. Russia's airforce is nowhere near as large as the USAF, and has to juggle priorities a lot more. And of course, in the end the Ukrainians can also keep taking advantage of infrastructure in neighboring NATO countries (for example, a lot of repairs are done out in Poland), for which refer to the first point.

Note that at the end of the day, as successful as Iran's campaign was, it has not stopped Israel in Lebanon. A long-range strike campaign may be able to defeat another long-range strike campaign (by hitting more meaningful enemy targets while preventing the enemy from hitting your own meaningful targets thanks to concealment and keeping assets protected in fortifications, thus preserving your firepower), but a ground force, in most circumstances, is going to have to be defeated by another ground force.