Testifying before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday, Rubio stated that recent American military operations had drastically diminished Iran’s military capabilities, effectively stripping its conventional forces of any credible deterrent power.
“What they tried to do is they were going to try to build a conventional shield and hide behind that conventional shield,” Rubio told lawmakers.
The top American diplomat emphasised that Tehran’s maritime forces had suffered a catastrophic blow during the hostilities. Dismissing the current state of their naval assets, he remarked, “What’s left of Iran’s navy is a ‘bunch of Boston Whalers with machine guns on them,'” adding that the fleet had been severely degraded.
Beyond naval power, Rubio noted that targeted US actions had heavily impacted Iran’s broader defence infrastructure, specifically hitting its manufacturing lines for unmanned aerial vehicles. While he admitted that cheap drone technology remains a persistent global threat, he pointed out that Tehran’s production capacity had been “eroded.”
“This is a pervasive problem around the world. The economics of it are something we have to solve for,” Rubio stated, while maintaining that the Islamic Republic’s “conventional shield” had been “substantially eroded” by the recent strikes.
