Operation Epic Fury — Day 25 Situation Report

Twenty-five days of daily tracking — Iranian ordnance expenditure, Strait of Hormuz ship attacks, and energy-market impact — drawn exclusively from target-country defence ministries, JINSA, CTP-ISW, FDD, and verified price feeds. No Iranian state sources.

What the data can and cannot show

This report is built on a strict evidentiary perimeter. Every launch figure derives from an official defence-ministry statement, government social channel, or secondary compilation (JINSA, CTP-ISW, FDD Long War Journal) that itself cites an official source. No Iranian government, IRGC, or state-media figures are used for daily counts. Energy prices come from FRED/EIA closes, Fortune's intraday Brent snapshots, and AAA weekly averages — with gaps marked explicitly rather than interpolated.

Within those limits, the curves show quite a lot and settle very little.

• Directly shown: daily realised launches by weapon type and target country; verified energy prices on reported days.
• Plausibly indicated: changing strike tempo, category-specific flexibility (drones vs missiles), targeting shifts, and the correlation between strike activity and energy prices.
• Cannot be settled: remaining inventories, hidden reserves, or whether lower firing rates reflect genuine attrition, logistics strain, or deliberate conservation.

Five hidden drivers sit behind every tempo inference: surviving inventory, launcher and basing survivability, reload and transport capacity, target-priority decisions, and escalation-management choices. All are opaque.

Part I · Ordnance — the four phases

Day 1 fired a pre-planned salvo of 1,080 projectiles (503 missiles and 577 drones) that is best treated as distinct from sustained tempo. After Day 1, volume compressed in stages — 300-range through D2–4, 200-range through D5–9, then a 40–100 band from D10 onward with notable surges on Days 14–15, 17, and 19. The data cannot distinguish degradation from rationing; it can only describe the band.

Drones — elastic

Drone launches stay more flexible than the missile arm: surges to 156 on D14, 135 on D17, and 132 on D19 alternate with troughs as low as 42 (D12). Saudi Arabia's share of drones climbed from near-zero early on to 47% on Day 17. This divergence suggests greater surviving operational freedom in the drone force, whatever the cause.

Missiles — constrained

The post-Day-1 missile band reads as a controlled step-down: 98 on D2, 89 on D3, 87 on D4. The D10–18 mean is roughly 31/day. Day 19 bumps to 56 — the Khorramshahr-4 debut with Qadr accompaniment, including 2 KIA at Ramat Gan. Days 20–25 average ~19 with a clear downward drift.

Cumulative by country — 25 days

UAE alone absorbs more than 40% of all projectiles — consistent with Al Jazeera's Day 19 figure of ~3,000 projectiles total with >50% directed at the UAE. Saudi Arabia's share is understated in cumulative because Riyadh publishes no running total; Day 17's 64-drone figure is the most reliably confirmed single-day Saudi number.

Part II · Energy

The ordnance curves land inside the price curves. Brent opened the war at $70.69 pre-war, jumped to $77.24 on the first trading day, crossed $100 by Day 14, and peaked at $113.71 on Day 20 (March 19) before Trump's "productive conversations" remark triggered a ~10% crash on Day 24. It closed Day 25 at $102.47.

US gasoline (AAA)

Pump prices lag crude by roughly 7–14 days, which means the Day 20 Brent peak has not yet fully propagated. The national average moved from $2.98 pre-war to $3.956 on Day 25 — a 98-cent, 33% gain in twenty-five days. Further increases are likely even without further escalation.

Part III · Assessment — interpreting the decline

The decline in daily launches is the central analytical question. Two explanations are compatible with the curves, and the data alone cannot pick a winner. The honest approach is to separate what the curves themselves show from external claims about damage.

Strait of Hormuz — ship attacks

Eighteen confirmed ship attacks through Day 12 (March 11), per UKMTO and JMIC bulletins. Too sparse for rate analysis, but the weapon-environment matching is legible: missiles in the Strait, USVs at range, fast-boat boardings in shallows. The post-March-11 cessation may reflect achieved closure, reduced traffic, or an operational pause — all three are consistent with the data.

Data quality notes

Confidence varies sharply by country. These are the load-bearing caveats a careful reader should carry out of this report.

• Saudi Arabia publishes no running cumulative missile total. Individual day counts are derived from specific MoD intercept announcements; Day 17's 64 drones is the most reliably confirmed single-day figure.
• Kuwait: only the first 36-hour figure (97 missiles + 283 drones) is confirmed directly from MoD; subsequent days are inferred from JINSA incident reports.
• Qatar: Day 1 = 66 missiles per the MoI head; Day 13 salvo = 14 missiles per Qatar MoD. Cumulative 180 missiles / 69 drones by Day 16.
• Bahrain: Day 15 cumulative 125 + 203; Day 21 = 139 + 238; Day 23 = 143 + 242.
• Israel: INSS reports ~200 missiles in the early days; IDF Day 21 release puts cumulative at 365 missiles; Israeli military correspondents put Day 25 cumulative at 400+ missiles. Khorramshahr-4 confirmed on Day 19.
• Jordan: only the 36-hour figure (13 + 49) is officially confirmed; no systematic subsequent data.

Quality tags across the 25 days: Confirmed 17 days, Estimated 7 days (derived from cumulative arithmetic), Partial 1 day (Day 25, reporting window still open at 18:00 GST).