From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Ketrowaf.

This is the Daily.

Nearly three weeks into the war in Iran, the U.S. and Israel have largely decimated the regime's missile capacity,

taken out key leaders, and disrupted its central command.

And yet, Iran has not backed down.

In fact, the regime has become more hardened and is wreaking more havoc than ever.

Today, my colleague Eric Schmidt, on how Iran continues to challenge the most powerful military in the world and what President Trump's options are for getting out of this conflict.

It's Thursday, March 19th. So, Eric, we had you on the show 10th,

to lay out where things stood, not in terms of rhetoric or stated goals, things that have been pretty hard to nail down, but in terms of hard facts, what has actually happened on the ground.

And here we are almost at the end of week three of this war, and we want to do something similar.

So please orient us.

Where do things stand right now?

So here we are, as you said, nearly three weeks into this campaign.

And from a military standpoint, the commanders think they're doing pretty well.

The United States is decimating the radical Iranian regime's military.

In a way the world has never seen before.

They think they're actually a bit of ahead of schedule.

In less than two weeks, we've rendered the Iranian Navy combat ineffective

and continue to attack naval vessels.

They've hit over 120 Iranian naval vessels. This includes ships that lay mines in the

Gulf. They've struck more than 7,800 targets in Iran. These are things like missiles, missile

launchers, drone storage areas. And this is the U.S. and Israel or just the U.S.?

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