Iran War, Night Twelve: Trump Vows to 'Bomb and Destroy' a Bridge or Power Plant for Every Ship Iran Hits

CENTCOM confirmed a twelfth consecutive night of US strikes against Iran early Thursday, as President Trump escalated his public warnings with a specific new threat: for every ship Iran targets in the Strait of Hormuz, the United States will "bomb and destroy" an Iranian bridge or power plant. Iranian state media reported explosions across seven provinces overnight, including a strike on an electrical installation near the Bushehr nuclear power plant — a target category that, if confirmed, sits uncomfortably close to the kind of nuclear-adjacent infrastructure that has drawn international concern throughout the war.

Iran answered Trump's threat with one of its own. An official quoted in Iranian media said Tehran would respond in kind by striking infrastructure and energy facilities across the wider region — not just US assets — if the bombing campaign against Iranian infrastructure continues. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps separately claimed a new wave of strikes Thursday morning targeting US military bases in both Kuwait and Jordan, continuing the pattern from recent nights of the war's front expanding into Gulf states that aren't formal parties to the conflict.

The maritime dimension of the war escalated in parallel. Yemen's Houthis, having declared a naval blockade against Saudi Arabia earlier this week, claimed to have struck two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea early Thursday — the first reported attacks on actual vessels since the blockade announcement, moving the threat from declared to demonstrated. CENTCOM, meanwhile, says it has now redirected nine commercial vessels and disabled one as part of the US military's own ongoing blockade operations against ships attempting to move through Iranian ports.

The financial toll is now being stated in public dollar figures rather than left to outside estimates. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Congress the war has cost $37.5 billion to date, and the Trump administration is formally requesting billions more in supplemental funding to sustain operations — a number that sits well below the long-run trillion-dollar estimates from Harvard's Linda Bilmes covered on this site, but represents the first official, on-the-record acknowledgment of the war's direct budgetary cost from the Pentagon itself.

Trump's bridge-and-power-plant threat marks a deliberate shift in how the US is framing retaliation: rather than responding to Iranian actions with strikes on comparable military targets, the new formula ties consequences directly to Iran's civilian and dual-use infrastructure, applied automatically and publicly announced in advance. Whether that kind of explicit, mechanical retaliation formula deters further attacks on Hormuz shipping or simply removes any remaining ambiguity that might have left room for de-escalation is now the operative question heading into a war that has gone from days to nights to, as of this week, a running dollar count that Congress will have to reckon with directly.