Iran doubled the hull count in each round of the Gulf tanker exchange

Ratios survive fog better than counts do. AMK_Mapping_ puts roughly 30 missiles against close to 100 PAC-2/3 interceptors, HormuzReport puts 50-plus interceptors against about 13 MRBMs, and Osinttechnical counts 60-plus ^[6][7][8]; the first pair works out at about 3.3 interceptors per inbound, the second closer to 3.8 ^[1][2]. Photographers on the ground counted 71, a figure Naked Capitalism lists inside the same divergence without saying which side of the exchange it belongs to ^[9]. Take the low end of each and one night of air defence over Azraq still spent something like three interceptors per Iranian missile, which is what turns Naked Capitalism's description of a Washington husbanding limited resources ahead of the midterms into a constraint with a denominator ^[14].

The tanker ledger is messier, or rather the interesting mess is in who gets counted. HormuzLetter's tally has the US hitting 3 on 5 September and Iran answering with 6, then the US hitting 5 and Iran answering with 10, a clean doubling that puts the running score at 8 against 16 ^[10][3]. Naked Capitalism cautions that Hormuz Letter often posts unverified rumours and Iranian claims as fact ^[11], and the IRGC's own statement carried by PressTV counts two US vessels, eight oil tankers and ten other ships targeted for entering what it calls a prohibited zone in the Strait ^[12], which is 20 hulls against five destroyed tankers, or four for one ^[4]. The ten other ships are the part with a market in them: on the IRGC's account they were hit for their route rather than their flag ^[12].

The price claim is the thinnest thing in the file. Over $100 a barrel sits in the publisher's headline ^[5] with no benchmark, no timestamp and no series behind it in the post, so treating that number as evidence of a durable reset in supply risk is reading a headline rather than a market. What the material does support is the widening of the target set. Iran has said that continued US strikes on its tankers will be answered by destroying Gulf state energy infrastructure ^[4], and that moves the exposure off cargoes, which are fungible and insurable, and onto installations belonging to governments that are not party to the exchange.

Two readings compete. In the first, the neutral hulls and the infrastructure warning are signalling, and CENTCOM's insistence that no American personnel were harmed ^[2] alongside Naked Capitalism's point that NO1 inflated near-misses on US destroyers into hits ^[13] describes an exchange both sides are still calibrating to survive, in which case the premium decays. In the second, the zone rather than the flag is now the unit of risk, and the next round costs a Gulf facility rather than an Iranian one. The evidence tilts to the second, mostly because Iran stated the escalation in advance and because the American account arrives pre-minimised: CENTCOM conceded losing the captured Arundil sea drone while calling it defective and an older model ^[15]. What would break the read is a next round confined to Iranian-flagged hulls, no Gulf installation touched, and interceptor counts falling back toward one for one.