The official said that the Donald Trump administration is planning for a wider war but cautioned that even an expanded conflict would fall short of a full-scale war.

The expansion of US operations will be constrained by dwindling stockpiles of air-defence and long-range munitions, as well as limitations on its ability to deploy additional troops and aircraft to the West Asia because of battle damage, the official said.

"We do not have enough to safely sustain operations, and I don't think the White House is aware of that," the official further told the newspaper.

The admission about the limitations of the US military comes at a time when Iranian strikes have increased the human and material toll on the United States in recent weeks. Over the past two weeks, at least three US soldiers have been killed and nearly 100 injured. Iranian strikes have also several aircraft in addition to other infrastructure such as radar systems at American bases across West Asia.

In recent weeks, the American war on Iran has been reduced from maximalist goals of dismantling its nuclear programme, overthrowing the Islamic Republic, and smashing the Iranian military to smithereens to keeping the Strait of Hormuz open. The US military is failing to achieve even that modest objective.

As Firstpost's Madhur Sharma previously flagged, the stalemate in the Strait is of Trump's own making. The memorandum of understanding (MoU) that he signed last month effectively granted Iran sovereign rights over the waterway, and once Iran began exercising those sovereign rights, he ordered attacks on Iran. Now that the Strait has effectively been closed by both sides —Iran dictating passage of ships only on the designated routes and the United States blocking all traffic to and from Iranian ports— Trump has once again found himself struggling to secure a face-saving exit.

Reopening Strait will require overwhelming force. US doesn't have it

As Firstpost previously covered, experts have flagged that reopening the Strait by military means would require the deployment of significantly more fighter aircraft, warships, and tens of thousands of additional troops to the region.

But Trump has repeatedly shown that he has little appetite for ground operations, and a US official has now admitted that the military does not have enough missiles for a full-scale campaign.

That means the United States and Iran are locked in a cycle of strikes in which each side continues attacking in the hope that the other will blink first.