President Donald Trump has threatened to attack Iranian desalination plants, adding to earlier warnings that the United States might bomb Iran’s energy and electricity infrastructure. The latest threat puts water and power systems inside the frame of a military strike, but the damage would fall hardest on civilians, not on Iran’s armed forces.
The reason is simple: Iran’s military runs mostly on middle distillates, especially diesel and jet fuel, and it has little need for the parts of the system Trump is talking about. Iran effectively no longer has an air force and has already curbed jet fuel consumption. Diesel can be stored for months, and the military accounts for only a small share of Iran’s total diesel use. In 2008, the U.S. military’s distillate demand reached 67,000 barrels per day, or 1.7 percent of total U.S. distillate demand. Iran’s total diesel consumption in 2024 stood at 684,000 barrels per day, a scale that suggests Iranian forces will almost certainly continue to have ample access to diesel for military operations and will be able to fight on.
What makes the threat more serious today is the reach of the infrastructure under discussion. The 92 million people who live in Iran rely on electricity for life-sustaining services, including cooling and hospital operations. The article also links refineries and the electricity grid to water infrastructure, meaning an attack on one system could quickly spread pain into another. That makes the civilian cost easier to see than the military payoff.
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That is the tension at the center of the threat: a strike on desalination plants, power stations and related infrastructure could deepen hardship for the Iranian public while leaving the military with the fuel it needs to keep operating. Trump’s warnings may raise the pressure, but the facts on the ground point to a familiar outcome in wars against national infrastructure — the people who depend on it suffer first and longest.
