As Sun Tzu put it: The best strategy is to foil the enemy's plans. The next is to disrupt their alliances. The third is to attack their army. The worst strategy is to attack their cities.
Really? Two weeks in and you pantywastes want to declare defeat? Nobody sensible didn’t think the strait might be closed. So, no, they didn’t surrender or engender a coup which was (and is) possible.
You don’t have to be maga to want this to succeed. Trump is a walking disinformation machine. Full of happy talk and conflicting BS 24-7. But once they started shooting rioters and Trump threatened the Mullahs if they didn’t stop, the die was cast. If you think Obama’s red line in Syria was an inflection point (or Bidens botched Afghan exit) then just wait. If we can’t persevere here, there is no hope for Taiwan under Trump or AOC.
Having started this conflict which we were “in” from January [7] on, the ramifications for the west if we fail are obvious and horrendous. And while there is no black line for failure, pretty much anything short of surrendering centrifuges and Ur probably is failure.
One of the few things Trump got right was when he said [we don’t win wars]. To all the talking heads here and elsewhere, you had two months before this happened. Your counsel before this started was as vapid as it is now.
I dunno, three guys with IQs they think high enough to boil water have 45 day notice Trump is planning military action. During the prewar period they offer no relevant commentary. Then two weeks in they wring their hands over how bad it's going with an almost giddy vibe suggesting no one ever thought the Iranians might close the strait. That idea is risibly insulting to Gen. Caine and the rest of the defense establishment and almost certainly untrue. Real analysts like FDD identified the likely closure in advance and predicted it would take weeks to degrade and exhaust Iranian assets before opening the strait to traffic. So... two weeks in, things are probably where a realistic plan would have expected things to be.🤷🏼♂️
Trump talked us into a redline on January 7. The biggest risk has always been that Trump's happy talk would talk himself into a corner and fail to complete the job (TACO). For whatever reason, it seems like he has realized he must see this through. Press reports say that MBS in SA and other Gulf nations are encouraging him to see it through. AlJazeera headline yesterday: The US-Israeli strategy against Iran is working. Here is why Subheadline: Every aspect of Iran’s ability to project regional power is being successfully degraded. For 47 years Iran has been at war with the US and inflamed the region impoverishing its citizens to fund regional proxies- Hezbollah, Hamas, Iraqi militias. It also seeks to join the nuclear club. Recently, satellite intelligence shows them seeking to access the uranium buried last year.
Removing that threat is one of the limited number of absolute positives available to the president. (Winning in Ukraine would be another.)
Also, contrary to talking head handwringing, there is little evidence civilians rallying behind the government (see WSJ last night) or of significant civilian infrastructure damage.
Finally, 4 days later, today's (Tuesday) headline: Iran Security Chief and Basij Chief Eliminated. All that sort of undermines their commentary and should provide encouragement to finish the job.
Justin’s point about the military mistaking the "high-payoff target list" for actual strategic objectives highlights a fatal bug in how we design modern warfare. At The Airlock, we map this specific architectural failure as The Geometry of the Lever: Asymmetric.
CENTCOM and systems like Maven represent the most advanced Lever in human history. But a lever is just a multiplier of force; it requires a load-bearing Fulcrum—in military terms, a coherent strategic objective (e.g., keeping Hormuz open, regime compliance).
What Shashank and the crew are describing is the dark physics of unmoored leverage. The Operators (Washington) are pulling an incredibly powerful lever, hitting 6,000 targets, and generating massive kinetic energy. But because there is no strategic Fulcrum, that lever is suspended in mid-air. It generates no mechanical advantage—it only generates destructive friction (depleted Patriot stockpiles, $150 oil, and political blowback).
Worse, the adversary understands asymmetric geometry perfectly. They aren’t trying to stop our lever; they are actively destroying our logistical and economic Fulcrum using $20k Shahed drones and dhows laying mines.
AI targeting machines like Maven actually make this worse by allowing commanders to pull the lever indefinitely, creating the illusion of progress (the "MACV body count" metric) while the structural foundation collapses underneath them.
Brilliant teardown by the Second Breakfast crew. You cannot win an asymmetric war by continuously pulling a lever that isn't anchored to anything.
I think soon there will be Shaheds or similar drones with anti-air weapons on them (e.g. MANPADs) to fly in the flock and be a nasty surprise to any manned aircraft trying to take them out from close range in a low-cost way.
That said, as far as I know Russia isn't doing this yet, which means probably there's some difficulty to making it work, and I'd expect Russia to overcome those difficulties faster than Iran.
Excellent conversation but I assume that Justin misspoke by saying John Boyd instead of (perhaps) John Warden. There’s no way on this earth that Boyd and LeMay should ever be lumped together. And for sure not on anything related to strategic bombing.
I think his focus on air power’s ability to cause “strategic paralysis” has been taken to mean that air power can smash the moral-physical-mental links of a country and has been applied in ways that he likely would not recognize but that I think do flow from his initial thoughts. I am also fully open to being wrong, and that LeMay is a harsh comparison.
As Sun Tzu put it: The best strategy is to foil the enemy's plans. The next is to disrupt their alliances. The third is to attack their army. The worst strategy is to attack their cities.
Really? Two weeks in and you pantywastes want to declare defeat? Nobody sensible didn’t think the strait might be closed. So, no, they didn’t surrender or engender a coup which was (and is) possible.
You don’t have to be maga to want this to succeed. Trump is a walking disinformation machine. Full of happy talk and conflicting BS 24-7. But once they started shooting rioters and Trump threatened the Mullahs if they didn’t stop, the die was cast. If you think Obama’s red line in Syria was an inflection point (or Bidens botched Afghan exit) then just wait. If we can’t persevere here, there is no hope for Taiwan under Trump or AOC.
Having started this conflict which we were “in” from January [7] on, the ramifications for the west if we fail are obvious and horrendous. And while there is no black line for failure, pretty much anything short of surrendering centrifuges and Ur probably is failure.
One of the few things Trump got right was when he said [we don’t win wars]. To all the talking heads here and elsewhere, you had two months before this happened. Your counsel before this started was as vapid as it is now.
So, ah, what’s your point, man?
I dunno, three guys with IQs they think high enough to boil water have 45 day notice Trump is planning military action. During the prewar period they offer no relevant commentary. Then two weeks in they wring their hands over how bad it's going with an almost giddy vibe suggesting no one ever thought the Iranians might close the strait. That idea is risibly insulting to Gen. Caine and the rest of the defense establishment and almost certainly untrue. Real analysts like FDD identified the likely closure in advance and predicted it would take weeks to degrade and exhaust Iranian assets before opening the strait to traffic. So... two weeks in, things are probably where a realistic plan would have expected things to be.🤷🏼♂️
Trump talked us into a redline on January 7. The biggest risk has always been that Trump's happy talk would talk himself into a corner and fail to complete the job (TACO). For whatever reason, it seems like he has realized he must see this through. Press reports say that MBS in SA and other Gulf nations are encouraging him to see it through. AlJazeera headline yesterday: The US-Israeli strategy against Iran is working. Here is why Subheadline: Every aspect of Iran’s ability to project regional power is being successfully degraded. For 47 years Iran has been at war with the US and inflamed the region impoverishing its citizens to fund regional proxies- Hezbollah, Hamas, Iraqi militias. It also seeks to join the nuclear club. Recently, satellite intelligence shows them seeking to access the uranium buried last year.
Removing that threat is one of the limited number of absolute positives available to the president. (Winning in Ukraine would be another.)
Also, contrary to talking head handwringing, there is little evidence civilians rallying behind the government (see WSJ last night) or of significant civilian infrastructure damage.
Finally, 4 days later, today's (Tuesday) headline: Iran Security Chief and Basij Chief Eliminated. All that sort of undermines their commentary and should provide encouragement to finish the job.
Justin’s point about the military mistaking the "high-payoff target list" for actual strategic objectives highlights a fatal bug in how we design modern warfare. At The Airlock, we map this specific architectural failure as The Geometry of the Lever: Asymmetric.
CENTCOM and systems like Maven represent the most advanced Lever in human history. But a lever is just a multiplier of force; it requires a load-bearing Fulcrum—in military terms, a coherent strategic objective (e.g., keeping Hormuz open, regime compliance).
What Shashank and the crew are describing is the dark physics of unmoored leverage. The Operators (Washington) are pulling an incredibly powerful lever, hitting 6,000 targets, and generating massive kinetic energy. But because there is no strategic Fulcrum, that lever is suspended in mid-air. It generates no mechanical advantage—it only generates destructive friction (depleted Patriot stockpiles, $150 oil, and political blowback).
Worse, the adversary understands asymmetric geometry perfectly. They aren’t trying to stop our lever; they are actively destroying our logistical and economic Fulcrum using $20k Shahed drones and dhows laying mines.
AI targeting machines like Maven actually make this worse by allowing commanders to pull the lever indefinitely, creating the illusion of progress (the "MACV body count" metric) while the structural foundation collapses underneath them.
Brilliant teardown by the Second Breakfast crew. You cannot win an asymmetric war by continuously pulling a lever that isn't anchored to anything.
I think soon there will be Shaheds or similar drones with anti-air weapons on them (e.g. MANPADs) to fly in the flock and be a nasty surprise to any manned aircraft trying to take them out from close range in a low-cost way.
That said, as far as I know Russia isn't doing this yet, which means probably there's some difficulty to making it work, and I'd expect Russia to overcome those difficulties faster than Iran.
Loaded with evidence sir!
What makes you think the plutonium is under rubble??
Excellent conversation but I assume that Justin misspoke by saying John Boyd instead of (perhaps) John Warden. There’s no way on this earth that Boyd and LeMay should ever be lumped together. And for sure not on anything related to strategic bombing.
I think his focus on air power’s ability to cause “strategic paralysis” has been taken to mean that air power can smash the moral-physical-mental links of a country and has been applied in ways that he likely would not recognize but that I think do flow from his initial thoughts. I am also fully open to being wrong, and that LeMay is a harsh comparison.