It’s been said that good tactics with a bad strategy is the slowest way to lose a war, and bad tactics with a good strategy is the slowest way to win one. To put it another way, if your ends, ways, and means are misaligned, you can win all the battles and lose the war. If your ends, ways, and means are aligned, you can lose battle after battle and yet win in the end.
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One of the emerging problems in the current conflict is that the stated objectives have shifted repeatedly, each one implying a different series of tasks that the military would need to perform. Destroying nuclear infrastructure requires a sustained air and cyber effort against hardened facilities. Eliminating mobile missile forces demands persistent intelligence and precision targeting through air and sea. Neutralizing proxy networks requires regional partnerships and ground intelligence. Regime change, if that’s the goal, requires something far larger and far more complex. And even an Army guy like me knows that escorting oil tankers through a restricted waterway requires diverting forces from one critical mission—supporting the kinetic strikes and missile defense associated with the critical aircraft carriers—to another, support to naval escort operations.
But war is not a video game, where new missions can be loaded and executed instantly. Military operations depend on intelligence preparation, positioning forces, logistics planning, and coordination with allies. Aircraft must deploy, ships must reposition, individual service members need to pack and move their equipment, trusted and informed allies need to provide forces that only they have, and supply chains must be set up to support sustained joint and coalition operations.
And still, the enemy always gets a vote.
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In the current war with Iran, the political goals are becoming increasingly unmoored from the operations the military is conducting. The administration, with a great deal of swagger, has projected confidence—sometimes bordering on triumphalism and cockiness—about the progress of the campaign. The president said the United States “won in the first hour” and that the war would end as soon as “I feel it, feel it in my bones.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth agreed that President Trump alone will “determine the pace, the tempo and the timing of this conflict, his hand firmly on the wheel as well as on the throttle setting.” And Hegseth described the closure of the Strait of Hormuz as “something we’re dealing with, we have been dealing with it and don’t need to worry about it.” The history of war proves all of those assertions to be naïve.
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The battlefield is not confined to the physical targets struck by missiles or aircraft. Economic and diplomatic consequences spread outward almost instantly. The military strength of the United States is being countered by the economic battlefield established by the Iranians. This is how militarily weaker powers complicate the plans of stronger ones. They impose costs, stretch resources, and create friction across multiple domains.
Where there is the will, the enemy finds a way to vote, no matter the strength of a military power.
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The president and his senior advisers didn’t consider that the Iranians would get a say in what happens in this war. As a result, they failed to plan for the potential and foreseeable consequences of attacking Iran. Regardless of what they say on social media or in front of the press, victory doesn’t come merely by proclaiming it louder and more often. It takes careful planning and clear objectives—and until we have those, no amount of “obliteration” will magically produce victory.
The Trump Iran war is to military conflicts what the Trump trade war is to international trade. They are both heavy on trash talk, incoherence, and overstated threats.
