Neither Winning Nor Leaving

The United States is stuck in the most dangerous place possible: a war with Iran we won’t end and won’t fully fight.

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There is so much else going on. Corruption. Vanity projects. Elections grinding into view. The daily circus that demands we look at it, react to it, share it, condemn it, and then do it all again tomorrow.

But underneath all of that, sitting like a low hum we have learned to ignore, is the fact that we are in an undefined state of war with Iran. The ceasefire is fraying. Drones are still finding their way into Gulf shipping lanes. The Strait is still effectively a question mark for the global economy. And we are still, as a country, pretending this is somehow background noise.

It isn’t. So let me return to it.

1. We were caught massively unprepared for a 21st century war.

I want to say this carefully, because I love our military and I know how good our people are. We are very good. The training, the professionalism, the courage, the institutional knowledge — all of it remains world class.

But the landscape of war has changed underneath us, and the honest truth is we were slow to admit it.

Drone warfare has rewritten the math. A $500 quadcopter or a $20,000 one-way attack drone can absorb, or destroy, a piece of equipment that costs us tens of millions of dollars to field and tens of thousands of dollars per intercept to defend. We have built an exquisite, gold-plated force, and we are watching it get nickel-and-dimed by adversaries who have figured out that cheap and many beats expensive and few. The defensive-cost curve is upside down. We cannot interceptor-missile our way out of this. We have to build differently, sustain differently, and repair differently.

Which brings me to something boring sounding that is actually a huge deal: right to repair.

The Senate and a bipartisan coalition are once again pushing to put “right to repair” provisions into the National Defense Authorization Act. The short version: when the Pentagon buys a piece of equipment, the contractor should be required to hand over the technical data and tools so that our service members can actually fix the thing in the field, instead of waiting for a manufacturer technician to fly out and charge us thousands of dollars to do what a trained airman or soldier could do in twenty minutes.

The example Senator Warren has used is almost cartoonish. The Army can replace a broken knob on a Black Hawk for about $15. But because we don’t own the right to repair, the whole bird is grounded and the contractor charges roughly $47,000 to come swap the screen. Multiply that across the entire force, across deployed environments, across a war that will be measured in expendables and tempo, and you get a maintenance system that simply cannot keep up with the kind of fight we are now in.

In fact, the aircraft I flew in the military was ultimately canned by the Air Force because we needed an avionics upgrade. The cost? $1 Million per plane. The reality? Had it been a civilian plane (which it does exist in the civilian world) you could have made the same avionics upgrades for: $180,000.

Right to repair was in the FY2026 NDAA. It had support from the House, the Senate, senior DoD leaders, and even, remarkably, the Trump administration. And then, behind closed doors, defense-industry lobbyists got it stripped out of the final bill. They are doing it again now. Warren and Sheehy have introduced the Warrior Right to Repair Act as a standalone, and a version of it is being pushed back into the next NDAA.

If you care about a single, concrete, unsexy thing that actually affects our ability to fight, that’s it. Pay attention to it. It is the difference between a force that can sustain itself and one that can’t.

2. We should not have been unprepared in the first place.

This is the part that I genuinely cannot get past.

We have spent years working closely with Ukraine on the intelligence side. We have had a front row seat — not a satellite-photo seat, a front row seat — to what 21st century war actually looks like. We have watched cheap drones reshape the battlefield. We have watched a smaller, scrappier military hold off a much bigger one because they iterated faster. We have watched our own systems be tested, in real time, in real conditions, against a real peer-level adversary’s toolkit.

There is no excuse for surprise. None.

So the question is no longer “will we learn?” The question is, will we adapt, or will we choose, as institutions sometimes do, to ignore the lessons because adapting is uncomfortable and expensive and disrupts careers and contracts?

I would like to be optimistic. I have seen the military adapt before, often brilliantly. But I’ve also seen what happens when industry capture and procurement inertia decide they would prefer not to. The Iran fight is going to tell us which version of ourselves we are.

3. We are currently in the worst of all possible options.

This is the part I find hardest to write.

Right now, we are nowhere. We are unwilling to accept that the war should not have happened in the first place. And we are unwilling to commit the power necessary to actually finish it. So we are sitting in a middle ground that gets us a decaying economy, a wobbly ceasefire, a Strait that is functionally hostage to Tehran’s mood, and no clear theory of how this ends.

There are basically two honest paths from here. Neither is good. Both are better than where we are.

Path one: back away. If we choose to back down and call it, we should be honest about what that means. We will have empowered Iran. We will have shown that we can be outlasted. They will consolidate their grip on the Strait of Hormuz. We can, and should, encourage investment in alternative energy routes out of the Middle East — pipelines, LNG hubs, alternative chokepoints — and over time make Hormuz matter less than it does today. But “less” is not “zero.” That chokepoint will remain strategically important for a long time. And in five to ten years, when Iran is stronger, more entrenched, and more confident, we will almost certainly have to confront them again. Walking away does not end the problem. It defers it, and lets the enemy choose the conditions for round two.

Path two: recommit. If we choose to recommit American power to actually achieving a strategic outcome — whether that is regime collapse, a permanent reopening of the Strait, or something else worth naming out loud — we have to be honest that this is not a clean air campaign anymore. It means a longer haul fight. It means more American casualties. It means damaged infrastructure, here and there. And it almost certainly means ground troops in some form. Not a full invasion necessarily, but boots somewhere doing something dangerous.

I’ll say what I believe: the United States has more than enough power to achieve a serious strategic objective against Iran. We are not militarily incapable. The question has never been “can we.” It has always been “is it worth it, and are we willing to do what it takes.”

Here is the lesson I wish we had learned by now, after Iraq, after Afghanistan, after Libya, after every half-finished war of the last quarter century: do not engage in war unless you are willing to do what is necessary. Otherwise, do not engage.

I am, and have always been, a massive air power proponent. I flew. I believe in what air power can do. But I have never, not once, seen air power alone win a war. It is a tool. It is an extraordinary tool. It is not an end state. Pretending otherwise is how you end up exactly where we are right now — strikes that feel decisive in the moment, a ceasefire that doesn’t hold, and an adversary that gets to reconstitute on its own timeline.

So what do I actually think we should do?

I’ll be honest with you, because I think you deserve honesty more than performance.

I don’t know.

There is no good answer here. The only truly good answer requires a time machine to a moment before this started, and we don’t have one. We are here.

What I worry about most is the easy answer. The easy answer right now is “just end it, take the L, move on.” It feels mature. It feels restrained. And it might be exactly the wrong call. Because if we take that L now, we are very likely going to have to confront Iran again — when they are stronger, when the Strait is more militarized, when their proxies are more capable, and when my son is 18.

I would go. I have always been willing to go. But I do not want him to have to go because we decided in 2026 to defer the problem.

So if I were in charge, and I had inherited this mess — and let’s be clear, it would be a mess inherited, not chosen — I would probably lean toward reengaging in a way designed to compel either a collapse of the regime or a durable reopening of the Strait. Not posturing. Not symbolic strikes. A real strategy, with real objectives, communicated clearly to the American people, with a defined definition of success.

But.

I do not trust this administration to execute that war in a way that actually succeeds. I do not trust them to define the objective. I do not trust them to resource it. I do not trust them to be honest with the country about what it will cost. I do not trust them to stay the course past the next news cycle. And I do not trust them to listen to the people in uniform who actually know what they are talking about.

So I am stuck where a lot of you are stuck. I trust my instincts on what should be done. I do not trust the people who would be doing it.

That is the brutal truth of this moment. Not the corruption stories, not the vanity projects, not the election noise. This. A war we should never have started, that we are now neither winning nor ending, with an adversary that is using the time we are giving them, while the people who would have to lead us through it are the last people I’d want at the controls.

I will keep writing about Iran. Because the rest of the noise will be loud, and this will be quiet, and quiet is exactly how bad decisions get made.

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