Iran and the Houthis are reshaping the war by disrupting shipping and energy flows faster than the United States can adapt its military power to stop them.
1. Quote :” The United States and Israel retain overwhelming superiority, but that superiority is optimized for a different kind of war”. The wars referred to are more accurately described as genocides masquerading as wars.
2. The frequent references to the “overwhelming military superiority of the US and Israel” greatly overstates the case, as this superiority has never translated into actual victory in war, as Vietnam, Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrate and which the current war will also prove.
3. The “overwhelming superiority” view fails to take account of the fact of the virtually total destruction of all US bases in the Middle East and inability of any of their naval vessels to get anywhere near the Iranian coast line.
4. The “overwhelming superiority” argument also fails to take into account the incompetence of the US military leadership, who are ordered about the Trump ldiot, the fragility of most US military assets ( as illustrated by their decrepit aircraft carriers, and temperamental “super planes” and more importantly by the bloated and utterly inefficient US military supply chain).
None of this adds up to overwhelming superiority. On the contrary it is Iran that possesses this quality in the most important domain, namely that of the united strength of widely held common human values. By contrast, the US and the Zionist entity are entirely lacking in this domain, relying as they do solely on lies and deception.
Thank you. You are raising several different issues here - moral, historical, operational and institutional, and its worth separating them because they point in different directions.
On the first point, the characterization of conflicts in moral terms is a serious one, but it sits alongside the analytical question I'm addressing rather than replacing it. My argument is about how power operates and why outcomes look the way they do, not adjudicating the legitimacy of particular campaigns.
On the second point about Vietnam, Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan, I agree with your underlying observation that material superiority has often failed to produce decisive political outcomes. That's precisely the puzzle the essay is trying to explain. But those cases don't demonstrate the absence of superiority. They demonstrate a gap between capability and outcome. In each of those conflicts, the US retained advantages in airpower, precision strike, ISR and logistics. What it struggled with was translating those advantages into durable political results.
That distinction matters because it leads to different conclusions. If superiority does not exist, the explanation is simple: the stronger side was never stronger. If superiority exists but fails to produce outcomes, then something about the environment, objectives or method of application is misaligned. My argument is in that second category.
On your third and fourth points concerning base vulnerability, contested access, supply chain inefficiencies and leadership quality, those are all relevant pressures but they speak to contestation and constraint, not necessarily to the disappearance of conventional advantage. The US can still project force at scale, operate globally and strike targets at distance in ways adversaries cannot replicate symmetrically. The fact that it must now operate under greater risk, rely more on stand-off methods or manage supply chain frictions does not erase that underlying capability. It shows that the cost and difficulty of applying it have increased.
Where I think your critique is most useful is in pushing on this point: if superiority does not deliver outcomes, how meaningful is it? That is exactly the question the essay is trying to answer. My answer is that superiority remains real but is increasingly insufficient on its own. The environment now rewards disruption, persistence and the ability to create systemic effects at relatively low thresholds. Under those conditions, even very advanced militaries can find themselves unable to impose the kind of stable control that would translate into "victory" in the traditional sense.
On your final point about values, I would frame that differently. Cohesion, legitimacy and social resilience do matter in war, but they operate in a different domain than conventional military capability. You can have strong cohesion and still lack the means to project power beyond your immediate environment. You can also have immense military capability and struggle to achieve political objectives. The current conflict is, in many ways, about the interaction between those domains.
The US and Israel retain high levels of conventional military capability. What the current conflict reveals is not the absence of that capability but its declining ability - on its own - to produce decisive political outcomes in environments structured around persistent, low-threshold disruption. That's the gap I'm trying to describe.
Thank you for such a considered and detailed reply to my few points.
As you rightly point out our differences are in relation to perspective on the issue of “technical” superiority versus actual outcomes. My views on such matters are, I am afraid, brutally realistic.
Wars are the ultimate test of a nation’s strength, morally, militarily, economically, politically and socially. On all of these measures the US is in very serious decline, over a very short period of time. Their inability to turn this “superiority” into actual real and enduring results proves this beyond doubt in my view. I can see no evidence to the contrary.
"The United States and Israel retain overwhelming superiority, but that superiority is optimized for a different kind of war".
I see the point, but surely "superiority" that accomplishes nothing, gains nothing, and cannot win a war is illusory.
Everything in war is relative to the purpose and goals of the war. So it profits the USA (and its camp followers) nothing that they spend hundreds of times more money on armaments and expenses than Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis, or the Iraqi resistance.
I challenge the proposition that the USA and Israel retain superiority at all, let alone "overwhelming" superiority. At least the USA has the chance to run away back home where Iran cannot (yet) harm it. Israel, however, has no such choice: it is pinned to Palestine. "You steal it, you (don't) own it". The Zionists' only chance of survival is to leave Palestine and go back whence they or their parents or grandparents came.
In the well-known colonial wars of the 19th century and earlier, the Zulus, Indians, Chinese, and others might just as sincerely have claimed "overwhelming superiority". After all, at the Battle of Plassey and other similar engagements, they outnumbered the British by more than 100 to 1. Nevertheless they lost, because the British had the right weapons on the day. Going back in history, the same could be said of Agincourt, where the French had overwhelming superiority in armoured knights. Unfortunately for them, the English cheated by fielding a lot of archers whose "great bows" could send an arrow right through plate armour at 200 yards.
Military "superiority" that is not "optimized" for the current war is not superiority at all; it is at best a huge waste of money, and at worst a recipe for catastrophic defeat.
You are absolutely right to emphasize that superiority in war is only meaningful relative to objectives. If military power cannot achieve political goals, then in a strategic sense it is failing. That's a valid and important point.
Where I would push back is on the conclusion that this means the US and Israel do not possess superiority at all. They still retain overwhelming superiority in a conventional and material sense through precision strike capability at range, naval dominance in the open waters, ISR networks and logistical reach. None of the actors you mentioned - whether Iran, Hezbollah or the Houthis - can match that in a direct, symmetrical contest. In a conventional war defined by force-on-force engagement and territorial control, the imbalance remains significant. But - and this is the core of my argument - that form of superiority is increasingly misaligned with the environment in which it is being applied. Thus, the issue is not that superiority is illusory. It is contextually constrained. In other words, tactical and material superiority still exists but it does not translate cleanly into strategic outcomes. That gap is precisely what I'm describing as adaptation asymmetry.
Your historical examples actually reinforce this point rather than contradict it. At places like Battle of Agincourt or Battle of Plassey, the side that “lost” often had advantages in numbers or prestige, but not in alignment between tools and conditions. That’s very close to what is happening here, but with an important difference that today, the US does not lack advanced tools. It has the most advanced tools ever fielded. The issue is that many of those tools are designed for decisive engagements, territorial control and escalation dominance. Whereas the current environment rewards persistence, dispersion, cost imposition and systemic disruption.
On your broader point that superiority that accomplishes nothing is not superiority, I would refine slightly by stating that it is still superiority but it is insufficiently translated into strategy. That distinction matters because it leads to different conclusions. If superiority is illusory, the system is collapsing. If superiority is misaligned, the system must adapt. My argument is firmly in the second category.
Finally, on outcomes you are correct that endurance can constitute success for actors like Iran and the Houthis. That is precisely why they structure their strategy around it. But that does not negate the existence of superiority. It highlights a divergence in what each side is trying to achieve and how each side defines success. And that divergence is what produces the current conflict dynamic.
"This is the first principle of the new environment: control is no longer required to generate systemic effects. "
The same applies to the Americans. The American/Israeli goal ever always only was, not to control Iran, but to turn it into a failed state, as was done to Iraq, Libya and Syria.
If the rest of the world suffers, why should the Americans care? They're behind their oceans and have petroleum and helium.
If Americans suffer, why should Trump care? He continues to live The Good Life and The Epstein Files stay quiet for now.
I think you are right that disruption can cut both ways, but I would draw an important distinction. For Iran and the Houthis, disruption is more likely to produce favorable outcomes because their objective is endurance. They don't need decisive victory. They need to sustain pressure long enough that US and Israeli operations become politically and economically difficult to maintain. In that sense, disruption aligns directly with their strategy.
The US and Israel can also generate disruption without control. The question is whether that disruption produces a usable political outcome. Cases like Iraq and Libya show that external powers can create state weakening and long-term dysfunction, but that doesn't necessarily translate into stable or advantageous end states, and often generates second-order instability. In fact, Israel's strategy in the 12-day June war against Iran as well as the current one appeared to rest on the assumption that decapitating Iran's leadership might trigger internal disorientation, street unrest and possibly wider state breakdown. But that logic faltered because the Iranian system proved able to reconstitute its leadership quickly enough to prevent military decapitation from becoming political collapse. Thus, in this case disruption has so far failed to produce the desired political outcome.
That's really the core point. The ability to disrupt is no longer the same as the ability to shape outcomes. In an interconnected system comprising energy, shipping, finance, those effects don't remain contained. They tend to feed back, even to actors who appear insulated.
So the issue isn't whether disruption is possible. It clearly is. It's whether it actually delivers the strategic outcomes being sought.
That may be true at the level of personal motives, but wars are not sustained by motive alone. They are sustained by munition stocks, interceptor availability, shipping confidence, alliance tolerance, domestic political bandwidth and the ability to prevent escalation from producing wider economic blowback.
So my point is not that leaders will suddenly become more compassionate or restrained. It is that even leaders who are indifferent to suffering still run into material and political constraints. The issue is less whether Trump or Israeli leaders care, and more whether the system they depend on can absorb prolonged attrition and disruption without forcing hard choices. That is why endurance matters. It shifts the burden from intentions to sustainability.
It certainly is a risk that cannot be dismissed lightly though I would be cautious about treating it as inevitable. Going nuclear is not just another step up the escalation ladder. It would cross a threshold with enormous strategic consequences - regional collapse, global political shock, likely international isolation and the possibility of uncontrollable retaliation or wider war. Even actors willing to use extreme force have historically treated that threshold differently because the costs are qualitatively different, not just larger.
So I would say the concern is real, but the more immediate analytical point remains the same. The fact that such escalation is even being discussed by numerous commentators shows how poorly conventional superiority is translating into usable outcomes. When overwhelming force cannot reliably deliver strategic objectives, the temptation to consider more extreme options grows - and that in itself is a sign of failure.
And why would Trump or Netanyahu care, as long as they are the ones ones who have The Bomb?
The european catamites would fret for a couple of days, maybe even a week, before whispering in Trump’s ear that he looked so powerful and regal and maybe he could do that to Russia just maybe...
One thing I forgot to add on the subject of ‘overwhelming military superiority’. For the authors thesis to be correct, Iran and the USA (Israel) would need to line up all of their military assets on and above some vast plain (like the edged weapons battles of the ancient world), and prepare to go at it. Then the latter would clearly confirm the authors position (though I don’t think it would open the strait). As I’m sure we have all noticed - that’s not how it works. Just sayin…….
The narrative of US & Israeli ‘overwhelming conventional superiority’ really needs to be pushed back. Firstly, Israel is not an independent belligerent, and can be removed from the equation in that sense…..it’s planes are American, it’s bombs are American, it’s intelligence and targeting are American, etc, etc……..Israel is just a U.S. FOB, or an airforce masquerading as a country. Secondly, watching the war unfold, it doesn’t look like the US is ‘overwhelming’ anyone. US bases rendered unusable, US ground radars destroyed, steady pounding of the gulf monarchies and Israel at Will, and the strait gated and under permanent Iranian control. Furthermore, the US and its Israeli component cannot fly unimpeded over Iranian territory and must instead use up enormous quantities of expensive and relatively limited stand-off munitions. Lastly, US, gulf, and Israeli AD interceptors and radars are being attrited down alarmingly, and are on course to run out - if they haven’t already. Yes, The Empire can destroy any number of TELs and missile decoys, empty buildings, huge amounts of civilian, and above ground military and other infrastructure, but that won’t win the war. Who is overwhelming who, in the conventional military sense? Of course, there is ultimately the nuclear option, but even then, as per Ted Postol, I’d put my money on Iran putting together a few nukes in a matter of weeks, and dumping them on TLV Haifa, Jerusalem, and Dimona. Goodbye Israel & good riddance. Iran has a history going back 4,000 years, and I’d be very surprised if (despite a limited nuclear attack), it wasn’t still there as a functioning state at the turn of this century. Who would bet on Israel (or even the USA in its present form) surviving that long?
Thank you for this comment. You are raising an important point about outcomes but I think we may be talking past each other slightly on what "superiority" refers to.
When I describe the US (and by extension Israel) as having overwhelming conventional superiority, I'm not making a claim about who is "winning" the war in a strategic sense. I'm referring to capabilities in a force-to-force, conventional military context - airpower, ISR, precision strike, naval reach and logistical sustainment. On those dimensions, the imbalance is very real. Iran and its partners cannot establish air superiority over US forces, cannot project sustained naval power into open waters and cannot match the scale of precision strike or ISR integration. That's what I mean by "overwhelming superiority".
Where your argument is stronger is in point out that those capabilities are not translating into decisive outcomes. US bases can be harassed, air defense can be stressed and shipping can be disrupted. That is all consistent with the evidence and its exactly the dynamic the essay is trying to explain. But that does not mean superiority has disappeared. It exists at the level of capability but not at the level of outcome. That gap is the core of the argument.
On Israel specifically, I would frame it slightly different. Israel is deeply integrated with the US in terms of systems and support, but it still operates as an independent military actor with its own command structure, doctrine and decision-making. Whether one sees it as independent or not doesn't materially change the analytical point that the combined system still possesses very high-end conventional capabilities.
On the battlefield observations you and other readers have mentioned - base vulnerability, interceptor depletion, contested airspace - those are real pressures but they reflect contestation, not parity or dominance. The fact that US forces must rely on stand-off munitions, for example, says less about a loss of capability and more about the cost of operating inside a denied environment. That again points to the same conclusion that the environment has changed faster than doctrine.
So, the US is not being outmatched conventionally. It is being out-adapted in an environment where conventional dominance is no longer sufficient. That's the phenomenon I'm trying to describe.
"The challenge is not that American power is insufficient, but that it is not optimized for the specific form of conflict being waged." Conflict waged from air or from the sea and high intensity. When it comes to land warfare, territorial and attritional type, that requires more than SOFs, the US, as well as IDF are no longer equipped to prevail. We saw that in Afghanistan, we see IDF now sputtering in Southern Lebanon and we see a truly modern land war going on in Ukraine, and where NATO and the US, with their present doctrine and capabilities would have their bottoms handed to them in no time.
You are raising important points and I think there are two distinctions worth clarifying.
First, I agree the issue isn't simply that the US spends more per interceptor. As I noted earlier, the deeper shift is that the threshold for disruption has fallen dramatically. Iran and the Houthis don't need decisive victories. They only need to create enough credible risk to disrupt shipping, insurance and market confidence. That makes the defender's problem much harder. It's not about intercepting everything but restoring a sense of normalcy. So the asymmetry isn't just cost, it's the gap between the low threshold needed to disrupt and the much higher threshold needed to restore stability. Cost matters, but as part of a broader strategic imbalance.
Second, on whether this reflects misconfiguration or inadequacy, I'd say both, but at different levels. The US still has enormous conventional capabilities (airpower, ISR, global reach) but those capabilities are optimized for decisive engagements and control. In an environment defined by persistence, dispersion and low-cost disruption, that creates a mismatch. Your point about even the best air defenses being unable to stop all the drones reinforces this. It suggests this is not just a US problem, but a broader shift in warfare where no system can guarantee full protection when disruption requires so little to succeed.
That's why I also agree the issue is partly political. The objective isn't just to destroy targets, it's to restore stable, predictable flows of commerce. If escalation limits constraints prevent that, then military capability alone cannot solve the problem.
So I would frame it by stating that the issue is not simply cost, but a changing enviroment in which modest capabilities can generate outsized disruption, while even advanced militaries struggle to restore normalcy. That is what I mean by adaptation asymmetry.
That is a fair concern, but I'd separate capability from incentives. The US certainly has destructive capacity, but using it at that scale would carry extreme strategic costs (see my response to Feral Finster regarding the risk of using nuclear weapons) that likely outweigh any short-term gains. In other words, it doesn't solve the underlying problem of restoring stable, normalized conditions but amplifies it.
That's really the point. The challenge isn't a lack of destructive power, but that even overwhelming force doesn't translate cleanly into the kind of outcomes being sought. History is abound with such cases as numerous readers have outlined in their comments.
And when the radio active cloud has settled, the spectators turn away and return to their daily lives. Forgotten are the millions of victims. The USA will be condemned for a while, but the elite will take care of other distractions and soon most of us have forgotten. Personally I think humans are the worst of all the species on this planet. Unable to ever live in peace, clearly expressed by DJT that he wil bomb Iran back to the stone age adding that is where they belong.
"Personally I think humans are the worst of all the species on this planet."
Sadly, your comment has a ring of truth. Human dominance over all other species is due to intelligence; its abject evil comes from a lack of integrity.
I agree with the author that the goal is the basic destruction of Iran. The Saudis see this as the opportunity to settle scores with the Shia once and for all. However, I have two problems with the analysis:
1. What's to stop Iran from destroying Saudi oil or water infrastructure?
2. The idea that Israel does not seek a failed state doesn't hold up. Israel cheered the destruction of Iraq and Libya, and participated int he destruction of Syria.
Oh, common, you should know better than this. It has nothing to do with Shia but everything to do with the big bulging republic, with some popular representation and some censorship on mores that offer an alternative to the Saudis' subjects. Iran is for the Arab sheicks in the Gulf the same bugbear that communism and USSR was for the US and its oligarchic elites. Has nothing to do with the Shia/Sunni split, which is always offered as a facile cop-out, from the desire to mask the actual, real, material reasons...
Whether its the vision of Iran as a political or religious alternative (and I get what you are saying, but Saudi Arabia has a large and restive Shia minority and the Saudi claim to rule derives from their self-proclaimed status as guardians of Sunni orthodoxy) - it gets to the same place.
The Saudis want to settle scores, once and for all.
A couple of points :
1. Quote :” The United States and Israel retain overwhelming superiority, but that superiority is optimized for a different kind of war”. The wars referred to are more accurately described as genocides masquerading as wars.
2. The frequent references to the “overwhelming military superiority of the US and Israel” greatly overstates the case, as this superiority has never translated into actual victory in war, as Vietnam, Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrate and which the current war will also prove.
3. The “overwhelming superiority” view fails to take account of the fact of the virtually total destruction of all US bases in the Middle East and inability of any of their naval vessels to get anywhere near the Iranian coast line.
4. The “overwhelming superiority” argument also fails to take into account the incompetence of the US military leadership, who are ordered about the Trump ldiot, the fragility of most US military assets ( as illustrated by their decrepit aircraft carriers, and temperamental “super planes” and more importantly by the bloated and utterly inefficient US military supply chain).
None of this adds up to overwhelming superiority. On the contrary it is Iran that possesses this quality in the most important domain, namely that of the united strength of widely held common human values. By contrast, the US and the Zionist entity are entirely lacking in this domain, relying as they do solely on lies and deception.
Thank you. You are raising several different issues here - moral, historical, operational and institutional, and its worth separating them because they point in different directions.
On the first point, the characterization of conflicts in moral terms is a serious one, but it sits alongside the analytical question I'm addressing rather than replacing it. My argument is about how power operates and why outcomes look the way they do, not adjudicating the legitimacy of particular campaigns.
On the second point about Vietnam, Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan, I agree with your underlying observation that material superiority has often failed to produce decisive political outcomes. That's precisely the puzzle the essay is trying to explain. But those cases don't demonstrate the absence of superiority. They demonstrate a gap between capability and outcome. In each of those conflicts, the US retained advantages in airpower, precision strike, ISR and logistics. What it struggled with was translating those advantages into durable political results.
That distinction matters because it leads to different conclusions. If superiority does not exist, the explanation is simple: the stronger side was never stronger. If superiority exists but fails to produce outcomes, then something about the environment, objectives or method of application is misaligned. My argument is in that second category.
On your third and fourth points concerning base vulnerability, contested access, supply chain inefficiencies and leadership quality, those are all relevant pressures but they speak to contestation and constraint, not necessarily to the disappearance of conventional advantage. The US can still project force at scale, operate globally and strike targets at distance in ways adversaries cannot replicate symmetrically. The fact that it must now operate under greater risk, rely more on stand-off methods or manage supply chain frictions does not erase that underlying capability. It shows that the cost and difficulty of applying it have increased.
Where I think your critique is most useful is in pushing on this point: if superiority does not deliver outcomes, how meaningful is it? That is exactly the question the essay is trying to answer. My answer is that superiority remains real but is increasingly insufficient on its own. The environment now rewards disruption, persistence and the ability to create systemic effects at relatively low thresholds. Under those conditions, even very advanced militaries can find themselves unable to impose the kind of stable control that would translate into "victory" in the traditional sense.
On your final point about values, I would frame that differently. Cohesion, legitimacy and social resilience do matter in war, but they operate in a different domain than conventional military capability. You can have strong cohesion and still lack the means to project power beyond your immediate environment. You can also have immense military capability and struggle to achieve political objectives. The current conflict is, in many ways, about the interaction between those domains.
The US and Israel retain high levels of conventional military capability. What the current conflict reveals is not the absence of that capability but its declining ability - on its own - to produce decisive political outcomes in environments structured around persistent, low-threshold disruption. That's the gap I'm trying to describe.
Thank you for such a considered and detailed reply to my few points.
As you rightly point out our differences are in relation to perspective on the issue of “technical” superiority versus actual outcomes. My views on such matters are, I am afraid, brutally realistic.
Wars are the ultimate test of a nation’s strength, morally, militarily, economically, politically and socially. On all of these measures the US is in very serious decline, over a very short period of time. Their inability to turn this “superiority” into actual real and enduring results proves this beyond doubt in my view. I can see no evidence to the contrary.
"The United States and Israel retain overwhelming superiority, but that superiority is optimized for a different kind of war".
I see the point, but surely "superiority" that accomplishes nothing, gains nothing, and cannot win a war is illusory.
Everything in war is relative to the purpose and goals of the war. So it profits the USA (and its camp followers) nothing that they spend hundreds of times more money on armaments and expenses than Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis, or the Iraqi resistance.
I challenge the proposition that the USA and Israel retain superiority at all, let alone "overwhelming" superiority. At least the USA has the chance to run away back home where Iran cannot (yet) harm it. Israel, however, has no such choice: it is pinned to Palestine. "You steal it, you (don't) own it". The Zionists' only chance of survival is to leave Palestine and go back whence they or their parents or grandparents came.
In the well-known colonial wars of the 19th century and earlier, the Zulus, Indians, Chinese, and others might just as sincerely have claimed "overwhelming superiority". After all, at the Battle of Plassey and other similar engagements, they outnumbered the British by more than 100 to 1. Nevertheless they lost, because the British had the right weapons on the day. Going back in history, the same could be said of Agincourt, where the French had overwhelming superiority in armoured knights. Unfortunately for them, the English cheated by fielding a lot of archers whose "great bows" could send an arrow right through plate armour at 200 yards.
Military "superiority" that is not "optimized" for the current war is not superiority at all; it is at best a huge waste of money, and at worst a recipe for catastrophic defeat.
You are absolutely right to emphasize that superiority in war is only meaningful relative to objectives. If military power cannot achieve political goals, then in a strategic sense it is failing. That's a valid and important point.
Where I would push back is on the conclusion that this means the US and Israel do not possess superiority at all. They still retain overwhelming superiority in a conventional and material sense through precision strike capability at range, naval dominance in the open waters, ISR networks and logistical reach. None of the actors you mentioned - whether Iran, Hezbollah or the Houthis - can match that in a direct, symmetrical contest. In a conventional war defined by force-on-force engagement and territorial control, the imbalance remains significant. But - and this is the core of my argument - that form of superiority is increasingly misaligned with the environment in which it is being applied. Thus, the issue is not that superiority is illusory. It is contextually constrained. In other words, tactical and material superiority still exists but it does not translate cleanly into strategic outcomes. That gap is precisely what I'm describing as adaptation asymmetry.
Your historical examples actually reinforce this point rather than contradict it. At places like Battle of Agincourt or Battle of Plassey, the side that “lost” often had advantages in numbers or prestige, but not in alignment between tools and conditions. That’s very close to what is happening here, but with an important difference that today, the US does not lack advanced tools. It has the most advanced tools ever fielded. The issue is that many of those tools are designed for decisive engagements, territorial control and escalation dominance. Whereas the current environment rewards persistence, dispersion, cost imposition and systemic disruption.
On your broader point that superiority that accomplishes nothing is not superiority, I would refine slightly by stating that it is still superiority but it is insufficiently translated into strategy. That distinction matters because it leads to different conclusions. If superiority is illusory, the system is collapsing. If superiority is misaligned, the system must adapt. My argument is firmly in the second category.
Finally, on outcomes you are correct that endurance can constitute success for actors like Iran and the Houthis. That is precisely why they structure their strategy around it. But that does not negate the existence of superiority. It highlights a divergence in what each side is trying to achieve and how each side defines success. And that divergence is what produces the current conflict dynamic.
"The Zionists' only chance of survival is to leave Palestine and go back whence they or their parents or grandparents came."
And if they do, they need to lose that dumbass idea that they are God's chosen people.
"This is the first principle of the new environment: control is no longer required to generate systemic effects. "
The same applies to the Americans. The American/Israeli goal ever always only was, not to control Iran, but to turn it into a failed state, as was done to Iraq, Libya and Syria.
If the rest of the world suffers, why should the Americans care? They're behind their oceans and have petroleum and helium.
If Americans suffer, why should Trump care? He continues to live The Good Life and The Epstein Files stay quiet for now.
I think you are right that disruption can cut both ways, but I would draw an important distinction. For Iran and the Houthis, disruption is more likely to produce favorable outcomes because their objective is endurance. They don't need decisive victory. They need to sustain pressure long enough that US and Israeli operations become politically and economically difficult to maintain. In that sense, disruption aligns directly with their strategy.
The US and Israel can also generate disruption without control. The question is whether that disruption produces a usable political outcome. Cases like Iraq and Libya show that external powers can create state weakening and long-term dysfunction, but that doesn't necessarily translate into stable or advantageous end states, and often generates second-order instability. In fact, Israel's strategy in the 12-day June war against Iran as well as the current one appeared to rest on the assumption that decapitating Iran's leadership might trigger internal disorientation, street unrest and possibly wider state breakdown. But that logic faltered because the Iranian system proved able to reconstitute its leadership quickly enough to prevent military decapitation from becoming political collapse. Thus, in this case disruption has so far failed to produce the desired political outcome.
That's really the core point. The ability to disrupt is no longer the same as the ability to shape outcomes. In an interconnected system comprising energy, shipping, finance, those effects don't remain contained. They tend to feed back, even to actors who appear insulated.
So the issue isn't whether disruption is possible. It clearly is. It's whether it actually delivers the strategic outcomes being sought.
"US and Israeli operations become politically and economically difficult to maintain. "
Israel cares only about Israel, and they need only stretch out their hand and Uncle Sam will fill it.
Trump cares only about Trump. If Americans suffer, why should he care?
That may be true at the level of personal motives, but wars are not sustained by motive alone. They are sustained by munition stocks, interceptor availability, shipping confidence, alliance tolerance, domestic political bandwidth and the ability to prevent escalation from producing wider economic blowback.
So my point is not that leaders will suddenly become more compassionate or restrained. It is that even leaders who are indifferent to suffering still run into material and political constraints. The issue is less whether Trump or Israeli leaders care, and more whether the system they depend on can absorb prolonged attrition and disruption without forcing hard choices. That is why endurance matters. It shifts the burden from intentions to sustainability.
I suspect that neither Trump nor Israel will hesitate to go nuclear.
It certainly is a risk that cannot be dismissed lightly though I would be cautious about treating it as inevitable. Going nuclear is not just another step up the escalation ladder. It would cross a threshold with enormous strategic consequences - regional collapse, global political shock, likely international isolation and the possibility of uncontrollable retaliation or wider war. Even actors willing to use extreme force have historically treated that threshold differently because the costs are qualitatively different, not just larger.
So I would say the concern is real, but the more immediate analytical point remains the same. The fact that such escalation is even being discussed by numerous commentators shows how poorly conventional superiority is translating into usable outcomes. When overwhelming force cannot reliably deliver strategic objectives, the temptation to consider more extreme options grows - and that in itself is a sign of failure.
And why would Trump or Netanyahu care, as long as they are the ones ones who have The Bomb?
The european catamites would fret for a couple of days, maybe even a week, before whispering in Trump’s ear that he looked so powerful and regal and maybe he could do that to Russia just maybe...
One thing I forgot to add on the subject of ‘overwhelming military superiority’. For the authors thesis to be correct, Iran and the USA (Israel) would need to line up all of their military assets on and above some vast plain (like the edged weapons battles of the ancient world), and prepare to go at it. Then the latter would clearly confirm the authors position (though I don’t think it would open the strait). As I’m sure we have all noticed - that’s not how it works. Just sayin…….
The narrative of US & Israeli ‘overwhelming conventional superiority’ really needs to be pushed back. Firstly, Israel is not an independent belligerent, and can be removed from the equation in that sense…..it’s planes are American, it’s bombs are American, it’s intelligence and targeting are American, etc, etc……..Israel is just a U.S. FOB, or an airforce masquerading as a country. Secondly, watching the war unfold, it doesn’t look like the US is ‘overwhelming’ anyone. US bases rendered unusable, US ground radars destroyed, steady pounding of the gulf monarchies and Israel at Will, and the strait gated and under permanent Iranian control. Furthermore, the US and its Israeli component cannot fly unimpeded over Iranian territory and must instead use up enormous quantities of expensive and relatively limited stand-off munitions. Lastly, US, gulf, and Israeli AD interceptors and radars are being attrited down alarmingly, and are on course to run out - if they haven’t already. Yes, The Empire can destroy any number of TELs and missile decoys, empty buildings, huge amounts of civilian, and above ground military and other infrastructure, but that won’t win the war. Who is overwhelming who, in the conventional military sense? Of course, there is ultimately the nuclear option, but even then, as per Ted Postol, I’d put my money on Iran putting together a few nukes in a matter of weeks, and dumping them on TLV Haifa, Jerusalem, and Dimona. Goodbye Israel & good riddance. Iran has a history going back 4,000 years, and I’d be very surprised if (despite a limited nuclear attack), it wasn’t still there as a functioning state at the turn of this century. Who would bet on Israel (or even the USA in its present form) surviving that long?
Thank you for this comment. You are raising an important point about outcomes but I think we may be talking past each other slightly on what "superiority" refers to.
When I describe the US (and by extension Israel) as having overwhelming conventional superiority, I'm not making a claim about who is "winning" the war in a strategic sense. I'm referring to capabilities in a force-to-force, conventional military context - airpower, ISR, precision strike, naval reach and logistical sustainment. On those dimensions, the imbalance is very real. Iran and its partners cannot establish air superiority over US forces, cannot project sustained naval power into open waters and cannot match the scale of precision strike or ISR integration. That's what I mean by "overwhelming superiority".
Where your argument is stronger is in point out that those capabilities are not translating into decisive outcomes. US bases can be harassed, air defense can be stressed and shipping can be disrupted. That is all consistent with the evidence and its exactly the dynamic the essay is trying to explain. But that does not mean superiority has disappeared. It exists at the level of capability but not at the level of outcome. That gap is the core of the argument.
On Israel specifically, I would frame it slightly different. Israel is deeply integrated with the US in terms of systems and support, but it still operates as an independent military actor with its own command structure, doctrine and decision-making. Whether one sees it as independent or not doesn't materially change the analytical point that the combined system still possesses very high-end conventional capabilities.
On the battlefield observations you and other readers have mentioned - base vulnerability, interceptor depletion, contested airspace - those are real pressures but they reflect contestation, not parity or dominance. The fact that US forces must rely on stand-off munitions, for example, says less about a loss of capability and more about the cost of operating inside a denied environment. That again points to the same conclusion that the environment has changed faster than doctrine.
So, the US is not being outmatched conventionally. It is being out-adapted in an environment where conventional dominance is no longer sufficient. That's the phenomenon I'm trying to describe.
Great clarification. Many thanks.
"The challenge is not that American power is insufficient, but that it is not optimized for the specific form of conflict being waged." Conflict waged from air or from the sea and high intensity. When it comes to land warfare, territorial and attritional type, that requires more than SOFs, the US, as well as IDF are no longer equipped to prevail. We saw that in Afghanistan, we see IDF now sputtering in Southern Lebanon and we see a truly modern land war going on in Ukraine, and where NATO and the US, with their present doctrine and capabilities would have their bottoms handed to them in no time.
Oh my.. That was powerful, succinct and probably 99% correct. I am in awe.
On the way to quadrophenia?
You are raising important points and I think there are two distinctions worth clarifying.
First, I agree the issue isn't simply that the US spends more per interceptor. As I noted earlier, the deeper shift is that the threshold for disruption has fallen dramatically. Iran and the Houthis don't need decisive victories. They only need to create enough credible risk to disrupt shipping, insurance and market confidence. That makes the defender's problem much harder. It's not about intercepting everything but restoring a sense of normalcy. So the asymmetry isn't just cost, it's the gap between the low threshold needed to disrupt and the much higher threshold needed to restore stability. Cost matters, but as part of a broader strategic imbalance.
Second, on whether this reflects misconfiguration or inadequacy, I'd say both, but at different levels. The US still has enormous conventional capabilities (airpower, ISR, global reach) but those capabilities are optimized for decisive engagements and control. In an environment defined by persistence, dispersion and low-cost disruption, that creates a mismatch. Your point about even the best air defenses being unable to stop all the drones reinforces this. It suggests this is not just a US problem, but a broader shift in warfare where no system can guarantee full protection when disruption requires so little to succeed.
That's why I also agree the issue is partly political. The objective isn't just to destroy targets, it's to restore stable, predictable flows of commerce. If escalation limits constraints prevent that, then military capability alone cannot solve the problem.
So I would frame it by stating that the issue is not simply cost, but a changing enviroment in which modest capabilities can generate outsized disruption, while even advanced militaries struggle to restore normalcy. That is what I mean by adaptation asymmetry.
That is a fair concern, but I'd separate capability from incentives. The US certainly has destructive capacity, but using it at that scale would carry extreme strategic costs (see my response to Feral Finster regarding the risk of using nuclear weapons) that likely outweigh any short-term gains. In other words, it doesn't solve the underlying problem of restoring stable, normalized conditions but amplifies it.
That's really the point. The challenge isn't a lack of destructive power, but that even overwhelming force doesn't translate cleanly into the kind of outcomes being sought. History is abound with such cases as numerous readers have outlined in their comments.
And when the radio active cloud has settled, the spectators turn away and return to their daily lives. Forgotten are the millions of victims. The USA will be condemned for a while, but the elite will take care of other distractions and soon most of us have forgotten. Personally I think humans are the worst of all the species on this planet. Unable to ever live in peace, clearly expressed by DJT that he wil bomb Iran back to the stone age adding that is where they belong.
"Personally I think humans are the worst of all the species on this planet."
Sadly, your comment has a ring of truth. Human dominance over all other species is due to intelligence; its abject evil comes from a lack of integrity.
Cats have both.
https://houseofsaud.com/mbs-netanyahu-trump-iran-war-saudi-strategy/
I agree with the author that the goal is the basic destruction of Iran. The Saudis see this as the opportunity to settle scores with the Shia once and for all. However, I have two problems with the analysis:
1. What's to stop Iran from destroying Saudi oil or water infrastructure?
2. The idea that Israel does not seek a failed state doesn't hold up. Israel cheered the destruction of Iraq and Libya, and participated int he destruction of Syria.
Oh, common, you should know better than this. It has nothing to do with Shia but everything to do with the big bulging republic, with some popular representation and some censorship on mores that offer an alternative to the Saudis' subjects. Iran is for the Arab sheicks in the Gulf the same bugbear that communism and USSR was for the US and its oligarchic elites. Has nothing to do with the Shia/Sunni split, which is always offered as a facile cop-out, from the desire to mask the actual, real, material reasons...
Whether its the vision of Iran as a political or religious alternative (and I get what you are saying, but Saudi Arabia has a large and restive Shia minority and the Saudi claim to rule derives from their self-proclaimed status as guardians of Sunni orthodoxy) - it gets to the same place.
The Saudis want to settle scores, once and for all.
I suspect that MBS sees the war as inevitable, Israel wants it, end of story, so might as well get what he can out of it.
That's a long ways from the author's thesis that MBS and not Netanyahu is pulling the puppet strings and making the puppet dance.