Sixty Days In
10 things that were all inherently predictable
We are approaching sixty days of a war the United States has not declared, debated, or formally authorized. The War Powers Resolution clock has been running. Congress has not acted. That silence is itself an answer, and not a reassuring one.
I have been writing about this conflict since the first strikes in early March, roughly three times a week, in real time, without the benefit of hindsight. Looking back across those pieces now, certain insights kept surfacing regardless of the specific event I was writing about. Ten of them have proven durable enough to name, none of them are profound except for in the absence of anticipation.
1. The U.S. uses violence too easily.
It was not recklessness that brought us here. It was accumulation: incremental decisions, narrowing options, forces already forward, timelines already running. No single moment felt decisive. From the inside, each step was rational. From the outside, the pattern is unmistakable. Democracies are supposed to choose war deliberately. We have built a system that makes drift easier than decision, and then act surprised when we find ourselves sixty days in with no clear endstate and no congressional authorization. The founders understood this risk precisely. That is why they put the war power in Article I. America’s primary instrument of national power has become the use of its military abroad.
2. War is decided in termination, not initiation.
We plan openings with extraordinary rigor. We rarely apply the same discipline to endings. That asymmetry is not accidental. Endings require political choices that are harder to make than military ones, and they force clarity about what you actually wanted in the first place. This conflict has no publicly articulated endstate. It has objectives that shifted, rationales that multiplied, and a ceasefire that is a pause in coercion rather than the beginning of a settlement. Strategy lives in termination. Everything before it is just operations, however intoxicating.
3. Legitimacy is a strategic center of gravity.
Not a moral argument, a mechanical one. Legitimacy in the use of force rests on three pillars: legal clarity, alliance cohesion, and constitutional authority. When the public rationale shifts between imminent threat, deterrence restoration, proxy retaliation, and Israeli defense, the legal foundation erodes. When key partners signal caution or decline basing, the coalition thins. When Congress is bypassed, the domestic architecture weakens. None of that is abstract. Legitimacy shapes what allies will do, what adversaries will risk, and how long a campaign can be sustained. Campaigns that start hollow degrade over time regardless of tactical performance.
4. Adversaries retain agency — always.
Iran did not need to win then. It does not need to win now. It needed to impose cost, stretch time, and force reactions. That was enough to shape the war. Leadership succession was resolved from within the existing power structure within days. The Strait became the central pressure point the moment fixed targets were exhausted. The rate of fire declined, but whether that reflects attrition, conservation, or adaptation remains genuinely unclear. Iran’s most powerful tool was never any single weapons system. It was its willingness to remain in the fight on its own terms. External actors do not get to decide unilaterally when a war is over.
5. Tactical success can accelerate strategic failure.
Decapitation strikes, ISR saturation, precision at scale, all working as designed. The problem is that tactical success advances the timeline to second and third order effects faster than policy can keep pace. Fixed targets get serviced and then the target set gets harder. Intelligence advantages are perishable: networks go dark, patterns change, deception increases. The picture that looked clear on the first night rarely stays that way. Every impressive opening creates expectations the subsequent phases have to meet. The opening of this conflict was tactically brilliant. That is precisely why the gap between what was done and what was achieved is so striking.
6. Precision ≠ control.
Precision reduces blast radius. It does not reduce uncertainty. A target destroyed to within meters can still trigger reactions nobody fully controls. Adversaries still vote. Domestic politics still matter. Escalation dynamics still exist. Smart weapons are an extraordinary engineering achievement. They do not make war predictable, and in Washington they have repeatedly tempted decision-makers into believing that they do. The seduction of precision is that it makes war feel like a policy instrument with manageable consequences. It is not. It is still war.
7. Control of systems > destruction of targets.
Destroying things is not the same as controlling outcomes. ISR advantages evaporate. SLOCs remain contested by uncertainty as much as by force. Insurance markets react faster than military operations can stabilize them. A single confirmed mine, or the credible suspicion of one, reshapes commercial behavior across an entire waterway. Iran did not need to defeat the U.S. Navy to make the Strait economically consequential. It needed to keep uncertainty alive. In the domains that produce strategic effect, energy flows, shipping confidence, financial markets, alliance cohesion, the side controlling the system has leverage the side destroying targets does not.
8. Interior lines beat projected power over time.
The local actor has shorter timelines, layered and cheaper systems, and the ability to adapt faster than a distant power can retask. The external actor has longer supply chains, higher cost per operational day, and declining flexibility as the campaign extends. This is not a new observation, it is as old as warfare, but it keeps getting discounted in planning because the opening phase almost always favors the side with superior technology, intelligence that provides false confidence, and a wealth of preplanned targets. Iran did not have to match American capability. It had to make American capability expensive to sustain. Geography, time, and economics favor the defender when the attacker is operating at range and under political pressure to show results.
9. Readiness gaps are revealed in war, not before it.
The United States retired its forward-deployed Avenger-class mine countermeasure ships while their replacements were still maturing. That decision looked manageable in peacetime. It looked different when the Strait of Hormuz became the central operational problem in a real conflict. The same pattern showed up in munitions: Tomahawk stocks consumed faster than production rates can replace them, foreign delivery commitments disrupted, a seven-year production ramp now running against a live campaign. The carrier strike group routed around Africa to avoid a contested chokepoint. Littoral Combat Ships arriving after the campaign began rather than before it. These are not failures of courage or competence. They are the accumulated consequences of decades of procurement decisions, force structure choices, and budget priorities made when the cost of being wrong felt distant. War has a way of making the bill come due all at once.
10. Alliances are not accessories, and we are treating them like they are.
Coalition capacity does not follow military superiority. It follows alignment of interest, sustained trust, and the perception that partnership is reciprocal. When meaningful allies hesitate on basing, signal caution publicly, or decline participation, that is not diplomatic noise. It is a readiness signal. The mine countermeasure capability we need most in the Gulf resides substantially with allied navies, the same navies we have treated as optional in recent years. The partners whose basing, overflight, and logistics we depend on are watching how we treat the ones already in the relationship. Arrogance toward allies is not strength. It is a force multiplier working in reverse, and it compounds every gap named in #9. A nation that hollows out its own capacity and simultaneously alienates those who could fill the gap has not projected power. It has isolated itself at the worst possible moment.
Long after we have muddled our way out of this conflict we will be repairing the damage done. America may move on, it has a gift for that. Our allies and the rest of the world are less likely to. We can bluster and say that is of little consequence. But we are less for it. So is the world we depend on.
