Where Are We Now

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Man, I turn off the news for a few hours and Fordow goes boom.

First, back to my earlier post regarding The Ten Ships. The true center of gravity in the Iranian problem is the Mullahs, not the nukes. The Mullahs are the true WMD. While they remain in power, every barrel of Iranian oil purchased, every dollar that touches their hands becomes a tool for mayhem. That puts the “pallets of cash” that Obama sent the regime in a new perspective.

While the Mullahs rule any actions we take will not be decisive but rather will be simply “mowing the lawn.” A useful action perhaps but one that will need to be repeated, and I seriously doubt we will have the same upper hand that we have today.

Second, if you want an example of an evil regime that everyone thought would have fallen a long time ago, look no further than the Chavistas in Venezuela. Nothing is inevitable; that’s a trope that historians and Hegelians like to push.

Third, regarding the timing of actions.

I will turn back to Boyd’s OODA loop. The key part of OODA, the most misunderstood part, is that it isn’t a linear process. You don’t beat your opponent by running through the loop faster than he does; rather OODA is a targeting mechanism, specifically the part dealing with orientation.

Boyd was quite explicit about this. In “Destruction and Creation” he identified Gödel’s Theorem as one of his foundational principles: we cannot determine the character of a system from within itself, but only in terms of an external frame of reference. In short, Orientation.

In “Patterns of Conflict” Boyd identified several historical examples of armies targeting through deception or disruption the enemy’s ability to correctly connect itself to the external environment. In fact the best tactics do not confuse the enemy or even render them helpless, but through deception provide a false frame of reference.

Right now, no one but Trump and Israel know which way is up. The ten-year slur about Trump being a stooge of Putin, the more recent one of TACO, etc… gone. Trump and Israel have the initiative and Trump has clearly demonstrated he means what he says.

This will change with time, Russia and Iran and all the rest will eventually find their footing. So you need to exploit the advantage.

Fourth, regime change.

There has been a lot of ink spilled the last few days comparing the dangers of regime change in Iran with our past experiences in Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Fair enough — those were disasters. But analogies are, beyond a certain point… well, a lazy tic.

All three of those examples are not real countries. Libya and Iraq were colonial constructs, provinces thrown together. Afghanistan is a spot on the map, not a polity. When we overthrew Hussein in 2003 we inserted ourselves right into those divisions among Sunnis, Shi’ites, and Kurds, and by doing so helped ignite that civil war by removing the Sunnis’ protection against the Shi’ites. That’s how you ended up with, in part, the Al Qaeda in Iraq and then ISIS. Then, given Iraq’s border with Iran, we allowed the Mullahs free reign.

The better example would be Serbia, a country with a relatively dominant ethnic group that remained in power after a successful western air campaign toppled the previous regime.

Five, the nature of the regime.

Governing parties, regimes, whatever are not monolithic entities but are rather composed of factions. If you know where those factional lines are and have the means to exploit them, then you have the ability to effect change, That’s what the Chinese have been doing to us for the better part of 20 years.

I will guarantee you that for the better part of a week that there are factions within the Iranian regime thinking about how to save their skin and looking to either flee the country or cut a deal to replace the Mullahs.

That’s who you talk to, not Khamenei and the rest. Once the first factions start bolting for the door, it’s then that you initiate a preference cascade. The Iranian regime may appear strong but it is brittle.

We will have to see what happens over the next few days, both in terms of an Iranian reaction and the domestic Iranian situation, but we are in uncharted territory.

26 thoughts on “Where Are We Now”

  1. Might I offer a thought? President Trump noted that if the Iranians do not want to talk peace, that they have a lot of targets in their country. I have been given to understand that our inventory of Massive Ordnance Penetrators [MOP’s] is not that large and today used up a significant fraction of that inventory. If anyone knows anyone in the funny 5-sided building or in Congress, might I recommend that they be lobbied to re-open that production line. The key to warfighting is logistics.

    Subotai Bahadur

  2. Mullahs can be replaced. The center of gravity is the apocalyptic vision that animates their particular Islamic sect. As long as that isn’t thoroughly discredited, someone will eventually arise to reignite it.

  3. Re: apocalyptic vision

    Agreed

    I still think the Mullahs and their defeat is a useful proxy.

    I’m willing to guess that it will be at least several generations if not much longer for another group to run with a vision of Shi’ite like they had.

    Losers don’t do well in history or an attracting a following. Less than 25 years after the mighty Third Reich they were made the butt of jokes and Hogan’s heroes and then 10 years after that and the Blues Brothers

    Even neo-Nazis keep a certain public distance.

    As a side note I’ve noticed a number of conservatives and people otherwise on the right liking the post pictures of pre-Mullah Iran of course the next question would be if you had a country of hot looking women walking around in short skirts and bikinis how did you end up with what we have today.

  4. If anyone knows anyone in the funny 5-sided building or in Congress, might I recommend that they be lobbied to re-open that production line.

    If the production line for a weapon as useful as these MOPs has been closed then a lot of government bureaucrats need to lose their pensions at best and die in prison at worst.

    The key to warfighting is logistics.

    Absolutely. So why don’t the putative professionals of the pentagon grasp that we need to be able to design, produce, and stockpile weapons of war- and, yes, also have the ability produce them in quantity if needed?

    My guess- that would be spendy, and the denizens of the pentagram would have their second careers threatened if they objected to a defense policy that doesn’t prioritize shareholder return over national defense, so no objections are made.

    This won’t end well, but it will end.

  5. While they remain in power, every barrel of Iranian oil purchased, every dollar that touches their hands becomes a tool for mayhem.

    In other words, you advocate for yet another regime change war of choice. No thank you.

    Trump and Israel have the initiative and Trump has clearly demonstrated he means what he says.

    Israel attacked while Trump was supposedly negotiating- and killed the negotiators. I suppose that gives them the initiative- but note Japan also had the initiative when they attacked Pearl Harbor.

    All three of those examples are not real countries. Libya and Iraq were colonial constructs, provinces thrown together.

    What? Libya sure seemed like a real country before Qaddafi was killed. It was real enough for him to give up his WMD program, like a real country would, for example. Iraq was also quite enough of a real country to invade Iran and spend eight years not quite losing.

    Afghanistan is a spot on the map, not a polity.

    Spots on a map are appreantly the most dangerous, because they were able to defeat us, unlike Libya and Iraq. But regime change in Iran will be totally different, because reasons.

    Then, given Iraq’s border with Iran, we allowed the Mullahs free reign.

    I remember all that. Iran was supplying Iraqi insurgents with rather sophisticated weaponry and we knew it. The US government said and did nothing about it at the time, for yet more reasons it wouldn’t tell us.

    That would have been the time to go after the mullahs, given the obvious casus belli and the well-known unpopularity of the regime. But no, that didn’t happen. Instead, we’re now supposed to initiate regime change just after Iran has been attacked by not only one foreign country but two. I’d bet the people of Iran aren’t keen on that, even if they don’t like the Mullahs.

    …but we are in uncharted territory.

    I agree. Good luck to us all.

  6. Peace in the Middle East is much more important to the Euros and to China than to the US. Middle East oil mostly goes to China and to Euro countries which have officially stopped buying oil from Russia. Iran apparently also is a major source of the fertilizers which allow Europe to feed itself.

    It seems it is time for the US to bow out of Middle East affairs. Bring the troops and the fleets home, and save some money. A further benefit is that this would also undercut part of the rationale for the unceasing hatred towards the US pouring out of the Euros.

    China will face big troubles if the Middle East falls into chaos, while Russia will be wealthier and happier if competing suppliers of oil & gas are discommoded. Let them sort things out while the US rebuilds at home.

  8. the Brits secured all the lands east of Aden, but then they gave up those perogatives, because they couldn’t afford it, neither can we in the long run

  9. The USA was a colonial construct, 13 provinces thrown together.

    France was, Germany was, Italy was, Russia was, China was, Switzerland was, Canada was, Australia was etc. etc. etc.

  10. Xennady…”denizens of the pentagram would have their second careers threatened if they objected to a defense policy that doesn’t prioritize shareholder return over national defense, so no objections are made”

    Building more MOPs would seem entirely consistent with shareholder returns for Boeing, which builds them.

    There are not infinite resources, either financial or human. Building more of weapons system X will inevitably mean building less of some other system or systems.

  11. A move that even Joe Biden could have foreseen:
    https://nypost.com/2025/06/22/world-news/iran-orders-closure-of-strait-of-hormuz-putting-one-fifth-of-worlds-oil-supply-at-risk/

    There won’t be just a few big targets, nothing to hit with bunker busters, just a plethora of small boats, manned and unmanned, short range flying drones of all sizes. There will be fixed targets that can be bombed from far away but not many. I doubt Iran made the mistake of concentrating their launch points, so lots of dispersed small targets of little individual value, easily replaced. Lots of targets of opportunity, lots of sorties, lots of flight hours, round the clock flight deck operations. How many JAG lawyers second guessing and vetoing every decision?

    Expect few casualties from air defense lately destroyed. Probably more from operational training deferred in favor of pronouns and “pride”. Now we find out if adequate spare parts have been neglected to pursue the latest whiz-bang. Now we find out if our best and brightest have been noticing what’s been happening in Ukraine.

    As always, listen for the siren song of the one target that will end the war by Christians. And make no mistake, war it is. As always, we win the war when there’s no one left on the other side willing to die to continue.

  12. Interesting times … when Trump did what Carter ought to have given orders to do, after the embassy takeover. What Reagan should have done after the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut.
    Well, the Iranian mullocracy has been pissed at the US for decades, so I don’t know what more they could do to us, other than kicking off a mass terrorist campaign in CONUS, a la Kurt Schlichter’s “The Attack”.
    I’m kind of glad that my public book events were all last weekend and the weekend before. Any time I’m out in public at some widely-advertised event from now on, I’m going to have my head on a swivel.
    Like I didn’t already have that in mind before, along with an escape plan out the nearest exist already skulled out.

  13. Building more MOPs would seem entirely consistent with shareholder returns for Boeing, which builds them.

    Key word: seem.

    These are large heavy bombs made of a metal casing stuffed full of chemicals guided to a target by electronics. None of these items should be especially rare or especially expensive and yet the United States has apparently managed to build only a handful over the last twenty years.

    What’s the margin on building 20 by hand versus 20000 in a factory? I’d bet it looks a lot better for shareholder return to handcraft a few instead of mass producing what would effectively become a commodity.

    Building more of weapons system X will inevitably mean building less of some other system or systems.

    The United States presently spends something like a trillion dollars a year on “defense.”

    With that in mind, I see no reason why we shouldn’t have both a large stockpile of every useful weapon along with the capacity to produce the same in large quantities whenever needed.

    Inbstead, we find again and again that we have too little of what we need and can’t make more without China.

    Not a recipe for success, I think.

  14. jamie dimon at an investor’s conference, some weeks back, pointed out the dangerous shortfall in targeted weapons, if there was an engagement in the South China Sea,

  15. “With that in mind, I see no reason why we shouldn’t have both a large stockpile of every useful weapon along with the capacity to produce the same in large quantities whenever needed.”

    All it takes is money. Lots and lots of money, every year from now to forever. All those chemicals and electronics have shelf lives, some longer than others. Once it’s built, it has to be maintained and tested periodically or we might as well throw rocks. Rocks having the distinct advantage of not being likely to explode when handled or in storage. Not so for complicated munitions filled with electronics and explosives.

    Production line are even worse. And where are the people going to come from to “instantly” increase production at need?

    Trent has made the point that a lot of our Ukrainian largess has probably saved us the substantial cost of decommissioning munitions that were near their use by date. The proportion of Russian casualties from out dated and especially poor quality North Korean shells is figured in the thousands.

    This is a circle that has refused being squared since we’ve been fighting wars with sharp sticks. Those sticks rotted eventually, the muskets in the armories rusted, the powder deteriorated or exploded, often both. More than one nascent empire ended in bankruptcy.

  16. Lots and lots of money, every year from now to forever.

    A trillion dollars a year, every year, now to forever- yes, we absolutely should have both a stockpile of every weapon we think we might need and also an industrial base ready and able to spool up quickly enough to erase any pumpernickel principality that wants to go head-to-head with us. Superpower, yo.

    Production line are even worse. And where are the people going to come from to “instantly” increase production at need?

    A trillion dollars a year, every year- are you kidding?

    Instead of arranging to stuff that trillion dollars into the bottom line of a few corporations arrange it such that people are paid to know and understand how to produce the endless swarm of manufactured items a modern miltary requires to exist.

    Sure, the present miltary establisment employs plenty of people- but when we can’t produce MOBs or build navy ships something has gone seriously wrong.

  17. Xennady: “… when we can’t produce MOBs or build navy ships something has gone seriously wrong.”

    Let’s not restrict ourselves to the military. The US can’t balance a budget; can’t build a railway line in California; can’t replace a bridge in Baltimore; can’t maintain a viable merchant marine fleet; struggles to build commercial jets; hardly builds a freeway anymore. The rot goes much deeper than military procurement.

    Too many lawyers; too many bureaucrats; too many speculators making short-term financial profits at the expense of long-term real capabilities; and a Political Class intent primarily on enriching themselves. Not enough incompetents in government & business getting taken down to the soccer field and shot a la Chinese.

  19. A few observations

    Magazine depth is an issue. One of the key components of Iosrael’s Iron Dome is its ability to track and predict landing spots for incoming missiles so that it only engages those which would strike important targets – population centers, military bases… If it is going for a field or desert, it will let it go. That might not be good for a bunch of Israeli kids doing Night Moves in a ’60 Chevy but it reduces strain on the number of missiles needed.

    Pre-10/7, most of Hamas and Hezbollah missiles/rockets were unguided and so many didn’t have to be engaged. The missiles that Iran is shooting off do and at some point, perhaps soon, Israel will run out of missiles. Who will run out first? Israel or Iran? Or Iran will run out of launchers?

    There are concerns that in a fight against China in the western Pacific we would run out of missiles in the first week or two. Those 30 TLAMs we fired at Iran represents about 1/3 to 1/2 the number we buy each year

    Negotiations are all about affecting the other side’s Orientation (in a Boydsian sense) The old Godfather framework of “Either your signature or your brains will on this document” is the old forcing a binary choice on the other side… pressing a perceived sense of superiority in order to accomplish an objective. A smart operator recognizes that a binary choice is – the old Cartel choice of “Silver or Lead” a dead end and instead looks to gain leverage by developing other options, Trump has been very good at this. Right now the Iranian regime is losing badly so it’s looking for other options to either deter or enhance.

    The problem is that due to its leadership either being isolated, destroyed, or shell-shocked it has little ability to develop an effective external framework for Orientation so it goes for reflexive, instinctual action. The old play from the 1980s of closing the Straits of Hormuz? As Bill mentioned, their Chinese buddies wouldn’t like that given the need for oil. Get their allies in Russia and China to pitch in? Perhaps helpful but not to the extent the Iranians need.

    Perhaps the best strategy for Iranian regime is to ride out the current American-Israeli offensive and once it expended itself pick up the pieces afterall we cannot impose our will directly, we need the Iranians to do it for us. Someone in the regime needs to beak. That’s the known unknown. The Israeli probably have a good idea of where the fault lines are, afterall they couldn’t have operated the way they had for the past 10 years without knowing. Once someone in the regime breaks and runs for the door it will end quickly.

    I am sure the Israelis are reminding the Iranians that there are first-mover advantages to running for the door. There is a collective memory in Iran to what happened to those of the Shah’s government when the theocrats took over, they got lined up and shot. The smart ones either cut their deal or skipped town long before hand

    The Iranians greatest strategic mistake was not to recognize their peril in the weeks after 10/7. Once Israel crossed that emotional threshhold of a full-scale invasion of Gaza, Iran needed to do whatever it could to bring its multiple fronts – Hezbollah, organic Iranian assets, international allies – to bear. That was always the Israeli nightmare scenario. Instead the Iranians held back and allowed the Israelis to pick them off one by one. If you are going to take Vienna….

    The other wild card is Turkey which with Edrogan is making a bid for regional power and thus brings in the old Ottoman-Persian Empires conflict. I would imagine that given how Syria is tied to Turkey and the way the Israelis are overflying it that Turkey is giving the big thumbs up to this operation. Not only is Iran a regional rival,. But about 20% of its population is Turkic. On the other hand Turkey seeing the chaos that happened in Syria post-2011 would not want a complete Iranian collapse

  20. “What’s the margin on building 20 by hand versus 20000 in a factory?”

    It’s not a question of margin, but how many Congress authorizes in a given year’s budget. We can’t just buy all the planes we need, or all the ship we want, etc., etc., unless Congress provides the funds. Congress fixes the number of things we can buy each year.

    Related: several Blue Ribbon panels that examined defense acquisition reform all listed Congressional micromanagement as the single biggest impediment to real reform.

  22. Congress fixes the number of things we can buy each year.

    Congress is nothing more than the Deep State’s rubber stamp, so I expect no sort of competence from them. If the Deep State wanted the US to have an industrial base capable of turning out 20000 MOBs a year, we would have one. But it doesn’t, so we don’t.

    Yet somehow we still manage to expend a trillion dollars a year. My view that we are being ripped off is the most charitable evaluation.

    Related: several Blue Ribbon panels that examined defense acquisition reform all listed Congressional micromanagement as the single biggest impediment to real reform.

    So the experts decided to blame Congress? Awesome. But I’m not sure why Congress (for example) is to blame for why the US Navy can’t design or build navy ships very well, or why the navy’s admirals don’t seem to have a problem with that.

    The problem is lot broader and deeper than Congressional micromanagement.

  24. Those who know, won’t tell. Those who tell, don’t know. This is especially true of “bombing assessments” made before the dirt has settled. It merely perpetuates more than a century of meaningless guesses.

    Mossad seems to have about half the Iranian government on their payroll and I expect they will know soon enough and pass it on to us. The $64 question is how accurately the tunnels were located. It’s unfortunate that this didn’t happen on the first day, while the sites were in operation. They would have been more vulnerable to a not so near miss.

    The real question is whether the Iranians might have managed to make a bomb or two? Why would we believe the same crew that gave us “WMD” in Iraq?

    And finally, where’s the enriched uranium? It’s not likely they could have moved many of the thousands of centrifuges, but I’ll wait to see how much UF6 is accounted for.
    https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2020/11/f80/SDS-Uranium_Hexafluoride_UF6_2020.pdf

  26. It’s taken a little while, but this looks like a reasonable assessment derived from open source information by someone with specific expertise:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3h_vnXc3PE

    The 130.000 cu. yd. of fractured rock he talks about would cover a regulation football (real, not metric) field 79 feet deep.

    It certainly points very favorably toward destruction of the site but it doesn’t add that much. We already know the bombs struck their intended surface target and detonated far underground. As Casey Jones (great name for an engineer) says, any direct evidence of, say, collapsed tunnels isn’t probably going to show up on the surface after such massive disturbance. Specifically, the fractured rock takes up more volume than it did before and the only way for it to go is up.

    This is also an example of some of the information that can be purchased with just a credit card and an internet connection. I assume the National Reconnaissance Office has better resolution images and data available and the Israelis and maybe us have ground assets but it’s getting harder and harder to keep secrets.

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