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But first…

And now, the main event…

This weekend will mark one month since Donald Trump took America to war against Iran without congressional approval or a plan. But do you really need congressional approval if you don’t call it a war? “I won’t use the word ‘war,’ ’cause they say if you use the word ‘war,’ that’s maybe not a good thing to do,” Trump said last night at the N.R.C.C.’s annual fundraising dinner at Union Station. “They don’t like the word ‘war,’ because you’re supposed to get approval. So I’ll use the word ‘military operation,’ because that’s what it is.”

The comment was reminiscent of Vladimir Putin’s insistence that the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which he launched four years ago, was a “special military operation.” That, too, was an operation that was supposed to be short—a week to take Kyiv. An excursion, if you will.

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But Putin’s war plans, like Trump’s, quickly disintegrated on impact with reality. Ukrainians did not rise up to hail the Russians as liberators, just as Iranians have not heeded Trump’s call to “take” their government. The Ukrainian military didn’t follow Putin’s invitation to defect, just as Iranian soldiers have not (not least because there’s no one on the ground to defect to). The Ukrainian navy, decimated in the invasion’s early days, was able to use novel naval drones to break Russia’s Black Sea blockade and push its fleet back, much as Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz despite the U.S. sinking so many of its ships. When Russia pounded Ukraine’s cities with sophisticated missiles, Ukraine responded with drones, striking Russian energy infrastructure, just as Iran has used cheap Shahed drones to attack the Gulf’s oil and gas facilities.

Despite Putin’s bravado, Ukraine’s much smaller military has been able to bog down Russia’s massive war machine, in a long and bloody slog that’s looking very much like a forever war. And now, President Trump is sending thousands of Marines and paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne to the Gulf, where it looks increasingly likely that the U.S. is about to launch a ground operation to reopen the Strait of Hormuz—which had been open just a month ago, before Trump launched the war. Oh, and the U.S. Army is raising the ceiling for maximum enlistment from age 35 to 42, and removing restrictions on people with a marijuana-related conviction. (Just a few months into its “special military operation,” Russia started running low on manpower and began recruiting directly from jails.)

Tired of winning yet? Because the parallels don’t end there. Yesterday, NBC reported that Trump wasn’t being briefed on the full picture of what was happening in the war. Instead, he was being shown daily two-minute sizzle reels that one official described as “stuff blowing up.” The things that aren't going so well—like when Iranian drones struck five American refueling planes at the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia—are glossed over. When Trump learned about the strike from the media, he was told the planes were only lightly damaged.

Putin, too, began the assault on Ukraine only after sycophantic briefings by officials who told him what he wanted to hear: that Ukrainians would welcome the Russians, that the Russian military would sail into Kyiv, that toppling the Ukrainian government would be a cakewalk, etcetera. He continued to get rosy assessments of the war’s progress even as everything was falling apart in the invasion’s early stages.

Democratic decision-making might seem slow and frustratingly unwieldy if you want to move fast and break shit—or blow stuff up—but it could have prevented the morass we’re quickly sinking into. As Vietnam taught us, sending a couple thousand Marines overseas to fix something real quick has a way of turning into hundreds of thousands of troops, two decades of war, tens of thousands of casualties, and a deeply wounded nation. Getting approval from Congress would have required building public consensus and preparing the public for the fallout of a war, in addition to interrogating the premise of going to war in the first place.

The MAGA ideology is built on denigrating expertise, but everything that the experts predicted in this case—that the Iranian regime would harden instead of folding, that it would respond asymmetrically, that it would close the strait—has already come to pass. (The experts, you may recall, also warned that Putin had no interest in a peace deal on Ukraine.) And so now that the war has begun—and has become, in fact, a war—the fact that the president is being fed only good news means only bad decisions can be made from here on out.

Helping to drive that process is Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. The former Fox News anchor has long been obsessed with “lethality,” a popular trope among the angry, right-wing young men who came home from Iraq and Afghanistan convinced that the U.S. lost those wars because the nerds in D.C. were tying their hands. Having to follow “rules written by dignified men in mahogany rooms eighty years ago”—such as the Geneva Convention—is the reason, as Hegseth wrote in his 2024 book, The War on Warriors, “why America hasn’t won a war since World War II.”

“If we’re going to send our boys to fight—and it should be boys,” Hegseth, who served in the National Guard, wrote, “We need to unleash them to win. They need to be the most ruthless. The most uncompromising. The most overwhelmingly lethal as they can be. We must break the enemy’s will.” In retrospect, renaming the Department of Defense the Department of War—also without the required congressional approval—was a clear signal of the administration’s intent.

Since becoming Defense secretary, Hegseth has made this right-wing mantra of “untying the warfighters’ hands” gospel in the Pentagon. On Wednesday, Hegseth held yet another of his Pentagon Christian worship services, during which he prayed for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” In the fall, he flew in generals and admirals from all over the world at the last minute (and on the government’s dime on the eve of a shutdown) to lecture them about lethality and personal grooming. In September, standing behind the Resolute Desk with Trump, he performed his strange version of slam poetry on the topic: War would now be fought with “maximum lethality, not tepid legality,” he intoned. That would be the way for America to win wars, for a change.

It’s hard to argue that the U.S.–Israeli military campaign in Iran hasn’t been lethal. Israeli air strikes have decimated the top ranks of the Iranian government and destroyed oil depots across Tehran, in part to break the enemy’s will. But somehow it hasn’t worked. Neither has the U.S. strike on a girls’ elementary school, which killed more than 170 people, mostly children—utmost lethality, by any measure.

Yet it’s also hard to argue that the U.S. is winning the war. Trump is publicly begging Iran to sit down to ceasefire negotiations—which Iran is instantly rejecting—and praising the Iranian leadership for the great “gift” of allowing a couple of non-U.S., non-Israeli ships to squeeze through the strait. That’s hardly the language of a victor who has broken his enemy’s will.

Because here’s the thing: Lethality is a tactic; strategy wins wars. And that kind of strategy has been glaringly absent. What is the war for? What are its goals? How will we know that they’ve been achieved? The job of general officers is to figure out how to use the military to help a president achieve a political goal, and the job of the military is to deliver lethality in service of that goal. Doing the weave may be helpful in throwing a fake-news reporter off course, but not when guiding the world’s most powerful military. And just as lethality without guardrails is a war crime by another name, tactics without strategy is worse: a recipe for endless war.

That’s all from me this week, friends. I’ll see you back here next week, with a slightly altered schedule because of the Passover holiday. Until then, good night. Tomorrow will be worse.

Julia

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