As a recent retiree from a reserve component, I am routinely asked by relatives and acquaintances about the current conflict between the U.S. coalition, inclusive of Israel and neighboring Sunni states, and Iran. I tend to give a quick overview on the three levels of war — strategic, operational, and tactical — which in my opinion are synonyms for three levels of foreign policy. I have learned that name dropping Clausewitz can make eyes glaze over, so instead I throw out a paraphrase of one of his classic statements that war is a continuation of politics by other means.
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In Iran, the political issues seem to be safe passage for international shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and the elimination of Iran’s nuclear program. The reason for the conflict is that whoever is leading Iran will not agree to our terms.
At a basic level, “strategic” is the big picture — what the U.S. wants and will tolerate throughout the globe, the prime directive of policies as to what should be done. As an open democracy, the U.S. is upfront with what we consider our strategy, and we publish our strategy every few years.
President Trump’s National Security Strategy can be found . Toward the bottom of page one is this statement:
Our elites badly miscalculated America’s willingness to shoulder forever global burdens to which the American people saw no connection to the national interest. They overestimated America’s ability to fund, simultaneously, a massive welfare regulatory-administrative state alongside a massive military, diplomatic, intelligence, and foreign aid complex.
This is followed by this statement on page five:
We want to prevent an adversarial power from dominating the Middle East, its oil and gas supplies, and the chokepoints through which they pass while avoiding the “forever wars” that bogged us down in that region at great cost.
The National Security Strategy was made public in November of 2025, but already it appears dated and somewhat nostalgic as the Trump administration with secretary of War Hegseth sought to reform the military, eliminate politics, and reignite the warrior spirit. The mistakes of previous administrations dating back to Bush would not be made.
I do not know if February to August consists of being “bogged down” compared to Afghanistan standards. But the concern seems to be that the current state of affairs will represent a status quo. The blockade of Iran will continue while shipping does not return to pre-February days. In any event, whether Americans agree with the National Security Strategy, and to what degree, the November elections will be a barometer.
Operations is the middle management. Essentially, operations is the execution of strategy on a focused target. Militarily, I never rose to a position to provide input at the national level. But my general impression is that planners from the War Department and State Department present options that are signed off by the commander-in-chief. At my level I have seen options from commonsense practical to hilarious farcical. An example, when I was in Afghanistan I was tasked with working with local officials. There was a huge problem with bribery with the local officials. The solution handed down was that all the local government officials would get an increase in pay.
I still remember the deputy commander explaining to me that the pay increase would eliminate the need to take bribes. In my civilian career, I had been a prosecutor and defense attorney by this time. I tried to explain my view of human nature: Once an official is willing to take a bribe, he has have done the math and realizes that a salary plus the bribe is always more than just the salary.
When Epic Fury was launched eliminating the Iranian leadership, I heard many media voices talking about how successful this will be in our attempts to get Iran to conform to our demands. Interestingly, the intelligentsia like to talk about the “Thucydides Trap” when dealing with China. I caution about the “World War II trap” of foreign policy. Every enemy is Hitler, every moment an appeasement. I saw Epic Fury as the fantasy that if we could have assassinated Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, and the upper echelon of Nazi leadership, the Germans would have pushed off the yoke of totalitarianism, and WWII could have been avoided.
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That may be great science fiction, but it does not meet the reality of our lived experience. If China, or another nefarious actor, eliminated the president, Congress, and the Pentagon, there is no indication that the U.S. population would acquiesce to Chinese-inspired leadership.
“But what about the frequent protests in Iran?” Yes, what about the frequent protests in the U.S.? There is no correlation between protests and armed revolt on a scale sufficient for regime change.
Beneath strategy and operations is tactics. Tactics can be described as the worker-bee implementation to affect strategic goals. The U.S. has implemented an on-again, off-again blockade to inflict economic pressure as well as engaging in occasional tactical strikes of targets after a significant utilization of air strikes.
Meanwhile, Iran tactically appears to stall and inflict shipping damage by utilizing low-cost drones on slow-moving vessels as well as occasionally directing a drone or rocket attack on infrastructure targets of those perceived as supporting the U.S. I am fairly confident that Iran is well aware of the cost disparity, with one Patriot missile starting at around four million dollars. This cost well exceeds the cost of a rocket or drone produced by Iran.
To some extent, the conflict has devolved into a game of economic chicken. What will cost more is imposition of the blockade on Iran or the deployment of the U.S. military to the Gulf and the expensive air defense refueling and other logistical costs borne by the U.S.
Though I believe that the West routinely resorts to WWII analogies when describing enemies, we are not prepared to engage in WWII tactics. For instance, a General LeMay mass bombing of the urban centers to disrupt military production and break the will of the enemy is not considered in this day and age.
Anyone can speculate as to how the conflict will conclude. Absent a land invasion, a result matrix looks essentially like the U.S. imposing its will on Iran; Iran resists us and holds out indefinitely; the U.S. gets bored and leaves. In any of these three oversimplified results, the U.S. redecorates the Middle East once again.
Whatever the result will be, whatever the impact on U.S. elections, one thing is clear: The Trump, Hegseth, Rubio National Security Strategy should be revisited — especially on page one, where it says,
A “strategy” is a concrete, realistic plan that explains the essential connection between ends and means: it begins from an accurate assessment of what is desired and what tools are available, or can realistically be created, to achieve the desired outcomes.
Diesel shortages are predicted, and the cost of anything transported, like food, will increase due to rising transportation costs. An election looms. It seems questionable if the current administration reads its own statements.
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Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.