How Trump Lost the Iran War

By Major General (Ret.) Paul D. Eaton

VoteVets

"I have spent a career planning military operations and evaluating the operations of others. The first question any competent military planner asks before committing forces is not “can we hit the target?” The United States military can always hit the target. The question is: to what end? What is the strategic objective? What happens on Day 4, 5, 6 and so on? What does success look like? How do we know when we’ve achieved it? And how do we get out?

In forty days of a war of choice (not necessity) with Iran, the Trump administration never answered any of those questions. Not once.In forty days of a war of choice (not necessity) with Iran, the Trump administration never answered any of those questions. Not once.

What we got instead was a pattern that repeated itself from the first week to the last: a threat, followed by bombing, followed by a frantic search for an offramp that didn’t exist because no one had built one. Deadlines were set and extended. Objectives shifted from destroying military capability to regime change to the nuclear program to the Strait of Hormuz to threatening to obliterate civilian infrastructure. The President threatened to destroy a “whole civilization” and then, two hours before his own deadline, took Iran’s offer and called it quits.That is not strategy. That is improvisation. And when you improvise a war, people die and families are left to wonder why..."

I haven't looked at this blog since 2022. That date coincided with the beginning of a sequence of medical problems beginning with Covid-19 at the end of '22 and a misdiagnosed spinal infection, courtesy of Dr. Agrawal. But I am still here with my wonderful wife Mary, who had a heart attack in March of 2025.

Alphabet and Facebook’s Stratospheric Internet Plans Get Tangled in High-Altitude Red Tape

High above the annoyances of weather and commercial air traffic, the stratosphere could be a great place from which to beam down Internet connectivity to places with poor communications infrastructure. Alphabet and Facebook are both working on drones to operate 18 kilometers or more above Earth, and this year Alphabet will start using balloons at that altitude to serve mobile subscribers in Indonesia.

But even the stratosphere, which at the equator starts at around 20 kilometers but varies by latitude and season, is within reach of Earth’s regulators. To work at large scale, Alphabet and Facebook's schemes will need significant changes to national and international rules. “This is all somewhat uncharted territory,” says Yael Maguire, engineering director at Facebook’s connectivity lab, which is working on a drone called Aquila that has the wingspan of an airliner (see “Meet Facebook’s Stratospheric Internet Drone”). “There are ingredients required beyond the technology for this to work.” 

MIT Technology Review: https://bit.ly/33k4Tic

 

SpaceX just lost 40 satellites to a geomagnetic storm. There could be worse to come.

 "On February 4, a geomagnetic storm caused by the sun knocked up to 40 new SpaceX Starlink satellites out of orbit. Now experts are worried about whether mega-constellations planned by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and others will be resilient to such events in the future.

SpaceX had launched its latest batch of Starlink satellites on a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida on Thursday, February 3. This was SpaceX’s 38th Starlink launch; in all, the company has launched more than 1,900 of the car-size satellites, and eventually it wants to have up to 42,000 of them in low Earth orbit to deliver the internet to all corners of the globe."

MIT Technology Review: https://bit.ly/3sBhzd1

[There needs to be an international agreement to regulate who, how many and where satelites are deployed. This has been obvious for a long time as a variety of companies plan to deploy large numbers of satelites.]

"A Peace to End All Peace"

Note from "A Peace to End All Peace" by David Fromkin

I placed the creation of the modern Middle East in a wider frame work: I see what happened as the culmination of the 19th century Great Game, and therefore saw Russia, too, playing a leading role in the story. It was in whole or in part because of Russia that Kitchener initiated a British alliance with the Arab Muslim world; that Britain and France, though they would’ve preferred to preserve the Turkish Empire in the region, decided instead to occupy and partition the Middle East; that the foreign office publicly proclaimed British support for the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine; and that, after the war, a number of British officials felt that Britain was obliged to hold the line in the middle east against crusading Bolshevism.

This is a book about the decision making process, and in the 1914 to 1922 period, Europeans and Americans were the only ones seated around the table when decisions were made. It was an era in which Middle Eastern countries and frontiers were fabricated in Europe. Iraq and what we now call Jordan, for example, we’re British inventions, lines drawn on an empty map by British politicians after the First World War; while the boundaries of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq were established by a British civil servant in 1922, and the frontiers between Muslims and Christians were drawn by France in Syria-Lebanon and by Russia on the borders of Armenia and Soviet Azerbaijan.

The European powers at that time believed they could change Moslem Asia in the very fundamentals of its political existence, and in their attempts to do so introduced an artificial state system in the Middle East that has made it into a region of countries that have not become nations even today.

The year 1922 seems to me to have been the point of no return in setting the various clans of the Middle East on their collision courses…By 1922, however, the choices had narrowed and the courses had been set; the Middle East had started along a road that was to lead to the endless wars (between Israel and her neighbors, among others, and between rival militias in Lebanon) and to the always-escalating acts of terrorism that have been a characteristic feature of international life in the 1970s and 1980s.

Above all, we see Britain embarking on a vast new imperial enterprise in the Middle East—one that would take generations to achieve, if its object were to remake the Middle East as India had been remade…

“War in Peacetime”

In his book “War in Peacetime,” published in 1969, General J. Lawton (Lightning Joe) Collins, the celebrated Army Chief of Staff during the Korean War, discussed Korea, and its lessons, writing, “We rushed into Korea with no advance planning, and we stumbled into the ground war in Vietnam with uncertain footing. In neither case did we have any fully thought-out ideas concerning our objectives or the means we would be willing to expend to attain them. As each situation arose we extemporized, unsure what the next step would be, until we were far more committed than we had expected to be.”

William Tecumseh Sherman: "War is a terrible thing!"

"You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it... Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth—right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail." General William Tecumseh Sherman (Exchange between W.T. Sherman and Prof. David F. Boyd, December 24, 1860. Quoted in "Sherman: Fighting Prophet" (1932) by Lloyd Lewis, page 138, attributed to "Boyd (D.F), mss. [manuscripts] in possession of Walter L. Fleming, Nashville, Tenn." Fleming's collection is now in the archives of Louisiana State University.)