The Bunker: Trump’s Waterloo?
This week in The Bunker: The U.S. finds itself trying to claw its way out of Iranian quicksand; the challenges of re-opening the Strait of Hormuz to free trade; why unfettered reporting from the Pentagon matters; and more.
This week in The Bunker: The U.S. finds itself trying to claw its way out of Iranian quicksand; the challenges of re-opening the Strait of Hormuz to free trade; why unfettered reporting from the Pentagon matters; and more. By the way, we're taking next week off. See you back here on April 29.
STRATEGIC ERROR
“The Bonaparte of the Deal”
The president was on a bombing bender
When he unilaterally demanded “unconditional surrender”
When Iran didn’t blink
It made Americans think
Their president’s an unconditional pretender.
Sorry. Couldn’t resist.
Like Napoleon, President Donald Trump racked up early military wins, plucking Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro from power, and blasting suspected drug-smugglers in the Caribbean and Pacific. Could Iran be Trump’s Waterloo, Bonaparte’s final and ignominious defeat at the hands of Anglo-Prussian armies that ended the Napoleonic Wars and led to his exile?
It pains The Bunker to acknowledge the shortsighted snafu that led to this standoff. The Iranian regime is vile and deserves to be overturned. But Trump erred by trying to go to war on the cheap. He didn’t enlist Congress, never mind his fellow Americans, in the fight. He ignored U.S. allies. In fact, he went out of his way to denounce them — until he was desperate for their help to re-open the Strait of Hormuz (which most continue to refuse to provide).
No wonder much of the world, as well as those steeped in international affairs, have turned sour on Operation Epic Fury. It took 20 years to conclude the U.S. war in Afghanistan had been a strategic failure, but only about 20 hours for many to reach the same conclusion about the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran.
Iran, which was known as Persia until 90 years ago, has existed for thousands of years. Its leaders have long been viewed as skilled negotiators. Now, they sense that the military force arrayed against them, while lethal, is also brittle. The calendar is chipping away at the attackers’ edge, one day at a time.
The Pentagon has the Tomahawks. But the Persians have the time.
THE HORMUZ STRAITJACKET
What’s a Navy for?
What. A. Mess.
It’s striking, but not surprising, that you’re spending about $300 billion on the U.S. Navy this year —approaching $1 billion a day — yet it couldn't keep the Strait of Hormuz open. The Navy flunked that test; now we’re going to see if the Navy can close it. Like Amazon Prime, the U.S. Navy’s purpose is to guarantee free shipping. Instead, the U.S. military created what maritime wags are calling the Tehran Tollbooth, with Iran levying million-dollar tolls to let a trickle of Iranian-friendly ships sail through the strait unscathed.
So President Trump is doubling down on his disaster, which one outside expert estimates will end up costing taxpayers more than $1 trillion. Trump has ordered the Navy to blockade the strait to keep Iran from pocketing those tolls, and to deny Tehran the oil-export revenues such commerce generates. But the move risks crashing a global economy still largely fueled by oil.
The U.S. military has known for decades that any war with Iran could lead to the strait’s shutdown. They just never thought it would be the U.S. military turning off the global gas pump. In fact, the Pentagon reportedly warned the commander in chief that Iran would likely try to shut down the strait if attacked. Air Force General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “flagged the enormous difficulty of securing the Strait of Hormuz and the risks of Iran blocking it,” the New York Times reported April 7. “Mr. Trump had dismissed that possibility on the assumption that the regime would capitulate before it came to that.”
Now Trump desperately desires a dismissal defense.
A fifth of the world’s oil traveled freely through the narrow strait before the war began. That’s been cut by more than 90%. Iran has restricted passage by sowing mines and threatening trespassers with drones and missiles well within range of the Iranian shore. An estimated 1,000 ships are treading water on both sides of the strait.
“Iran has established the capacity to control the Strait of Hormuz, perhaps indefinitely,” former Navy lawyer Mark P. Nevitt wrote April 8 at Just Security. “Overwhelming military force alone is unlikely to change that reality.”
There is debate over whether Iran will buckle if it loses the 15% of its GDP fueled by oil and gas exports. Given the lack of a neat military solution, Trump is betting that a U.S. blockade of Iranian ports and vessels is worth a shot, even if it means escalating and extending the conflict. He opted for the blockade because other military solutions to loosen Iran’s chokehold are limited (experts note that “there is no silver bullet”) and less than satisfactory (like traditional measures that “compress risk into a narrow and controllable space”). But imposing such a blockade is a marine minefield.
It’s the tyranny of physics that makes navigating the Strait of Hormuz so challenging. Less than 30 miles across, large ships have to sail within inbound and outbound channels that are only two miles wide, funneling them into Iranian crosshairs. Iran’s nearby coastline is crammed with caves, ideal for hiding drones and missiles, and coves, perfect for hiding speedboats. Before Trump ordered his blockade, the concern was that such Iranian weaponry could sink tankers ignoring Iran’s blockade. Now that Trump has flipped the offense-defense charts by imposing his own maritime wall, the more than 15 U.S. warships enforcing it could be attacked. Despite the war, Iran has plenty of ammo left.
Trump knows he needs to show he is doing something amid his search for an off-ramp to enable him to convince the American people that his war wasn’t a colossal mistake. That’s because Iran has been winning the perception game, especially as the cost of gasoline in the U.S. has soared by more than 30% since the war began. This is not how a “total and complete victory,” as Trump described the war’s outcome two weeks ago, is supposed to look.
At least to U.S. motorists.
DE-PRESSING, AGAIN
Reporters need to cover the Pentagon freely
The Bunker began covering the U.S. military before Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was born (yea, he’s that old). That doesn’t mean The Bunker knows more about the military than Hegseth (but he might). Yet given those extra decades, he surely knows more about human nature. That’s why he finds Hegseth’s press vendetta so peculiar and self-defeating.
We’re returning to this topic, which we last addressed two weeks ago, because it’s vital for the U.S. public to have a clear understanding of what the increasingly-detached-from-the-U.S.-public military is up to. There is only one way to achieve this: a free and unfettered press, buzzing around the Pentagon and keeping track of what the nation’s armed forces are doing.
The logic of such a stance was made clear April 9 in two documents: a second court ruling (PDF) against Hegseth’s press restrictions, and a CBS News report showing that the Pentagon’s spin on the deaths of six U.S. troops in the war’s opening hours was incorrect. The Bunker has to wonder if it was deliberately wrong. It could easily be seen by some as a handcrafted effort to mislead the public about a war their children are waging for which neither their approval, nor that of their legislators, was ever sought.
Here’s Judge Paul Friedman, on the Pentagon’s efforts to constrain the press following his earlier ruling that Hegseth’s initial restrictions were unconstitutional. “What this case is really about: the attempt by the Secretary of Defense to dictate the information received by the American people, to control the message so that the public hears and sees only what the Secretary and the Trump Administration want them to hear and see,” Friedman, appointed to the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., by President Bill Clinton, wrote (PDF). “The Constitution demands better. The American public demands better, too.”
And then there’s that CBS report the same day challenging the Pentagon’s account of the March 1 attack on a Kuwaiti command post that killed six. Hegseth said they were victims of a lucky “squirter” drone that had evaded U.S. defenses. “In that particular case it happened to hit a tactical operation center that was fortified,” he said.
The surviving troops who were there disagree. They said they were “dangerously exposed” in their ops center. While it was ringed with concrete walls, it was protected from above only by flimsy wood and tin that did nothing to halt an incoming Iranian drone. “I want people to know the unit … was unprepared to provide any defense for itself,” one of the survivors, speaking anonymously, told CBS. “It was not a fortified position.”
Bad things happen in every war. The nation shouldn’t expect perfection from its military. But it should expect the truth. A fortified press corps inside the Pentagon would help ensure it.
WHAT WE’RE READING
Here’s what has caught The Bunker’s eye recently
Congress should demand a say in future wars before approving a bigger defense budget, Jason Willick wrote April 12 in the Washington Post.
The Pentagon inspector general has ordered the Defense Criminal Investigative Service to refer to the “Department of Defense” and not the “Department of War” in its official filings, apparently to avoid undermining criminal cases, Defense One’s Meghann Myers reported April 7. The Trump administration has renamed the Department of Defense the Department of War without congressional approval.
Some Air Force aviators could be eligible for up to $600,000 in bonuses if they elect to keep flying in uniform for up to 12 more years, Matthew Cox reported April 9 in Air & Space Forces Magazine.
While The Bunker doesn’t offer bonuses to its readers, thanks for stopping by anyway. Once again, The Bunker will be away next week but will return on April 29. In the meantime, please consider forwarding this on to a friend and encourage them to subscribe here.
