The aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln’s supply problems began soon after the first day of the war, as Iranian missiles and attack drones fell on a Navy base in Bahrain. The Iranian attack, retaliation for the U.S.-Israeli assault on Tehran, destroyed much of the base. And as it went up in smoke, so did a major logistics hub that the Navy has relied on for decades. The Navy needed a Plan B to continue feeding the sailors working around the clock to keep warplanes flying strike missions, and later to maintain a blockade of Iran’s ports. With the threat of Iranian attacks at other ports in the region, the Pentagon looked to a base under British command on the island of Diego Garcia as its supply hub, which is south of the Maldives and roughly 2,200 miles from where two aircraft carrier strike groups have been operating in the Gulf of Oman. The loss of the hub in Bahrain has contributed to a host of reported problems on carriers supporting operations against Iran, as Democratic senators raise concerns about the Lincoln’s 5,000 sailors and their nearly nine-month deployment.

Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said in a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that the reported problems included shortages of basic supplies and the deteriorating mental health of its crew members. On Friday at a military air base in Maryland, Mr. Trump dismissed those concerns. “That ship is moving right now, or very shortly, and it’s being replaced with another, very similar, ship,” he said. The Lincoln’s replacement is the Japan-based carrier U.S.S. George Washington, which earlier this week was heading west through the Strait of Malacca in Indonesian waters en route to the Middle East. Another carrier, the U.S.S. George H.W. Bush, has been operating in the Middle East for months since deploying from Norfolk on March 31. When asked if the carrier deployments were too long, the president said, “No, no, no, not nearly long enough.”

Mr. Hegseth had a similar response on Thursday when a reporter asked how long the United States could maintain its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. “We can hold it as long as we need to, indefinitely,” he replied.

guy who runs out of steam in 10 seconds of fighting: "no dude I could totally keep bobbing and weaving around here all day"

At the war’s outset, Keir Starmer, then the British prime minister, denied the Pentagon access to Diego Garcia for use in the operation against Iran. That decision drew Mr. Trump’s ire, and Mr. Starmer ultimately relented on March 1, granting the U.S. military access to the island for what he described as a “specific and limited defensive purpose.”

imagine how quickly the US empire would basically disintegrate if any of these vassal fucks grew a spine

A U.S. military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive logistics, said the Navy began using Diego Garcia as the main shipment point shortly after the Navy’s base in Bahrain was heavily damaged. The use of Diego Garcia as the Navy’s new logistics hub may explain why Iran fired two medium-range ballistic missiles at the island on March 20. One of the missiles fell into the Indian Ocean short of its target. A Navy warship shot down the other.

The San Diego-based Lincoln has been at sea for nearly nine months without what the Navy calls a “liberty port” — where sailors can get off the ship for a few days. Bahrain is one of the two ports where U.S. aircraft carriers in the region have typically moored so their crews can get some downtime. The other, the Emirati port of Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman, is also well within the range of Iranian missiles.

whoopsie!

The Trump administration relied on yet another carrier, the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford, in the Caribbean for its pressure campaign against Venezuela and later extended its deployment to the Middle East to launch airstrikes against Iran. So far the war has seen the commitment of a significant portion of the Navy’s fleet of aircraft carriers, which will go down to 10 with the expected retirement of U.S.S. Nimitz next year. While six months is the typical length of a Navy deployment at sea in peacetime, some carriers have done far longer stretches following the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Ford’s 326-day deployment, however, broke the record for the longest by a carrier since the Vietnam War. But in that war, carriers assigned to Yankee Station, a section of the Pacific off the coast of Vietnam, would often head to the Navy base at Subic Bay, Philippines — a short two-day transit away — where sailors could take a break from running nonstop flight operations and the ship could load up on ordnance, food, fuel and other necessary supplies. By tradition and Navy regulation, the commanding officer of a warship can request a “beer day” for their crews when they have been at sea for 45 straight days or longer. Given the Lincoln’s time at sea, the crew would have been eligible for five beer days already. A spokesman for the U.S. Fifth Fleet, which covers naval operations in region and would authorize beer days, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday about whether any of the ships participating in the Iran war had requested them. In an interview, Representative Mike Levin, Democrat of California, said that his constituents included sailors aboard the Lincoln, and that their family members had reached out to express their concerns about the deployment. “It gets back to that big picture, which is: What is the mission here?” Mr. Levin said. “That’s what the families want to know.”

U.S. Army troops faced off against Ukrainian drone operators at a military exercise in Germany earlier this year. It didn’t go well for the Americans. During the exercise, called Combined Resolve, Ukrainian drone units easily spotted and defeated U.S. troops and armored vehicles on rotation from Fort Hood in Texas, according to people familiar with the events. The exercise, coupled with U.S. casualties in Iran, shows American vulnerabilities to drones—years after the U.S. made uncrewed systems an essential part of warfare. America pioneered using long-range drones in war. The Pentagon has recently spent billions acquiring new drone and counterdrone technology and formed special units to operate it. Still, in the Middle East this year, the U.S. has struggled to defend against Iran’s long-range drones, which have killed and injured soldiers and destroyed aircraft.

The drubbing in Germany conveyed lessons from Ukraine focused on short-range battlefield drones. The exercise, held in April and May, tested visiting troops’ ability to operate and defend against the proliferation of smaller, front-line drones that have dominated the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Exercises like Combined Resolve are run precisely so that forces can experience realistic combat conditions. Army leaders in Europe over recent years have taken advantage of having Ukrainian forces on hand to participate and impart their hard-won skills to U.S. and allied troops in practice, on simulated battlefields. The expectation is that failures are educational. British and Swedish exercises have also resulted in easy Ukrainian triumphs. “You can’t get training like this in the United States,” said Air Force General Alexus Grynkewich, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s top military leader. He said that after NATO forces exercise against Ukrainian forces, “The change is remarkable.” Eliot Cohen, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, said that recent battlefield experience shows how drones of all kinds are essential to modern war. “It is vital that the U.S. military master that, and thus far, unfortunately, that does not seem to be the case,” he said.

Combined Resolve is a semiannual exercise focused on large-scale ground combat operations, in which rotating U.S. forces use armored divisions supported by ground troops, helicopters, drones and other military assets. Around 3,500 U.S. personnel, primarily from the 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, took part in the exercise. Their task was to attack a position defended by the Army training-ground’s opposition force, or OPFOR, who were reinforced by Ukrainian troops from the 412th Regiment of Unmanned Systems Forces, or Nemesis, people familiar with the matter said. The rotating troops were equipped with standard electronic-warfare and counterdrone systems, according to an Army official. New Mobile Brigade Combat Teams, equipped with the latest gear and tactics, have fared much better in exercises, the Army official said. The Ukrainian drone operators eliminated a U.S. armored brigade in the exercise, according to U.S. officials briefed on the exercise and one participant. The exercising troops sent into battle heavy armored vehicles that threw up dust and were easy for Ukrainian reconnaissance drones to spot, according to the participant. Those drones were followed by drones dropping explosives and first-person-view drones, which smash into targets in combat, this person said. Live ammunition is rarely used in such exercises. Drones typically hover above a vehicle or move close enough to it for an observer to award them a “kill.”

Ukrainian drones were doing this so quickly with U.S. vehicles that they had to be sent back into the exercises as new units, or “re-spawned,” to keep the exercise going, a U.S. official briefed on the drill said. The U.S. reran the training scenario over the two-week engagement. The rotating forces improved their performance, as they became more adept at dispersing and concealing themselves and using electronic warfare, said the Army official. The Ukrainians also switched sides midway through the exercises and helped them use drone technology offensively, which they did effectively, the official said. Ukrainian troops have become expert in drone warfare over nearly 4½ years of fighting Russia, with operators and their support troops now skilled at continually repairing and adapting drones. Moscow’s forces have also gained invaluable skills. American drone operators lack experience fixing and arming drones under fire, said the person present at the exercise. In Ukraine, so many tanks and other armor are destroyed in battle that large parts of the country’s vast front line is almost free of armor.

Some U.S. military officers, though, argue that drones are particularly deadly in this war because it has reached a stalemate with little battlefield movement. In a war of maneuver, the tank and other armor would come back into its own, they say. But Ukrainian military thinkers such as former chief commander Valeriy Zaluzhniy argue that drone technology has made traditional maneuver warfare unfeasible, for now, explaining the largely static front line in Ukraine’s east. Both Russia and Ukraine are searching for the next breakthroughs in technology and tactics to restore movement to the battlefield. The exercise showed that the U.S. may struggle to protect that armor as it moves. This wasn’t the first time the U.S. has come across Ukrainian drone proficiency. In 2023, a U.S. infantry officer helping train Ukrainian troops realized the U.S. needed to learn from them about drone warfare and designed a training program that other Army units later followed, according to a U.S. official. Despite a sometimes prickly relationship with Kyiv, President Trump’s administration has been reaching out to Ukraine. The U.S. is currently testing Ukrainian drones to buy and has used counterdrone systems tested in that war to help defend its forces in Iran. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in May told senators he has increased the number of U.S. personnel being sent to Ukraine to study drone warfare.

The U.S. Army isn’t the first to be found wanting by Ukrainian drones. In May of last year, Ukrainian drone operators easily defeated the British, Estonian and other forces from NATO, including a U.S. contingent, in an exercise in the Baltic region, according to a person familiar with the matter. This spring, Swedish forces led an exercise with NATO allies in which Ukrainian drone teams outperformed them too, Swedish officials told local media.

In one of the more unusual examples yet of where Ukraine is sourcing military hardware, a Danish military museum has begun transferring vehicles from its own collection for use in the war against Russia. Panzermuseum East, a privately run museum in Denmark specializing in Soviet and Warsaw Pact armor, announced that it has delivered its first batch of armored vehicles to Ukraine. “We have now completed the first shipment of vehicles to Ukraine. The first one to be picked up was our fine BMP-1, and the second was the MT-LB SNAR-10. We hope they’ll last a long time and make a difference,” the museum said on social media today. The museum describes itself as Scandinavia’s largest collection of vehicles, uniforms, and equipment from the former Eastern Bloc.

The donation includes a BMP-1 infantry fighting vehicle and an MT-LB amphibious tracked armoured fighting vehicle fitted with the SNAR-10 battlefield surveillance radar. This is an uncommon artillery reconnaissance variant that was designed to detect troop movements, vehicles, and artillery fire while directing friendly fires. While governments across Europe have emptied Cold War stockpiles to support Kyiv, it is considerably rarer to see museum exhibits making the journey to the front. The transfer underscores the increasingly varied mix of equipment finding its way into Ukrainian service after more than four years of high-intensity warfare. Entering service in the late 1960s, the BMP-1 is among the most iconic Soviet armored fighting vehicles ever built. Although obsolete by modern standards, Ukraine already operates the type in significant numbers, meaning integrating another example should be straightforward, assuming it remains mechanically sound.

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Despite being more than half a century old, the BMP-1 continues to demonstrate its utility on modern battlefields. Reflecting sustained demand for the Soviet-designed infantry fighting vehicle, Slovakia’s STV Machinery secured a contract to serially produce newly manufactured BMP-1 hulls for an unnamed foreign customer. The company says the hulls will incorporate modern armor materials and updated production techniques, with manufacturing capacity expected to reach up to 100 vehicles annually, underscoring the enduring value of the platform. Previously, there have been known BMP-1 transfers to Ukraine from Greek stocks (40 BMP-1A1s, delivered from October 2022 onwards), and from Slovak stocks (30 BVP-1s, from November 2022). Another 56 upgraded ex-East German BMP-1s were provided by the Czech Republic. The more intriguing donation is the MT-LB SNAR-10. Based on the ubiquitous MT-LB multipurpose tracked vehicle, the SNAR-10 carries a ground surveillance radar intended primarily for artillery spotting and battlefield reconnaissance. The system can detect moving vehicles, troop concentrations, explosions, and shell impacts, helping artillery units adjust fire and build battlefield awareness.

Exactly what condition either vehicle is in is unclear. Museum vehicles are often maintained in running condition, particularly at private collections that conduct demonstrations, but they also lack military equipment, sensitive electronics, or functional weapons. The museum has not disclosed whether the vehicles required refurbishment or modification before transfer. The donation nevertheless reflects a broader trend that has become increasingly apparent throughout the conflict. Ukraine has sourced equipment from virtually anywhere it can be found. Beyond government transfers, Kyiv has received privately donated vehicles, civilian pickups converted into military transports, restored Soviet-era equipment, commercially purchased armored vehicles, and even aircraft and helicopters acquired through unconventional channels. As traditional Cold War reserves continue to shrink across Europe, previously overlooked sources of compatible Soviet-designed equipment have become increasingly valuable. Private collections, museums, training establishments, and industrial storage yards have all become potential sources of hardware that can be returned to operational service. The SNAR-10 is especially noteworthy because it represents a relatively niche capability rather than simply another armored hull. Battlefield surveillance radars remain useful assets for locating enemy activity, adjusting indirect fire, and supporting reconnaissance, even if newer drone-based systems increasingly perform many of the same functions. Even if the SNAR-10 is delivered without an operational radar, it would still be useful for its MT-LB chassis.

More broadly, whether these two vehicles ultimately see frontline service, are used for training, or serve as sources of spare parts remains unknown. However, the museum’s wording (“first shipment”) strongly suggests more donations for Ukraine may already be planned. Beyond the BMP-1 and SNAR-10 that have now gone to Ukraine, the Panzermuseum East collection remains packed with Warsaw Pact hardware, including T-72 and T-55 main battle tanks, a PT-76 amphibious light tank, a 2S1 Gvozdika self-propelled howitzer, BRDM reconnaissance and anti-tank vehicles, BTR-60 command vehicles, and more. The museum also displays dozens of Cold War military trucks, field support vehicles, artillery pieces, and other specialist equipment. Examples of foreign museums releasing collection vehicles for Ukrainian military use remain uncommon but not unheard of. Ukrainian museums have also returned equipment to military units, based on available reports, as well. Britain’s Tank Museum did not donate vehicles, but it helped Ukraine by giving Cook Defense Systems — which also produces tracks for the British-made Challenger 2 main battle tank — access to its Soviet vehicle collection, manuals, and physical components to reverse-engineer tracks and sprockets for T-72s, BMPs, and MT-LBs. You can read more about that here. The departure of these armored vehicles from a Danish museum floor for an active war zone is another reminder of the extraordinary lengths Ukraine and its supporters continue to go to sustain the country’s war effort, and of how almost any usable piece of Soviet-designed equipment can still find new life on today’s battlefield.

Gen. Michael Guetlein, the top U.S. military officer in charge of the Golden Dome missile defense shield, says he is confident that the initiative will be able to deliver the desired capabilities within its current stated budget of $185 billion. Operational elements of the huge new architecture are currently scheduled to start coming online in mid-2028. This is despite independent estimates that the required ‘system of systems’ could cost exponentially more to develop, field, and maintain. At the same time, Guetlein has now warned that work on Golden Dome could abruptly end, at least for a time, regardless of its total price tag, if a huge budgetary hurdle is not overcome. Guetlein, whose current title is Director of Golden Dome and is presently assigned to the U.S. Space Force, shared new details about the initiative during a talk today at the annual Space & Missile Defense (SMD) Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama, at which TWZ is in attendance.

“What is the bill to the nation? How much national treasure are we asking the American public to commit to the defense of the homeland?” Guetlein said in his introductory remarks. “I’m on record, and I’m still up here saying the exact same number: $185 billion. We started at 175 billion dollars, and we added 10 more billion [dollars] worth of accelerating space capabilities that we thought the nation needed, that were not part of our original architecture.” “That is a lot of money. It’s one of the biggest systems that we’ve ever put together as a nation. We [have] got to keep it affordable,” Guetlein continued. “There’s two other cost estimates out there that are exceptionally larger, but I’m going to tell you those cost estimates are not estimating what we are building.”

The general did not specify what cost estimates he was referring to, but the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has put out two top-level figures since the initiative was first unveiled in 2025. CBO’s first estimate in May 2025 said the complete architecture could cost up to $542 billion to develop, deploy, and then operate over a period spanning two decades. The office put out a second estimate in May of this year that said the full price tag might actually be nearly $1.2 trillion over the same 20-year timespan. At that time, CBO also explicitly said its analysis had been hampered by a lack of publicly available information about exactly what the so-called “objective architecture” for Golden Dome actually entails. There are other independent estimates of Golden Dome’s full cost that are even higher than CBO’s May 2026 projection. “We’re building something completely differently, and that architecture is coming together, and is being proven every single day,” Guetlein stressed today. “We have radars on contract. We have launchers on contract. We have space-based interceptors on contract. Hypersonic ballistic tracking system on contract. Space data network is on contract. Our construction contracts have been let [sic], and we are moving out with haste to get after what the President [Donald Trump] asked us to do in the summer of 2028.”

Space-based interceptors are notably vital to the Golden Dome plan as it has been described publicly to date. They are also central to CBO’s $1.2 trillion cost estimate, which projected that it would be necessary to have 7,800 of them in orbit at any one time for the architecture to work as intended. “We have our first operational site. We are digging dirt around the homeland, getting ready for the capabilities that the President asked us to deliver in the summer of 2028,” Guetlein also said, but did not elaborate on where that work was being done or its exact purpose. “We’ve had two tests. We can’t talk about those tests, but those tests were phenomenally successful, and they demonstrated that the capabilities that we are putting together, both command and control, our sensor network, and our effectors, are going to be effective against the threats as they are currently designed,” the Golden Dome director added.

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Despite all of this apparent progress and significant authority to keep pushing ahead, Guetlein warned today that Golden Dome is facing a potentially insurmountable budget impasse. This has to do with how the initiative has been paid for so far, with core funding coming from outside normal defense spending streams via a process called reconciliation. “When the President submitted his President’s Budget over to the Hill for FY27 [Fiscal Year 2027], I was not in the top line. I’m in what they call mandatory funding, which is another reconciliation-type funding bill,” Guetlein explained. So, yes, we have a CR [continuing resolution], and we’re not going to shut down the federal government, but a CR doesn’t help me under Golden Dome because I don’t have a top line to fall back to to get that percentage of the continuing resolution.” Continuing resolutions are short-term spending bills Congress passes to keep the government running in the absence of the approval of a full annual budget. The defense budget for the 2027 Fiscal Year that the Trump administration submitted earlier this year was already historically large, in part because of expected reconciliation funding. The $1.5 trillion “topline” was broken down into a base budget of $1.1 trillion and then “$350 billion in additional mandatory resources through reconciliation.” “So we’ve got to figure out, as a nation, a different way of funding Golden Dome, at least for [20]27. Right now, that’s under reconciliation,” Guetlein added.

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“I do believe, as a nation, we’re going to figure this out just because the sense of urgency is so great, but it is a challenging budget environment,” he continued. As an aside, the Senate, which is currently controlled by President Trump’s Republican Party, just passed its version of the new continuing resolution last week. It notably omitted certain defense spending provisions the White House had sought, including $1 billion for work on the Trump class battleship program, another top priority for the administration. That bill still needs to be reconciled with a separate temporary spending bill making its way through the Republican-controlled House of Representatives before it can be sent to President Trump’s desk to be signed into law (or vetoed). On top of all this, there has been some bipartisan pushback to further use of the reconciliation process and related mechanisms to boost defense spending outside of the U.S. military’s base budget. “I think it’s safe to conclude there will not be another reconciliation bill,” Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, a Republican, said during a hearing on the U.S. Air Force’s proposed 2027 Fiscal Year budget back in June.

It is also worth noting here that a significant delay in additional funding could have a cascading impact on Golden Dome and its aggressive schedule. The Pentagon could also seek to redirect funds from other parts of its budget, but this could then have similar effects on other efforts. Guetlein did tell reporters after his talk at the SMD Symposium that the Pentagon is looking at contingency options to keep Golden Dome running in the absence of direct funding, according to Air & Space Forces Magazine. “Several of the space capabilities that we are investing in are also being invested in by the Space Force,” he said, per Air & Space Forces Magazine‘s report. “So, if Golden Dome is not able to continue to invest in those type of capabilities, then the Space Force could decide at that time to continue the investments.” “Because we have diversified execution of a lot of these capabilities, and a lot of these capabilities are already requested by combatant commands, there are some alternatives that we can pursue. We have not made any decisions on any pathway,” he also noted. Still, this all comes as the U.S. military is currently in the midst of a host of other major modernization programs, many of which are also deemed critical to national security. This is especially true of costly and expansive programs now underway to update all three legs of America’s nuclear deterrent triad, as well as the command and control architectures that underpin them. Based on Guetlein’s comments today, Golden Dome now looks to be approaching its first major watershed moment, with this budgetary dilemma set to have significant impacts on how the initiative continues to progress.

In mid-February 2026, before the US military initiated the airstrikes that began Operation “Epic Fury,” the National Intelligence Council (NIC), an agency of the executive branch created to synthesize the analysis of the US’s 18 intelligence agencies, submitted to the president a classified report detailing the prospects of an attack on Iran. This assessment, first reported on in the Washington Post and subsequently confirmed by the Associated Press, painted a grim picture. It concluded that an offensive operation launched by the US military would be unlikely to dismantle the central pillars of the Iranian government. Assassinating Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei could backfire, resulting in the consolidation of Iranian military and political structures and the activation of emergency protocols the Iranians had been preparing for years. Iran’s domestic opposition was unlikely to be able to seize power in such a scenario. A limited air campaign or even a protracted war stood a serious chance of failing to achieve regime change. The NIC report was the final warning in a decades-long, documented history of US military and intelligence planners predicting grim strategic outcomes in a war with Iran. Official analysis anticipated every major failure of a potential conflict, from the brutal arithmetic of interceptor production to the possibility that Iran might close the Strait of Hormuz. In this piece, we’ll trace the public record of this analysis, and show that it was widely dispersed and understood within the American military, intelligence, and political establishments. We’ll rely on primary sources whenever possible, focusing on pre-war assessments, because failure is easy to identify in retrospect. Finally, we’ll attempt to establish the mechanism that caused these warnings to go unheeded.

An Empty Threat

First: the casus belli upon which the Trump administration has based its conflict with Iran. For nearly two decades, American intelligence has assessed, repeatedly and in public, that Iran was not actively developing a nuclear weapon. Moreover, American planners consistently rejected the notion that airstrikes could prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon in the long term. In 2007, the NIC began work on a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran. This would be the first major test of reforms within the intelligence community made in response to the disastrous intelligence failures in the NIE for Iraq’s WMD program released in 2002. These reforms mandated higher standards for intelligence sourcing, review, and the precision of predictive language. After an initial draft reaffirming the prior intelligence assessments that Iran sought nuclear weapons, the NIC started over based on new analysis. The report it finally published in late 2007 said unambiguously that the Iranians had terminated prior nuclear weapons programs and were not actively seeking the bomb. The 2007 Iran NIE ignited a political firestorm when portions were declassified that December. The Bush administration and hawks like John Bolton openly rejected its conclusions. Bush said that the US intelligence community had overcorrected for the mistakes it made in Iraq. Bolton called it “a sin of either commission or omission.” Nevertheless, the NIC and the key intelligence officials such as DIA director Ronald Burgess and DNI James Clapper defended the report and reaffirmed that position as late as 2012. No public report emerged from the NIC or any intelligence agency to supersede or correct the conclusions in the 2007 NIE.

Despite this, American military, political, and intelligence leadership continued to explore their options for ensuring the Iranians wouldn’t change their minds. While the Israelis publicly inflated the threat and engaged in saber-rattling, US military officials were consistently skeptical of the value of American military action towards Iran. Amidst increased sanctions pressure on the Iranians in 2010, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen publicly advocated for diplomacy as a superior solution to military action. In 2012, his successor, Martin Dempsey, told journalists that a military campaign would probably only delay an Iranian nuclear program, and that he didn’t want to be “complicit” if the Israelis chose to attack. He predicted that the diplomatic coalition exerting pressure on Iran could be “undone” in the event of a premature military operation. Former CIA Director Leon Panetta concurred with the JCS chairmen in 2011, warning that Iran wasn’t actively building a bomb, and strikes would only set the Iranians back “one or two years at most.” But these statements were in line with the diplomatic and sanctions efforts of the Obama administration, which meant they carried little professional risk. This was not the case with military and intelligence support for the JCPOA during the first Trump administration. The administration faced severe pushback from its advisors and the military-intelligence apparatus during its fight to decertify the agreement. National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster asserted that the Iranians were in compliance with the deal. Defense Secretary James Mattis and JCS Chairman Joseph Dunford both told Congress in 2017 that the deal was in US security interests to maintain, and withdrawal would have “unfortunate ripple effects” on American diplomacy.

The release of the 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment (WTA), an annual report produced by the US intelligence community, reprised the political controversy of the 2007 Iran NIE. The assessment concluded, in line with previous intelligence reports, that Iran was not developing a nuclear weapon, even eight months after the unilateral US withdrawal from the JCPOA. This was in direct conflict with the Trump administration’s public statements during that period. The political fallout was intense, with Trump summoning his intelligence chiefs to a meeting in the Oval Office, and the next year’s WTA fully classified to head off additional controversy. This conclusion would carry through all the way to the beginning of the 2026 war. Each annual threat assessment (which would be partially declassified again after 2020) up to 2023 restated the 2019 WTA’s conclusion. In 2024, the ODNI removed the conclusion pending a “reexamination,” but then restored it in 2025 under director Tulsi Gabbard. In 2024, CIA Director William Burns said that the intelligence community had no evidence that Khamenei had reversed his decision to block the development of nuclear weapons, and American intelligence would be able to quickly detect if he had. The historical record here is damning. American intelligence and military officials at the highest level of the power structure consistently warned four successive presidents that Iran was not developing nuclear weapons, that diplomacy was the best path for making sure they wouldn’t, and a military option could at best delay an Iranian nuclear weapons program by a year or two. These warnings helped prevent conflict, but only up until February 2026.

Attrition Arithmetic

The core issue with voluntarily entering into a protracted missile attrition war was identified by Reagan advisor Paul Nitze, who led negotiations on the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with the Soviet Union, in the mid-80s. While Nitze was focused on homeland ballistic missile defense in the event of a nuclear war, the core tenet of his argument would also apply to a scenario he never envisioned: non-nuclear conflict with a smaller, regional power heavily armed with deep stocks of conventional ballistic missiles and drones. Nitze said:

New defensive systems must also be cost effective at the margin – that is they must be cheap enough to add additional defensive capability so that the other side has no incentive to add additional offensive capability to overcome the defense. If this criterion is not met, the defensive systems could encourage a proliferation of countermeasures and additional offensive weapons to overcome deployed defenses instead of a redirection of effort from offense to defense. He later clarified: The defensive system must be able to maintain its effectiveness against the offense at less cost than it would take to develop offensive countermeasures and proliferate the ballistic missiles necessary to overcome it. [This] has valid application to other military systems as well.

Nitze believed that the American defense sector was theoretically capable of designing, eventually, ballistic missile defense solutions that were “cost-effective at the margin.” He was wrong. His prediction that the failure to create such systems would motivate prospective opponents to mass-produce “offensive capability” was, however, prescient. Due to the extreme cost and complexity of producing the US military’s core air defense systems, and Iranian strategic planning, the US would begin the 2026 war with severe asymmetries in capability with Iran. The premier systems American planners knew they would rely on in an Iranian conflict would be the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) and Standard Missile 3 (SM-3), which cost up to $15 million and $37 million (Block IIA) per interceptor, respectively. The costs of some variants of the SM-3 have more than doubled in the past five years. With Iranian missiles costing around $1-2 million to manufacture on average, the arithmetic is devastating. Both systems have multi-year lead times for order fulfillment. Government Accountability Office reports dating back to 2011 flagged consistent failures to meet production targets for THAAD interceptors.