An Iranian Toll-Gate on the Strait of Hormuz?

The American-Israeli war against Iran began a couple of weeks ago and seemed very much a David-vs-Goliath contest, with combat operations likely to be extremely one-sided.

In recent years, America’s annual military spending has been roughly a trillion dollars, while Iran’s budget was merely $8 billion. Some estimates put Iran’s true outlays as considerably higher, but hardly enough to level the playing field. So whether the actual ratio of our military expenditures has been 100-to-1 or 70-to-1 or even merely 50-to-1, the mismatch was stark.

Over the last quarter-century, our ground forces have greatly shrunk in size, so our current strength is overwhelmingly concentrated in our air power, supplemented by our naval forces, with the latter primarily serving as mobile platforms for aircraft and cruise missiles. According to news accounts, the forces that we positioned in the Persian Gulf against Iran amounted to our largest deployment in decades, including roughly half of our air assets and two of our powerful carrier groups, thus constituting a very substantial fraction of our total military power.

Even that greatly understated the odds against Iran. In a 2003 interview, the renowned Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld had rather boastfully declared that his country’s armed forces were the second or third strongest in the world. While that was probably something of an exaggeration, Iran was not merely at war with the world’s greatest military power, but also another in the topmost ranks.

Raising Iran’s challenges to even more absurd heights, the Israelis and Americans initiated the war with an extremely successful surprise attack against their Iranian foes.

The Trump Administration was engaged in ongoing peace negotiations regarding Iran’s civilian nuclear program then exploited the ruse of a possible breakthrough. This baited the Iranians into having their top military and civilian leadership meet to discuss whether to accede to the American demands, allowing them all to be killed in a sudden missile strike. The victims included Iran’s 86-year-old Supreme Leader, its top national security officials, and dozens of their most senior military commanders, all eliminated in the very effective decapitating first strike that amounted to the official American-Israeli declaration of war.

This recalled the penultimate scene in the Oscar-winning first Godfather film, in which Michael Corleone set up negotiations with his leading mafia rivals, then successfully assassinated all of them. Numerous other films or television shows have followed this same basic plot device, but I’m not aware of any major country in modern history that had ever utilized this sort of stratagem in real life. The Iranians were certainly caught rather flat-footed by this less than entirely honorable approach to peace negotiations.

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With Iran facing a military force many dozens of times more powerful than its own and having lost its top leadership in the first moments of the attack, few gave it any serious chance of overcoming the onslaught. Our cheerleading mainstream media almost uniformly declared that the result would be a swift and decisive American victory.

My first article on the Iran War was published less than 48 hours after the lethal salvo of missiles that initiated it. I took a rather cautious approach and expressed considerable skepticism that we could easily achieve our ultimate strategic objective of either totally subjugating that large country or fragmenting and destroying it. But I hardly doubted that the desperate Iranian military retaliation would prove ineffective, nor that Iran would be easily defeated in combat.

I was not alone in those conclusions. A couple of days after my own piece appeared, a leading Russian policy analyst published an article emphasizing that our sudden decapitation of Iran’s government had sent “shockwaves” across the world, not least in the Kremlin and among its top military leadership.

In the last couple of years, important elements of Russia’s nuclear deterrent had been successfully attacked using highly innovative drone tactics, several top Russian generals had been assassinated in Moscow, and there had also apparently been major attempts to kill Russian President Vladimir Putin. Although we had maintained plausible deniability, all these extremely provocative operations must have surely required extensive Western backing, and they suggested that we were probing Russian vulnerabilities in preparation for a much more sweeping and decisive attack.

The worried Russian analyst argued that if America and Israel believed that the Iranian response to our decapitating first-strike against its leadership would merely produce “painful but acceptable” retaliatory losses, there were obvious concerns that we might eventually come to believe that the same would be true for a similar attack against Russia. As he explained:

Russia possesses far greater retaliatory capacity than Iran. But that alone does not guarantee stability. An opponent who calculates that the damage is bearable may continue escalation. The Iranian crisis reveals a deeper mood emerging in global politics: fatalistic determination. Major powers appear increasingly willing to absorb risk and accept instability, which may be the most troubling lesson of all.

The events in Iran are not an isolated regional episode. They are part of a broader transformation in the international system. It’s one in which sanctions evolve into strikes, negotiation coexists with attrition, and leadership itself becomes a target.

Although he didn’t mention it, the Iranian leaders had been lured to their doom by the ongoing peace negotiations of Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, the two personal representatives of President Donald Trump. And even as they gulled the naive Iranians, those same two individuals had also been simultaneously negotiating with the Russians, something that must surely have now raised the concerns of the latter.

A few weeks earlier, Trump had given a wide-ranging interview to several New York Times journalists, and in it he stated “that he did not feel constrained by any international laws, norms, checks or balances” and the “only limits on his ability to use American military might” were “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” His decision to suddenly assassinate Iran’s top leadership and follow that with a massive surprise attack on the country demonstrated that his bold statements to the Times had been much more than mere bravado.

Stephen Miller is one of Trump’s most influential advisors, and around the same time he gave a remarkable interview to CNN, in which he similarly declared that America planned to use its military power in a completely unconstrained fashion, with absolutely no concern for international laws or norms of behavior.

JUST IN: CNN’s Jake Tapper ends interview after fiery clash with Stephen Miller over the future of Venezuela.

Tapper: “We went into the country, and we seized the leader of Venezuela…”

Miller: “D*mn straight we did!! We’re not going to let tin-pot communist dictators send… pic.twitter.com/aU5frDnvGN

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) January 5, 2026

Until relatively recently, the American government and its media allies had only intermittently paid much attention to the Iranian government or its leaders. Meanwhile, Russian President Putin had been massively demonized all across our ideological spectrum for many years, probably becoming the most vilified foreign leader since Adolf Hitler, with leading media figures and top U.S. Senators regularly calling for his death. So now that we have actually carried out such an unprecedented killing of an important foreign leader and his top government officials, only the most mindlessly insouciant Russians would not be greatly concerned over whether their own country might be next on the list.

• American Pravda: Putin as Hitler?
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • March 7, 2022 • 7,900 Words

However, what had initially seemed likely to be a swift and overwhelming American military victory began to rapidly change during the days that followed, surely representing one of the most striking reversals in recent warfare. Some knowledgeable military experts began noting that Iran’s drone and missile strikes had been remarkably effective, far more so than almost anyone had expected. All our major bases in the region had come under devastating Iranian attack and had mostly been destroyed, with our crucial strategic radars suffering the same fate.

These latter installations were among our most important regional assets. They constituted a large fraction of our entire global inventory and they would require years of time and billions of dollars to replace. Although very heavily defended, they had been overwhelmed and destroyed by waves of inexpensive Iranian drones, and their elimination blinded both ourselves and Israel to subsequent Iranian missile strikes.

For decades MIT Prof. Ted Postol has ranked as one of our foremost experts on military technology, especially on matters involving missile systems. During his long career he had regularly dealt with groups of three- and four-star flag officers on terms of full equality or better, while frequently attracting the enmity of corporate lobbyists for his candid and often less than flattering evaluations of the extremely pricey weapons systems that they marketed to our gullible government.

Although he retired from his academic post about eight years ago, he has maintained a strong interest in his technical specialty. So while his past briefings would have been restricted to the topmost ranks of our military services, they were now available to anyone who watched his interviews on YouTube

In his lengthy discussions with Lt. Col. Daniel Davis and Prof. Glenn Diesen, Postol demonstrated that the American Patriot and Israeli Iron Dome air defense systems seemed almost totally useless against Iran’s ballistic missiles. Their rates of successful interception only ran somewhere between 0% and 5% even against the older Iranian missiles that had begun the bombardment.

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As I explained last week:

According to Postol’s analysis, the Iranians seem to be firing their ballistic missiles from individual underground locations all covered by thin layers of topsoil. Such firing positions could not possibly be detected by our satellites or even by overflying aircraft or drones, and therefore could not be targeted and destroyed. Other military experts have noted that many or most of the targets that we had allegedly hit were apparently just cardboard decoys, so these were probably the destroyed mobile missile launchers about which our government had apparently been bragging.

Furthermore, Postol explained that the newer Iranian ballistic missiles were now often equipped with multiple decoys or with submunition warheads, with the latter able to produce a saturation bombing of a targeted area.

He emphasized that the Iranians had an enormous supply of large attack drones, each armed with a 200 pound warhead sufficiently powerful to destroy a radar system. So the American and Israeli defenders couldn’t ignore such attacks and would be forced to expend one or more $4 million interceptors on a drone that probably only cost $10,000 to $30,000.

Even worse for their opponents, the Iranians had equipped some of their drones with Iridium satellite communications systems able to broadcast video images back to their human controllers, thereby allowing the precise targeting of particular buildings or military sites.

All of these technological factors seemed to be giving the Iranians a major edge in the current state of combat.

Given these facts, the regional American facilities, our Arab allies of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), and Israel were all essentially defenseless against Iranian attacks, and the latter inflicted massive destruction against their targets. All our bases in the region had been severely damaged or destroyed, and whenever they chose, the Iranians could eliminate all of the oil and natural gas infrastructure of Saudi Arabia or the other wealthy Gulf Arabs.

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