Us military

America’s war with Iran is in its eighth month and stuck. On September 26, Donald Trump confirmed that he had rejected Tehran’s offer to reopen the Strait of Hormuz in return for lifting the American naval blockade and easing sanctions. He has reportedly told his staff that renewed bombing is likely after the midterm elections on November 3. He is reluctant to resume major combat any sooner. The embarrassing question is whether America actually has enough missiles to bomb Iran. The West spent a generation persuading itself that making clever weapons could compensate for making fewer of them, with even fewer factories and a thinner web of suppliers behind them. The reality of war is messier and less obliging.

Last month, an Iranian cargo ship in the Caspian Sea was struck by a Ukrainian drone. Kyiv claimed the vessel was carrying military equipment heading toward Russia. “The regime in Tehran is a direct accomplice to Russian aggression against Ukraine, fueling Moscow’s criminal war with weapons,” Kyiv’s foreign minister said. Tehran reportedly contemplated a counterstrike on one of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, then thought better of it. But the threat of a conflagration is higher now than at any point since the end of the Cold War. Conflicts that are currently contained risk spilling out and engulfing whole regions, perhaps the world. If the Iran and Ukraine conflicts were to merge, we’d see a war that runs from Poland to the edges of India.

Ever since World War Two, America’s aircraft carrier fleets have served as imposing instruments of imperial power, roaming the oceans to cow recalcitrant nations into obedience. Favored by the Trump administration for this purpose, current experience indicates their day is done thanks to the proliferation of anti-ship missiles and the increasing ubiquity of drones. In America’s last Middle Eastern war but two, against the Yemeni Houthis in 2025, the carrier USS Harry S.Truman, complete with its attendant escorts, was driven into retreat, leaving antagonists in control of the Red Sea. On one occasion, the carrier’s desperate maneuver to avoid a Houthi drone caused an $80 million Hornet jet fighter to slide off the deck and topple into the sea.

Erik Prince, the American mercenary, wants to sell you a phone. His Unplugged phone is aimed at stopping big tech and big government spying on you. It’s available in the United States, and shortly in the United Kingdom too. He tells me: “It’s been troubling for me to see the crackdown on free expression in the UK.” But the phone is a sideline. His main business remains sending private armies to some of the world’s most dangerous places. The Biden years were lean ones, or at least quiet ones; now that Donald Trump’s back, so is Prince. Most people know Prince as the founder of Blackwater, the world’s most notorious private military company. In 2014, four of Prince’s soldiers got long prison sentences in the US for opening fire on Iraqi civilians, killing 14.

Six months into President Trump’s second administration and there is perhaps no other government department that has been subject to more controversies than the Department of Defense. Brouhahas have ranged from the in-fact favorable (see the banning of affirmative action) to the admittedly concerning (see significant leaks of sensitive information). And now Trump has pulled the pin on possibly his most powerful grenade so far – and rolled it Pete Hegseth’s way. But after the smoke clears from this particular explosion, there is a real opportunity for the department to be born again, fighting fit, from the debris. President Trump has signed an executive order returning the Department of Defense to its original moniker, the Department of War.

Washington, DC “Every other country celebrates their victories, it’s about time America did too,” Donald Trump told a whooping, albeit smaller-than-anticipated crowd on the National Mall tonight. “We’re the hottest country in the world right now,” the President boasted. Temperature-wise, that’s debatable. But he’s right that the whole world has been watching on, as the President turned his plans for a military parade from conception into reality. If you gave a 79-year-old man some say in what he did for his birthday, he’d choose one of two things: nap, or pay a laudatory tribute to the US military that everyone had to watch.

Mohamad Hamad, a 23-year-old Air National Guardsman from a Palestinian refugee family, was charged last month with attempting to blow up Jewish institutions in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood, using homemade pipe bombs. Hamad allegedly vandalized the buildings with antisemitic slogans accompanied by Hamas-related symbols. But Hamad was hiding in plain sight. If anyone had bothered to check his social media they have seen him boasting about holding extremist views and posing with weapons. “Been a terrorist since I was a kid in Lebanon,” he posted on social media alongside photos of him with AK-47 rifles and other firearms. His case highlights a catastrophic flaw in US military vetting procedures.

Back in 2010, there was no more respected warfighter and general beloved by his men than Stanley McChrystal, commander of US forces in Afghanistan. Bob Gates once called him "the finest warrior and leader of men in combat I ever met." He was also a man of the people, uncomfortable around the fat and happy elites of the foreign policy and national security world. As the late reporter Michael Hastings wrote in his profile for Rolling Stone, McChrystal's favorite beer is Bud Light Lime, his favorite movie Talladega Nights, and dismissed fancy restaurants with candles on the table as "too Gucci". It was that notorious article that proved to be McChrystal's undoing and led directly to him offering his resignation to President Barack Obama.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s trip to NATO headquarters in Brussels couldn’t have been easy for either Rubio or the Europeans.  The normally copacetic relationship between the United States and Europe isn’t in shambles as the more overly sensitive lawmakers and pundits would have you believe. But it’s not exactly rosy either. European policy elites for the most part like to downplay their differences with Trump’s Washington and emphasize the positive, but it’s hard to be a European politician these days and not be terrified of the future.