In launching his war on Iran, U.S. President Donald Trump promised quick and decisive results. More than six months later, despite thousands of airstrikes, thousands of dead Iranians, and the destruction of Tehran’s air force and navy, Iran is unbowed. Its new leaders are more radical and uncompromising than those killed by the United States and Israel at the start of the war. By disrupting traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, Iran holds the global economy hostage as the supply of oil, gas, and refined fuels out of the Gulf remains intermittent. For the Trump administration and its dwindling core of supporters, the hunt is on for excuses.
There is a default narrative for Washington’s military failures—one that is more than likely to be picked up by Trump and only compound his failure. It is the narrative of triumph forsaken: The United States can still defeat Iran if only it has the will and endurance. It just has to endure more pain and launch more missiles. Retired U.S. Army Gen. Jack Keane picked up on this supposed solution: “We really do have the capability to end this militarily if we desire to.”
In launching his war on Iran, U.S. President Donald Trump promised quick and decisive results. More than six months later, despite thousands of airstrikes, thousands of dead Iranians, and the destruction of Tehran’s air force and navy, Iran is unbowed. Its new leaders are more radical and uncompromising than those killed by the United States and Israel at the start of the war. By disrupting traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, Iran holds the global economy hostage as the supply of oil, gas, and refined fuels out of the Gulf remains intermittent. For the Trump administration and its dwindling core of supporters, the hunt is on for excuses.
There is a default narrative for Washington’s military failures—one that is more than likely to be picked up by Trump and only compound his failure. It is the narrative of triumph forsaken: The United States can still defeat Iran if only it has the will and endurance. It just has to endure more pain and launch more missiles. Retired U.S. Army Gen. Jack Keane picked up on this supposed solution: “We really do have the capability to end this militarily if we desire to.”
Triumph forsaken is an old trope in U.S. military history. One prominent revisionist account of the Vietnam War bears that very title. This belief that any defeat is merely a lost victory springs from a fixation on material conditions and numerical calculations of comparative military strength—the bean counting school of military analysis. Since World War II more than 80 years ago, the United States has never fought a foe with peer or near-peer military or economic strength. In many cases, such as Afghanistan, the disparity in power between the U.S. military and its adversary was so large as to be absurd. Yet despite this massive imbalance, Washington has clearly and repeatedly lost wars. Repeating the failures of U.S. policymakers and military planners in Vietnam, the architects of the war in Afghanistan elided the political obstacles to victory to make the case that a flawed strategy could work with just more time and willpower.
While the United States’ wealth, technology, and power projection capabilities remain preeminent for now, armed conflict is never decided by a tally of military assets. In case after case, Washington’s strength has actually played against it. A belief in military force as the sole ingredient for success has enabled a lazy and destructive foreign policy that ignores the will and motivations of both allies and adversaries. Such thinking also elevates tactics above strategy, prioritizing quick battlefield victories over attrition, exhaustion, and will. As a result, the ostensibly weaker side—despite being decidedly outmatched by the U.S. military—has often won.
A key component of this latest triumph of hope over experience—the belief that somehow Trump’s Iran war would be different—was a sanguinary spin on triumph forsaken: the idea that the U.S. military failed to take the proverbial gloves off in Iraq and Afghanistan in order to prosecute those wars with sufficient ruthlessness. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been a relentless purveyor of this myth. In his 2024 book The War on Warriors, the former Army platoon leader wrote that he told his soldiers in Iraq to ignore the rules of engagement they’d been issued. During Trump’s first term, Hegseth’s major contribution was pushing the president to pardon two high-profile service members found guilty of war crimes and reverse the disciplining of a third.
Hegseth, with the cadences of the TV host that he was, summarized this unrestrained “gloves-off” approach to warfare as “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.” He has backed up this rhetoric with moves designed to make it easier for U.S. troops to skirt rules of engagement and the laws of war—or even ignore them with impunity. One of his first moves was to fire the military lawyers that commanders rely on for interpreting and applying legal restraints on violence, followed by defunding the office in the Pentagon tasked with reducing harm to innocent bystanders in conflict.
Taking the gloves off has done nothing to defeat Iran. Indeed, it has had the opposite effect. The horrific deaths of more than 100 schoolchildren in Minab on the first day of the war hardened Iranian resolve, pushing even some dedicated regime opponents into public nationalism. The rally-around-the-flag effect remains a predictable consequence of military action, often for the attacked more than the attacker. National unity should come as no surprise when the attacker threatens to destroy not just enemy forces, but an entire civilization.
The Wall Street Journal recently interviewed Iranians who had shifted from regime opposition to ardent support. One young entrepreneur was badly beaten during 2022 protests and tear gassed by security forces in January. Now, after his uncle’s house in Tehran was destroyed and he feared his girlfriend was killed, he has joined the military to defend Iran against what he sees as a civilizational threat.
As Iranian resolve has grown, Trump has continued his pattern of declaring victory while simultaneously threatening to escalate the conflict, most recently with the threat of a massive bombing campaign after the midterm elections.
Despite the clear risks that such an escalation would entail for the region, Trump’s threats come with no clear logic beyond an unfaltering belief that more violence will magically lead to triumph. Others have embraced this faulty but familiar thinking. U.S. Rep. Rich McCormick, for example, said, “We should’ve taken the gloves off right from the beginning and hammered them. You have to make it absolutely miserable on their populace.” This is the logical end point of what the counterterrorism analyst Jonathan Schroden has termed “the asylum of lethality.”
Regardless of the ultimate outcome of this war with Iran, Hegseth is taking steps to ensure that no meaningful lessons will be learned by future U.S. generals. Last month, he signed a one-page memo ending tenure for civilian faculty at U.S. military academies. The academies train lieutenants and ensigns, setting the tone for the careers of many of the nation’s future senior military leaders. Destroying their academic excellence and faculty independence in the name of “the warfighting mission” prioritizes training over education and will erode the ability of cadets to learn strategic lessons during their formation as officers. The abolition of academic independence will also make it easier for Hegseth and his successors to instill their views on the military in future generations.
For those at the pinnacle of their careers, Hegseth has imposed a new hurdle: a Joint Warfighter Evaluation that will screen all future generals and admirals for “their ability to fight, adapt, and win.” What this will amount to is a series of written tests and war games focused on tactical decision-making and lethality.
As Trump’s failed Iran war shows, tactical competence is far down the list of what needs fixing in the U.S. military. This has been true for a long time. As told by U.S. Army Col. Harry Summers, one of the U.S. officials involved in negotiations to end the Vietnam War in Hanoi, he insisted to one of his North Vietnamese counterparts, “You know, you never defeated us on the battlefield.” His former foe replied: “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”
The exchange as told by Summers may be apocryphal, but it remained fundamentally true in the two wars Hegseth fought. In Afghanistan, the United States and its coalition partners won nearly every tactical engagement. Western troops killed Taliban fighters at a ratio of more than 20 to 1. But less than 20 years after invading, the United States withdrew in defeat. The U.S. military fell short in Afghanistan, but a lack of lethality and battlefield competence was not the reason it lost.
With a series of costly military defeats since the 1991 Gulf War, the United States has come to embrace a perverse and unsustainable orientation to the rest of the world: extreme belligerence paired with strategic fecklessness. As the Canadian writer Stephen Marche acidly noted, “[T]he U.S. military invents whole new genres of defeat.”
Military defeat usually leads to major policy reforms, but the United States has bucked that trend. The country’s wealth, geographic security, and solipsism have prevented meaningful foreign-policy reflection and reform for the past 30 years. But as failures mount and U.S. power ebbs, the need for course correction has become urgent.
Even as it stares at another defeat in the Middle East, this U.S. military and its civilian leadership appear intent on learning nothing. At an August ceremony commemorating the fifth anniversary of the Afghanistan withdrawal, Hegseth presented three former Marines with upgraded awards for valor. “You are the vanguard of a lethal, proud, and undefeated force,” he told them. Such delusions will do far more damage to American national security than any Iranian missile.
