The U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran is now in its seventh month, with costs during periods of heavy fighting estimated at roughly $1 billion per day. Despite having the world’s most powerful military, the United States has failed to achieve the Trump administration’s constantly shifting war aims—initially the overthrow of a deeply unpopular, conventionally inferior adversary.
As the war dragged past his promised “four to five weeks,” U.S. President Donald Trump has traded his maximalist objectives for terms inferior to the prewar status quo. An even more hard-line Iranian regime still controls the Strait of Hormuz as Trump alternates threats to destroy Persian civilization with ever-greater concessions in search of an off-ramp. The United States chose the time, place, and manner of this war, but Iran now holds the upper hand in deciding when—and on what terms—the war ends. By some of his own staff’s accounts, Trump’s war has failed, and not for lack of military capability.
Indeed, this failure was secured in Washington, the inevitable outcome of Trump’s 19-month campaign against the city’s own institutions and workforce. Trump gutted the National Security Council (NSC), purged the Defense Department’s military leadership, and politicized intelligence, all while Congress failed to assert its authority. In place of qualified staff, Trump relied on outside advisors, relatives, and self-appointed internet activists whose lists of “enemies within” reached his desk, while intelligence assessments did not.
The result was a poor understanding of a long-studied adversary, a lack of attainable objectives, a breakdown in policy and defense planning, and an inability to identify diplomatic off-ramps, all leading ultimately to catastrophe.
Since its creation, the National Security Council’s size has varied, but no administration has deliberately destroyed the council’s most basic function—to coordinate the instruments of national power. Three successive purges—in January, April, and May 2025—stripped the White House of its career professionals on loan from other agencies. This left the NSC with fewer than 50 policy experts, its smallest complement since the Eisenhower administration. The senior director for Middle East policy was 12 days into the job when the June 2025 strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities began—and his team had just been cut from 10 officers to five.
Initially, when the new senior directors for the Middle East and China tried to restart interagency meetings in the administration’s first weeks, the White House chief of staff suspended them. The normal cadence of assistant secretary-level sessions—where an administration’s aspirations meet the realities of planning timelines, logistics, and diplomacy—never resumed. The administration’s decision to have the secretary of state double as national security advisor produced predictable results: uninformed decision-making and a lack of policy coordination.
Within weeks of going to war, Trump admitted that his administration did not foresee that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz to impose costs on the United States, even though decades of war games had ended the same way. The White House simply underestimated Iran’s willingness to do so. A proper policy process would have let the administration plan an adequate response rather than improvise in real time.
A senior official later told CNN that before the purges, the NSC served as “the final synthesizer” of options for the president—and that without it, “the planning falls apart.”
The administration was equally unprepared to get its own citizens out of harm’s way: It went to war having staged no charter flights and issued no departure advisories for the roughly half a million Americans living in the Middle East. Not until two days after strikes began did the State Department advise citizens and U.S. diplomats’ dependents to depart—by which point airspace across the region had already shut down. Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, by comparison, began plans to evacuate their nationals within hours.
Likewise, the administration launched the war with no consultation with its transatlantic allies. So when the president later pressed European navies to send minesweepers into the Strait of Hormuz to reopen it, every major NATO ally refused. This was the foreseeable cost of starting a war without consulting the very partners whose help would be needed to end it.
In his first term, Trump appointed seasoned professionals, including retired Marine Corps four-star Gen. Jim Mattis, who served as his secretary of defense for the first half of the administration. In his second term, Trump has chosen vastly less experienced leaders, appointing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host whose military career had ended at the much more junior rank of major. Hegseth had never led a policy-planning process or an institution approaching the Pentagon’s scale—a gap that showed when the department needed contingency plans and had no process left to produce them.
On assuming office, Trump’s team and its allies began a witch hunt against those deemed disloyal to the president or associated with so-called “woke” or diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Trump fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., less than halfway into his four-year term, without a stated cause, along with the chief of naval operations and the military’s most senior lawyers.
Each firing cost the United States expertise developed over decades. Those who remained watched their backs or simply left to avoid being dismissed over a tweet—or by one. Trump then elevated as chairman Gen. Dan Caine, a less-qualified officer seen as less willing to contradict him. The officers who rose in the purged leaders’ places understood the terms of their promotions—and what candor with this president had cost their predecessors.
Broader U.S. military readiness has also suffered from long deployments that have eroded morale, missed maintenance cycles, and depleted stocks of vital munitions, forcing the relocation of assets from the priority Indo-Pacific theater.
Meanwhile, career civilians have been sidelined from the process, and key positions have been filled by individuals who lack the expertise of their predecessors. With the workforce under perpetual threat of firing, the Pentagon failed to conduct proper planning or think through off-ramps. At one point, the department leadership resorted to mass emailing staff for ideas on how to break the stalemate in the strait. These are precisely the tasks performed by the Pentagon’s policy arms in coordination with the NSC.
The administration has also sought to muzzle those it has fired. As a result, former officials who might testify to the planning failures find silence to be the price of employment at D.C.-area companies that do business with the government.
Critics might dub Iran an intelligence failure like Iraq, but this is unfair to the country’s intelligence community. Instead, the fault lies squarely with the policymakers who blocked the warnings that the president did not want to hear. From its opening days, the second Trump administration cast the intelligence community as an internal enemy—a “deep state” that it insisted had spent Trump’s first term seeking to undermine the president.
Thus, the administration’s stated goal was to put career civil servants “in trauma” so they would dread coming to work. In this environment, some people’s careers ended because they were associated with the president’s political enemies or because their identity made them the wrong kind of American.
The more than a dozen agencies that constitute the intelligence community include thousands of officers whose views span the political spectrum, but they are trained to be nonpartisan public servants and held to strict analytic standards. During her controversial tenure, recently departed Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard politicized intelligence, gutted her own office, and oversaw the firings of officials who had provided honest assessments reflecting the intelligence community’s consensus.
Trump himself has rarely read the President’s Daily Brief or used intelligence to inform his decisions. Instead, he has taken issue with specific agencies or assessments when their findings have contradicted his preferred narratives. In the months before the war, the administration fired the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency after his assessments of the damage from U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities undercut the president’s claims.
This has flipped the intelligence-policy feedback loop. The consequences are predictable: When officers watch colleagues stripped of their clearances and livelihoods for reaching unwelcome conclusions, no one needs to order the institution into silence. A government that punishes warning gets none—and then blunders into crises that it forbade its analysts to predict.
None of the above would have been possible without congressional acquiescence. The president’s party has failed to rein Trump in even as he has refused to defer to it on war powers, and even as his combative officials have stonewalled basic questions in hearings while requesting increased appropriations for the war. It has done nothing in response to the gutting of the NSC, and it stood by as the administration hollowed out the federal workforce and purged generals and admirals.
As a result, the Trump administration’s war in Iran has dragged on without end—and without meaningful accountability from a co-equal branch of government.
The war in Iran was a stress test of the United States’ institutions. A functioning NSC would have forced planning for the closure of the strait; an intelligence community free of fear would have delivered the warnings that no one wanted to hear; an experienced Pentagon leadership would have set achievable objectives; and Congress would have demanded answers before the U.S. sank into a quagmire. Instead, the administration gutted the country’s institutions, and the United States is left trying to bargain for an outcome worse than the prewar status quo, with the Iranian regime emboldened and in control of a strategic chokepoint.
The results of Trump’s war on the “enemy within” should end the argument about whether the most complex institutions on the planet need expert professionals. Cutting government for its own sake—or to align it with the president’s politics—has left the state without the expertise to plan, execute, or end a major war.
None of this was inevitable. It is what happens when a government fires its air traffic controllers and expects the planes to land themselves.
