Pete Hegseth believes the real problem with Donald Trump's strategy in Iran is that people are criticizing it

Starting in 1964, officers from the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam — more commonly known by the abbreviation MAC-V — held daily press briefings at the Rex Hotel in Saigon.

As the war dragged on and became an increasingly bloody quagmire, military officials outlined with great precision the number of enemy soldiers killed, the number of targets bombed, and the number of sorties flown each day.

The military continued to give journalists access to the frontlines and speak to the troops on the ground throughout the Vietnam War. Reporters dubbed the daily press conferences the “Five O’Clock Follies.”

“They seldom bore any resemblance whatever to the facts in the field,” observed one correspondent, Keyes Beech of the Chicago Daily News.

Journalists with experience covering Vietnam and the war could see that no matter how the brass massaged the math of “kill counts,” it would never add up to American victory.

As a result, despite the ceaseless flood of meaningless statistics, the public was accurately able to gauge the widening gap between the reality on the ground and the fantasy in the minds of the generals at MAC-V. The dismal picture painted by the media contributed to growing anger at home, feeding the milieu of anti-war movements that were shaking America out of its post-World War II domestic somnolence.

Not even the Pentagon’s best efforts at spin could prevent the truth — that America couldn’t win the war — from piercing the veil of official bullshit.

A contemplative policymaker might draw a number of lessons from this. Half a century after the end of the Vietnam War, the United States finds itself again locked in a conflict with a surplus of kill counts but a deficit of strategy. The official response is to flood the zone with facts and figures, signifying nothing.

America’s defense secretary is interested only in the imaginary past he has created, in which the reason the U.S. loses wars is because of “wokeness,” and an imaginary present in which the United States’ latest boondoggle overseas has been a resounding, historic success. He believes that the real problem with the Trump administration’s precipitous intervention in Iran is that people are criticizing it.

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“The biggest challenge, the biggest adversary we face at this point are the reckless, feckless and defeatist words of congressional Democrats and some Republicans,” Pete Hegseth told Congress on Wednesday.

With all due respect to the man who calls himself the secretary of war, words alone do not lose battles any more than they win them. And one need not possess the political and strategic acumen of Napoleon Bonaparte to find it problematic that the nation’s top defense official believes his primary adversary in a war with Iran is in Washington, and not Tehran.

There’s ample evidence that in three months of undeclared war, the U.S. and Israel have destroyed a large amount of Iranian military equipment. There are entire rooms full of analysts and military personnel whose sole job is to compile reports cataloging this destruction.

You can ask various officials at different times, and they will describe America’s progress with mathematical certainty: Iran’s military is 92 percent destroyed. Or 100 percent. Or whatever. The U.S. has carried out more than 13,000 strikes, according to Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell. It has destroyed 158 Iranian ships. It has hit 90 percent of weapons factories. It has killed the 86-year-old cleric who ran the country, and a significant portion of the Islamic Republic’s top leadership.

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All of this sounds quite meaningful. In truth, it’s “got the sizzle but not the steak,” as Tom Waits put it.

No matter how the Pentagon graphs the stats, what precisely have America’s bombs accomplished in Iran strategically? The administration is quick to say it has already met its goals, listing a number of half-truths (that the Iranian Navy is “destroyed”) while glossing over the conflict’s central issue: the status of Iran’s nuclear program.

The hardliners are still in charge of the Islamic Republic. They still have hundreds of kilograms of highly enriched uranium, and the potential and will to pursue a nuclear weapons program. Their proxies are degraded, but intact. Enough of their asymmetric military capabilities remain that they can threaten vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, and strike at their neighbors in the Persian Gulf.

At the moment, the temporary ceasefire agreed to in early April has only created an impasse. Talks have gone nowhere.

“The president has got himself and America stuck in a quagmire of another war in the Middle East. He’s desperately trying to extricate himself from his own mistakes,” Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) said in the congressional hearing where Democrats grilled Hegseth.

“You call it a quagmire, handing propaganda to our enemies? Shame on you for that statement. And statements like that are reckless to our troops,” Hegseth replied.

That the criticism is aimed at the civilian leadership and not “our troops” is lost on the defense secretary. One must learn to expect hyperpartisan pugilism from Hegseth, whose primary interest in war is using it as a backdrop for his masculine domination fantasies.

Unfortunately, there is no other, more responsible party waiting in the wings to guide America through the crisis it created. The president is more interested in interior decorating projects than managing a geopolitical conflict. Congress long ago abrogated its duty of oversight over this particular executive. Vice President J.D. Vance — whatever rumors are spread about his supposed antipathy to the war — and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are non-entities, unable or unwilling to influence a course correction.

America’s military is capable, but few U.S. generals can be trusted to devise winning strategies. Afghanistan alone — another war rich in spreadsheets and powerpoint presentations depicting a reality that didn’t exist — should have taught the American public that. In any case, generals do not make policy. They can make excellent plans for blowing things up, but they cannot solve a political problem that requires delicate, visionary, and sustained international diplomacy.

President Donald Trump and his cabinet of belligerents never had a plan for victory. They had a plan for war, a rather important distinction.

The bill of goods peddled by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who reportedly convinced Trump to join Israel in attacking Iran, was a mirage of regime-change-made-easy. Netanyahu understood that the current crop of American leaders has no interest in patient, long-term strategies. Hegseth and his ilk are pure swagger without prudence. Trump, his age and mental decline ever more visible, is not the man to thoughtfully tackle complex problems with dogged persistence.

In the wake of kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the U.S. president believed he had learned how to slice through Gordian Knots. But Roy Cohn was no Aristotle, and Trump is no Alexander. He hasn’t unraveled the Persian knot — he’s become entangled in it.

The president now wants to be free of the whole affair. “Maybe we’re better off not making a deal at all,” Trump said on Friday. “We can’t let this thing go on, you know, it’s going on too long.”

Few will mourn if Iran’s brutal regime collapses, but that outcome looks unlikely. The U.S. naval blockade on the still-closed Strait of Hormuz means Tehran is losing billions of dollars in much-needed revenue, and the dire effects are amplified with every passing day. But the government still has the guns, and it still has the will to resist.

Iran is feeling the economic pain, but so is everyone else. Twenty percent of the world’s oil supply isn’t moving. Ships won’t sail through the Strait of Hormuz if they risk being sunk. Prices are rising. Inflation is climbing. There are shortages of fertilizer, of helium, of a dozen boring things that keep the global economy chugging along its merry way.

When asked how he arrived at financial ruin, Mike Campbell, the fictitious Scottish war veteran in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, replies simply: “Gradually, then suddenly.”

This too, will be how most Americans experience the crisis in Iran as more than just a distant abstraction. Climbing prices at the gas pump are just the beginning.

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