Please no. It’s hard enough to keep a straight face as it is.
12.03.2026 11:43
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Please no. It’s hard enough to keep a straight face as it is.
Whether a woman is a honeypot or a just a honey you can’t have is solely predicated on whether you still feel like an “expert” in national security by the time she’s done with you. 💅🏻
As the chair of the International Committee of Blonde Baddies, let me be the first to say:
Take the money. Take the money and run.
It was lost lost before it began. When you shoot without aim, you can blow an adversary into the Stone Age and win nothing but intractable geopolitical insolvency.
Man, we're gonna *lose* lose this war, aren't we?
My opening assumption was a strategic defeat but tactical stalemate that Donald would spin into a win in domestic politics because we killed a lot more of them than they did of us, but this is gonna be like if Vietnam and the oil crisis had a baby.
Has it now? They don’t have to attack at all though, really. They just have to create the conditions for a high cost, intolerable strategic failure. And they’ve got us there.
I mean, when the strategic errors are this spectacular does it even matter who does them? 🤡
First rule of fight club is “if your entry into conflict is predicated on a strategic blunder or deficit and you do not account for the asymmetric posture of your adversary you will eventually degrade your own capability…and that may be the entire playbook of said adversary”. - Palahniuk, probably
First rule of fight club is “if your entry into conflict is predicated on a strategic blunder or deficit and you do not account for the asymmetric posture of your adversary you will eventually degrade your own capability…and that may be the entire playbook of said adversary”. - Palahniuk, probably
Preferences? Perhaps. Behavior? Unlikely.
That’s the real pain point right there. Having to watch it all go down again like we didn’t already start paying the piper at a premium, with interest.
I had a very bracing convo with bae on Book 9 last night. I’m not sure I have the emotional bandwidth but I’m gonna do it anyway. The most dangerous knowledge is an incomplete one.
A no-shit, real capability problem in how we professionally war lay in the myth that operators don’t need to understand how tactics translate cross-domain to outcomes. “How does this lesson learned from a CASEVAC translate to me doing a deterrence?” is a whole era of high-capability fuckup.
girl are you the Straight of Hormuz because I see a lot of men greatly overestimating their chances of getting their ship into your channel
I mean…
Anyway, it’s a decent read to confirm current reality. Iran doesn’t need, nor planned, our defeat. It only aims to deny clean victories, impose high regional costs, and survive to see the collapse of our political patience.
That’s the entire asymmetric playbook. Now we watch them run their game.
So. It wasn’t immediately prescient. But it IS diagnostic.
Baer and his ilk warned ages ago that Iran as a caricature was a strategic blunder, because Iran itself is a clever strategic actor with agency.
That was an uncomfortable but necessary correction then and hindsight on a major cockup now.
He also drifts from realism to fatalism, occasionally implying Iran’s real leverage means inevitable accommodation, but reality is a bitch.
Baer underweights Iranian infrastructure vulnerabilities to sustained ISR dominance. Butttt…proxy networks are resilient.
Baer overshot by describing Iran as an emerging superpower. That was IC theatrics. He nails the underestimation of a formidable regional power with asymmetric reach, but is doing too much in predicting a peer competitor to global powers.
He was also right about something Washington hates admitting:
That military superiority ≠ strategic closure.
You can destroy assets, degrade capability & infrastructure, and still inherit a geopolitical shitshow that’s far harder to control than the regime you just punished.
Where Baer was VERY right?
Iran’s real power is in political warfare; posture built on militias, dispersed proxies, hybrid conflict, and distributed deterrence. Iran never aimed for battlefield supremacy.
It aims for regional instability at tolerable cost, knowing the US view as intolerable.
He warned Washington repeatedly misreads adversaries through ideology. American discourse: “mad mullahs.”
Reality? A strategically postured state with deep historical memory, disciplined intelligence services, enduring proxies, and leadership comfy with the very long game on dispersed fronts.
Baer also argued the US supercharged Iran’s influence with strategic error in Iraq, removing Tehran’s biggest regional counterweight. Iran gained opaque Iraqi influence, decentralized proxies, Gulf reach, and ideological legitimacy through anti-US posture
An all-you-can-resist geopolitical buffet.
Baer argued that Iranian strength was always in an asymmetric strategy, not conventional military dominance.
Proxies
Regional political penetration
Militias
Energy chokepoints
Long timelines
All predicated on anticipating US incursion, and making victory both expensive AND highly ambiguous.
BLUF: Baer argued the U.S. fundamentally misunderstood Iran not a rogue irrational state, but a strategic, patient regional power playing a long game. Iran behaves rationally, not predictably to Washington.
Ideology, proxies, economic leverage *exist* to impose costs on stronger adversaries. 👀
Decided to revisit this little gem from 2008 the last two nights because I recall thinking there were some subtle strategic insights likely applicable to our current pickle. Turns out I was quite correct. I’ll give you the highlights and what Baer got wrong
That’s exactly what they expect. After the administration hand selects the new Iranian sovereign, of course. Which is all stupidity mind-boggling in its scope, really.
There’s chaos - and then there’s Clausewitz.
