Barney Frank, the former Massachusetts Congressman once remarked that he could not recall a terrorist ever being killed by a submarine.
What he was talking about is you have to use the right weapon for a particular enemy, and more generally, you have to fight a war with the right weapons.
There is that indelible scene in David Lean's movie, "Lawrence of Arabia" where an Arab king on horseback pursues a Turkish airplane strafing his village frantically waving his sword at the plane as it disappears off into the sky.
During the war in Vietnam, American military officials repeated the reassuring phrase, "We are bombing them back to the Stone Age," as the Viet Cong sheltered safely in their tunnels only to emerge during the Tet Offensive of 1968 to over run American and South Vietnamese positions.
In our current war on Iran, Secretary of Excursion, Pete Hegseth takes the podium to assure his bros in the sports bars that we are bombing them back to the Stone Age, hitting them while they're down, eviscerating the Iranian Air Force and Navy, which means, of course, we must be winning.
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Of course, no mention is made of the Iranian's successful attack which set afire the Gerald Ford aircraft carrier, using a $20,000 drone to defeat a $3 billion aircraft carrier. The Ford has fled the field of battle as has the rest of the US Navy, effectively. We have only a show Navy there now. They are too vulnerable to cheapie drones and missiles to risk. Fourth rate powers like Iran and Yemen can take them out with dime store weapons.
Robert MacNamara, a hawk on Vietnam, lost faith in the ability of the United States to win that war no matter how many battles it won because he calculated it cost $20,000 to kill a single Viet Cong.
By that sort of analysis, we have already lost the war with Iran, which uses drones and missiles which cost tens of thousands of dollars while the U.S. and Israel spend missiles costing millions to bring down each of those Iranian weapons.
It is also likely that the Iranians can replace these cheap missiles more rapidly than the Americans can replace their million dollar Patriots.
Beyond all that, the real end point is who controls the straight of Hormuz, which clearly the United States cannot do, and has, tacitly, admitted it has no chance of doing. The Straight is lined with mountainous caves from which missiles cannot be dislodged, and, in any event, the Iranians can close the Straight without missiles, using fast boats armed with drones or simply mines. So Trump has shrugged his shoulders and said, "We don't need the Straight of Hormuz. Let NATO worry about Hormuz."
Which is to say, we cannot beat Iran. Iran will still be there no matter how many Iranians we kill or how many power plants we bomb and we, eventually, have to go back to from where we came.
But, we beat them! USA! USA!
Sieg Heil!
And once again, America has won a non touch war, fought on the other side of an ocean costing only money and few expendable middle class lives of hero servicemen and women who we solemnly welcome back in their coffins to Andrews Air Force Base, having made the ultimate sacrifice for a President who thinks them fools and losers.
The average MAGA mob guy will grumble about paying more for gas at the pump, but he knows that won't last long, as his President has reminded him: A short war we can declare we won is not really a war, but only an excursion and we won it, and moved on.
MAGA. MAGA.
And who was that fellow Jeffrey Epstein anyway? So last week's news.
