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I despise Pete Hegseth, but I don't see much reason to blame him for the conduct of the war. The military performed very well from what I can tell, it's just probably not possible for the current US military to open the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping without either a ground invasion or a several months' long air campaign, no matter how brilliant the leadership is. Based on how Hegseth acts, I suspect that he would have been all for a ground invasion.
I should probably also say that I don't give Hegseth any credit for the conduct of the war, either. You could have put a 10 year old in his position at the start of the war, and the war would probably have proceeded pretty much the same as it did.
In certain cases, you can just bomb and assassinate the enemy into submission pretty quickly and win that way. Iran happens to not be one of those cases because its political structure turns out to be more resilient and stable than many people thought and it has the Strait of Hormuz card. Of course, the latter should have been obvious to every US leader at the start of the war.
I feel like not enough people are talking about how Trump screwed over anti-regime Iranians who live in Iran. They got bombed, there has been no regime change, and now the regime is probably going to be even more wary of dissent than it was before the war.
A smarter man would have done more to talk Trump out of it, or at least help identify strategic objectives and have an exit plan for what to do if those objectives weren't realized within a certain timeframe. I get the impression that Hegseth pretty much discounted the possibility that anything but bunnies hopping through the woods would come out of this, and that if he'd given stronger pushback from the outset, then we might not be in this mess. He's clearly the least qualified person in a major cabinet position and the only thing he has to offer is the role of sycophantic yes-man who's the only one in the room to tell the president his instincts are correct. Because let's fact it, if Trump wanted a qualified candidate who would tell it like it is, those guys aren't in short supply, especially when you consider the qualifications of the guy he actually picked. Unfortunately, unflappable loyalty doesn't keep you from being the scapegoat, especially when it's the only quality you have to offer, extra especially when the president trusted your word over all others. I agree that the problem wasn't with any of Hesgeth's individual tactical decisions. The problem was with his strategic decisions, of which there were none. Not once in this entire conflict did we get a clear picture of what the administration's goals were. If the administration doesn't know what its strategic goals are, then the whole enterprise is doomed. I hate to quote Sun-Tsu, since it's the realm of cringeworthy corporate assholes, but tactics without strategy is the fastest route to defeat.
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There are limited insights into how the US military performed because they're being unusually taciturn, but at the very least you can identify that a point of criticism is that they were not adequately prepared for Iranian counterstrikes.
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