Trump bombs Iran, what could possibly go wrong?

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Joohn Choe

"The Wall Street Journal reported today, Friday March 13th, that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has approved a CENTCOM request to deploy an Amphibious Ready Group and attached Marine Expeditionary Unit to the Middle East, centered on the USS Tripoli and the 31st MEU, currently being redirected from Japan. The force package includes up to 5,000 sailors and Marines across three ships, the Tripoli, the USS New Orleans, and the USS San Diego, carrying F-35B stealth fighters, helicopters, and a battalion landing team built for sea, air, and land assault.
This is happening on Day 14 of Operation Epic Fury, in which CENTCOM says it has struck roughly 6,000 targets inside Iran, sunk over 60 Iranian vessels, and destroyed more than 30 minelayers. It is happening the same day the Pentagon confirmed all six crew members dead from a KC-135 tanker crash in western Iraq, bringing total American deaths to 13. It is happening while Iran's new supreme leader has declared the Strait of Hormuz should remain closed as a pressure tool and at least 16 merchant vessels have been attacked since the war began, killing eight civilian seafarers.
The additional forces being sent need to be put in perspective; it is very easy to simply blast a headline that says "FIVE THOUSAND MARINES HEADED TO IRAN!" and that's going to probably get some clicks, but not shed a whole lot of light. In an environment where, again, the government is lying, that's a really bad idea.
Per detailed reporting from The Navy Times:
"The supplemental forces would include up to 5,000 personnel and several warships, including the USS Tripoli, which is on its way to the Middle East from its homeport in Sasebo, Japan, the report said.
The Tripoli Amphibious Ready Group includes the America-class amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli, the San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock ships USS New Orleans and USS San Diego and the embarked 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit.
The 31st MEU, meanwhile, includes a ground combat element, which features a battalion landing team — an infantry battalion and combat support elements — of around 1,100 Marines and sailors."
An Amphibious Ready Group appears to consist of about 2,200 Marines in "the smallest configuration of a Marine Air-Ground Task Force" per the Marine Corps; let's call it somewhere in the range of 2,200 actual Marines.
Let's keep it honest: let me explain the "this isn't escalation" argument, because it deserves a serious hearing before I explain in a measured way why I think it fails.
Iran is a country of roughly 90 million people. Its armed forces include approximately 610,000 active duty personnel, with 350,000 in the regular army, 190,000 in the IRGC, and an additional 350,000 reservists plus the Basij paramilitary volunteer force numbering over a million. The terrain is mountainous, vast, and historically hostile to invaders.
"Five thousand Marines", much less 2,200 of them, do not invade Iran. They do not occupy Iran. They do not even establish a beachhead against a defended coastline held by a country with this force structure.
The 31st MEU is a crisis response unit, not a spearhead for regime change. The honest version of this argument is that their deployment creates a flexible tool for securing shipping lanes, conducting limited raids, protecting regional bases, and deterring further Iranian attacks on Gulf infrastructure.
An ARG in the Persian Gulf gives CENTCOM options that aircraft carriers alone do not provide, particularly the ability to put boots on oil platforms, contested islands, or evacuation zones quickly. Kharg Island, for instance, which has been left relatively untouched up to this point, is a conceivable (if ill-advised) potential target.
That is the strongest case. Here is why it doesn't hold.
The problem is not so much what 2,200 Marines can do in a single operation as it is the pattern of commitment. We are, candidly speaking, half-assedly escalating a war against the most dangerous enemy our nation has faced in war in some time, and that is very, very dangerous in a different way than whole-assedly avoiding or committing to the conflict would be.
The first six days of Epic Fury cost an estimated $11.3 billion according to figures Pentagon officials provided to senators in a classified briefing this week. Amphibious ship readiness is at 53% - per Vice Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jim Kilby’s testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee this week, well below the Navy’s own 80% readiness goal - meaning the Pentagon is pulling a forward-deployed Pacific asset to backfill a Middle East campaign at a moment when the fleet is already strained.
The air campaign was supposed to be sufficient. Two weeks ago the premise was that precision strikes would decapitate the regime and produce capitulation, but here we are now, two weeks later, Khamenei is dead and the regime is still fighting, still mining the strait, still launching missiles into nine countries. The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) reports today that IDF forces are hitting Iranian law enforcement authorities now, presumably to help an Iranian popular uprising that there is still - on day 14 - no sign of.
So now we are adding a ground component, not because Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump in their infinite wisdom planned it this way, but because the original theory of victory failed and the political pressure for escalation is building from a president who now says he'll know when it's over when he "feels it in his bones."
This is what military historians call piecemeal commitment, the incremental feeding of forces into a conflict without a unified operational concept, and it is one of the most reliable indicators that a war is being run by political intuition rather than strategic planning. This is how Vietnam happened; this is how U.S. entanglement in Somalia happened; it is about to happen now with a country that is substantially larger, more advanced and more dangerous than either.
And now, as with every other time this has happened, it is a recipe for failure, because you do not win wars by gradually discovering you need more than you sent.
Worse, there is a credible assessment that Iran's "Operation Madman" strategy - indeed, the doctrine of its leading military theorists - assumes for a protracted war that pits Iran's willingness to defy non-proliferation and demilitarization demands against the American Executive Branch's ability to sustain an unpopular war on a 60-day War Powers Act clock.
As a senior adviser to Iran’s speaker of the parliament said on social media, per The New York Times:
"We know America is extremely worried about a regional war, its economy will be impacted, its allies will be hurt… Our plan is to expand the war’s reach and expand the time. It’s the biggest blow we can deliver to Trump and we have no other choice."
There appears to be no coherent counter-strategy to Iran's massive retaliate-and-endure plan, and it is an entirely valid question whether the Commander-in-Chief at this moment is even aware of it.
The 31st MEU is, to be completely fair, not 2003's Third Infantry Division rolling to Baghdad. But the road to Baghdad did not begin with the Third Infantry Division either. It began with no-fly zones, then sanctions, then inspectors, then a carrier buildup, then a congressional vote that many members later said they cast because the buildup itself had made war feel inevitable.
The question Americans should be asking is not whether 2,200 or so Marines can invade a country of 90 million. That is not a realistic question.
The question is what comes after the Marines, when the Strait is still closed, 13 Americans are dead, the War Powers Act 60-day clock is still ticking and the president is conducting a war based on vibes.
The longer the Hormuz stays closed and casualties mount, the more political pressure builds, and the more plausible the national-security pretext becomes for actions under emergency-powers laws like EO 13848 and IEEPA against domestic targets - this is an international economic emergency, literally what the IEEPA was intended to address, just not by an adversarial Executive Branch who had already been handed a stinging defeat on the usage of IEEPA to ‘end-run’ a global tariffs regime around Congress.
This the framing that I'm converging on with other writers. As Marc Elias puts it:
"To understand American politics in 2026, it is important to remember that most events are explainable, at least in part, by Donald Trump’s insatiable appetite for power — and that the greatest threat to that power lies in the midterm elections. Other issues like tariffs and immigration may motivate some of his actions, but election denialism and its twin manifestations — voter suppression and election subversion — are always at the heart of his decision-making.
Once you start looking for the signs, it is something you cannot easily unsee or ignore. For example, shortly after launching a military assault on Iran, Donald Trump posted on social media that “Iran tried to interfere in the 2020 and 2024 elections to stop Trump and now faces renewed war with the United States.”
False claims that foreign government interference caused him to lose in 2020 have been a staple of the diet of lies Trump feeds to his faithful. The countries may change — Venezuela, China, Italy, Cuba, Iran — but the purpose of the lies remains the same."
As Timothy Snyder puts it:
"A purpose of the war on Iran might well be to provoke a terrorist attack inside the United States. This would provide Donald Trump with a pretext to try to cancel or “federalize” the coming Congressional elections.
Self-terrorism might not have been the initial aim; but as time goes by, and failures and atrocities mount, its appeal will grow. Trump could think that he has much to gain; the war itself makes terrorism more likely; there are plausible vectors of terror; and the United States has let down its defenses.
Trump has already telegraphed the move. We know that he is obsessed with the fall elections, which his party will almost certainly lose by spectacular margins, and that he fears the accordant loss of power. This is clear from his own statements and actions. In a social post right after starting the war, he claimed (wrongly) that Iran had tried to hurt his cause in past elections.
We lack any other explanation for the war, at least from the American side. Trump is incoherent, and his administration is inconsistent. Much of what has been said about Iran is not true. The propaganda is contradictory. It is as though the war itself is not the main goal, but that it was simply important to somehow get the thing started."
The core thesis that ties together what I've been talking about since early February, resulting in a quote in the Guardian alongside one of the architects of American election interference emergency law, is not so much specifically about any one mechanism like EO 13848 or the IEEPA at this point as it is, simply, this:
As the plausibility for an out-of-normal-bounds national emergency grows, so too does the political feasibility of the abuse of expansive emergency powers which could be used to disrupt the election.
The question is not legal probity; nothing that we're talking about is meant to stand up in court as much as it's intended to preemptively attack infrastructure.
As Stacey Abrams put it:
"This is a Republican regime. I don’t think they’ll suspend elections—Venezuela has elections, Russia has elections. The issue is whether decisions are made before people vote.
You don’t have to suspend elections to undermine them. All you have to do is break the infrastructure."
And out of all the things that the government is not telling you about the war, that, right there, is probably the most important out of all of them."
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Cheerleader Hannity thinks Trump ought to 'finish the job' by putting boots on the ground in a country of 90 million pissed off Iranians. Ya, pour thousands of our troops into the streets of Iran, I'd suggest that qualifies as a suicide mission.
https://www.mediamatters.org/us-iran-re ... ots-ground

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Trump outdoes himself, and that's not easy
"When oil prices go up we make a lot of money"
https://crooksandliars.com/2026/03/trum ... oil-prices

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Are we being asked to believe that Hegseth is sober?

""The only thing prohibiting transit in the Straits right now is Iran shooting at shipping. It is open for transit should Iran not do that."
-- Whiskey Pete, Secretary of WAWR! Verbatim.

[mister_coffee]

Just saying, but a lot of EV manufacturers are offering very generous discounts (often up to $10,000) on new EVs right now. Don't know how long that will last but this is probably a very good time to buy an EV.

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But there's no money for health care.

[mister_coffee]

I'm also reading that the only country currently able to export oil from the Gulf region is Iran. Oh, the irony!

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Crimes against humanity continue
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/1 ... lestinians

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'27 is optimistic based on if/when this gets turned around within CENTCOM's 100 day window.

Bruce Fanger:
"When a Missile Hits a School
White Rose
March 12, 2026
When the girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran collapsed under a missile strike, the first explanation from Washington arrived quickly. President Donald Trump told reporters that “early indications suggest this was likely an Iranian munition that malfunctioned and fell on their own facility.” The implication was unmistakable. The deaths of the children were attributed to Iranian incompetence rather than to the forces conducting the strike campaign.
That explanation unraveled almost immediately.
Video from the blast site began circulating within hours. Weapons analysts examined the impact pattern and debris field. Open-source investigators compared the incoming missile captured in the footage with known weapons profiles. Their conclusion was consistent across multiple analyses. The strike matched the profile of a Tomahawk cruise missile.
The identification matters for a simple reason. Tomahawks are American weapons systems. Israel does not operate them. Iran does not accidentally fire them at its own schools.
The initial narrative therefore collapsed as soon as serious examination began.
A second explanation quickly appeared. Officials and unnamed sources began suggesting that the strike resulted from “outdated intelligence.” According to this account, the targeting database still listed the building as part of a military compound and the coordinates used for the strike had not been updated.
The phrase sounds technical. It also raises a deeper problem.
Modern U.S. military operations rely on one of the most elaborate surveillance and targeting architectures ever assembled. Satellite reconnaissance monitors urban areas continuously. Drone platforms provide real-time visual confirmation. Pattern-of-life analysis examines daily movement around suspected targets. Strike approval normally passes through multiple levels of command review before a weapon is launched.
These systems exist because modern warfare claims precision.
Precision weapons. Precision targeting. Precision strikes.
Opening strike packages are normally assembled months in advance and reviewed repeatedly because the first phase of a campaign is designed to hit known military infrastructure with high confidence. Those capabilities create a simple expectation. Protected civilian sites such as schools and hospitals should be among the easiest structures on earth to identify and avoid.
The explanation that the building was struck because of “outdated intelligence” therefore strains credibility, particularly in the opening phase of a war when target lists have already undergone extensive review. A structure functioning as a school generates unmistakable daily activity. Children arrive each morning. Teachers move through the building. Neighborhood traffic reflects the rhythm of civilian life.
Even publicly available satellite imagery makes such locations easy to identify. Anyone with a laptop can open Google Maps and locate schools in cities around the world within seconds.
The United States military operates surveillance systems far more sophisticated than those available to the public.
That reality leads to an uncomfortable conclusion. The location of the building itself was almost certainly known.
The question therefore shifts. The issue is no longer how investigators later discovered that the building was a school. The issue is how a known structure entered the strike sequence that destroyed it.
The school stood near an Iranian military facility reportedly targeted in the opening wave of attacks. That proximity raises difficult questions about how the strike envelope was defined and how targets were authorized. The answers to those questions have not yet been offered.
More than a hundred children died beneath the rubble of that school.
The first explanation given to the public blamed the victims’ own government.
Evidence emerging afterward now points toward a very different reality.
War has always produced tragedies. Civilian casualties have accompanied every conflict in human history. The promise of modern precision warfare rests on the claim that technology can reduce those tragedies through accurate identification and careful targeting.
That promise carries a responsibility.
When a missile destroys a school, the explanation cannot end with a single bureaucratic phrase. The public deserves a clear accounting of how a building visible from space and identifiable even through public satellite imagery became part of a strike sequence.
A missile destroyed a school in Minab.
The deeper question concerns how a system designed to see nearly everything on the modern battlefield managed to overlook the most obvious fact of all.
The building was a school."

[mister_coffee]

Apparently datacenters in the Gulf were already targeted and hit. Which apparently is messing up local government operations in the area. Kind of a perfect target choice if you think about it. Difficult to effectively defend, you aren't likely to risk a lot of civilian casualties, and has an obnoxious impact.

I'm reading that the mines the Iranians are supposedly deploying are Russian surplus that Russia sells for about $500. So there probably are a lot of them. Meanwhile, the only US minesweepers left in the world are in Japan and will take quite a bit of time to get there. I think we have four left. And oh, we scrapped the five that were deployed in Bahrain in late 2025. Ooops.

It seems reasonable to assume that Iran has deployed hundreds of those mines. Maybe even thousands of them. And there is no way we can escort convoys through the Strait while it is mined. So the oil will not flow for quite some time. Right now IEA is predicting that oil and gas prices will remain elevated through at least mid-2027.

It is obvious that this will crush our economy like a bug.

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Lest we forget

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Article on the threats
https://www.euronews.com/next/2026/03/1 ... s-in-middl

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Iran issues threats against Google, Microsoft, Palantir, Nvidia...
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/18S5RZ9Tj3/

[mister_coffee]

Also, a KC-135 just "went down" (e.g. crashed) in Iraq. The KC-135 is a US aerial tanker aircraft derived from the old Boeing 707.

[mister_coffee]

The International Energy Agency is now describing our current mess as "the largest oil supply chain disruption in history."

Some people voted for this for some reason. I will point and laugh at all of the Trump voters in F150s and RAM 3000s while I drive by in an electric car. But I still do not own a blue Tesla. Or any other kind of Tesla.

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Trump's response to higher prices of oil and gas at the pump.

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I suspect that the FBI warning to Calif that was unsubstantiated, of a drone attack was more likely a distraction. The threat alone is a good psyop move. With all the Chinese and Iranian hackers out there, not to mention the Russians (all of whom are allies) it's a no brainer that there will be some cyber attacks and if they follow the premise of asymmetrical tactics they will be grid, communication, economic disruption rather than any killing. There's also the same vulnerability of ME countries that would demonstrate that the US cannot protect its allies.

[mister_coffee]

My question is how "many sleeper cells and what will they target?"

One is to hit highly visible "spectacular" targets that are mainly political in nature. So the White House &c. I'd suspect that using a nerve agent delivered by drone against the Capitol or White House would have a pretty huge impact. I'd also bet that a decapitation attack against the chain of command and civilian succession would be very effective and feasible.

The other is to go after critical infrastructure that is more obscure but is very hard to defend. I'm thinking of critical parts of the power grid and oil and natural gas pipeline networks, as well as telecommunications systems. You can figure out the critical parts of those systems that are hard to replace quickly and are undefended from OSI.

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Iranian military leadership has been planning for this event for a very long time. They know the power of an asymmetrical war and are prepared to implement it.
Good insights.
https://thesoufancenter.org/intelbrief-2026-march-9a/

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In depth
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/iran-war ... cebook.com

[PAL]

It's an "excursion", as Trump himself said. Not a war.

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Hegseth is living pretty high on the taxpayers' dole.
https://www.mediaite.com/politics/pete- ... yuwicnby5n

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From NYT:
"<Updated
March 10, 2026, 6:41 p.m. ET6 minutes ago
Iran Live Updates: Trump Officials Offer Conflicting Messaging on War
Lebanese leaders and aid groups warned of a growing humanitarian crisis as Israel targeted Hezbollah. The Pentagon said 140 American service members had been wounded, eight severely, in the war.
Here’s the latest.
Trump administration officials sent mixed messages on Tuesday about the goals, timeline and tactics of the war against Iran, the latest in a string of muddled statements throughout the fighting, which has so far killed more than 1,800 people and disrupted global energy markets.
The confusion was typified by Chris Wright, the U.S. energy secretary, saying on social media that a Navy warship had “successfully escorted” an oil tanker through the Strait of Hormuz, where the war has slowed ship traffic. Shortly afterward, a military official said that had not happened, and the social media post was deleted.
The day before, President Trump threatened to strike Iran “TWENTY TIMES HARDER” if it moved to stop the flow of oil through the strait, even though Tehran had already begun doing so days earlier.
And in a news briefing at the White House, the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said that President Trump, and not the leaders of Iran, would be the one to declare that Iran had unconditionally surrendered — one of the conditions he has laid out for ending the war.
“When President Trump says that Iran is in a place of unconditional surrender, he’s not claiming the Iranian regime is going to come out and say that themselves,” she said.
Early in the day. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters that Tuesday would be marked by a significant increase in American and Israeli strikes on Iran. As midnight passed in the Middle East that had not appeared to take shape, though Israel did begin a wave of attacks early Wednesday local time.
As Washington again struggled to come up with a consistent narrative for the war, a humanitarian crisis loomed in Lebanon, where nearly 700,000 people have been driven from their homes, the United Nations said Tuesday. Israel’s mass evacuation orders and bombing campaign have transformed the country into a major new front in the expanding Middle East war. Airstrikes there continued on Tuesday.
In Beirut and its densely packed surrounding area, tens of thousands of people fleeing Israel’s attacks on the Iranian-backed armed group Hezbollah were living in schools and government buildings. Others slept in cars and on sidewalks along the city’s seaside promenade.
More than 667,000 people have registered on the Lebanese government’s online displacement platform, the U.N. migration agency said on Tuesday, citing government figures. That included more than 100,000 in the past 24 hours, it said.... >>