Seven months, at least $38 billion, depleted American missile-defense inventories and one failed settlement later, Washington is preparing for the possibility of another major attack on Iran. The objective increasingly appears to be not a political settlement, but the periodic destruction of whatever Iran has managed to rebuild.
By Omar Afra
Photo by Mohammed Ibrahim
The United States could be bombing Iran at major scale again as soon as next week. NPR reported October 22 that American and Israeli officials are preparing plans for a possible attack in early November, after the November 3 U.S. midterm elections, with the United States moving forces into position to make such an operation possible. The preparations supposedly do not mean Donald Trump has made a final decision; the same military buildup could be ‘used to pressure Tehran’ into a settlement. But the White House’s assurance was strikingly specific: the United States would not attack Iran before the midterms. It did not say the war was over. It did not say Washington had rejected another offensive. It put a date on the calendar. (NPR)
That calendar is now synchronized with another one. The apartheid state of Israel votes Tuesday, October 27, and Benjamin Netanyahu spent the final days of his campaign promising that Iran remains unfinished business. On Sunday, Trump urged Israelis to reelect the chief architect of genocide Netanyahu because the two countries needed to “finish the job” they started when they attacked Iran in February. Netanyahu in turn said Trump was prepared to act again against Iran and has publicly instructed the Israeli military and Mossad to pursue the overthrow of the Iranian government. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has been substantially expanding the American military presence around the region. (Reuters)
That is the immediate news. The more important story is what the fuck America now believes a war is supposed to accomplish. Testset has written repeatedly about the politics of permanent emergency: the process by which exceptional powers, exceptional rhetoric and exceptional threats become ordinary instruments of government. What is happening in Iran looks increasingly like the foreign-policy equivalent. War is no longer necessarily a discrete event with an identifiable political end state. It is becoming an ambient condition that can be turned up, turned down and turned back up again.
There is no serious question about whether the United States can destroy Iranian military infrastructure. It can, spectacularly. After roughly 40 days of Operation Epic Fury, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared a “capital V military victory” and said Iran’s navy was at the bottom of the sea, its air force wiped out, its integrated air defenses destroyed and its missile program “functionally destroyed.” Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine said American forces had struck more than 13,000 targets, destroyed roughly 80 percent of Iran’s air defenses and sunk more than 90 percent of its regular naval fleet. These are not entirely insignificant achievements, and pretending otherwise would be stupid. Iran suffered catastrophic conventional military losses. (Department of War)
The problem is that none of those figures answers the strategic question. A military can destroy 13,000 targets and still fail to produce the political outcome for which the targets were supposedly destroyed. By May, classified U.S. intelligence assessments reported by The Washington Post estimated that Iran still possessed about 75 percent of its prewar mobile missile launchers and roughly 70 percent of its prewar missile stockpile. The assessment also found that Iran had reopened nearly all of its underground storage facilities, repaired damaged missiles and begun recovering its ability to assemble weapons. The administration said Iran’s missile capability had been essentially demolished; its own intelligence community was reporting that large portions of it remained usable or were already being dug back out. (Washington Post)
That discrepancy is not evidence that the bombing accomplished fuck-all. Iran’s conventional military was unquestionably degraded, production facilities were destroyed, its command structure was battered, and rebuilding costs time and money. The discrepancy shows something more important: Washington has begun using tactical destruction as the metric for strategic victory. Once those two concepts are collapsed into one another, a war never has to produce a settlement to be called successful. You blow up the missile factory, announce victory, watch another factory appear six months later, blow that one up and announce victory again.
There is already a name for this strategy. Israeli military thinkers call it “mowing the grass.” The term was not invented by Israel’s critics. Efraim Inbar and Eitan Shamir laid out the concept explicitly in a 2014 article in the Journal of Strategic Studies, describing Israel as confronting a “protracted intractable conflict” in which military force is not intended to achieve otherwise unattainable political goals. Instead, periodic military operations degrade an enemy’s capabilities, impose costs and create temporary periods of deterrence. The adversary eventually rebuilds, at which point the grass requires mowing again. (Journal of Strategic Studies)
There is an important distinction here. Inbar and Shamir were primarily describing Israeli cruel operations against armed non-state organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah, not a sovereign country of roughly 90 million people. Israel also confronts a radically different geography and security environment than the United States. But the operational logic is increasingly difficult to distinguish from Washington’s approach to Iran: not victory as a durable political condition, but repeated degradation of capabilities that everyone assumes will eventually return.
This is why Hegseth’s April victory speech deserves considerably more attention than it received. Hegseth did not merely say the campaign had gone well militarily; he said the United States and Israel had achieved “every single objective” of the operation and had rendered Iran combat-ineffective “for years to come.” Yet six months later, American and Israeli planners are preparing options for another substantial campaign, and Netanyahu is arguing that the previous war did not resolve the Iranian threat because the Iranian government itself must now be overthrown. A war that accomplished every objective in April apparently requires another offensive in November. That is not some semantic gotcha. It is the central strategic contradiction.
The Congressional Budget Office provides a useful way to strip the triumphalism out of this debate and simply look at the fucking ledger. CBO estimated that Pentagon operations against Iran had already cost approximately $38 billion by August 1. At the lower operational tempo seen in May and June, CBO estimates that continuation costs about $2 billion every month; at something closer to July’s fighting, about $3 billion a month, with higher costs possible during another major escalation. The administration separately requested $87.6 billion in supplemental appropriations, including $67.1 billion for the Defense Department. (CBO)
The economic damage runs well beyond the Pentagon. Reduced oil and gas shipments through the Strait of Hormuz and disruptions elsewhere in the region pushed up global energy costs. CBO estimates the conflict will leave inflation measurably higher than it otherwise would have been. The war is therefore not some distant exercise in blowing up Iranian bunkers. Its costs have been quietly incorporated into gasoline, freight, food, consumer goods and interest rates paid by Americans thousands of miles from Tehran.
Then there is the ammunition problem. CBO identified expenditure of missile-defense interceptors as the war’s principal military opportunity cost and warned that inventories will remain reduced for several years. It specifically noted that a shortage could become especially dangerous in a conflict with China, where American forces would face enormous inventories of ballistic and cruise missiles around Taiwan. This is the strategic balance sheet Washington rarely places beside the target count: the United States is consuming weapons relevant to one potential great-power confrontation in order to repeatedly suppress military capabilities in another conflict it has not figured out how to terminate.
Supporters of the war can point to a substantial ledger on their side. Iran entered 2026 weakened by regional setbacks, internal economic pressure and years of Israeli attacks on its allies. Its surface navy, air-defense network and parts of its military-industrial base have taken losses that cannot simply be wished away because one opposes the war. But that is precisely where the strategic argument should begin rather than end. If the objective was to sink the Iranian navy, the United States succeeded. If the objective was to destroy particular installations, it succeeded thousands of times over. If the objectives were preventing Iranian missile regeneration, eliminating Iran’s capacity to threaten Hormuz, securing a durable nuclear settlement, changing Tehran’s regional behavior or producing regime collapse, the record is considerably murkier.
Whether Iran is now “stronger” overall is therefore debatable and depends almost entirely on what is being measured. Its conventional armed forces are weaker. Its economy has been badly damaged. Yet the Islamic Republic preserved institutional cohesion, continued launching missiles and drones, retained leverage over Hormuz and demonstrated an ability to regenerate military capacity more quickly than Washington’s public victory rhetoric suggested. That is not an Iranian victory parade. It is evidence that destructive superiority and strategic success are not the same fucking thing.
The distinction matters because this war has already become part of the domestic political machinery. Testset documented how the opening of the Iran conflict produced a sharp surge in anti-Muslim propaganda and Islamophobic content, including more than 25,000 anti-Muslim posts identified by researchers in the days after the war began. We also watched American politicians circulate synthetic military propaganda from the Iran conflict, including a fake image of a supposedly rescued American airman that Ken Paxton and Greg Abbott shared as though it were documentary evidence. Permanent war does not remain neatly overseas. It generates enemies, symbols, propaganda and political permission structures at home.
At the same time Washington has failed to establish a durable political endpoint to the war, Congress has been considering a much deeper institutional relationship between the American and Israeli military systems. This has often been described online as Congress voting to “merge” the two militaries, which is inaccurate. There is no unified command structure, Israeli officers are not acquiring authority over American troops, and American units are not being absorbed into the IDF. But dismissing the whole matter because the word merger is wrong misses what Congress actually proposed.
Section 219 of the House-passed FY2027 National Defense Authorization Act directs the Pentagon to appoint an executive agent responsible for synchronizing U.S.-Israeli defense cooperation. The legislation creates pathways for jointly developed or Israeli-origin technology to enter American military programs, establishes mechanisms for joint ventures, licensing and U.S.-based co-production with Israeli industry, and directs cooperation across missile defense, counter-drone systems, artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons, quantum technology, cyberwarfare, electronic warfare, directed energy, subterranean warfare, network integration, data fusion and contested logistics. It also calls for joint training and information-sharing mechanisms designed to improve the ability to deploy jointly developed systems. (Congressional Record)
Nor is that proposal disappearing into the usual congressional swamp. On October 13, Rep. Don Bacon introduced a standalone United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Act that again instructs the Pentagon to create an executive agent to synchronize bilateral research, testing, procurement and industrial cooperation. The bill explicitly contemplates Israeli-origin technology entering U.S. systems, joint manufacturing arrangements and department-wide coordination with Israeli counterparts. (H.R. 10796)
This is where the idea of “synthesis” becomes more useful than the overheated claim of a literal merger. The two states are not becoming one military. Their defense-industrial systems, research programs, missile-defense technologies, operational experience and assumptions about common adversaries are becoming more deeply interconnected. Testset has already examined the political convergence between unconditional support for Israeli state power and the treatment of Muslim political dissent as a security problem. What Congress is now contemplating adds a material layer beneath that political alignment: manufacturing, procurement, research, data, technology and battlefield systems increasingly designed to operate together.
None of this proves that American officials consciously sat around a table and decided to adopt permanent war as national policy. Governments rarely announce structural changes that neatly. Institutions create their own momentum: procurement systems are built, factories are financed, commands develop operating procedures, weapons are co-developed, exercises are conducted, intelligence networks are connected and the political cost of another round of fighting declines. The striking thing is that Washington is formalizing deeper integration with the Israeli defense ecosystem at precisely the moment that its own approach to Iran increasingly resembles the Israeli doctrine of periodic military degradation.
There is a political feedback loop here as well. Israeli security doctrine developed under the assumption that certain threats could not be eliminated and therefore had to be periodically suppressed. If Washington imports not merely Israeli technology but the strategic assumptions built around its use, the United States risks importing a fundamentally different conception of war itself. The purpose shifts from producing an endpoint to maintaining military advantage inside a conflict presumed to be permanent.
Congress’s inability to impose a clear end state makes that convergence harder to dismiss. Members have repeatedly invoked the War Powers Resolution in attempts to constrain or terminate American participation while the executive branch has continued prosecuting the conflict. A government can debate whether a war should legally continue at the same time its military bureaucracy plans the next phase. That is almost a textbook example of the distinction between democratic authorization and institutional momentum.
The public appears to understand the permanence of the arrangement better than Washington does. Pew’s October polling found that 65 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the Iran conflict, just 33 percent approve, and only 16 percent say they are very or extremely confident that the administration will achieve its goals. Even more revealingly, 77 percent believe American military action will continue for at least another six months, including 47 percent who expect it to last more than another year. (Pew Research Center)
The administration can reasonably argue that military planning is not the same thing as deciding to attack. The current November options could be intended to strengthen Washington’s bargaining position, and diplomatic channels have not entirely disappeared. That possibility should not be waved away. But coercive diplomacy requires a diplomatic endpoint, and the administration has never reconciled the contradictory objectives now circulating around the war: Hegseth says the original military objectives were achieved; Netanyahu says Iran’s government itself must fall; Trump says the two countries must “finish the job”; U.S. intelligence says major Iranian capabilities survived; and Pentagon planners are preparing to attack many of the same categories of targets they supposedly eliminated in the spring.
That is the trick fuck at the center of the entire enterprise. Once success is defined as the amount of infrastructure destroyed rather than the political condition produced by destroying it, there is no obvious criterion for failure and no obvious criterion for peace. Every new Iranian missile becomes proof that the last bombing campaign must be repeated rather than evidence that bombing alone did not resolve the underlying conflict.
This is what “mowing the grass” means when stripped of the euphemism. It is not necessarily endless combat every day; it is a permanent state of war, punctuated by periods of lower violence during which both sides reload, rebuild and prepare the targeting folders for the next round. Israel developed that doctrine because its strategists concluded that some conflicts could be managed but not solved. The United States appears increasingly willing to apply the same premise to Iran, only with American carriers, American interceptors, American deficits and American constitutional authority tethered to it.
The danger is not confined to Iran. Once permanent emergency becomes an accepted mode of governance abroad, it becomes easier to reproduce at home. Testset’s Texas Islamophobia / Sharia Panic dossier has documented the domestic version of the same political mechanism: threats are presented as existential, exceptional measures become ordinary, minorities and dissenters become security categories, and the absence of resolution becomes justification for preserving the machinery. Different arena, different scale, same institutional temptation. An emergency that ends eventually has to surrender its powers. A permanent emergency gets to keep them.
A superpower can choose that strategy, but it should at least have the balls to call it what it is. If Washington’s actual policy is that Iran will retain some irreducible military capacity, that diplomacy cannot permanently constrain it, that regime change cannot reliably be produced without an occupation nobody wants, and that the United States and Israel will therefore bomb the country every time its capabilities cross some undefined threshold, then the Iran war has no victory condition in the conventional meaning of the word. It has a maintenance schedule.
That may be the most consequential change of all. America once justified wars, however dishonestly or disastrously, by describing the political world that would supposedly exist when they were finished. In Iran, Washington is drifting toward something colder and considerably more dangerous: a doctrine in which finishing is no longer part of the plan. The grass grows, we mow it, somebody tallies the targets, Pete Hegseth announces another capital-V victory, and the Pentagon starts building the target list for next time. At that point war has ceased to be an instrument of strategy. War has become the strategy.
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