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The whole running out of ammunition thing is being treated like a problem that can be managed, rather than the complete fuck up that it is. Even when they arrest or kill a mass shooter, police find their houses or cars stuffed with thousands of rounds of ammunition, the great fear being, of course, I can’t run out of ammo.
That fear, apparently, did not exist in the Pentagon run by Secretary Shake-Me-Up-Another-Chocolate-Martini Hegseth.
I’ll briefly visit the bureaucratic squabble that surfaced after last Friday’s quickie-cabinet meeting at Camp David, when Trump hit his national security team with the obvious question, are all these stories I’m reading about us running out missiles correct? Man, would I have loved to have been a fly on the wood-paneling of the room when that one landed like a gigantic pile of shit in the middle of the table. Hegseth blamed his deputy, Stephen Feinberg, for having failed to keep Trump abreast of the true status of our missile stockpiles – as if it isn’t the job of the top guy at the Pentagon, as the president’s chief military adviser, to pick up the phone and tell him, Uhhh, Mr. President, I hate to interrupt you in the middle of your second shot on the 12th hole, but we’re running out of Tomahawk cruise missiles.
Putting the blame shifting aside – I mean, what else would we expect from this clown car of dufuses – whose finger is pointing at who is hardly the issue.
The point is this: You don’t make a decision to go to war against an enemy – any enemy – without first checking to see how many weapons you have and how much ammunition is in stock to be shot by those weapons at the enemy. As I recall from my time as a Plebe, they tought this on day one of tactics training at West Point. Having enough ammunition was then hammered into us at every turn thereafter: summer training sophomore summer at Camp Buckner, junior year training at Fort Knox, Kentucky, where I road-marched a company of tank trainees out to the firing range to shoot the main guns on M-48 battle tanks, senior year when we studied Military Art and History. Stocking up on ammunition is so basic – it’s like if you hired some guys to cut your lawn, and they showed up without their mowers, would you hire them again?
I could go into the grim details of the failure – we’ve expended nearly 80 percent of our best anti-missile weapon, the THAAD interceptor, more than half of our Patriot anti-missile inventory, and “virtually all” of the Army’s mid-range ATACMS and its newer and longer range Precision Strike Missile, the PrSM. These are the primary ground-to-ground missiles used to destroy enemy targets from a distance great enough that the enemy can’t hit you back.
Well, that essential quality of our missile arsenal is out the window, too, because Iran has plenty of drones that can travel as far as U.S. ground-to-ground missiles and even further. The evidence of how far and how accurate Iran’s drones are is all over the Middle East, where U.S. bases have been emptied of soldiers and equipment because Iranian drone strikes were wiping them out.
What I’d like to know is, did the military leadership miscount the number of missiles we had? Did they lie to each other? Did they tell the White House a gigantic lie?
I mean, you just don’t make these kinds of mistakes! Everything in the military has to be counted, and then counted again, and it has to happen every single day. When I was a lieutenant in the Army, I was weapons officer of an Infantry company. My job as weapons officer was to enter the arms room where all our rifles, pistols, and machine guns were kept, and count the weapons and the ammunition, box by box, and sign a formal weapons report on a special DOD form each day certifying that I had counted all those weapons and all that ammo, and it was present and accounted for, listing specific numbers of each. Every. Single. Day.
The punishment for lying on the weapons report, for falsifying the numbers, was five years in the Fort Leavenworth Disciplinary Barracks. That is how seriously the Army took accounting for weapons and ammunition.
I can’t tell you this for sure – I haven’t been in the Army for multiple decades – but it is my strong belief that if counting rifles and pistols and bullets is taken seriously, counting anti-aircraft missiles and anti-missile missiles and ground-to-ground offensive missiles -- each of which costs in the millions of dollars – has to be a very, very serious matter, with multiple people at every level of command signing off not only on the level of missile stockpiles, but their combat readiness.
So, the question arises: what the fuck happened at the Pentagon?
I’ll tell you what I think happened. That military genius Hegseth, who thinks you need to be a man to fight in combat, and not only that, you need to have a high level of testosterone to be what he calls a “warfighter,” told his boss Trump that Iran was weak, that we could hit them with missiles and bombs, and we would decapitate the Iranian leadership, and they would, in Trump’s recent words, fold like an umbrella, and we would have them surrendering their arms in a central square in Tehran within days.
If that sounds familiar, that is because it is what Putin’s generals told him before Russia invaded Ukraine in February of 2022. Remember? Russia believed that Zelenskyy would flee in fear for his life, the Ukrainian government would surrender, and Russian tanks would be rolling down the broad boulevards of Kiev within five days.
Here is the grim reality. In the war against Iran, we’re Russia. The kindest thing you could say about how this war was handled is that the Pentagon and White House miscalculated in their assessment of Iranian resolve and military strength.
But let’s be unkind. We knew going into the war that Iran had so many Shahed drones, they were selling them to Russia. We knew Iran had huge stockpiles of ballistic missiles, because Iran had fired hundreds and hundreds of them at Israel during previous exchanges between the two countries. We also knew that Iran did not have what you would think of as a normal, rational government. We knew that Iran was ruled by a Muslim theocracy as radical as any on earth. We knew that Iran was the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism. We knew that Iran had enough missiles and drones that they supplied not only Hezbollah in Lebanon, but the Houthis in Yemen and other radical Muslim groups in Africa.
We knew all this. Unless I miss my best guess, someone in our government knew exactly how many missiles of every kind we had in our arsenal. Because we have military experts in and out of uniform, we knew exactly how long that stockpile would last in a war that was even moderately protracted by enemy resistance.
But we did it anyway. Trump launched his war on Iran, and we have lost that war by every single military measure there is. Iran now has a vise-like grip on 20 percent of the world’s oil market with its military domination of the Strait of Hormuz. I am positive that there are people in the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon who, if Hegseth had asked them, could have told him that we didn’t have enough missiles and bombs to knock out Iran’s stockpiles of missiles and drones it uses to shoot at ships in the Persian Gulf, and at U.S. bases in the region. But Hegseth probably fired all the generals and civilian defense officials who would have had the guts to stand up and tell him the truth.
The United States military, under the command of Donald Trump and his deputy, Pete Hegseth, has its tail between its legs. We have run out of enough ammunition to fight this war or any war. We have lost the war on Iran. We are, in the immortal words of no less a figure than Richard Nixon, a pitiful helpless giant.
And the whole world knows it.
