School of War - Auditing the Iran War, with Eliot Cohen

Episode Date: June 16, 2026

Eliot Cohen, Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, author of The Strategist: How to Think About War and Politics; and co-host of the Shield of the Republic podcast, joins School of War to discuss the recent agreement between the United States and Iran. Did the United States and Israel accomplish their objectives against Iran? What does the conflict reveal about the U.S. military's readiness for future wars? And did Trump negotiate from a position of strength, or squander one? 01:22 - Eliot Cohen on the war with Iran 03:34 - Judging Trump by outcomes 05:08 - A war 47 years in the making 06:45 - What we don't know about the air campaign 08:08 - Negotiating from strength? 09:10 - Trump's negotiating style 12:05 - Questions about America's conduct of the war 14:31 - The Strait of Hormuz becomes the objective 15:41 - Why the war ended when it did 17:25 - Trump and the nature of war 19:01 - Has Iran succeeded? 23:21 - The decline of the Iranian empire 28:09 - Why Trump got a bad deal 31:36 - Auditing the U.S. military 39:39 - Has warfare been transformed? 42:10 - What should America do next? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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and good faith. If you're a paid subscriber, join us in the forum. If you're not, become one today at www.vfp.com slash forum. Today, my guest, Elliot Cohn and I do a bit of an audit of where we stand after several months of open conflict with Iran, what the stakes and situation of the current diplomacy are and what the consequences of the military campaign so far have been and what it all means about the state of the art of war fighting. Let's get into it. It is for a war. This is a rocky invasion of Hawaii.

December 7, 1941, a date which will live in him. A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the rain, situations and grand. People are not being good. We'll fight on the beaches. We'll fight on the landing ground.

We'll fight in the fields and in the streets. If you read the headlines about Israel, you're only getting a tiny slice of a long, complicated story without depth, context, or sometimes even the basic facts. I'm Norm Weissman, the host of unpacking Israeli history, the podcast that dives into the fascinating and sometimes controversial events and figures that have shaped Israel's past and present each week on unpacking Israeli history. I explore the layers of Israeli history. debates around the Palestinian and Israeli conflict, the cultural forces at play, drawing from a variety of sources and perspectives. So if you're looking for a nuanced, thought-provoking take on Israel,

one that avoids the oversimplifications and political spin, I think you'll really appreciate the show. Find unpacking Israel and History wherever you listen to your podcast or on YouTube. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining the School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today. Elliot Cohn, the R. Lee A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic in International Studies, Professor Emeritus at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where he taught

from the year 1990 onwards. There's so much else to say about you, Elliot. You're an author of many books. The next one is going to be the strategist, how to think about war in politics, which, as I understand it you can pre-order now on Amazon. You are most importantly, because this is the defining element of all of our careers, the co-host of the Shield of Republic podcast. So well done for you on having a podcast. It's unique these days, as I can personally attest to. And look, I mean, there's so you were counselor, the State Department under Secretary Rice, long career in government. I think actually particularly relevant to our conversation today, I want to just say, is that you, I'm not sure what the title was, maybe you're the director of the Gulf War Air Power,

study. So the study of of a pivotal arguably a hinge moment in the history of air power, which is particularly relevant to the conversation we're going to have today. Elliot Cohen, thank you for joining School of War. Aaron, it's always good being with you. You're a contributor to the Atlantic.

You've been covering the war in Iran with a series of analytic essays since the beginning of the war. I've personally been struck by how measured your tone has been. This administration has a way of sorting people into groups

where they're either strongly for or strongly against things the president are doing. But your tone has been measured, supportive in some ways, critical in others. And I want to start by asking you, maybe you could just walk us through the personal evolution of your attitudes towards this war from its outset.

Well, there are really two parts to it, Aaron. The first, actually, more important in some ways, is the evolution of how I wanted to write about Donald Trump. I was one of the original Never Trump Republicans back in 2016. There was a lot of stuff that I was appalled by. And when the second term began, I sat down with myself and just thought, okay, how do I want to, I'll be writing about this administration, obviously.

How do I want to do it? And I decided that the best thing really would be to say, look, I'm going to, I'll judge them by what they do. I've learned enough not to put too much stock in what they say, although what people say is important. And I'm going to try to be as detached as I can because it has struck me the lot of people have gone way over the top. And it's not that I'm uncritical to the administration very far from it. I mean, and critical on moral issues as well as just purely policy ones. But I think it's both inaccurate and it's misleading.

I just had a, I was recently at a conference, I was talking to some senior Europeans. And I said, you know, the problem I think is you guys, either you hear from the administration itself and you go crazy because they want to take Greenland or say they do. Or you hear from people say, this is Weimar, Germany, this is the end of the republic.

There won't be midterms. There certainly won't be another presidential election. He'll be dictator for life, stuff like that. And there are other perspectives. And I just, it's also partly just age. In terms of the war, you know, as you get older, you learn hopefully to be a little bit more careful. In terms of the war itself, the reason why I try to be analytic, there are a couple of reasons for it. One is, I very much view this war as this is a campaign actually in a much bigger war.

Partly, of course, of thinking through the next book, The Strategist. I've been really struck by the way in which we're sometimes too quick to assume that we know when a war began and when a war ended. And I think you get a very different view of a conflict if you change the frame. And in this case, I think it's a war that began 47 years ago with the creation of the Islamic Republic, which is profoundly hostile to the United States and even more so to the state of Israel, which it has wanted to obliterate from the beginning. And I think the way to understand this thing is this is a campaign in the middle of it. The other thing, though, that really struck me, and this does to some extent emerge from, among other experiences, having led the Gulf War air power survey of the first Gulf War, is the realization there's a lot of stuff you don't know.

So, for example, people have been assuming that, you know, 13,000 American strikes and probably a larger number of Israeli strikes, I'll say more about that in a moment, didn't do anything. Well, I think that's unlikely. I mean, at least I don't know what they've done, but the two best air forces in the world operating on very good intelligence, using some of the best munitions in the world, really no effect that the last, I kind of doubt it. And I guess part of what's happened is I've become more modest about what I think I really know. And I think that should induce a certain amount of caution. Let me just say one last thing about the Israelis. It is very striking to me. The commentary on the war, as soon as we've kind of fought that war on our own, but actually

half the effort, roughly, maybe a little bit more, maybe a little bit less, was Israeli. So it is simply in terms of estimating the magnitude of what went on, you really have to put the two together, even though it's the United States that's been driving the diplomacy. You know, Elliot, being modest about what you think you know will get you everywhere in this town. It's the Roman Road to Success in Washington, D.C. Yeah, I've had fewer teams. Well, the truth is actually a serious problem. I mean, the, you know, people talk about the 24-7 news cycle, but actually there's a 24-7 commentary cycle.

Right. And networks and, you know, all the various news outlets are always in search of hot takes. And the hot takes that they want are definitive, not could be, maybe we don't know. you know, there's a lot of obscurity here. That does not get you invited back onto some of your competitors. Let's put it that way. Let me ask you about then this seeming tension or contradiction. If, as you expect, the U.S.-Israeli air campaign did great damage to Iranian targets,

hard to say what exactly with the information we have, but also hard to imagine that on some level it didn't. Why does it appear sitting here, and I should say, we're recording this, the afternoon of Monday, June the 15th, just because these things change so quickly. Why does it appear that the United States is not, and this is my characterization, you're welcome to challenge it, is not negotiating from a position of strength. The evolution of this memorandum of understanding, the whole vibe, to use a word the kids use surrounding it, does not feel like America having concluded the most recent phase of hostilities in a position to well, certainly far from dictating terms, but not even necessarily close to it. What's your,

what's your assessment of that tension? Well, there's a difference. At first, I draw a distinction between not negotiating from a position of strength or negotiating from a position of weakness and simply negotiating poorly. And I think this administration has a fatal tendency to negotiate very, very poorly. They, you know, they, he's, the president has a couple of, a family member and real estate associate, Steve Whitkoff and Jared Kushner, who he sentenced to pretty much every negotiation. They're not experts on any of the issues they're dealing with. They seem to cut out the State Department, which does historically have some sort of expertise. And they're in a rush to conclude agreements, which, you know, Trump, I think part of the one of the things that's

characteristic of the president wants to get this stuff done and over with it and move on to something else. And for a lot of these things, you simply have to have patience. And this is a misdemeanor. to a greater degree than other American administrations, but only to a greater degree does not have strategic patience. It's one of our great national failings at the moment, I would argue. So I think they've negotiated poorly. As far as we can tell, and as you say, it's all very obscure. We haven't seen the text. The Iranians are saying different things than we're saying. This looks like the JCPOA minus the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that the Obama administration negotiated over a very long period of time with the Iranians, and that was rightly

criticized, I think. And this is basically the same thing. And I think there's evidence that that is uncomfortably close to the truth by virtue of the fact that the president was willing to spend a couple of hours with David Sanger of the New York Times explaining that it's not the JCPOA, but not in words that made any sense whatsoever. Yeah, the administration continues to reject. this comparison. In fact, the vice president was on the CBS morning show just today, Monday morning, asserting that this deal will prevent Iran from ever getting a nuclear weapon and essentially in a number of different ways, claiming that this deal is superior to the JCPOA, to which I say, well, then I would like to see the text. I would like to see what's actually in there.

And for some reason here, even though the deal was apparently signed electronically yesterday, we still don't have it, which engenders a certain skepticism. I think the vice president may have committed what somebody was called a terminological inexactitude because there's absolutely no reason to think it's any better than the JCPOA. As you say, we haven't seen the text. And to the extent that we do know what's in it, it's a commitment to negotiate over 60 days. This is classic Iranian behavior.

and the administration seems to have gone along with it. There'll be a lot of questions that should be asked about their conduct of this phase of the conflict with Iran. I mean, to go back in the way to your original question about a position, not negotiating from a position of strength, there are a number of things that are, I think I find puzzling about the conduct of operations. First, one, why didn't we blockade Iran a lot sooner? Secondly, why didn't we, as I am, have been told by people who are in a position to know, immediately begin operations designed to secure the Strait of Hormuz. This is a problem that Central Command has been working on for decades.

The war plans have been there to do that. So why didn't that happen? Why? We have very limited mine sweeping assets, mine hunting assets, really, to be technically a bit more correct. why weren't they deployed where we needed them? And that's quite apart from having so badly mistreated our allies that they didn't want to show up to help us out with that. So they have a lot to answer for. I suspect that the administration deep down knows that this is not actually better than the JCPOA.

And there's an argument actually that it's worse because, and again, you'd be in a better position to know about this than I would. There have been various reports out there that with our knowledge, knowledge, the Qataris, at least, and possibly the Emirates, have been paying off Iran. So those are nominally not tolls, but they are very large bribes. And that's a very, very bad thing. Right. Well, another regard in which this could, emphasis on the could, because I don't know, I haven't seen the tax of the MOU. But could be worse is you keep seeing reports, and by reports, I mean the Iranians keep saying in their own media that they intend to extrad. some degree of sovereignty in the Strait of Hormuz going forward one way or the other. And they seem to be comfortable saying, oh, no, no, we won't charge tolls.

But there may be fees. Yeah, there may be fees, you know, for good administration. So I would like to see the text of the MOU to see if we've accepted that distinction or if we've rejected it. I don't know. And obviously, any deal that left Iran with any kind of uncontested assertion of control over the strait, let alone one that is meaningfully enforced by registration and fees. is a catastrophe for world order, to be honest.

You know, among other things, I think you're right to focus on the Strait of Hormuz even more than the nuclear program. The nuclear program, you can periodically batter down and really limit its a version of mowing the lawn. For the Iranians to get away within any way restricting traffic in the Strait of Hormuz is unacceptable. And, you know, people sometimes have the action. that you go to war, you've got a very clear set of objectives, one, two, three, and four,

and all you have to do is make sure you achieve those three or four objectives, and you've won. The truth is, what happens in any war is that objectives evolve. When Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, the critical war objective, to my mind, or one of the critical war objectives, had to have become is making sure that in no way, shape, or form are the Iranians successful in doing that? And which is not where you started, but that's just the way wars are. And I don't think that they, I don't think that they understand that, actually. I have a pet theory as to why the operation to open the Strait of Hermuz was much belated and then aborted swiftly after it began.

I'll say it aloud here, and I'm curious your reaction. One thing that was very clear to me about the president's way of thinking about this war, which, by the way, is sort of coherent with his thinking about military action more generally, is that it is something that he can stop at his, at a time of his choosing. So wars are things that he starts and he stops as the president of the United States. And you see that, you know, you saw that with Yemen in 2025, Operation Rough Rider, which arguably, by the way, also did not have an extremely successful outcome. It was less dramatic. The stakes weren't quite as high, so it didn't get quite as much notice.

But, you know, another short campaign that was moving towards inconclusive results, which essentially the United States stopped with a diplomatic agreement that, let's just say, had some questionable elements. So here at the start of this war, fairly early on, you had the president saying that this war was going to be limited in time. You know, four to six weeks was the formula I heard over and over again. And here's the problem with counter blockade operations in the straight, some sort of ongoing project freedom or the historical comparison is Operation Ernest Well from 1987 and 88. You just have to keep doing it as long as the Iranians keep shooting. There's no end date to that. You don't get to stop that. They get to stop that.

And I don't think the president ever wanted to put himself in a position where that was true. But of course, that came at a cost. And that's the cost that we're facing right now. I don't know what your reaction to that is. I think that's right. I think it's part of a larger issue with the president in that I think he wrestles with the idea that smaller states have agency. And that goes for allies as well.

It's why it gets so frustrated with Ukrainians, with Canadians, with the Danes, with Israelis, and then, you know, with enemies like Iran. Who says that they get a vote? Well, turns out they very much do. they very much do get a vote. And so I agree with you. And I think he, look, this is not, he's not a student of war. He's not somebody who is personally touched by war, even though he's of the Vietnam generation.

And so I just think the world of war is alien to him. And he also, you know, we know he gets frustrated when he doesn't simply get his will and is kind of shocked and surprised by it. Again, let's remember, this is not somebody who's had a long career. in politics. He's come to politics from a very different world where he was able to exercise a lot of control and overwhelm lesser parties of various kinds by his skill of negotiation or however you want to characterize it. But that's not the world that he's in. And that's on top of course of the consequences of simply getting older.

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. We're being pretty tough on the president and the administration here. And I mean, who knows, Elliot? The text of the MOU could be released in. And it turns out Iran really is agreeing to dismantlement and is making no claims over the straight time. Only time will tell. But let's shift gears to Iranian strategy and the Iranian approach to Iran's own security. Give us an overview there of how it's going for the gang in Tehran, either going back to February the 28th in their conduct of this phase of hostilities,

or you can zoom out as far as you like to, you know, October 7th is the starting point. How are they doing? So first, let's acknowledge the limits to our knowledge. I think Churchill once said that trying to figure out the internal politics of the Soviet Union was like watching cats fighting under a rug. I suspect something similar is true here of Iranian elite politics. One thing that is mistaken, I think, is when people say, well, you know, this war brought the hardliners into power. Now, a regime that is willing to massacre tens of thousands of its own citizens is pretty hard line.

What it is probably done, it is probably brought to power in the shape of some of the leaders of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, people who are less risk-averse than the Ayatollah Khomeini. There's a reason to think that the Ayatollah was a more risk-averse kind of personality than the kinds of people you have now. So I think that's one really quite important consequence. Second important consequence is we don't know a whole lot about their internal politics. It's not clear to me that there's a single dominant figure. You know, we still haven't seen much Tava, Chaminay. I think there are a number of things. They clearly are feeling that their leadership, I think it's fair to say, is clearly feeling

that they've been very, very successful. And that's partly ideological belief that, you know, if you simply resist the great Satan, And that counts as victory, but the truth is they have undoubtedly had some successes. On the other hand, the internal social pressures have not gone away. Now, they may think that they can just overwhelm that by sheer repression and possibly they can. But that hasn't gone away. I think the damage, the infrastructural damage has not gone away. And the second and third order consequences are still there.

So, you know, one thing you and I have talked about in the past is it's clear you're going to have the oil kingdoms of the Persian Gulf invest a lot not only in defenses, but I suspect in the kinds of things that will allow them to do a lot of damage next time around to the Iranian petrochemical industries. I mean, I think particularly the Emirates, which view themselves as sort of a little Sparta, will. want to be in a position where if they get hit again, as they probably expect they will be, they can say exactly the same thing is going to happen to you and you can afford it less. I think, you know, for them, the most important thing is to make, they very much want to retain control of the Gulf to the extent that they can. They want to maintain their proxies, the shape of Hezbollah and the Houthis. They're probably feeling pretty good about that. And they want to continue to prosecute their struggle with the Israelis.

So I think probably at the moment they're feeling very good. But it does nothing, it has done nothing to improve the underlying fact that the regime has impoverished that country, that, you know, the capital, Tehran could run out of water, that very, very large segments of the population hate them and view them as totally corrupt. And so, you know, I think they're structurally remained in a bad place, but with a leadership that is perhaps dangerously intoxicated with what they not unreasonably view as success. All of this is to say that as far as I'm concerned, this is not going to be the last rant. There'll be more. I mean, if I had to make the best possible case for Operation Epic Fury, it would go something like, I would actually start with your observation.

This is one phase, one campaign in a broader war. I would start my accounting at October the 6th, where the Iranian Empire was a regionally mighty force, an empire of proxies and of terror, guarded by a shield of missiles and perhaps one day by nuclear weapons, dedicated to the ending of Zionism, the ejection of the United States from the Middle East, and a potent force. I mean, Israelis would talk about a war with Hezbollah in the way that Brits. would talk about what it was going to be like when London was being bombed in the late 30s. You know, these sort of apocalyptic notions of Tel Aviv and Haifa in flames. And, you know, even tracking a little bit into the war. If you go, you know, forward into, say, some point in 2024, you have Israel badly bogged down in Gaza. You have, you know, the candle's still about to go up in the north.

You have Israeli politics and shambles over the question of the hostages. You're very tense U.S. Israeli relations with the Biden administration and Netanyahu. And there were moments in there where I asked myself like, gosh, is the West winning here? It's not totally, it's not totally clear to me. I mean, Israelis are killing a lot of terrorists in Gaza, but it's actually not totally clear to me the broader strategic direction of all this. And then, and then sometime around the fall of 2024, things. start to go very, very badly indeed for Iran. The Syria falls, Hezbollah is eviscerated, and slowly, solely, solely up until 2026,

with obviously Midnight Hammer in the summer of 2025, you just see them taking hit after hit, after hit, being reduced down to just a rump of Hezbollah in Lebanon, a potent one, but nevertheless a shadow of its former self. You have the Houthis, but you've lost a lot, and you've lost a lot of capacity, the The economy's already damaged. The nuclear program literally begins to be rebelized in the summer of 2025. Epic Fury does nothing to help with that. And then, just to finish the thought, you know, being bombed all of March into early April, 2026 through, as you put it, you know, two of the most sophisticated air forces in the world with exquisite intelligence did nothing to help the situation further.

So, yeah, maybe a little too far to call for regime change. maybe a little callous to encourage the Iranian people to come into the streets without a coherent idea of how to see it through. Nevertheless, one more body blow to a regime that's taken several in recent years, which is why, you know, dot, dot, dot, it's a little mystifying to me why the diplomacy now seems to be designed to start throwing very substantial economic lifelines. Because if you, I've left a lot out as I made that case. There's been some problems along the way that we've already discussed. But if you accept that as like a semi-plausible account of the trajectory of Iranian power since the fall of 2023, why the sudden 180-degree pivot to helping them out and sort of doing

with everything within our power to meet them at least halfway and perhaps more on a series of issues. So look, I basically agree with that. I guess I'd supplement it with a few observations. One is a lot of this is the Israelis. I mean, the, where the tide really begins to turn is with the Israelis taking down Hezbollah with beepers and walkie-dokies and even exploding computers. The Syrian revolution, which, again, transforms their ability to do things with Isbala. His bala is still there, but it's much weakened.

And then the so-called 12-day war, let's remember, midnight. hammers one day. That's after the Israelis have been pounding them for 12 days and taken down a lot of the air defenses very, very effectively. So, you know, the Israelis have played a role. But I think, look, your broader point is right. It's not that any previous administration has done better. And in fact, we have tried everything else. We've tried ignoring the problem. You know, I remember vividly, I was in the Bush administration for the last couple of years as the counselor of the Department of state. And quite literally, the Quds Force, the kind of covert military action wing of the revolutionary guard corps, they were killing our people in Iraq. And I, you know, I kept on saying,

we know who some of their operatives are in Iraq. Why don't we kill them? Why do we do something to the Iran just make it clear? We know exactly what you're doing, which we did, and make them pay for it. We didn't. You read the JCPOA, which was a terrible deal, because all it did was rewarded them with money for kicking the can down the road. And it's, so, you know, when people talk about the JCPOA, it's true, you know, this deal doesn't sound like it's a lot better. But it's not like that was a good deal. It was a very, very bad deal.

I think Trump, you know, what you can say, on behalf of Trump is, it's in part because he has fewer scruples than some. He is willing to use force. And when he uses force, he's willing to use it in a kind of a big and ruthless way. I think he did do the damage that we described. So your question then is, okay, then why do you get such a lousy deal? Well, first, objectively, you know, there is the question of jeopardizing global oil supplies, inflation that has political consequences.

But I think it goes a little bit deeper. You know, I think he is basically a transactionalist. He's not a geopolitical thinker by any stretch of the imagination. I think he has a general sort of idea that they're the great. powers and somehow he still sort of thinks of Russia is a great power, which in many ways it is no longer. And then there are all these kind of lesser states. And but then I think from there he, he can, the way he conceptualizes these things is he wouldn't talk about it the way you just talked about, the Iranian Empire, you know, and the forces that are leading it to expand or that are forcing it to contract. I think he views international things as a set of problems to be fixed or resolved without paying too much attention to human rights kinds of issues, but in ways that usually involve money.

And hopefully, in his few things that flow to the benefit of the United States and sometimes to him personally. And then I think they are absolutely trapped by the fact that this is not a professional team. What they're doing is they're turning to Whitkoff and Kushner, who are also of the same stamp. That is, say, very transactional business people who are way stretched way too thin, who don't have anything remotely resembling a geopolitical perspective. And so they do a bad job of it. You know, it is entirely possible to, I think pulling defeat from the jaws of victory is overstating it, but unquestionably underperforming what they should have, what they should have been able to do. I agree with you, by the way, that above all, that it's going to be very important to have a long-term perspective here.

I mean, one of the things that's clearly happening is this is going to affect people shift to renewable. energy. It's going to affect things like the construction of pipelines in Saudi Arabia, railroads. I mean, there are going to be a lot of things that are now going to happen because nobody, I think, in the future, can take the security of oil flows from the Persian Gulf for granted, and they won't. So let's shift from the grand strategic situation and diplomacy and where this is all going to war fighting and what the last few months tell us about the state of the art of war. You cited in a recent Atlantic piece, this book, The Audit of War by Corelli Barnett. And I just wanted to ask you just to appropriate its title, how does the audit show the U.S.

military is doing purely as a war fighting entity? Let's leave sort of strategy at the high level aside. Well, so the good news is the United States military has very high-end technology. It can orchestrate very large-scale operations. It can move a lot of stuff around the world. It has highly competent operators, and it has pockets of very serious innovation. It's also, I think, very clear, it's become clearer in retrospect that it is taking advantage of developments in AI for developing targets and then being able to prosecute them pretty quickly. So that's all the good news. And it's very, very considerable. But there's plenty of bad. news. And I think it's very important for people to focus on it. Clearly, our procurement system

is not designed for really serious war fighting. Otherwise, you would not have been expending between a third and a half of your stocks of absolutely critical munitions in what is a minor regional conflict that didn't go on very long. It means that we do not have a system that develops and sustains the kinds of stocks of munitions that you need, or at least the ability to rapidly produce things. You know, there are deep reasons for this. It's because we go for the very best with all the bells and whistles rather than the good enough. The contrast with, say, things like, think about the Sherman tank in World War II.

Was it a better tank than the Tiger tank? Absolutely not. Was it good enough? Absolutely. Could you mass produce a lot of them? Yes, you could. and so on for a lot of other systems as well, including ships. Speaking of which, it's clear that we under-invested in,

we've under-invested in key platforms. I noted, I think, in one of my columns, that in the 1980s, when we were again engaging Iran the first time, the U.S. Navy had 116 frigates, which is what you want to have if you're escorting ships back and forth, not as expensive as the fancy destroyers, smaller, but we had a lot of them. They're basically the lineal descendants of the destroyer escorts of World War II,

which we built for the convoy war in the North Atlantic. We built over 600 of them, 500 for ourselves, another 100 or so for the Brits. Today we have none, zero. Similar with mine hunting. You know, we had the U.S. Navy has very much. repeatedly failed to develop an adequate mine hunting, a flotilla of dedicated mine hunting vessels. We have the littoral combat ships with supposedly a mine hunting module.

You know, that did not, has not worked out particularly well. We clearly have some mine clearing capability to the extent we've been able to clear some sort of channel in the Strait of Hormuz. But these are major underinvestments in the capacity that we, that we really need to have. There are other aspects of the audit of war, which I think would only be more visible in a really big war, and that, among other things, that's the inability to mobilize manpower. You know, we've gotten used to fighting wars, which casualties are relatively low,

and you can sustain your forces with an all-volunteer force of the kind that we've had for decades and decades now. That got stressed very badly during Iraq. and Afghanistan, but we've now reverted to where we were before that, which is you can take very modest numbers of casualties. Last thing I would say is we have, you could see in this conflict the consequences of having had effortless superiority for a long time. So one of the more dramatic pictures that comes out of this is a E3 command of control aircraft.

This hugely expensive, big airplane with a big radome on it, blown up in the Gulf on the ground with a precision strike, possibly guided by Russian intelligence, we don't know. Well, you know, one of the reasons why that sort of things happens is we have not taken the many different kinds of defense, including passive defense, seriously. You know, I, when I was in the government, I frequently flew into Al-Deed Air Base in Qatar. And I'd look down when I flew in and I would say, my goodness, this is what Clark Airfield looked like on the day of Pearl Harbor or day afterwards. Right. The Philippines got hit. No wingtip to wingtip. No hardened aircraft shelters.

None of the, I mean, yes, we have things like Patriot missiles and so forth. And yes, we disperse airplanes. But the fact is, we have basic. expected that we would have air supremacy pretty much wherever we operated. And that is just profoundly not true anymore. I mean, one of the big technological changes has been the spread of accurate ballistic missile, cruise missile and now drone technology that can operate at scale and over long ranges with a great deal, as I said, a great deal of precision. That is, changes things. I mean, it means that in a certain sense, air supremacy is no longer something that exists.

And these are, I think, are all failings of the armed forces. And that's, I know, go back to where we started, Aaron. I can be critical of the Trump administration, but I think a lot of the errors here unquestionably predate the administration and very frequently go to the heart of the bureaucracies that have been responsible for national defense. So I think there's, there's plenty of blame to go around. And so in the context of that critique, let's talk about warfare itself. Because I'm a hopeless nerd and interested in these things, I won't say I've read the full, I believe it's five volumes, right, the Gulf War Air Power Survey.

I've not read the five volumes. I have read around in the first volume. It would be a bit of a slog. You know, and I didn't subject myself to it. I did not make the attempt. But I have read around in the first volume. And I remember reading the conclusion of that volume where you directly address the question, you know, was this a revolution? Has there been a revolution in war fighting or military affairs or however we want to term it because of the sophistication of the precision strike complex that gets underway in that conflict?

And the chapter sort of, you know, it's even-handed. It's a little ambivalent. You say, well, there are certain signposts, but it's sort of too soon to say. Well, here we are in 2026. to grill you about books that are, you know, 30 plus years old. But what's your, what's your, you know, with, with all of the tools that were available then in the early 90s, now everything's accelerated. AI in particular accelerates the targeting process. Potentially, I mean, with every passing month, it seems, with even, to even greater tempo, autonomous networked systems, sort of democratized

things. What do you think, Ellie, has the revolution come? No, I think warfare has been transformed in a number of ways. One way to think about is simply the role of the information technologies, which are pervasive and which have changed many different aspects of how you conduct war, from how particular weapon systems function to how you do things like targeting. I mean, first, actually, the Israelis were probably the first to actually use this kind of stuff operationally in Gaza, not that it saved them because it didn't. But we're doing it as well.

I absolutely think the advent of very precise ballistic crews and drone missiles, it does change many things. And it, you know, does make it a lot harder for the United States to exercise the kind of supremacy that it did. I think in general, the availability of data is really quite extraordinary. I mean, you know, at this point, everybody can get access to, extraordinarily high quality overhead imagery. And that's why, you know, you can actually follow something like the Russia-Ukraine more pretty well by going to the Institute for the Study of War website, where they're looking at a lot of satellite imagery and infrared and all kinds of other things and interpreting

it really well. So there's this sort of democratization of knowledge. So I think, yeah, war is being transformed in a number of ways. that doesn't make it any cheaper and it doesn't make it any less, any less bloody, as we see in Ukraine. And that's one of the reasons, by the way, why I, you know, people have now been talking a lot about Ukraine war has gone on longer than World War I. And people were saying, well, it's just like World War I because there are trenches and it's gone on for a long time. And I think that's a profound misunderstanding of what we're seeing there. And it's, again,

because we're now in a world in which for a smaller power, a medium power, can make use of the third dimension to strike deep at its opponents and to do a lot of damage. And the Iranians have sort of done that to us, but the Ukrainians have done much more of that to the Russians. And it's, again, completely apart from the whole information, collection analysis and dissemination world, which has. has been transformed by the new technologies. So to conclude where we began, I want to bring it back to Iran into the present moment and just ask you, Elliot, if you suddenly had the power to take us forward,

but you had to play the ball where it lies, what would be the road ahead here for American policy with the Iranian regime? Well, the road that one would like to see us take is one in which we do not make economic concessions to that regime, that we really stick to our two basic principles, which is no control whatsoever of the Strait of Hormuz, limitation of the nuclear program. You know, we've begun, the fact is a lot of their proxies have been somewhat defanged.

We can do a lot of that on our own. But I think that keep your eye on the ball. And the, and what are the key stakes here now? stakes or the Strait of Hormuz and the nuclear program with the straight of Hormuz being because of the way we've played our hand, now in jeopardy in a way that it was not before. And, you know, then you can get more ambitious. But I think it has to be illuminated by an understanding that as long as that regime exists, it is going to be hostile to us. It'll be out to destroy the state of Israel and it'll be out to disrupt that part of the world. And it's

That's the hard fact. And I think most people, and again, this is not a Trump, this is not a failure peculiar to the Trump administration. I think Obama and Biden just as bad on this. You have to understand. This is not a regime that you could cut any lasting deal with. You just can't. Elliot Cohn, the forthcoming book is called The Strategist, How to Think About War in Politics, available for pre-order now. Thank you so much for coming on school where I've been remiss. not having you so far, so I hope this will not be your last appearance. You can come back and I hope to talk about the book when it comes out. I hope so too. It's always good to talk with you, Aaron. Is one of those media strategy people clicking through slides, scrolling spreadsheets? Yes? Good. This is for you. Because on Spotify, there's an audience that's different, locked in, loyal, invested. They're called fans. Fans don't just listen to music. They feel seen by it, like it belongs to them.

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