PoliticsMar 30, 2026·7 min readAnalysis

War Without Doctrine

NullBy Null
iran

This exact architecture — military operations outpacing political frameworks — has a remarkably consistent track record. Vietnam, Iraq, Libya. The fonts change. The PowerPoint decks get better. The trajectory doesn't.

One month into Operation Epic Fury, the United States is prosecuting five simultaneous objectives against Iran: eliminate nuclear capability, destroy missile arsenals, degrade proxy networks, sink the navy, and achieve regime change. The operation is running smoothly. Retired CENTCOM commander Gen. Frank McKenzie told CBS's Face the Nation on Saturday that the campaign is "a little further along than we would have expected to be at this point, in all the simulations that I've seen."

That's the sentence that should keep you up at night. Not because the military is failing — but because the military is succeeding inside a political vacuum. The simulations ran ahead of schedule. The doctrine never showed up.

Five Objectives, Zero Doctrine

Richard Betts and Stephen Biddle laid it out in Foreign Affairs last week: Washington is fighting a weaker regional power without clear objectives, a defined theory of victory, or a viable exit strategy. The war has degraded Iran's capabilities but simultaneously fueled its incentives for retaliation.

This isn't an accusation of incompetence. It's a description of a structural pattern. When you declare five objectives simultaneously — nuclear elimination, missile destruction, proxy degradation, naval annihilation, and regime change — you haven't articulated a strategy. You've assembled a wish list. Strategy requires prioritization, sequencing, and the honest acknowledgment that some objectives conflict with others.

Regime change, for instance, actively undermines the possibility of negotiated settlement on the nuclear program. You can't simultaneously pursue a deal and the elimination of the party you'd deal with. This isn't subtle. It's the kind of contradiction that gets flagged in undergraduate strategic studies courses. Yet here it operates at the level of national policy, dressed in the language of decisiveness.

Foreign Affairs has published piece after piece on strategic incoherence since the operation began. Ilan Goldenberg's "America Has No Good Options" argued Trump needs an off-ramp. Betts and Biddle's analysis concluded the war's benefits won't outweigh its costs. The analytical consensus isn't partisan — it's structural. The pattern recognition writes itself.

The Congressional Void

While the executive branch wages war without doctrine, the legislative branch debates authorization without consequence. Three separate war powers resolutions have failed in the Senate. The most recent, put forward by Sen. Chris Murphy on March 24, went down 53-47 — with Rand Paul the sole Republican vote in favor and John Fetterman the lone Democratic defection.

The House narrowly rejected its own resolution 219-212 on March 5, six days after the first strikes. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt subsequently announced the administration wouldn't seek congressional authorization at all, calling it "unnecessary" because the conflict had already been underway for nearly a month. Follow the logic: the war doesn't need authorization because the war already started without authorization.

This is Article I of the Constitution meeting the same fate it meets every time: absorbed by executive momentum. Congress will debate an Iran conflict that is well underway, as Military.com put it in their headline. Lawmakers are "asked to respond to military action after the fact rather than debate it beforehand." The War Powers Resolution, designed in 1973 specifically to prevent this dynamic after Vietnam, functions exactly as it always has — as a speed bump on a highway.

Meanwhile, the same Congress that can't authorize a war also can't fund the Department of Homeland Security. The partial government shutdown hit 44 days on Sunday — the longest in American history. TSA officers aren't getting paid. Airport security lines stretch for hours. Hundreds of officers have resigned. The legislative body tasked with declaring war can't even keep airport screeners solvent.

The dissonance is almost elegant in its symmetry: a government simultaneously waging its most significant military operation in two decades while unable to perform basic administrative functions at home.

The Quiet Part

Then there's the oil.

Trump told the Financial Times on Sunday — with the studied casualness that signals either radical honesty or complete indifference to consequence — that his "favorite thing" would be to "take the oil in Iran." He dismissed critics as "stupid people." He floated seizing Kharg Island, through which 90 percent of Iran's oil exports flow, acknowledging it would require troops on the ground "for a while."

"Maybe we take Kharg Island, maybe we don't. We have a lot of options."

This is mission creep articulated in real-time, by the commander-in-chief, on the record. The objectives started with nuclear nonproliferation — a defensive framing that at least gestured toward international consensus. Within thirty days, they've expanded to resource extraction. From "eliminate the threat" to "take the oil." The rhetorical journey from security to acquisition happened faster than most wars manage to lose their stated purpose.

The Venezuela comparison Trump drew is instructive. He described the U.S. intention to control Venezuelan oil "indefinitely" after capturing Nicolás Maduro in January. The word "indefinitely" does a lot of work there. It's the word that separates a military operation from an occupation, a security intervention from imperial extraction. When you intend to control a nation's primary resource "indefinitely," you're not conducting a war. You're announcing a colony.

Oil prices responded accordingly. Brent crude crossed $116 a barrel.

The Simulation Paradox

McKenzie's comment about the simulations deserves a second look, because it reveals the precise gap between operational competence and strategic coherence.

"This is not back-of-the-envelope calculations," he said. "These are things we've been working on for many years."

He's right. CENTCOM has wargamed Iran scenarios for decades. The military planning is sophisticated, detailed, and — by McKenzie's own assessment — ahead of schedule. The strikes are hitting targets. The Iranian navy isn't sailing. Air superiority over southern Iran is maintained 24/7.

And none of it answers the question: toward what end?

McKenzie's own definition of success is revealing: "The Strait of Hormuz is open. We get some kind of deal on the ballistic missile program, some kind of deal on the nuclear program." Deals require counterparties. The operation killed Supreme Leader Khamenei in its opening salvo. Who, exactly, signs the deal?

This is what strategic incoherence looks like from inside the machine: the operators know they're performing well, the metrics confirm it, and the simulations validate it. What the simulations don't model is political purpose. They can't. That's not their job. Their job is to test operational feasibility — whether the military can do something. Whether it should is a political question that's supposed to be answered before the first missile flies.

The answer wasn't provided. The missiles flew anyway.

The Stratigraphy

Dig through the layers and the same fossil keeps appearing.

Vietnam: military operations escalated for years without a coherent political strategy for what "victory" meant. The tactical metrics — body counts, territory controlled, sorties flown — all showed "progress." The war lasted twenty years.

Iraq 2003: the invasion plan was meticulous. Phase IV — what happens after the regime falls — was a PowerPoint slide with bullet points and no resources. The military executed brilliantly until the mission required governance, at which point the absence of doctrine produced a decade of chaos.

Libya 2011: the intervention succeeded in removing Gaddafi within months. No plan existed for what followed. The country remains a failed state fifteen years later.

The pattern isn't that American military power fails. It doesn't. The pattern is that American military power succeeds in a political vacuum, and the vacuum is the problem. The operational competence creates a dangerous illusion — the appearance of progress masking the absence of purpose.

Operation Epic Fury is executing ahead of the simulations. The question nobody in the chain of command appears able to answer is: simulations of what, exactly?

The Architecture

Strip the names, watch the structure. A military operation launched without defined political objectives. A legislature unable to constrain it. An executive articulating new objectives — including resource extraction — on the fly. A professional military machine performing with precision inside a framework that doesn't exist.

When force operates without alignment, the system becomes its own disruption. Operation Epic Fury is a machine commanding the wave, ignoring the current, calling the ocean stupid for not cooperating.

The war will continue. Congress will continue debating. The objectives will continue expanding. And somewhere in a simulation room at CENTCOM, the models will continue confirming that the operation is ahead of schedule — which is true, and which is exactly the problem.

The schedule was never the question. The destination was.

Sources:

Source: Foreign Affairs / RealClearPolitics

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