Third Order Effects of the U.S.-Iran Conflict

None of This Is Resolved

The podcast is back. . .after a bit of a hiatus. As always, there is a written form for those who prefer not to listen. The Blockade: What It Is, What It Isn’t, and Why It’s Hard The United States has instituted a naval blockade of Iranian ports, enforced by just under a dozen ships operating in and around the CENTCOM area of responsibility. At the height of normal operations, roughly 130 ships transit the Strait of Hormuz daily. In the opening days of the blockade, various news outlets reported that approximately six made it through. The gap between those two numbers tells you most of what you need to know about the immediate economic impact. But blockades are considerably harder to sustain than they are to announce, and there are several dimensions to this one that deserve more scrutiny than they are getting. We wrote about some of the aspects of blockades on Monday, but we thought it might be worth revisiting. Here are four things to consider: The first is enforcement capacity. A blockade is only as effective as the assets enforcing it around the clock. That means ships on station continuously—not rotating through, not in maintenance cycles, not refueling. It potentially means sailors and Marines doing boarding operations, which even in the best case are manpower-intensive and carry real risk. The 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit in the Gulf has some boarding capability, but not at scale across the entire force. And every extended deployment comes with a maintenance bill on the back end that temporarily removes that asset from the available force structure when it returns. The second is intelligence. Knowing which ships to stop, what they are carrying, what flag they are flying, and whether that flag accurately reflects their cargo and destination. This is an enormous intelligence lift, even for a community as capable as the one the U.S. operates. Iranian oil does not always leave on Iranian-flagged ships. The enforcement problem is as much an information problem as a naval one. The third is the question of what happens when someone tests it. No commercial tanker captain, no insurance underwriter, and no shipping company is going to push a slow-moving oil tanker through a U.S. Navy blockade in this scenario. The economics simply do not work. But Iran has chosen to send tankers through anyway. So far, all have complied with the U.S. blockade, but what does the U.S. Navy do when a tanker approaches and refuses to comply? Finally, there is the legal dimension. Under international law and longstanding norms, a blockade is considered an act of war, which is precisely why the Kennedy administration during the Cuban Missile Crisis went to considerable lengths to call their blockade a “quarantine.” The word choice was designed to stay below the threshold of a formal act of war and avoid giving the Soviets a legal or rhetorical basis to escalate. The current administration has made no such distinction, explicitly calling it a blockade. In the context of an operation that was already on legally contested ground from the first strike, this is just another brick in the wall. But it is worth understanding what is being discarded. The Economic Slow Burn Markets Haven’t Registered Markets have been volatile throughout this conflict, swinging on each new rumor of negotiations or escalation. The S&P 500 is, remarkably, back above its pre-conflict level. This reflects investor optimism about a near-term resolution more than it reflects economic reality on the ground. What the markets are almost certainly not fully pricing is the fertilizer problem. The Persian Gulf is a critical export corridor for fertilizers that underpin global agricultural production. When that corridor closes, the effects do not show up immediately. They show up at harvest time. Farmers who did not receive fertilizer during planting season cannot retroactively fix their crop yields. The ship carrying that fertilizer has, in a very literal sense, already sailed. For much of Asia, which is significantly more dependent on Gulf-sourced fertilizer than the United States is, the fall harvest may reflect shortfalls that are now essentially locked in regardless of when the strait reopens. Europe’s breadbasket in Ukraine has been functionally impaired since 2022. Add a disrupted Gulf fertilizer supply to an already-strained global food system, and the downstream effects—higher food prices, potential shortages in import-dependent nations, fiscal pressure on governments trying to subsidize agricultural inputs—could persist well beyond any ceasefire. These are slow-moving consequences, which is precisely why they tend to be underweighted in real-time market and policy analysis. What 60 Percent Enriched Uranium Actually Means The nuclear material question has become the central sticking point in negotiations and is somewhat misunderstood in public discussion. Uranium enrichment works by running uranium gas through centrifuges. The heavier uranium-238 isotope migrates to the outside of the spinning column and is removed, leaving behind a progressively higher concentration of the lighter, fissile uranium-235. The physics of this process mean that enriching from low levels to moderate levels is slow and difficult, while moving from moderate to high levels becomes progressively faster and easier. The International Atomic Energy Agency classifies anything above 20 percent enrichment as highly enriched uranium. Above 5 percent, there are really only two practical uses: fuel for naval nuclear reactors, which require very high enrichment because they need to run for 15 to 20 years without refueling, and weapons material. Iran’s stockpile is approximately 60 percent enriched. This is not weapons-grade by the standard definition—90 percent is the conventional threshold for a compact, deliverable nuclear weapon. But 60 percent is by no means harmless. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima used uranium enriched to approximately 80 percent on average. At 60 percent, it is possible to construct a large, gun-type fission device. Not the compact implosion-type weapon that modern arsenals favor, but a functional nuclear explosive that could yield roughly two kilotons. That is a substantial explosion, and more importantly, it would be a nuclear detonation—which, as North Korea demonstrated, fundamentally changes how the world interacts with whatever country sets one off, regardless of yield or delivery mechanism. The more immediate concern is what 60 percent enrichment represents as a starting point. Moving from 60 to 90 percent in centrifuges is significantly faster than moving from 5 to 60 percent. If Iran retains its 60 percent stockpile—estimated at roughly 400 kilograms—and retains functioning centrifuge capacity that has not been fully destroyed, the breakout timeline to weapons-grade material is measured in weeks, not months. Reports indicate that some centrifuge facilities have not been located and destroyed. That is the core of the negotiating problem. From the episode: The “two weeks from a bomb” framing is somewhat hyperbolic — there is significant metallurgy and machining involved beyond enrichment. But the window is genuinely short, and it gets shorter the higher the starting enrichment level. The negotiating gap reflects this directly. The U.S. is reportedly seeking a 20-year moratorium on enrichment and wants Iran to physically surrender its 60 percent stockpile. Iran wants a five-year moratorium and is invoking its rights under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. A possible bridge between the two positions is a new version of the JCPOA. The 2015 deal was a 10-year agreement that permitted enrichment to low levels (under 5 percent), subject to rigorous IAEA inspections of all facilities. Of course, any deal would have to include the removal of the 60 percent enriched material from Iran. The major criticism of the JCPOA was that it “expired”. This misunderstands how these arrangements work in practice: at the end of 10 years, you renegotiate, or you reimpose sanctions. The Ceasefire and the Clock A two-week ceasefire is in place as of this writing, with roughly one week remaining. High-level talks, including direct engagement at the vice-presidential level, something that did not occur during the 18-plus months of JCPOA negotiations, are ongoing. There is pressure, from multiple directions, to produce a deal quickly. That pressure is unlikely to produce a signed agreement on the current timeline, and it would be a mistake to expect one. Nuclear negotiations of this complexity are not resolved in weeks. The JCPOA took nearly two years of intensive diplomacy with teams of specialists working full-time on the technical details. The current talks are happening at higher levels, which creates political momentum, but political momentum is not a substitute for the painstaking technical work of verifying stockpile quantities, agreeing on inspection protocols, sequencing sanctions relief, and handling the question of the existing 60 percent material. As the ceasefire expiration approaches, expect both sides to take negotiations to the wire, potentially followed by face-saving extensions (i.e., another week or two of ceasefire agreement due to “progress” in negotiations). The U.S. has extracted roughly 90 percent of what an air campaign can achieve; getting the last 10 percent would require disproportionate effort. Additionally, troops on the ground could present serious political problems for the Trump administration at home. Iran has absorbed severe damage and has no interest in further degradation of its already-battered military. The mutual incentive to avoid a resumption of the fight is real. But mutual interest in avoiding conflict is not the same as having a deal. The gap between a 5-year and a 20-year moratorium, and the question of what happens to the 60 percent stockpile, are not small technical disputes. There are fundamental disagreements about Iran’s long-term status as a near-nuclear state. Bridging them will take longer than the current ceasefire allows, and anyone claiming otherwise is not reckoning honestly with the complexity of what is being negotiated. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit grayandgritty.substack.com/subscribe [https://grayandgritty.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Ground Troops in Iran?

Below is an article summarizing our conversation on this week’s podcast. It is provided for those who prefer to read rather than listen. We are now 11 days into the U.S.-Iran conflict. In the first week of the conflict, the US expended more than 3,000 precision-guided munitions, decimated most of Iran’s navy—including the first ship sunk by a submarine-launched torpedo since the Falklands War—and destroyed IRGC command nodes across the country. The situation has developed faster than almost anyone predicted. And the harder questions are only now coming into focus. Here is where things stand, and what we think the next phase of this conflict actually looks like. The Ground Troops Question The social media chatter about American boots on the ground in Iran has grown louder, with speculation centering on two locations: Kharg Island, in the northern Persian Gulf where Iran conducts most of its oil exports, and the islands near the Strait of Hormuz. The case for large-scale ground troops—the kind needed for true regime change—simply does not exist right now. Operations like that require months of preparation. The Iraq invasion took six months of buildup and consisted of over 150,000 troops. While the capability to conduct a large-scale air campaign is in place, the infrastructure to conduct an Iraq-style invasion is not. More importantly, the primary objectives of this campaign—dismantling the 3H network of Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, destroying Iran’s conventional military capacity, and neutralizing the nuclear program—do not require a ground invasion to achieve. The air campaign is doing the first three progressively and effectively. The nuclear question is where ground forces become a genuine, if highly risky, possibility. Iran’s enrichment capability has been substantially destroyed. But the physical stockpiles of highly enriched uranium—material that was potentially buried beneath Natanz during the June strikes—remain unaccounted for. These are not warheads. They are canisters of 60-percent-enriched uranium, potentially dispersed across multiple sites. The Iranians almost certainly anticipated that this material would become a target and have had every incentive to scatter it. Recovering that material would require extraordinary intelligence—specific location data, probably from Mossad or CIA—and a special operations raid under extraordinarily hostile conditions. Iran knows this is coming. They are prepared for it. And any team going in would be operating against a regime with nothing left to lose and would be fighting back hard. The enriched uranium stockpile is the last real bargaining chip Iran holds. They know it. We know it. That makes going after it both the most important objective and the most dangerous one. The cancellation of an 82nd Airborne training exercise has fed speculation that large-scale airborne operations are being planned. That may be reading too much into a single data point — training exercises get cancelled for any number of reasons. But it cannot be entirely dismissed either. What seems more likely than a U.S. ground assault is an Israeli special operations mission, potentially backed by American air power. Israel has far more skin in this game—a nuclear-armed Iran is an existential threat to Israel in a way it simply is not to the United States. That asymmetry in stakes makes it easier to justify the asymmetry in risk tolerance that a ground mission would require. Politically, an Israeli-led operation also gives the administration considerably more room to maneuver domestically. American air support for an Israeli raid to secure nuclear material is a much easier sell than American soldiers on the ground in Tehran. Russia's Intelligence Sharing Is No Surprise The United States has been sharing intelligence with Ukraine that directly enables combat operations against Russian forces. Russia sharing intelligence with Iran is the mirror image of exactly that. The causes may be more or less just, but the logic is the same, and anyone who has been paying attention to how great powers behave in proxy and adjacent conflicts should not be surprised. More practically, the Russian intelligence sharing does not appear to be making much difference. Iran has not successfully hit a U.S. naval vessel. The targets being struck are largely predictable anyway. The operational impact, so far, is marginal. Venezuela, Iran, China: 3D Chess or Coincidence? A compelling narrative has emerged that the Venezuela operation and the Iran campaign are connected elements of a deliberate grand strategy. That they are a master plan designed to squeeze China’s energy supply, demonstrate American military reach, and walk into future summit negotiations from a position of overwhelming leverage. Large-scale military operations of this kind are extraordinarily difficult to keep coordinated as deliberate strategy. If something like this were true, it is very likely that it would have already leaked from the administration. And the Venezuela operation has the fingerprints of a president focused on his own backyard, rather than a sophisticated chess move aimed at Beijing. Venezuelan oil is also low-grade crude that will take years and significant investment to make useful. Also, China only gets about 4% of its oil from Venezuela. It is not the kind of asset you seize as part of a global energy strategy. It is far likelier that the Venezuela strategy was exactly what the administration said it was: a focused approach to the Western Hemisphere. Iran is a more complex case. The administration had been pressing for a nuclear deal and lost patience. The regime has spent fifty years destabilizing the region, funding proxy violence, and working toward a nuclear capability. At some point, the calculus shifted from coercive diplomacy to direct action. That is a legitimate strategic choice and does not require a China theory to explain it. That said, the downstream effects on China are real, even if they were not the primary intent. China gets roughly half its oil from the Middle East (if only 14% from Iran). The Strait of Hormuz closure disrupts that supply and puts pressure on Beijing’s 100-day strategic reserve of oil. And the U.S. is walking into a Trump-Xi summit having just demonstrated, in vivid terms, that it is willing and able to project decisive military force across the world. Whether or not this was designed as leverage, it functions as leverage. Xi Jinping is watching U.S. military operations around the globe and doing the same math as everyone else. The complication is that this leverage cuts in both directions. China is also watching the United States burn through its high-end munitions inventory at a pace that cannot be quickly replenished. Beijing is likely noting that the United States may have a meaningful capability gap opening up between now and 2027 or 2028. That window doesn’t necessarily make Chinese adventurism more likely in the near term, but it could be a part of a larger decision to move on Taiwan. China’s internal commentary on the Iran conflict has been telling. The dominant theme has been to sit back and let the United States consume itself in another Middle East conflict. China’s rise over the last two decades occurred largely while America was bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan. Are We Already in World War III? The question has moved from fringe concern to mainstream conversation. Volodymyr Zelensky has argued it started with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Jamie Dimon (the CEO of JPMorgan Chase) has said it has already begun. So are we in WWIII? Well, it kind of depends on your definition. If World War III means a direct military confrontation between nuclear-armed great powers, we are not there. If it means a global systemic conflict involving multiple theaters, proxy forces, economic warfare, and the breakdown of the post-WWII international order, then we are somewhere on that continuum and moving in a concerning direction. The more useful frame is probably the concept of the long geopolitical cycle. The order established at the end of World War II—the Bretton Woods institutions, the UN Security Council framework, the American-led alliance system, the primacy of international law in governing the use of force—is visibly fraying. The conditions that historically precede these convulsive cycle-endings are present. There is an ambitious rising power with authoritarian characteristics, a prevailing power that is financially overextended (a $1.9 trillion deficit), military overextension over two decades of foreign engagement, deep internal political divisions, and the erosion of rule-of-law constraints in favor of raw power calculations. But intellectual honesty requires acknowledging the limits of these frameworks. Before 2000, serious scholars were writing about the “end of history” and a permanent liberal peace underwritten by American hegemony. Thomas Friedman’s famous observation that no two countries with McDonald’s had ever gone to war with each other was treated as near-law. . . until Russia and Ukraine, both with McDonald’s, went to war. Grand historical predictions have a poor track record precisely because the world is too complex and contingent for them. But. The warning signals are genuine, the trajectory is concerning, and the time to get one’s house in order—economically, militarily, diplomatically, institutionally—is before the crisis fully arrives, not during it. Inspired, mature leadership that is willing to make difficult decisions across political cycles will be required. Whether that leadership materializes is the open question that no model or theory can answer in advance. The Taiwan Timeline One final consideration about China and Taiwan. The Davidson Window is the assessment that China would have the capability to move on Taiwan by 2027. This assessment has dominated strategic planning discussions for years. We believe that Xi Jinping has three constraints that all point to a window after mid-2028 rather than before. First, the 21st Party Congress in November 2027, at which he will secure an unprecedented fourth term. He will not risk a failed Taiwan operation in the months leading up to that consolidation of power. Second, winter conditions in the Taiwan Strait make a post-Party Congress crossing in late 2027 or early 2028 operationally extremely difficult. Third, the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Olympics. Vladimir Putin did not invade Ukraine until after the Sochi Winter Olympics concluded. China will not choose to be a global pariah during games it intends to use to demonstrate the superiority of its system. Those games end in late July 2028. Late summer 2028 also brings a contentious American presidential election. This moment of intense domestic distraction is one China could seek to exploit. What to Watch for Do any special operations activities materialize around the nuclear material? Does the 82nd Airborne cancellation prove significant or irrelevant? Does the Trump-Xi summit at the end of the month shift the diplomatic landscape? And does Iran find any way to meaningfully escalate before its remaining military capacity is fully exhausted? Gray and Gritty is a national security podcast hosted by LJ Winnefeld and Admiral (Ret.) Sandy Winnefeld. New episodes every Tuesday. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit grayandgritty.substack.com/subscribe [https://grayandgritty.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Third Order Effects of the U.S.-Iran Conflict

The news cycle has fixated on what is getting hit, whether the Strait of Hormuz will close, and what oil is trading at. Those are the obvious questions. But they are not the most important ones. Every military action of this scale generates ripple effects that take weeks or months to fully surface — strategic, economic, legal, and geopolitical consequences that outlast the conflict itself. Here is what is actually worth watching. An article summarizing our conversation follows if you would prefer to read rather than listen. How Does This End? The administration has offered no coherent answer to this question, and that ambiguity is itself a strategic problem. The stated rationale for the strikes has shifted between at least three positions: regime change, preempting an imminent Iranian threat, and a circular argument that Israel was about to strike Iran anyway, Iran would have retaliated against U.S. forces, so the U.S. had to strike first. These are not complementary arguments. They are competing ones, and the confusion they create complicates every possible path to an exit. The regime change framing is particularly consequential. When survival is on the table, adversaries do not negotiate — they dig in. By framing the conflict in existential terms for Iranian leadership, the administration has made a negotiated settlement harder to achieve, not easier. Leaders who believe they are fighting for their lives do not make concessions. However, there is a political offramp being constructed in parallel. The argument — already previewed publicly — is that the U.S. did everything short of boots on the ground, and if the Iranian people did not rise up to seize the moment, that is on them. It is a way of declaring success without achieving regime change. Whether it is persuasive is a separate question, but it is the most likely public framing if a clean military outcome does not materialize. A Qatar-brokered nuclear deal remains the most plausible diplomatic endpoint. But before any of that, expect significantly more munitions to be expended. Anyone claiming to know exactly how this ends is not being honest about the nature of Middle Eastern conflicts, which have a long history of defying prediction. The Weapons Problem The U.S. is burning through a substantial volume of high-end precision munitions — Patriots, THAADs, AMRAAMs, Tomahawks. This matters far beyond the current conflict. For roughly a decade, the military services systematically prioritized force structure — ships, aircraft, personnel — over munitions procurement. The logic was understandable in a budget-constrained environment, but the consequence was that defense prime contractors were pushed to minimum sustaining production rates and, in some cases, stopped manufacturing certain munitions entirely. You cannot simply turn that back on. Assembly lines require workers with specialized skills. Supply chains — particularly for rocket motors and sophisticated guidance components — are long and fragile. Some of the same components appear across multiple missile programs, forcing painful tradeoffs when production ramps up. The U.S. will not run out of weapons entirely. There is a large inventory of unguided bombs that can be fitted with precision guidance kits, and those will last a long time. But the high-end inventory that provides the most credible deterrence against sophisticated adversaries is finite, and replenishing it will take years, not months. What the conflict has also demonstrated, however, is the extraordinary capability gap between the U.S. military and everyone else. Thousands of targets prosecuted against an adversary equipped with Russian and Chinese air defense systems — and American technology has performed at a level that should give pause to any potential adversary. The planning complexity alone, the airspace coordination, and the command and control required to execute operations at this scale represent a capability no other military on earth can currently match. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are watching. The calculation they are likely making: yes, U.S. munitions stockpiles may be somewhat depleted, but these are not people you want to fight. That deterrent effect may be more valuable in the short term than any potential vulnerability in the munitions stockpile. The longer-term imperative is clear: the War Department needs to award prime contractors multi-year contracts that justify the capital investment required to dramatically increase production. That has to happen now. There is one more signal from this conflict that cuts at the heart of adversary decision-making. This is now the second time the U.S. has directly targeted a foreign head of state. The obvious question any leader in Moscow or Beijing is quietly asking: could they do that to me? The answer that provides them some reassurance — and the same answer that explains why Iran wanted a nuclear weapon so badly — is the nuclear umbrella. No American president is going to risk a nuclear exchange by targeting a nuclear-armed adversary’s leadership. That deterrent is real. But for any non-nuclear state, the calculus just shifted significantly. What This Means for China China is more exposed to Middle Eastern energy than most Western coverage acknowledges. Roughly half of China’s oil imports come from the Middle East, with Iran supplying somewhere between 12 and 15 percent of the total. A disrupted Strait of Hormuz does not immediately cripple Beijing, but it is not a rounding error either. China has built up approximately a 100-day strategic petroleum reserve, anticipating exactly this kind of scenario. In the near term, the impact will be felt in prices rather than supply — oil becomes more expensive, which flows through the broader Chinese economy. Beijing will also look to expand imports from Russia to compensate. But the buffer is not infinite, and if the conflict extends or escalates, that math starts to tighten. Yesterday, the President said that the U.S. Navy would begin to escort tankers through the Strait if necessary. There is a peculiar irony in this. The policy is driven by keeping Gulf state partners onside and keeping energy prices low for American consumers — not by any desire to benefit China. But if American naval escorts keep Middle Eastern oil flowing, China could end up with U.S. military protection of its own energy supply lines as a side effect. It is important to think of oil is a commodity: a barrel kept on the market is available to whoever needs it, regardless of flags or politics. The more durable strategic consequence is the vulnerability exposure itself. China’s dependence on Middle Eastern energy — flowing through the Strait of Hormuz and then the Strait of Malacca — is a potential structural weakness in any prolonged confrontation with the United States. We’ve discussed this before, when considering possible non-military deterrents to counter a potential invasion of Taiwan. A 100-day reserve sounds substantial until you consider that a conflict over Taiwan could easily run longer. We believe that leverage should sit more prominently in every planner’s calculation on both sides. Europe’s Quiet Exposure Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine severed much of Europe’s reliance on Russian natural gas, European countries have diversified their LNG imports — and the Middle East, particularly Qatar, has become a more important source. Italy, France, and Belgium are the most dependent. Europe now sources roughly half its LNG from the United States, which provides a meaningful buffer, but the Middle Eastern share is large enough that Strait of Hormuz disruption has already pushed European gas prices higher. The Russia-Ukraine dimension is less straightforward than it might appear. A common assumption is that disrupting Iran cuts off a key military supplier to Moscow. That was true — until Russia began domestically manufacturing its own Shahed-style drones, having acquired the design from Iran. The direct military supply line from Tehran to Moscow is now less critical than it was a year ago. The indirect effect — Iran, too consumed with its own survival to provide Russia with any meaningful support — may matter more over time. The Legal Framework Is Breaking Down This is the conversation that makes people uncomfortable, but it has the longest tail. Under international law, there are three legitimate bases for the use of military force: a UN Security Council resolution, genuine self-defense against an imminent attack, or an invitation from a sovereign government. None of those three conditions are cleanly met here. The Security Council was not consulted. The “imminent threat” justification has been undercut by the administration’s own simultaneous rhetoric about regime change — you cannot claim self-defense and regime change at the same time without raising serious questions about which is actually driving the decision. No government invited U.S. forces onto Iranian territory. The allied response is the clearest signal of how this reads internationally. The United Kingdom — one of America’s closest partners, a country that has provided Diego Garcia as a staging base for Middle Eastern operations in the past — declined to do so this time. Spain has been loudly critical; the administration responded by threatening trade cutoffs. The broader NATO alliance sat out. These are not countries reflexively opposed to American military action. They have supported it repeatedly when the legal and strategic case held up. Their absence here is a meaningful data point. The power of American leadership has always been strongest when backed by the legitimacy of law. One without the other is a diminished version of both. The domestic legal picture is no cleaner. Congress has not authorized this military action. The War Powers Resolution has been stretched and selectively applied by administrations of both parties for decades. If Congress does not assert its constitutional authority — through hearings, through a formal vote, through any meaningful assertion of oversight — it will have established a precedent that any future president can invoke: self-defense claims, asserted unilaterally, with no legislative check required. That precedent does not expire with this administration. It is available to whoever comes next, under whatever circumstances they choose to define as a threat. The broader stakes are harder to quantify but difficult to dismiss. The rules-based international order — imperfect, unevenly applied, frequently criticized — has nonetheless provided the scaffolding for eight decades of relative great-power stability. When the framework governing the use of force is treated as optional by the country that did the most to build it, it does not simply bend. It erodes. And the countries watching most carefully are not America’s allies. They are its competitors, taking careful notes on what is now considered permissible. The Bigger Picture Taken together, these threads point toward something larger than a U.S.-Iran conflict. Weapons stockpiles are being drawn down faster than industrial capacity can currently replenish them. Legal frameworks that have governed international conduct for generations are fraying at the edges. Alliances built over decades are showing visible strain. China is being handed both a vulnerability and a sobering lesson in American military capability. And the domestic constitutional balance between executive and legislative authority over war is being tested in ways that will have consequences long after the last missile lands. Gray and Gritty is a national security podcast hosted by James “LJ” Winnefeld and Admiral (Ret.) Sandy Winnefeld. New episodes every Tuesday. The views expressed here are the personal opinions of the two authors and do not reflect official positions of the U.S. Government. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit grayandgritty.substack.com/subscribe [https://grayandgritty.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Loose Tweets Sink Fleets

This week on the Gray and Gritty Podcast. . . The Iran Standoff As this episode was recorded, a significant volume of U.S. military assets had been repositioned toward the Middle East—carrier strike groups, long-range strike platforms, and supporting forces flowing steadily into the CENTCOM area of operations. Negotiations between U.S. and Iranian representatives are underway in Geneva, while protests inside Iran are beginning to intensify. The question on the table: would the accumulation of force produce a deal, or precede a strike? Sandy offers important context on what that decision-making process actually looks like at the highest levels of government—not the version that leaks to social media, but the disciplined, structured deliberation that happens inside the Pentagon’s Tank, where the Joint Chiefs meet in their most secure configuration to weigh options candidly before anything reaches the President’s desk. He pushes back on characterizations of General Dan Cain’s reported reservations as opposition, explaining that honest risk assessment from senior military advisors is not dissent—it is exactly what the system is designed to produce. The Joint Chiefs would not be doing it right if they did not have candid conversations about strategically consequential decisions. A Framework for When to Use Force The most substantive portion of the episode centers on a methodology Sandy developed alongside former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Martin Dempsey during their time as Chairman and Vice Chairman—a five-tiered hierarchy of national security interests against which any potential use of force can be evaluated: * Survival of the United States as a free market democracy * Prevention of catastrophic attacks on the United States * Protection of the rules-based international order and global economy * Secure, confident, and reliable allies and partners * Protection and extension of universal values Applied to Iran, the framework yields a sobering and honest assessment. The correlation between a potential strike and the highest-ranked interests—survival, prevention of catastrophic attack, preservation of the global order—is, at best, negligible. The cleaner intersections appear at the fourth and fifth tiers: regional partners who have long sought to prevent Iranian nuclear capability, and a civilian population whose violent suppression by the regime has drawn international condemnation. The conclusion is not that force is wrong, but that the strategic case is more nuanced than either hawkish or dovish commentary tends to acknowledge. What the assembled force may ultimately accomplish, Sandy argues, is coercive diplomacy—pressuring Tehran into a negotiated outcome without a single shot fired. The Unsolvable OPSEC Problem The second major theme of the episode is directly relevant to anyone serving in or recently separated from the military: the slow collapse of operational security in the age of open-source intelligence (OSINT) and social media. Service members are trained from their earliest days to guard information about movements, intentions, and capabilities. Yet the carrier strike group and the mass of air power headed to the Middle East have been tracked in near real-time by civilian accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers—accounts that, in many cases, outcycle official reporting. Sandy had experience leading through OSINT challenges while commanding USS Enterprise during the lead-up to strikes in Afghanistan. In the month between the 9/11 attacks and the first strikes on Afghanistan, Sandy cut the internet aboard the USS Enterprise to condition the crew (and families back home) for what it would be like during combat operations. This had a secondary effect of preventing an internet blackout from becoming an indicator for potential forthcoming strikes. The truth is that social media is making OSINT a more potent challenge for operational security than ever before. The answer will require adaptation—using deception, conditioning, and the information environment itself as operational tools. The story of how he managed shipboard internet access for 30 days specifically to prevent the crew’s silence from becoming a signal is a small but telling illustration of how commanders will need to think in an era where every movement, communication, or blackout is a data point for adversary decision-making. Our episode closes with a speed round: Sandy’s probability assessment on strikes against Iran in the next ten days (70%), the next three months (80–90%), and a brief, warm exchange about the State of the Union, the particular discipline required of Joint Chiefs sitting in the House chamber, and the merits of watching from home. Listen to the full episode above. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit grayandgritty.substack.com/subscribe [https://grayandgritty.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Iran’s Protests, Xi’s Purge, and the Treaty Nobody Noticed Dying

Moving forward, every podcast will be accompanied by a full-length article. This is for those subscribers who prefer to read over listen. If you read the article below, you will get the gist of the podcast episode. If you prefer to hear our conversation about it, you can find our podcast on most platforms. On to this week’s episode... It’s been a little over two weeks since our last podcast, and quite a bit has happened. Iran’s streets are still on fire, Xi Jinping just gutted his own military leadership in a way we haven’t seen in decades, and the last nuclear arms treaty between the U.S. and Russia quietly expired while almost nobody was paying attention. Plus a Navy collision and a very fishy story out of El Paso. Iran Protests It has been hard to determine exactly what is happening on the ground in Iran as the regime has instituted an internet blackout. The regime has used internet disruptions before, but what we’re seeing now is a broad, sustained effort to throttle connectivity. Now, our intelligence picture isn’t entirely dependent on the internet being up. We have other sources and methods we obviously can’t get into here. And there’s been reporting—the Wall Street Journal had a great piece on this [https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/u-s-smuggled-thousands-of-starlink-terminals-into-iran-after-protest-crackdown-69a8c74f?gaa_at=eafs&gaa_n=AWEtsqd2M9cWtAei1hG5YDH8WG1J2D-6msfUwKxIgUQmrBuCcesy9kYUcmmDC3XU1ME%3D&gaa_ts=699475a4&gaa_sig=XkaAPY2rG7xTvvU5ALu4WSQKosQVG6UQCEeLNXR0Vb0j5k88k3Nk4sTb_Z7VSI-bJSSJQ91a_onBRQcJFfUvkw%3D%3D]—about the U.S. smuggling Starlink terminals into Iran to help people get information out even when the regime clamps down. That tells you something about how deeply our intelligence agencies have penetrated into the country. Mossad has clearly done the same. So while the casualty numbers coming out of these protests vary wildly—we’ve seen reports anywhere from tens of thousands to as high as 90,000, all unconfirmed—we probably have a decent picture of what’s actually happening on the ground. While Tehran is killing its own people, the U.S. and Iran are also heading into another round of nuclear talks. The second round is in Geneva, with Oman mediating, and the IAEA is pressing for clarity on Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile and access to key sites. So what does success actually look like here? It’s not regime change. We want to be really clear on that. Regime change is a phrase people throw around like it’s a switch you flip. It’s not. Even when you remove a leader—as we saw in Venezuela—the regime is still in place, the oppressive government is still doing what it does. Actual regime change in Iran without major U.S. boots on the ground is, in our view, impossible. And even then, you have to ask: change to what? The realistic definition of success is narrower: tighter constraints on enrichment, accountability for stockpiles—especially the highly enriched uranium that was moved before last summer’s strikes—real verification, and a deal that reduces the sprint-to-a-weapon risk without tipping into a broader war. Iran will be a tough negotiator. As Sandy likes to point out, the Iranians invented chess. They play things very close to the line. And they’ve lost most of their regional leverage—Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis have all been significantly degraded. The only real card they have left to threaten Israel is ballistic missiles, so getting them to give those up is going to be extraordinarily hard. Israel, for its part, is exactly where it’s always been: deeply skeptical of any negotiated outcome short of total elimination with intrusive inspections. Netanyahu made that clear just the other day. Trump pushed back, saying he’d prefer a deal to returning to combat. But the second carrier strike group heading to the region sends a very clear signal—and we literally just used that kind of posture in Venezuela a few months ago. What we’re watching: Is this mostly sticks, or will there be carrots? We think it’s mostly the release of the stick, “we won’t strike you if you give us a deal,” with maybe a minor symbolic carrot, like limited sanctions relief, that Iranian leaders can point to domestically. Whether Iran responds to that kind of pressure, or whether things escalate further, is the question of the next few weeks. China is Purging its Own Generals Xi Jinping has been systematically dismantling his own senior military leadership, and it just escalated significantly. In late January, China announced an investigation into Zhang Youxia, a vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission and someone long considered one of Xi’s closest allies. Their fathers were boyhood friends. This wasn’t a corruption charge, either. The stated basis was essentially “trampling on the chairman’s duty to lead,” meaning this guy directly challenged Xi’s authority. That’s a very different kind of removal than the corruption purges we’ve seen before. At this point, Xi has removed all but one of the CMC’s vice-chairmen. He is, effectively, the sole leader of the world's largest military. Now, we need to be careful here, because we’ve had our own senior military shakeups in the U.S.—the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Chief of Naval Operations, the Chief of the Coast Guard, a combatant commander, others—all removed in the past year. We’re not equating the two systems. Our officers aren’t going to prison. Lisa Franchetti isn’t in jail—she’s in retirement. The U.S. purge was driven by perceptions around DEI and a desire for change, not by officers threatening the president. That’s just not how our military operates. But rapid senior turnover in any system creates disruption and uncertainty, and that’s worth acknowledging honestly. Does this change Taiwan's timelines? Probably not. A possible invasion of Taiwan hinges on bigger factors: PLA readiness (something strategic leaders have little to do with), political windows (i.e., the 2028 Olympics), perceived U.S. and allied posture, and the complex calculus of escalation. A purge can signal turbulence, but it can also strengthen loyalty. One interesting wrinkle: the CIA just released a recruitment video explicitly targeting disaffected PLA personnel, trying to capitalize on the resentment and turmoil inside the system. It went viral in U.S. military circles. Whether it actually penetrated China is another question—what resonates with an American audience may not land the same way in another culture. But it tells you something about how opaque China’s military remains. As we’ve said before, it’s essentially a black hole from an intelligence perspective, and some of those six things you need for a great military—will, skill, culture, technology, mass, logistics—are very hard to assess from the outside until someone actually has to fight. One of the Most Important Stories Almost Nobody Talked About On February 5th, the New START Treaty—the last remaining nuclear arms control agreement between the U.S. and Russia—expired. And unless you’re plugged into national security circles, you probably didn’t even hear about it. That’s a problem, because this is one of the most consequential things that happened in the last two weeks within the realm of national security and foreign policy. New START wasn’t just about the headline numbers, though those mattered: 1,550 deployed strategic warheads and 700 deployed delivery systems per side. The real value was the verification architecture—on-site inspections, data exchanges, and notifications when missiles moved. That infrastructure is what “strategic stability” actually means in practice: two nations that can wipe each other out maintaining enough confidence that it’s very unlikely to happen. Sandy was part of the team that negotiated this treaty. He was on the Washington end—working out of the White House Situation Room and providing guidance to the forward negotiating team led by Rose Gottemoeller at the State Department. One of the interesting dynamics he remembers: because of our IT systems and decision-making processes, the U.S. side could quickly turn around answers to negotiating questions. The Russian side had a much more cumbersome bureaucratic system. What this meant was that the U.S. side would reach decisions faster than the Russians. The discipline was not to “negotiate against yourself” during those delays—the Russians weren’t rejecting proposals, they were just slow. Putin offered a one-year extension to keep the New START limits in place while negotiating a new agreement. Trump rejected it, saying he wants a more modern deal that includes China. On paper, that sounds responsible. In practice, it’s brutally hard. Sandy calls it the “three-body problem” — negotiating between two nuclear powers is already agonizing, and bringing in a third makes it nearly unsolvable. China has consistently resisted joining the trilateral arms control regime because its arsenal is smaller and it doesn’t want to lock itself into a perceived disadvantage. There could also be a political dimension. It is likely that Trump doesn’t want to live with an Obama-era treaty. He wants to put his own stamp on something. Neither side is going to suddenly build a bunch of new warheads. That process is expensive, politically difficult, and would take time that would be visible to intelligence collection. The real risk is the lack of verification, leading to less information and a more clouded decision matrix. That’s how miscalculation risk rises, especially during crises that involve cyber, space, and conventional operations alongside nuclear signaling. It’s also worth noting: the actual number of warheads on each side—roughly 5,400 for Russia and 5,100 for the U.S.—is much larger than the deployed limits. Most are in storage, not readily deployable. Generating them would be a deliberate, recognizable process. But without a treaty framework, even the confidence that comes from knowing what the other side is doing erodes over time. This story is going to keep evolving. And frankly, negotiating something like this is probably the single most important thing a president can do. Speed Round Two Navy Ships Collide in the Caribbean The destroyer USS Truxtun and the supply ship USNS Supply collided during an underway replenishment, with minor injuries reported. Social media, naturally, had opinions—mostly along the lines of “they had so much time to move apart.” Which tells you people don’t understand how this works. Underway replenishment means pulling alongside another ship at about 13 knots, closing to within 120–140 feet, and staying there for hours while hoses and high-tension wires pass back and forth under load. There’s a Venturi effect that literally tries to suck the ships together. Add crosswinds, night conditions, and the fact that these things don’t turn like cars, and you get a sense of how demanding this evolution is. It’s one of the things that can get a captain fired. We don’t want to prejudge the investigation. But almost every collision like this comes down to human factors or mechanical failure, like a steering casualty in which the rudder goes somewhere it’s not supposed to. Either way, it’s a reminder that readiness isn’t just about combat. It’s about operational excellence in the day-to-day stuff that keeps a Navy running. The El Paso Airspace Closure (and the Rumor Machine) The FAA briefly shut down airspace over El Paso, initially announced as a 10-day closure for national defense reasons—then lifted it almost immediately. The story that traveled fastest on social media was about cartel drones coming across the border. The more likely explanation? A counter-drone exercise at Fort Bliss—which is right next to the El Paso airport and where the Army does its air defense work—combined with a monumental breakdown in communications between the Pentagon and the FAA. Think about it: if you’re a cartel leader trying to move product via drone, you’re not doing it over the El Paso airport. You’re doing it in the middle of the desert, where a pickup truck can meet you. The 10-day timeline also doesn’t make sense for a cartel drone incursion—you’d close airspace for 24 hours, not 10 days. We hope the Army had a very successful counter-drone exercise and learned from it. But this is the future showing up early: counter-drone defense in domestic airspace is messy—technically, legally, and bureaucratically. And when agencies don’t share a common operating picture, the public fills the gap with whatever story travels fastest. The lesson, as always: don’t have a knee-jerk reaction. Let the facts settle before you form an opinion. (Since we talked about this on Friday, more information has come to light about the incident. Read more here [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/11/us/trump-administration-el-paso-airspace-closure-questions.html]) Or as Sandy put it: “These are not the drones you’re looking for.” Thanks for reading. If you prefer to listen, the full episode is available wherever you get your podcasts. And thank you to our paying subscribers — you make all of this possible. This is a public episode. 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