"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux

Barely makes a difference and those goons are very much not trained for it.

I have not seen the part of this plan that makes me think, "yeah, they really thought that part through."

Correct. That system continues to function. It would not need to be recreated, it still exists. It is still staffed.

Congress would just need to flip the 'on' switch, authorizing conscription and the gears would grind forward.

That...seems...ill-considered.

It'd be a pain, but the system has always had to cope with that.

It could cope with it again.

I just think it is worth remembering that it is just 54 years since the last draft right now; folks think it couldn't happen.

But the draft had been idle for 52 years when Wilson activated it in 1917.

I think that's precisely correct.

But there's a huge difference between the notional military capacity of the United States 'when roused,' as it were and the military capacity available to the President in a discretionary fashion (illegally) as here.

The latter is insufficient to hold down Iran unless you get *really* lucky.

I really think the Trump folks are totally unprepared for the fact that the Iranians can keep the war 'going' just by threatening the Strait.

Trump can't just declare victory and walk away from this one, unless Iran lets him. Which they do not appear inclined to do.

In short, the United States *could* do this thing, but only in an environment where the public understood the mission and was highly supportive of it, because you would be demanding significant sacrifices.

Under current circumstances...yeah, you can't do it.

Active duty gets you to ~450,000, guard and reserve to ~900,000.

So you can get there, but not comfortably and you need to cannibalize everything else and mobilize the whole Guard and Reserve and then probably do conscription to provide rotations.

So is where I feel the need to remind folks that the selective service system still exists.

But in practice, yeah. Super-lazy back-of-the-envelope, holding all of Iran might require c. 600,000 ground troops. (~3x our max Iraq deployment).

But you also need rotations, so 2x or 3x that.

And something tells me the companies involved will keep pressing until they do.

Huh. Wow, really. That's tough.

So, uh, what are the Senate seats that become competitive in a D+15 environment? What about D+20? D+25?

Ironically, if the whole 'we were forced to attack Iran because the Israelis were going to' turns out to be true, then Trump will have committed the same strategic sin of creating conditions where others could force him into a war against his interests.

Though I suppose I might characterize Wilhelm in that moment as like a fellow who, having floored the accelerator feels sudden regret as he approaches the turn.

His prior bellicosity created the conditions where me might be effectively forced into the war despite his sudden outbreak of concern.

Oh, I mean, I'm sure that's true, I just don't think the Judge is going to be terribly impressed by that position.

'My right pocket cannot pay you because my wallet is in my left pocket, sir' is just a delaying tactic.

The thing you have to remember is that Pete Hegseth has never seriously engaged with Clausewitz because his superiors correctly determined that his career ought to flame out well before he got sent to a staff college.

I'll have to try that trick the next time I get a speeding ticket.

Unfair, those guys were substantially more capable than he is.

It is, of course, all gender.

We're doing War-as-Gender-Affirming-Care. Some men get hair transplants, some buy a too-expensive car, Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth accidentally-on-purpose tank the global economy killing thousands in an idiot war.
bsky.app/profile/prom...

Incredible to watch Hegseth just faceplanting into the Absolute Destruction acceleration of violence with his whole face.

Utterly convinced that you lose wars if you don't war crimes hard enough and entirely unprepared for any other theory of victory or success.

Why Are There No Ships in the Strait of Hormuz | March 5, 2026, Update

Video: youtu.be/lwSLe1qWpSs

I was just about to say, 'but this sure does seem like a job for @mercoglianos.bsky.social '

Unlike the Red Sea crisis, where the solution was 'go around Africa the long way' there is no other route for these ships to take. There is no feasible alternative for a lot of this oil to move - some of it can be piped, but not most.

It's just stuck. Completely stuck.

Again, I am not claiming to be a Shipping Knower - I'm not.

But I can read a map and I can do basic math and if traffic through an artery that moves a quarter of the world's natural gas and oil is down by ~95%, that is going to be a global economic problem pretty quickly.

A marinetraffic map showing ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz 2/27/2026 at 22:00 UTC. There are dozens of large ships moving through the strait.

For comparison, this is what normal pre-war traffic through the strait looked like - this is what they have to restore:

I count at least two-dozen tankers (large red arrows) transiting the strait at any given time.

I'm by no means a pro at using MarineTraffic but having looked it up, green is cargo, red is tanker and the size of the dot or arrow indicates the size of the craft. So the wee little green arrows are small cargo ships.

You want to watch the big red arrows. Which are, you know, not transiting.

So there are a few ships making the Hormuz run, but in tiny numbers and not big ones.

By contrast, you can see the huge cloud of ships waiting outside the strait on either side.

Until there are more ships moving in the strait than sitting outside, the USA/Israel is not winning.

Home by Christmas is what I am hearing.

Yeah, in practice here the measure of operational success is just, "is it safe to navigate the Strait of Hormuz?"

If the answer is 'no,' then you haven't yet achieved the objectives.