← It Could Happen Here
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And on March 30, 2026, which is the day that I started sitting down to write the episode that you're listening to right now, Reuters published an article announcing the arrival of another 2,500 United States Marines in the Middle east as the Trump administration, quote, considers options for Iran operations. As you all know, Operation Epic Fury it's nothing to call it, but its name was launched a little over a month ago, with, the administration insists, an expected duration of four to six weeks. And we're coming up to the end of that timeline. Trump announced the day I record this March 31 that he's expecting combat operations to end in two weeks or less, so we'll see what happens tomorrow. There's supposed to be a speech by the president on Iran, so we'll know more then. But relevant reporting indicates the Trump administration is at least seriously weighing the feasibility of sending Marines in to take and hold Iranian territory, namely Kharg island and potentially other islands in the Strait of Hormuz, most of which are inhabited and all of which are heavily defended. If they go through with this, we might be about to watch in real time one of the most consequential disasters in military history, a modern day Gallipoli in which hundreds or thousands of American soldiers and billions in materiel get chewed up in an unsustainable and unwinnable war of attrition. There's no real way for the average American to know what kind of stockpile our military maintains of the most advanced munitions. We're talking precision guided missiles like the Tomahawk cruise missile, but also the interceptor missiles used by our various missile batteries. Estimates suggest the U.S. has already expended about 1,000 Tomahawks in a month of combat operations, which would be around a third, maybe a little less of the total stockpile. That doesn't sound so bad until you realize that our present stockpile of Tomahawks was built up over more than a decade. We're only capable of making about 150 a year at present levels. Which means our military already burned through around seven years worth of these things. Maybe more, because in 2025 the US defense budget included something like 56 Tomahawks, even though our largely ineffectual war against the Houthis had already depleted the stockpile. This is a story that you'll hear over and over again in this episode. The US military is actually quite bad at knowing and asking for what it will need, and even worse at predicting accurately what it's going to need in the immediate future. Each tomahawk costs around $3.6 million to produce, and these are the only long range offensive we mounted by our naval destroyers. Per a source interviewed by Military Watch magazine, quote, without intervention, the Pentagon may be left out of ammunition. Now, Tomahawks aren't the only things the US military is low on. Per that same article, inventories of anti ballistic missiles and GBU 57 bunker buster bombs are estimated to have been almost totally spent while being significantly more costly to replace. We just don't have granular data on the size of US interceptor missile stockpiles or our supply of stuff like Patriot missiles. But we do have a pretty good understanding of how badly our regional allies have depleted their stockpiles of these defensive tools. Bahrain is estimated to have expended 87% of their Patriot missiles, the UAE and Kuwait are up to 75%, and Qatar is at like 40%. Experts estimate that Iran has gone through or lost via airstrike roughly a third of their ballistic missile stockpile. This may or may not be accurate, and if it's inaccurate, it may or may not be inaccurate in either direction. Our intel and Israel's intel is often very spotty when it comes to stuff like this. A good illustration of this would be the fact that on March 20, Iran fired two ICBMs at Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean that hosts a joint U.S. uK Air and Naval base. Neither missile did any damage, but that wasn't really the point. The launch of these missiles was a message from the Iranian regime to the US One. Previously, Iran had limited itself to only striking targets within 1240 miles of its own borders with ballistic missiles. Diego Garcia is roughly 2,300 miles away. Many US analysts had treated for years 1240 miles as if it represented an actual hard limit on Iran's striking capability based on what their missiles could reach, as opposed to what it really was, which is a political decision made by Iranian leaders to limit the scope of conflicts. When the Trump administration launched an unprovoked series of joint strikes on Iran, killing the Supreme Leader and many senior officials, we violated one of the unstated agreements that had held for over decades of conflict. The President's supporters and major hawks on Iran argued that these self imposed limits were allowing Iran's leadership to support terrorism abroad with impunity. The strike on Diego Garcia proved that military analysts had been wrong about the top range of Iran's best ballistic missiles. But it also served as a statement from Iran's new leaders. You've taken the gloves off and thrown out the rulebook. Now we have two. Hudson Institute senior Fellow Khan Kosopoglu published an analysis that made this same basic argument. A strike profile extending into the Indian Ocean demonstrates not merely extended range, but Iran's deliberate abandonment of strategic ambiguity. Iran is no longer signaling restraint, it is signaling reach, and doing so under live war fighting conditions. It also more subtly signaled something else. US Planners didn't know as much as they thought they did about Iran's capabilities. This has been evident since the war began, despite Trump's claims to have totally annihilated Iran's offensive capability. On March 27, a combined missile and drone attack hit Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, injuring more than 10 US soldiers too seriously and damaging several aircraft. One of these, which we have pictures of, was an E3 AWACS, aka the planes with those huge radar dishes on top. And at least one AWACS was destroyed. The Air Force only has 16 of these, and only about half are mission capable at any given time. The army also maintains a fleet of E3s. I found an article in Air and Space Forces magazine by Chris Gordon and Steven Lossy, who interviewed Heather Penny. She's a former F16 pilot and current director of the Air Force Academy's Institute for Aerospace Studies. Penney said, quote, the loss of this E3 is incredibly problematic given how crucial these battle managers are to everything from airspace deconfliction, aircraft deconfliction, targeting, and providing other lethal effects that the entire force needs. For the battlespace, E3s provide an irreplaceable service on the battlefield. They act as both airborne radar stations and air traffic control towers, spotting threats up to 250 miles away and providing Crucial early warning to forces in combat about incoming threats, particularly missiles and drones. Drones really above anything else. In other words, the E3 is really, really useful if you're, say, planning to have troops land on islands in a narrow strait surrounded by hostile forces who can shoot at you from mainland. Now, the AWACS themselves aren't technically irreplaceable, but they aren't easy to replace, especially on short notice. Each one costs between $700 million and a billion dollars. And we don't, like, we don't, like, make them anymore. AWACS are old. The average age of our remaining fleet is 45, per a relevant article in Task and Purpose magazine. Nobody makes spare parts for the E3's TF33 engines anymore, which takes a toll on maintenance. In 2022, General Mark Kelly, then the head of Air Combat Command, told reporters, we basically have 31 airplanes and hospice care, the most expensive care there is, and we need to get into the maternity business and out of hospices. That's a weird metaphor for a plane designed to help you fight wars, but we'll move past that and into some ad. And we're back. So when we left off, I'd mentioned how in 2022, Mark Kelly, then the head of Air Combat Command, was like, we've only got about 31 of these AWACs and they're in hospice care and we need to, like, make some new AWACS that are modern and aren't falling apart and have engines being produced. Unfortunately for our military, but fortunately for not our military, the Pentagon voted against getting into the maternity business last year. The E7 Wedgetail, which is in service currently in the Royal Australian Air Force, was meant to replace the E3s for the US Air Force. And the first of 26 new craft were supposed to arrive from Boeing in 2027, but the project was killed last summer. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth argued it was sort of late, more expensive and gold plated. Plus, Pete warned it might not survive a war with China. Hegseth's plan was to just have the military use satellites for all their airborne tracking needs. And if we had to have, you know, a plane doing some of that, we could just have Navy E2D Hawkeyes as a temporary replacement. Now, most of my listeners are not Air Force generals, and neither am I, but I've read stuff. Guys who know that kind of thing have written. And I'll tell you this, it's a bad fucking idea, or it's widely agreed by the experts to be a bad fucking idea. Or for One thing, the E7, which is what we would have been replacing our E3s with, has already proven itself in combat. The Aussies sent theirs over to Iraq during the fighting against isis. And per task and purpose, it quote, was so reliable that whenever American F22 fighters were in theater, the U.S. air Force asked the Aussies to support the U.S. jets. Sixteen retired U.S. air Force four star generals took the unprecedented step of writing a letter to Congress and begging them to reverse Hegseth's decision. Their reasoning why? Boils down to satellites aren't ready to track airborne targets and the Hawkeye is too small for the job. Congress ultimately reversed course, but it's uncertain when, if ever, new E7s will arrive. Certainly not in time for whatever the Trump administration is going to do next. In the meantime, the Air Force is down roughly 10% or more of its functional fleet of AWACs. And we don't even have boots on the ground anywhere. Now what I think happened here, what I think is behind all of these bad decisions, and this is not something I can verify, this is opinion, is that AWACS aren't sexy. They're not like a cool weapon system. They don't kill people directly. They facilitate other soldiers and sailors and airmen from killing people using other weapons systems. But you can't threaten somebody with just an awac. They're not like scary. And you can't show one blowing something up on the news because they don't do that. So I don't think it was a priority for Hegseth or anyone else in his administration because they're all fucking 12 year olds. Previous administrations. And let me be fair here, it's not like they were any more forward thinking. Had kind of looked at our aging fleet and said, eh, good enough. It's not like anyone were fighting as a better alternative, right? Who cares? It's the same kind of story we just heard with the Tomahawks, right? What the military was already doing was good enough to scrape by in the conflicts it was already fighting. And nobody involved in starting the next conflict was interested in making sure that the military was prepared ahead of time. Now I recognize all this talk about failures to produce war materiel in sufficient quantities may make it sound like I'm complaining that our Air Force isn't buying enough weaponry and that I'm urging us to spend more money producing arms and ammunitions. And that is not my intent. I want exactly the opposite. What I'm trying to do is to highlight how utterly unprepared Our administration is for the conflict they started and how that failure to prepare has made a major military disaster for US forces, not just foreseeable, but but likely, if the administration makes the decision to send in ground forces or in some other way significantly escalate the pace of our operations against Iran. Now, the mainstream media has done an okay job of reporting on the ammunition shortages that I've discussed, but what I don't think has been hammered home enough is that both our expenditure of advanced ammunitions and the loss of multiple aircraft due to Iranian strikes are a kind of attrition. And they're a really serious kind of attrition. Now, you may be more familiar with the term attrition as it applies to human casualties in a war or battle. But to an extent, the attrition of interceptor missiles and hard to replace special purpose vehicles like AWACS does a lot more to damage U.S. warfighting capability than human losses. A good example of this came in March 6th of this year after Iran struck and per CNN, apparently destroyed the radar system for a Thaad missile battery in Jordan. Thaad stands for Terminal High Altitude Area Defense. These are our absolute best, most effective anti missile defense systems. Each battery costs more than a billion dollars and each missile they fire costs like $12.6 million. These are part of why you don't have healthcare. Now we know another series of strikes in the UAE hit buildings housing similar radar systems to the Thaad battery in Jordan. It's unclear if these were damaged or how badly they might have been damaged. And it's gonna remain unclear because the workings of these systems are extremely classified. As of 2025, the United States owns and operates a grand total of eight Thaad batteries. So at least one of eight is now out of commission and two more may have suffered some degree of damage a month into this conflict. That is not the kind of attrition you want to see prior to actually putting boots on the ground. Now, US Military spokespeople will point out whenever asked that the vast majority of Iranian missiles and drones are being intercepted and that Iran is currently firing few of these munitions than they did at the outbreak of hostilities. And what you're supposed to conclude from that is that they're running out because we are doing a better job of attriting them than they are doing of attritting us. And I can't tell you who's actually coming off worse in this fight. I certainly don't have good insight into the levels of Iran's stockpiles, of the weapons systems that they're using. However, there is reason to doubt that the United States is coming off the better in this conflict. Ari Ciceurel is an analyst for the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, or ginsa, and he told Fox News overall, overall, high missile and drone interception rates have been important, but only tell part of the story. Iran came into this war with a deliberate plan to dismantle the architecture that makes those strikes possible. It has struck energy infrastructure to upset markets and used cluster munitions to achieve higher hit rates. Because we simply lack good data on this stuff, I can't tell you perfectly how our rate of interceptions has changed from day one to day 30, but there is evidence in a few different places that in late March, the rate of successful drone attacks on our regional allies like the UAE increased. In other words, more drones were getting through or being launched. But I think getting through is the more supported conclusion. And they're getting through because our defenses have gotten or the defenses of our allies have gotten less effective. The Jinsa report also notes that Israeli officials have stopped intercepting some cluster munition attacks in order to preserve ammunition, basically not shooting down the cluster munitions that don't look like they're going to hit anything or anyone because they don't have the ammunition to stop everything. Now, I don't doubt that Iran is also feeling somewhat pinched in the munitions department. It would be kind of weird if they weren't both due to how many they fired and how many have been destroyed via airstrikes. But the question isn't are they suffering attrition, too? It's are they better able to maintain the rate of attrition they're suffering than we are? And while I can't answer that question in absolute terms, I think the answer is probably yes. Iran's ballistic missiles generally cost a few hundred thousand dollars each. Thaad interceptor missiles cost, as I said, around $13 million. Shahid drones cost like $30,000 to make and are often stopped by munitions that cost millions to make and are hard to replace. It's also worth noting that the reduction in the total number of missiles fired by Iran is not just due to the fact that they run through some of their stockpile. It's at least partly a strategic decision, as even Fox News admits, quote, iran has adapted its tactics accordingly, shifting from large barrages to smaller, more frequent attacks designed to maintain constant pressure while gradually draining defensive resources. These persistent salvos, even if limited in size, force defenders to remain on high alert and continue expending interceptors, accelerating the depletion of already finite stockpiles. Now, there's an important point made towards the end of that paragraph. Persistent attacks force defenders to remain on high alert. This is true, and it also brings us to another under discussed aspect of attrition, the energy and time of the soldiers. Our administration expects to fight this war for them, and we'll talk about that after another brace of ads. And we're back. Too often, people who want to war game out how the US will perform in a given conflict just focus on the theoretical capabilities of the vehicles and weapons systems we own. A Nimitz class aircraft carrier has this many planes and so it can unleash this amount of firepower on a target in this amount of time. And that's a bad way to predict combat performance because it ignores the human element. The USS Gerald R. Ford, a Gerald R. Ford class aircraft carrier is what's commonly known as a supercarrier. It can travel for 25, its nuclear reactors need refueling, and it has a complement of more than 4,500 men and women. It is a small city at sea and I've talked in the past about how hard these things are to actually sink. During the Ford's deployment to fight the Houthis, there were viral rumors stoked by AI misinformation that it had been seriously damaged or even destroyed by a Houthi ballistic missile strike. Now, I pointed out at the time that this was fanciful. The defense systems on a boat like this cost billions and provide excellent proven protection against most missiles, drones and aircraft it's likely to encounter. The entire naval battle group it travels with exists to protect and enhance the carrier's capabilities. And even if it were stripped of all those things, these boats are just so damn tough to fucking sink. In 2005, the US Navy conducted a live fire test to sink a retired Kitty Hawk class supercarrier. Per an article in Forbes, the carrier endured nearly a month of intense weaponized testing and was finally scuttled via internal explosive charges. It should be added that the warship had been decommissioned nearly a decade earlier and was in poor material condition. There were also no damage controllers efforts to save the ship. In February of this year, just days before his own death, Iran's former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei threatened the US carriers operating in the Persian Gulf. In a post on Twitter, because it's fucking 2026, quote, the Americans constantly say that they've sent a warship towards Iran. Of course a warship is a dangerous piece of military hardware. However, more dangerous than that warship is the weapon that can send that warship to the bottom of the sea. Now it's kind of unclear exactly what he was talking about. Maybe it's some sort of secret weapon that the Iranians have that we don't know about. But we do know that Iranian negotiators are currently talking with the People's Republic of China about purchasing CM302 supersonic missiles. These were developed by Chinese military planners to fly low and fast, avoiding most of the layered defenses. A boat like the Ford Joys, they're carrier killer missiles. Or at least that's the idea. Beijing also has a line of land based carrier killer missiles because if you think you might wind up in a war with the United States, it probably behooves you to think about how you would kill an aircraft carrier. Now again, Iran doesn't have any of these weapons systems yet, at least not to our knowledge. But this war of choice by the United States didn't come as a complete surprise. The Iranian military and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps had been preparing to fight this war for quite some time. Those preparations have included the construction of multiple fake aircraft carriers which their forces have sunk in a variety of war games exercises. The most recent of these occurred in 2020. The Prophet Muhammad 14 exercise was meant to prepare for an attack on a Nimitz class carrier. And ironically Iran made it too easy to sink, which caused it to go down while it was being towed in an inconvenient location that temporarily blocked a canal. And that should act as a warning that that just as American military planners and analysts fuck up constantly, so too do their Iranian counterparts. And we shouldn't assume our guys are a bunch of hegseth looking chucklefucks while Iran's Pentagon equivalent is staffed entirely by hard eyed professionals. Every military has dipshit officers and has to deal with bad calls made by people with political power that fuck shit up for everyone. What you should take from this though is that Iran is a country with a large, comparatively well funded and prepared military. They regularly invent and sell weapons systems that are utilized around the world. And they've been obsessively planning to kill an aircraft carrier for years. And now that doesn't mean they're gonna sink one. In fact, I still think that's pretty close to impossible, at least with the technology we know they have. But they don't need to sink one to render it inoperable. Just hitting the top of it could be enough to do serious damage that would render it combat incapable for an extended period of time. And to back me up on that point point. A few weeks ago, while it was actively engaged in combat operations against Iranian forces, a fire started on board the Jerry Ford. It began in the laundry room, or at least in an area related to the vast laundry system that a vehicle like this has. It's kind of a little unclear exactly what happened. According to the New York Times, though the fire alone took 30 hours to put out. Now, the Navy disputes this, that the ship was burning for more than a day, but they provided no reason anyone should should actually trust them. Here I found an article published in the National Interest by Peter Susio. He writes that, quote, the fire caused far greater damage than was initially reported, with one sailor medically evacuated from the ship and 200 more treated for smoke inhalation. I'm not surprised that the Navy wanted to hide the extent of the damage its biggest warship suffered due to a laundry fire. But this reinforces how unreliable the Navy is as an ongoing source in these matters. Sussio notes, quote, there remain conflicting accounts of the fire in the media. And the Pentagon seemingly attempted to downplay the severity of the fire in the immediate aftermath, leading to later confusion. What we do know is that the Ford, a small city on the sea, lost all ability to launder clothing, bedding and anything else. This caused an immediate hygiene issue aboard and a logistic nightmare for the Navy which had to fly in clean clothing at terrific expedition expense. Saying a supercarrier was taken out of commission by a laundry fire. Sounds silly, but you can't keep a town of 4,500 people going if no one can do the laundry. The fire seems to have also done extensive damage to crew living quarters, which forced a thousand mattresses to be flown in while the crew slept. Well, wherever they were sleeping, it wasn't in their bunks. Now, we don't know how the fire started again, but unconfirmed reports have blamed sabotage by members of the Gerald Ford's crew. I can't tell you if this is true or not, but if it is, it would not be the first time something like this happened. In 2012, a civilian contractor started a fire aboard the USS Miami, an attack submarine, because he wanted to leave work early. The fire cost $400 million in damage and led to the vessel being decommissioned. Two years later, the contractor was sentenced to 17 years in prison. Naval sabotage was an even bigger business during the latter stages of the war in Vietnam. In December of 1972, Jeffrey Allison, a 19 year old sailor from Oakland, was sentenced to five years in prison for lighting a fire aboard an aircraft carrier, the USS Forrestal. That same year, a sailor aboard the USS Ranger, another supercarrier, delayed its deployment to the Pacific by three months by allegedly sticking a paint scraper in the main reduction gear, which disabled an engine, per an article in the Alameda Post. The Navy's official history of the Ranger confirms that sabotage was becoming more popular as the war in Vietnam became more unpopular. Sabotage happens every day, all day, a crewman serving aboard another carrier based in Alameda, the Oriskeni, was quoted as saying. Now these sailors, the folks sabotaging their own warships in the later stages of the Vietnam War, were part of the so called SOS movement, a protest campaign launched and sustained entirely by sailors angry at being forced to participate in the war against Vietnam. The movement gained its name from an act of protest in 1971 when 40 sailors stood on the flight deck of their returning aircraft carrier and spelled out SOS with their bodies. Again, I don't know if sabotage caused the fire on the Gerald Ford, and neither does anyone else, but there are good reasons to believe it did. As Senator Mark Warner, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in late March, the Ford and its crew have been pushed to the brink. After nearly a year at sea, normal deployment for sailors on the Ford is like six months. Come April, it will break the record for the longest post Vietnam carrier deployment, 294 days. Crew members have been told their deployment will likely be extended to May, at which point they'll have been at sea for an entire year. Now, I don't want or really expect anyone to pour out their sympathy for sailors on a warship that has helped to kill a minimum of 1,500 Iranians so far, including 200 children. But you don't need to feel bad for all the lost birthdays and weddings and missed funerals to understand the deleterious effect that this has on morale. Fighting spirit isn't just a buzzword. When soldiers are exhausted and pissed off, they're likelier to fuck things up. And I'm not just talking about grand acts of sabotage. When it was still off the coast of Venezuela earlier in this deployment, the Ford suffered massive recurrent issues with its plumbing system, which was ripped off, a design used in cruise ships and works very badly. I can't exaggerate how bad the sewage systems on the Ford work. They are broken fucking constantly. And per the Alameda Post, some crew members may be intentionally exacerbating problems with defective toilets aboard the ship by flushing T shirts and other objects, as documented in an email from the ship's Engineering department obtained by npr. Our sewage system is being mistreated and destroyed by sailors on a daily basis. That March 2025 email stated, My whole maintenance technicians are currently working 19 hours a day right now to keep up with the demand. That's a lot of flushed shirts. Now what I'm building to is that there's a perfectly good chance this fire didn't even start as an act of sabotage, but because somebod up, maybe because they were exhausted, maybe because they've just been running the machines too long. The laundry is always going while this thing's underway. And if it's going for months longer than normal, shit like lint is going to build up. In fact, I want to read a quote from that article in the national interest. If the ducts haven't been cleaned out properly, it is easy for small lint particles to catch fire, potentially leading to a larger blaze, not unlike a house fire caused by lint buildup. So again, this fire was certainly not enough to sink the Gerald Ford. It didn't destroy it, but it did enough damage that it became combat ineffective. Or at least you could argue that's the case. You know, obviously we replaced it with a different carrier group. There's not. Just not a carrier now, but the Ford was not originally scheduled to leave and left as a result of the fire in order to undergo repairs. That gets at something very important, very relevant, the question of how a higher intensity war, one involving ground troops against Iran would go. Because while Iran may or may not be able to sink a carrier, they certainly have the tools to potentially hit one starting a fire or just damaging the deck badly enough to render it combat ineffective. And if these deployment cycles keep getting extended, if sailors are kept at a high operational tempo for days or weeks or months at a time, people will start fucking up. And some of those fuck ups have a chance, as we've already seen, to remove the ship from being combat capable or to remove other ships from being combat capable. If you're talking from the perspective of US Marines trying to hold onto an island surrounded by enemies, this is a really scary thing. The fact that your main source of air support might not be able to function because somebody fucks up or sabotages it. There's a fire, it gets hit. You know, these boats are not sinkable, but in certain ways they're a lot more fragile than people are used to thinking of them as being. Aircraft carriers have been gods of the sea for so long, I think it really is something people ought to pay attention to. The fact that this simple laundry fire took the Jerry Ford out of the theater matters. The longer the US Keeps fighting, and the longer we keep our ships deployed chasing Donald Trump's dreams, the higher the odds that something else goes wrong get. Whether it's just exhausted soldiers screwing up, angry sailors sabotaging things to protest an unpopular war, or a damned lucky shot, the Pentagon is continuing to roll those dice every day, and I guess we'll see what happens next. That's all I've got for you right now, everybody. Hopefully we're not invading islands with ground troops by the time this episode comes out, but we might be It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, cool zonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here, listed directly in Episode Descriptions. Thanks for listening. This is an iHeart podcast, guaranteed.