The Iran Miscalculation

3 reasons the U.S.-Israel military playbook is failing

Mar 13, 2026

The war doesn’t seem to be going well. Or to be more direct, the war can be termed a catastrophic failure. When the U.S. and Israel launched a coordinated attack on Iran, it seems that they believed they could follow a fairly simple playbook that would quickly prove successful: target Iran’s defenses, eliminate Iran’s ability to retaliate, eradicate the core of Iran’s leadership so as to foment confusion and incoherence at the top. But the reality of Iran’s makeup has turned out to be nothing like what the U.S. and Israel had assumed. The effects of this somewhat outmoded playbook seem to be backfiring, and the U.S.-Israel forces may be farther behind than they originally thought.

It is important to us to simply analyze the facts, which is becoming increasingly hard in a world with so much available information and so little ability to distinguish propaganda, or even our own biases, much less the biases of others. And so, we are making an honest attempt to cut through the noise. We want to tell the truth—as best we can and as best as we can define the word. We start with the fact that Iran has three overwhelming advantages.

1) Aided by China and Russia, Iran has a massive advantage over both the U.S. and Israel in terms of critical military technologies. To give just one example, Iran has hypersonic missiles that can reach speeds of Mach 14, are incredibly precise, and designed to penetrate advanced air defense systems like Israel’s Iron Dome. Iran is holding its most advanced missiles in reserve.

2) Second is Iran’s geographical and geopolitical location. The country’s control of the Strait of Hormuz gives it control over about 20% of worldwide oil trade. Moreover, Iran has land borders with 15 countries, making it critical to the land bridges that interconnect Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. This fortunate geography combined with massive oil reserves makes Iran a critical cog in world oil trade.

Also true is that Iran provides an essential geopolitical link between the world’s two largest and most important countries, China and Russia. In seeking to destroy Iran, the U.S. and Israel evidently failed to realize that Iran would get as much help as it needed from those two countries. Taking on Iran in concert with its Mideastern allies might have seemed like a relatively easy task. But fighting the combined might of the entire Global South, including Russia (historically part of the Global North but now increasingly allied with the Global South) has turned the war into a fiasco that will likely put the final nail in the coffin of America’s global hegemony.

3) The third advantage is that while Iran certainly is guilty of crimes against its own people, with women in particular singled out, it still represents a culture with a spiritual foundation that has persisted more than five millennia. Iran has many flaws, but, unlike Sunni Muslims who seem to be shifting ever closer to strict fundamentalism, modern Shia Muslims generally have a willingness to view the world philosophically and to be open to deviating from, or to reinterpreting, religious dictums. Without in any way excusing the systemic and escalating violence against women in Iran, it is worth noting that Iranian women are historically highly well-educated. For example, the first-ever female winner of the most coveted prize in mathematics—the Field’s Medal—was Maryam Mirzakhani, a woman born and educated in Iran. The mostly free education system in Iran has created a society in which 89% of adults are literate (vs. a 79% adult literacy rate in the U.S.). Some 60% of college students in Iran are women.

Iran’s long-range planning

Long-lived cultures like Iran’s—they also include China and Russia—have a natural cohesion that brings the population together in times of crisis. A spiritual culture also contrasts with a material culture in its willingness to plan for the long term. In the case of Iran, this has meant years of planning for war with America. When the U.S. and Israel attacked, Iran’s defensive and offensive strategies had been intricately defined. For example, Iran had chosen layers of leadership to replace any killed in initial strikes. It’s another reason why the attempted decapitation of the country via the targeting and killing of its leaders has backfired so badly. Iran, at the time of the attack, had divided itself into more than 30 autonomous regions that ensured that what otherwise would have been major body blows could be easily managed.

Offensively, the country combines an arsenal of nearly impossible-to-hit hypersonic missiles with multitudes of offensive and defensive drones. Rough estimates are that about 75% of its drones can be destroyed by the enemy, which means 25% can get through and fulfill their mission. Iran had stockpiled 100,000 or more drones and can produce about 5,000 per month—an overwhelming number for completing their missions, greatly contributing to Iran’s success. The drones have been successful in destroying billions of dollars’ worth of radar equipment, leaving the U.S. blind in many of its offensive and defensive sorties. These early efforts at blinding the U.S. and, by proxy, Israel, could have devastating implications if the war continues and becomes protracted. It seems that Iran is playing the long game, compared to the short-sighted outlook of the U.S. and Israel.

Though war-related images in Israel have been severely censored by the Israeli government, there are reasons to believe damage to the country has been extensive. These reasons include visual assessments from the few images that have bypassed the censors. Also telling have been Trump’s calls to Putin asking him to act as a mediator in ending the conflict. Journalist Pepe Escobar has characterized Putin’s reply as requiring Trump to put forward a “credible” plan for U.S. withdrawal as a precondition for mediation. We strongly suspect that any plan will have to include a pathway for nearly complete withdrawal of the U.S. from the Middle East.

As we wrote in last week’s blog, the key figure to what happens next is Netanyahu. While we would never hope for any ultimate harm to come to any human being, as things look now, the war seems unlikely to end in a way that would suit Israel. If Netanyahu is out of the picture, the world would likely have a better basis for coalescing, though there still would be a lot of work ahead. We hope Netanyahu will step down as Prime Minister and turn the reins over to someone more spiritually minded and more in sync with all that Israel originally stood for—homeland, the Jewish people, and peace and harmony within the small nation of Israel. It is worth remembering that when the Jewish people found their way into Palestine in the late 1940s and were offered it as their homeland, the Jews offered to share it with the Palestinians, and the Palestinians said no. Lately, that situation has been reversed. But while much of the fighting between the Palestinians and the Jews over their homelands is rooted in religion, they all share the same ancestry. From a purely scientific perspective, genetic studies have shown that Palestinians and Jews alike have ancestral ties to the ancient populations of the region, specifically Levantine and Canaanite, making them, in some respects, genetically related. And in terms of their religious texts, both are descendants of the same man—Abraham.

One undeniable biblical interpretation is that we are all one. We are all a part of the same messy and twisted family tree. All this fighting and war in the name of religion makes no sense. Beyond the ties between Jews and Palestinians, there are similar relationships with all people of the Muslim faith. The only difference is that in Islamic tradition, Ishmael, the son of Abraham and Hagar, is viewed as the ancestor of the Arab people and a progenitor of faith, whereas Isaac, the son of Abraham and Sarah, is viewed as the ancestor of the Israelites.

According to the holy book of Islam, the Qur’an, “He has sent down upon you, [O Muhammad], the Book in truth, confirming what was before it. And He revealed the Torah and the Gospel.” Similarly, the Christian faith recognizes the Torah, the holy book of the Israelites, as a precursor to the New Testament of Jesus. The spiritual lineage of Christianity also descends from Abraham. The only reason this is relevant is that Zionist Christians, many residing in the U.S., seem to somehow view the survival of Israel and the so-called building of the third temple as essential for the arrival of the Messiah, who will lead the believers into paradise. Maybe, maybe not. We obviously have no idea. But it seems tragic that what you might think should be connecting all of the religions is dividing them instead. What we do know is that the heartbeat of a soldier in an American uniform and the heartbeat of a soldier in an Israeli uniform and the heartbeat of a soldier in an Iranian uniform all beat in the same way. We are all human beings. We all share the same planet and are alike in the most fundamental ways, and that should be all that matters.

Stephen Leeb, PhD > Turbulent Times Investor

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