Ever since the start of the U.S.-Iran war, or conflict, however one wants to describe it, the situation has placed a tremendous amount of pressure on China. That pressure comes from several directions: tariffs, technological restrictions, energy insecurity involving oil and other resources, and declining access to certain markets.
Because of that, I have started reconsidering the usual way we discuss the Thucydides Trap, or at least the way it is commonly presented.
Now, in no way, shape, or form am I saying that the Thucydides Trap is wrong. The trap is still the trap. I am simply looking at it from a slightly different direction, which I will explain in a moment.
The danger may not come only from an established power fearing the rise of a challenger. That fear may also come from the challenger itself. China’s fear may not simply be that it cannot keep up with the United States. It may be that its own rise is slowing, which in turn creates the impression that its strategic window is closing. If that happens, then its opportunity to achieve its objectives, whatever those objectives may be, could begin to disappear.
Professor Graham Allison uses the term Thucydides Trap to describe the increased likelihood of war when a rising power, such as China, threatens to displace an established power, such as the United States.
However, I personally see it somewhat in reverse—or, rather, as a reversed Thucydides Trap. Frankly, it is still a Thucydides Trap regardless, but the reversal identifies which side of the power transition feels the greatest urgency.
The classic formula is that a rising power threatens an established power, and the resulting fear makes war more likely. However, both sides can experience different versions of the same trap. The established power fears displacement and may act before the challenger becomes unbeatable. At the same time, the rising power may fear that its rise is stalling or reversing and act before its best opportunity disappears.
Those pressures can operate simultaneously. The United States may fear that China will become too powerful if left unchecked. China, however, may fear that containment, tariffs, energy vulnerability, demographic problems, technological restrictions, and other pressures will prevent it from ever reaching its strategic objectives.
Each side interprets delay differently, but dangerously. Washington may believe that waiting strengthens China. Beijing may believe that waiting weakens China.
This is not really a separate trap moving backward. It is the same competitive mechanism closing from different directions.
Another way of putting it is that the Thucydides Trap in reverse occurs when a rising power, such as China, fears that its rise is stalling, its strategic window is closing, and delay will leave it permanently weaker. Instead of war emerging only because an established power fears being overtaken, conflict may also arise when the challenger fears it may never achieve its objectives or realize its true potential. It therefore believes it must act to defend its position before that position deteriorates any further.
In that sense, the trap is reciprocal: the established power fears the challenger’s continued rise, while the challenger fears that its own rise may be arrested before it can achieve its objectives.
In a nutshell: The United States fears the China of tomorrow. China fears it may never reach tomorrow.
In war, an action can accomplish its immediate purpose while simultaneously altering the surrounding environment in ways that strengthen, weaken, reverse, or transform the original success.
Take counterinsurgency, or COIN, as an example. The United States employed COIN extensively in Iraq and Afghanistan. Its immediate purpose was often to secure territory and protect the population from insurgent activity. In the process, forces gathered intelligence, identified and removed insurgents, and attempted to build relationships with local communities. One operation could accomplish all of these objectives and therefore appear successful.
However, that same operation could also generate resentment, dependency, political distortion, and further resistance. Resentment could arise simply because foreign forces were present, regardless of whether they intended to protect the population. Local groups that allied with those forces could also become dependent on their protection, money, intelligence, or logistical support. Once that happened, they might struggle to operate or maintain their political position without outside assistance.
This dependency could then produce political distortion. Alliances were fragile. A tribe might cooperate with American forces against one enemy while remaining hostile toward another tribe that was also cooperating with them. A local ally could therefore become connected to a network of rivalries and obligations that extended well beyond the immediate operation. The question was no longer simply who supported the counterinsurgency effort, but why they supported it, whom they opposed, and what they expected to gain.
Over time, these relationships could generate further resistance. While American forces might not initially feel the brunt of that resistance, it could eventually turn against them. It might begin as an intertribal conflict, in which support for one group could indirectly alienate another, turning a local rivalry into resistance against the outside force itself. An operation might secure an area, remove insurgents, and protect part of the population while simultaneously remodeling the surrounding environment in ways that create new enemies, strengthen old rivalries, or transform the original success. Successful distortion is risky.
II. So, what is an interpositive?
An interpositive is a positive image printed directly from the original camera negative. In simple terms, the original image is reproduced as a copy. That copy resembles the original, but it is no longer the original itself.
Defining Interpositive Warfare
Warfare comes from human decisions. Humans interpret, implement, manipulate, and respond to everything involved. Technology does not choose its objective; humans determine its purpose and how it will be used. Terrain does not formulate strategy, but it can redirect human action. Institutions are also made up of people making decisions, and those decisions shape what happens next.
Interpositive warfare shares a basic premise with praxeology: war begins with purposeful human action. The difference is that interpositive warfare is concerned not only with the intention behind an action, but with what happens after that action passes through human relationships, political institutions, and the wider environment of war. Along the way, the original intention is filtered and transformed.
Effects Are Recursive
A response not only changes the conditions under which the next action is planned and understood, but may also manipulate them. The process is not merely a linear exchange of action and reaction. Instead, it frequently returns to the past, reinterprets it through the present, and carries that altered understanding into the future.
In a linear model, action produces reaction, and the past provides a fixed baseline. In a recursive model, action and reaction form a continuing loop. The event remains fixed in the past, but its meaning changes as actors reinterpret it. Control therefore produces not only an intended result but also an emergent transformation that shapes what follows.
Success Can Produce Its Own Negation
An action may succeed according to its immediate measurement while producing consequences that weaken the larger objective. A tactical success can create operational difficulties. An operational success can produce strategic failure. Political success can also create future military liabilities.
Effects Can Be Delayed or Indirect
As for effects, they may return through memory, resentment, institutional behavior, doctrine, ideological change, economic dependency or lack thereof, and technological adaptation. While some of these may not appear in the current generation, they may appear in the next. In either case, the original action need not produce an immediate or direct response. It may simply nudge events in a particular direction, leaving later actors to carry the effect forward without recognizing where it began.
Actors Transform and Reposition Relationships
Whether it is soldiers, commanders, civilians, government workers, media organizations, allies, enemies, or institutions, they do not merely react; they interpret, transform, and retransmit effects. Think of it this way: improvise, adapt, and overcome.
Lastly, there are relationships. An action changes not only the actors involved but also the relationships among them. Once again, think of praxeology, the study of human action. Every interaction produces a response, which then produces another. The result is a chain reaction. Watch people moving through a crowded mall, constantly adjusting their paths to avoid colliding with one another. Each person’s movement causes others to reposition themselves.
Warfare operates in much the same manner. Allies may become less dependable. Populations may become hostile. Who needs conspiracies when you have bureaucracies growing defensive? Meanwhile, enemies may adapt in unexpected directions. Every action repositions the relationships surrounding it, changing how the actors respond to one another and what they may do next.
III. The Problem with Existing Models
Multi-Domain and Systems Models
Land, maritime, air, space, cyberspace, physical, informational, and human categories remain useful for organization, planning, and analysis. The problem begins when these analytical categories are treated as independent parts of reality.
Multi-domain models generally show effects moving across or between domains. Interpositive warfare asks how those exchanges transform the actors, relationships, institutions, and boundaries through which later action must pass. The boxes do not merely exchange effects. The boxes themselves, and the people who operate through them, are altered by the exchange.
Think of the Columbian Exchange. It did not simply transfer people, goods, diseases, and ideas between otherwise unchanged worlds; it transformed the worlds involved.
Linear and Geometric Assumptions
A diagram captures the structure of a particular moment, but it cannot represent the transformation that follows. Interpositive warfare focuses on the organized chaos beyond the diagram: one action creates a vacancy, the opening passes through intermediaries, and the entire field rearranges itself—rather like a line of hermit crabs exchanging shells.
Distinctions from Existing Concepts
Interpositive warfare overlaps with many concepts, but it is not identical to any of them. Its purpose is not to replace established military theories, but to identify a particular feature of war. That feature is the study of human action and the institutions through which it operates, both on and off the battlefield.
Second- and Third-Order Effects
Second- and third-order effects describe consequences that extend beyond the immediate result of an action. A tactical decision may produce a cascade of operational, strategic, political, or social consequences that were neither intended nor immediately visible. In other words, blowback.
Interpositive warfare is built for these consequences but places greater emphasis on the process through which they emerge. The issue is not merely that one action causes another effect later. Instead, the action passes through intermediaries that interpret, redirect, delay, strengthen, weaken, or transform it, sometimes making it stronger while causing it to appear weaker. Intermediaries also change in the process. The result is not merely a chain of consequences, but a continuing alteration of the environment through which future history must pass.
Feedback, Complexity, and Friction
Feedback and complexity explain how actions produce responses that alter the conditions of later action. Clausewitzian friction explains how the human element disrupts intention.
Interpositive warfare shares these concerns but focuses on the reproduction of action in altered form. Friction may obstruct an action, and feedback may return information or consequences to the original actor. Interpositive warfare asks what the action becomes after it has passed through the wider field of war. In doing so, it may return in a misinterpreted form or even work against the purpose for which it was originally produced.
Praxeology
Praxeology begins with purposeful human action. Human beings choose objectives, employ means, and interpret circumstances, all in pursuit of a preferred outcome. Warfare likewise begins with human decisions, even when those decisions operate through various institutions.
Interpositive warfare begins with the same premise but extends the action beyond its original intent. Once purposeful action enters war, it passes through other human beings and the institutions they represent. Along the way, it is filtered, bottled, and transformed. Praxeology explains why the action begins; interpositive warfare examines what that action becomes after it enters a conflict, reshapes the surrounding conditions, and influences what happens next.
IV. Historical or Contemporary Illustrations
Counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan
Counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan offers a clear example of self-negating success. In theory, COIN seeks to protect the population, secure territory, and win the confidence of local communities rather than simply destroy the enemy. It also attempts to address the political, economic, and social grievances that sustain insurgent movements, including poverty, corruption, weak infrastructure, and the absence of legitimate government.
COIN also depends heavily on intelligence. The more trust military forces establish with the population, the more information they hope to gather. That information helps identify insurgents, map relationships, and build case-by-case dossiers on individuals and networks. In the long term, the goal is to leave behind a legitimate and self-sustaining host-nation government capable of maintaining security without foreign assistance.
On paper, these are obvious strengths. In practice, however, they also reveal the doctrine’s self-negating character. COIN is extremely resource-intensive. It requires large numbers of personnel, money, and time, as well as repeated deployments. The longer forces remain, the more vulnerable they become to ambushes, IEDs (improvised explosive devices), and other forms of asymmetric attack. What begins as counterinsurgency can gradually expand into nation-building, creating an open-ended mission funded by outside taxpayers and carried out in a political environment that may never have possessed a strong sense of national unity to begin with.
A prolonged focus on COIN can also erode conventional military readiness. A force that spends years preparing for patrols, population security, intelligence collection, and small-unit engagements may become highly experienced in one form of warfare while allowing other capabilities to weaken.
The greatest difficulty, however, lies in human loyalty. Loyalties shift. Local actors may cooperate because the money is right, because one rival poses a greater threat, or because foreign support temporarily strengthens their position. That relationship may change as soon as another tribe, militia, political faction, foreign government, or outside economic interest enters the picture. An ally in one situation may become an obstacle in another. Trust remains conditional, and intelligence gathered through those relationships may be incomplete, manipulated, or directed against local rivals.
Counterinsurgency could therefore succeed tactically while undermining itself strategically. American forces won engagement after engagement, secured territory, removed insurgents, and often built enough trust to gain intelligence and local cooperation. In that immediate sense, COIN worked.
The strategic problem was that the groups involved were not unified in any meaningful way. In many areas, the real political units were tribes, militias, religious factions, local power brokers, and patronage networks. American forces were trying to win their support, but these groups were also competing among themselves for money, influence, protection, and position. The United States became another actor within the same field of rivalries rather than a power standing above it.
Winning the hearts and minds of one tribe did not necessarily strengthen the larger political order. It could weaken another tribe, deepen an existing rivalry, or make one group dependent on American protection. There was no true unifying apparatus capable of turning these separate tactical relationships into a lasting national settlement. COIN could therefore create local success without producing strategic unity.
This leads to COIN’s central weakness: the absence of a clearly defined end state. What does victory look like? How much stability is enough? When does a host-nation government become self-sustaining? At what point does the foreign force leave without undoing the gains it helped create? Without clear answers, tactical and operational success can continue indefinitely while strategic success remains undefined and elusive.
COIN could therefore protect populations, remove insurgents, gather intelligence, and secure territory while simultaneously creating dependency, weakening conventional readiness, distorting local politics, and extending the mission without a measurable end. Its successes were real, but they often altered the environment in ways that made those successes difficult to preserve. In that sense, counterinsurgency became a self-negating success.
V. The Military Mechanics of Interpositive Warfare
Inside the Box of Mirrors
A tactic is never static. It exists inside a box of mirrors, multiplied, distorted, and reinterpreted by every observer. The box represents the operational environment. Its six faces represent six primary sides that refract the tactic: enemy forces, allied partners, command structures, institutional logistics, populations within the domain, and the physical and cultural terrain itself. These six faces are illustrative rather than fixed. Depending on the conflict, there may be many more.
Each reflection differs because perspective warps it. A flanking maneuver may appear to the enemy as a vulnerability, to an ally as resolve, to commanders as data, and to populations as a narrative. When the tactic is executed, adapted, or redirected, every reflection changes with it. There is no isolated action.
The Negative–Interpositive Cycle
The photographic analogy of the negative and interpositive beautifully captures how one effect becomes the source of the next. The original negative is the intent: the plan as conceived. The interpositive is the first-order effect, or how reality develops the image through human action, interpretation, and Clausewitzian friction.
The interpositive then becomes the new negative. The altered reality—enemy adaptations, unintended consequences, alliances, and fractures—becomes the baseline for the next cycle. Each iteration inverts and evolves the tactic. What begins as deception may harden into a predictable pattern if it is not refreshed. What once looked like strength may reveal fragility under a different light.
This is why rigid doctrines fail and why truly effective operators treat every success as a potential trap. The environment has already begun adapting to yesterday’s move.
Adaptation, Deception, and Predictability
In warfare and beyond, this dynamic helps explain several enduring principles. Take the OODA loop developed by U.S. Air Force Colonel John Boyd (observe, orient, decide, act): observe the reflections, orient to their distortions, decide when and how to turn, act, and immediately begin the next loop before the enemy’s reflections stabilize.
Reflexive control deliberately shapes what the mirrors show the adversary so that the adversary’s reflected decisions serve one’s intent. Emergent strategy operates through a similar process. Real plans are not simply executed from the top down; they coevolve with the reflections that conflict produces.
The best commanders do not merely impose a plan. They design systems that learn from inside the box of mirrors faster than their opponents do. Entropy and surprise are useful only for a short time because repeated tactics lose their contrast. The box becomes familiar. New light, such as novelty, deception, and tempo, must be introduced before the reflections flatten into predictability.
Tactical Reproduction
At the tactical level, a single action—an ambush, feint, or drone strike—does not merely succeed or fail. It alters local conditions: enemy morale, alertness, ammunition stocks, small-unit trust, terrain usability, electromagnetic signatures, and civilian perceptions.
The result becomes a new negative. Tomorrow’s patrol operates in the world that today’s action helped create. Even inaction reproduces the same dynamic. Hesitation becomes data that the enemy develops into the next interpositive.
A battle does more than produce a result. It reproduces the actors who must fight the next battle. Enemy soldiers learn. Allied forces form new expectations. Commanders revise their judgments. Populations assign new meanings to what they have witnessed. The tactic survives not as an unchanged event, but as a series of altered interpretations carried forward by everyone involved.
Operational Reproduction
At the operational level, the mirrors multiply. An operation—a campaign phase, major offensive, or sustained air interdiction effort—reshapes force ratios, logistical nodes, command relationships, intelligence advantages, and political will. It changes what future operations can accomplish and what courses of action remain possible.
A successful breakthrough may advance too far without secure flanks, creating a vulnerable salient while also establishing a new base for further action. A deliberate withdrawal may cede ground but preserve forces, restore operational tempo, or strengthen political cohesion.
In either case, the altered battlefield, alliance dynamics, and resource picture become the fresh negative. Future operational art must develop from this plate rather than from the original plan. The operation that follows does not begin where the previous one began. It begins inside the environment that the previous operation helped manufacture.
Strategic Reproduction
Strategy is the highest-order darkroom. It does not merely win battles or campaigns; it redefines the war itself. Every strategic choice—forming alliances, imposing economic sanctions, conducting information campaigns, or changing war aims—reconfigures the enemy’s options, the home front’s endurance, third-party involvement, and even the conflict’s moral and legal framing.
The interpositive of one strategic decision becomes the negative for the next. Expanding war aims after early victories, for example, may make later restraint or de-escalation more difficult. A strategy of attrition, as seen in the Russo-Ukrainian war, may exhaust the enemy while also exhausting one’s own military and society, altering the political terrain upon which any negotiated settlement must eventually rest.
The introduction of new domains, including cyberspace and economic warfare, changes the purpose and character of the conflict. At this level, recursion can become self-referential. Strategy begins to reproduce the nature of the war, which in turn reshapes strategy. Wars begun for limited objectives may metastasize into existential struggles, or existential struggles may eventually contract into limited settlements. The means shape the ends, and the ends reshape the means.
The Recursive Loop
Tactics alter conditions and create the basis for new operations. Operations alter the conditions from which new strategies emerge. Strategies alter the conditions for a different war or for a different peace. Each level is both produced by and productive of the levels above and below it.
This is why linear planning eventually collapses. Effective practitioners treat every outcome as provisional source material rather than final validation and design for adaptability across tactical, operational, and strategic levels.
Victory belongs less to the side with the best initial negative than to the side that masters the repeated development process: the side that sees the reflections clearly, turns at the right moment, and develops cleaner, more useful interpositives faster than its opponent.
VI. Conclusion
War is often planned and analyzed in terms of action and reaction. Objectives are identified, forces are assigned, and operations are conducted. As for success and failure, well, those are measured through the outcome. Yet war does not remain still, nor do its conditions remain stable long enough for this process to unfold exactly as intended. Every reaction changes the actors, their relationships, the institutions they represent, and the conditions through which later action must pass.
Interpositive warfare does not promise control over this process, nor does it offer a formula for predicting every consequence. Human action cannot be predicted with certainty. Its value lies in recognizing that action and environment cannot be separated; that is its strongest suit. The battlefield is not simply the place where war occurs. It is continually reproduced by the people acting within it.
Humans are interpositives: 360-degree transparent images of time and space, drawn inward toward a center that looks back from every direction. Conflict lives in a geometric box of mirrors that never sits still.
Most of us know War of the Worlds primarily through film, whether it is Byron Haskin’s 1953 version or Steven Spielberg’s 2005 adaptation, though both ultimately trace back to H. G. Wells’s 1898 novel of the same title. After recently watching the 1953 version and revisiting Spielberg’s 2005 adaptation, I started thinking about the invaders’ military way of war.
The first thing that stuck out to me was decapitating the human world by shock, paralysis, and absolute asymmetry. All of these are key to what will be discussed. The one thing that really stuck out to me in both movies and the book is that they do not maneuver like an army trying to defeat another army. No. Instead, they arrive as a force, so technologically superior that human command systems, weapons, morale, and assumptions collapse immediately, or almost immediately.
Method
1. Strategic surprise
When it comes to their method, their approach has several layers. In Wells’s book, the Martians arrive in cylinders from Mars. However, in the 1953 film, they come through meteor-like landings. In Spielberg’s version, the machines are already buried underground and are activated by lightning-like energy from above that somehow transports the driver into the machine. The last version is especially interesting because it makes the invasion feel less like an expeditionary landing and more like pre-positioned sleeper infrastructure or even a preplanned first strike. The enemy is not merely arriving; the enemy was already inside the world, waiting to be activated. In that sense, it gives the invasion a rhizomatic and cybernetic flavor. In other words, these hidden nodes are embedded in the environment and activated at the right moment.
2. Paralysis
Second is paralysis. Humans do not understand what’s happening because it’s moving too fast to respond coherently. From that point of view, that’s the liminal part of all this. The invasion begins in a zone between normality and war. Because of this, the people are still living their roles as civilians, spectators, reporters, police, and families, until suddenly the world crosses into annihilation. The aliens understand this, and they exploit that psychological gap.
The first weapon is not the heat ray. The first weapon is confusion, and with confusion comes terror and incomprehension.
3. Tactical annihilation, not battle
Number three on this list would be tactical annihilation. The tripods do not fight battles in a balanced sense. No, instead, they erase opposition. Infantry, artillery, aircraft, tanks, police, crowds, all become targets of the same system. They become singular. Their method is simple: detect, advance, vaporize, harvest, occupy. Negotiations do not exist. The victims are given no terms, no demands, and no recognizable war aim — only annihilation. This is war stripped of diplomacy and presented as predation. In other words, if I were to sum it up, I’d say it’s insect politics at its finest.
4. Mobile terror platforms
In the book, like in the Spielberg movie, unlike the 1953 version, the tripods are essentially walking systems of dominance. They combine mobility, surveillance, firepower, and psychological terror. In modern terms, they are not merely vehicles. They are integrated, compartmentalized kill systems. They move through the human battlespace like an immune system attacking a body, or like a machine clearing terrain, or a chemical agent killing an infestation.
5. Environmental conversion
This brings us to environmental conversion. This is probably the strongest aspect of Wells’s novel and of Spielberg’s adaptation. The invaders are not just conquering territory. No, they’re trying to make Earth usable for themselves. Take Spielberg, for instance. The red weed makes this very visual. They’re not simply occupying the world; they are beginning to terraform the human environment into an alien ecology. That means their military method is tied to biology and infrastructure. They are not just defeating armies, they are replacing the conditions of life to favor theirs.
Now, this is where the invasion begins to cross into what is known as liminal warfare. Once the Martians begin converting the environment, the battlefield is no longer limited to armies, weapons, or territory. The world humans know becomes unrecognizable. Human space becomes alien space—a Martian Lebensraum—and the victims are forced to fight within a confused reality, where the rules of survival are no longer clear.
Forms of Warfare
Liminal Warfare
This brings us to warfare. The first type of warfare we begin to notice is called liminal. The invasion begins before humans can even fathom what’s going on. They look around themselves, trying to make sense of the situation. Is it the weather? A meteor? A machine? Terrorism? An earthquake? An alien attack? All of the above matter because each is a delay. Understand that liminal warfare operates in the threshold space before the victim can clearly say, “We are at war.” Too late. In War of the Worlds, humanity loses the opening phase because it cannot interpret or even comprehend the event, as it is moving too fast for them. By the time the threat is legible, the aliens already dominate the battlespace.
Cybernetic Warfare
Next is the connection to cybernetic warfare. In both the novel and the films, the Martian system is superior to the human system. The invaders do not need to understand human society, culture, or politics. They only need to disrupt its control loops: communication, command, mobilization, defense, and morale. Once those loops break, organized resistance collapses into local survival. This is especially clear in Spielberg’s version, where the invasion scatters individuals almost instantly. The state disappears from view. The military becomes background noise. The family becomes the only functioning unit. Cybernetically, the Martian attack reduces humanity from an organized civilization into scattered biological fragments—survivors, bodies, dust, and panic.
Rhizome Warfare
Next is rhizome warfare. Spielberg’s version is the most rhizomatic of the three. The tripods are buried underground across the planet as hidden nodes. They are activated simultaneously or near-simultaneously. The attack does not come from a particular direction, such as a beachhead or border. Rather, it erupts from beneath the world itself. There are no clear front lines. The enemy is not over there. The enemy is under the street. In this sense, the Martian method involves infiltration/pre-positioning, dormancy, node activation, and the collapse of the surface order from within. This is not about breaking through the wall, but about already being inside it.
Kinetic Warfare
Which now brings us to kinetic warfare. The kinetic layer is simple: overwhelming direct destruction. The heat ray is the ultimate asymmetrical tactical weapon. Human weapons are irrelevant. Once the machines are active, the aliens do not need operational subtlety. Their kinetic power is so dominant that maneuver becomes almost ceremonial, like marching.
They walk, and humanity dies. End point.
However, the most important point is that kinetic violence comes after the deeper shock. That deeper shock is the collapse of understanding.
Military Summary
To summarize it militarily before moving on, one could say the aliens wage a war of absolute asymmetry.
Their pre-positioned or sudden arrival produces psychological paralysis, which enables mobile annihilation, systemic collapse, and ultimately environmental replacement. The Martians do not invade a battlefield; they convert the world into one, then make humanity irrelevant inside it. Their method is not conquest first, but erasure first. Conquest, from their viewpoint, only begins after humanity no longer exists.
Conclusion
Overall, War of the Worlds is a useful case study because the alien method is not really war in the human sense. What the book and films show is something closer to extermination by technological overmatch, followed by attempted occupation and extraction.
That is what got me thinking. If humanity is being slowly exterminated by technological overmatch, then something similar happens to the aliens. Except, in their case, it is not technological overmatch that destroys them. It is technological overreach.
Their own power outruns their understanding. They can dominate human weapons, cities, armies, and machines, but they fail to account for Earth’s invisible ecology. They understand destruction, but apparently not the environment. They conquer the surface, but not the system underneath it.
That is the irony of War of the Worlds. The Martians defeat humanity militarily, but lose ontologically. They misread what Earth is. Their method assumes that superior machines create superior force, and that superior force guarantees conquest. But the reality is different: alien bodies enter a hostile biosphere, and the result is systemic collapse.
So the ending is not simply that germs kill them. It is deeper than that. When one steps back, it is the planet itself that defeats them. Earth is not passive terrain. Earth is an active battlespace.
In that sense, the Martians commit the classic error of overreach. They project power into a space they do not fully understand but take for granted. Their technology allows them to enter the world, but not belong to it. Therefore, humanity was technologically overmatched by the Martians, but the Martians were exterminated by their own technological overreach. Their machines conquered the battlefield, but their bodies could not survive the world.
In other words, they mastered war but misunderstood life.
“Humanity. You never had it from the beginning.” — Charles Bukowski
Erra’s weapons grow impatient during peace. Ours learned to wear human faces.
A mysterious yet ominous idea—one that leaves the reader asking: Who was Erra?
Over centuries of Mesopotamian syncretism, Erra became closely associated—sometimes virtually interchangeable—with Nergal, the god of war, plague, death, and the underworld.
Through Nergal, the tradition extends even further back into older Mesopotamian religious structures tied to Enlil and the Sumerian world. The names shifted across centuries, but the results remained strikingly familiar.
Yet even Erra required instruments of destruction, which brings us to the Sibitti.
The Sibitti were a minor group of seven divine warlike daemonic beings associated with Erra. In many respects, they functioned as catalysts of destruction itself—personified weapons and agents of chaos bound to Erra’s violent sphere of influence.
Their role within the Epic of Erra is particularly unsettling. The Sibitti incite Erra to leave his peaceful slumber beside his consort and once more embark upon a destructive path against humanity. They are not passive servants awaiting command, but active participants in violence, almost partners in destruction itself.
This is what gives the Sibitti their distinctly daemonic character. Their existence is tied not merely to war, but to the activation of chaos, devastation, terror, and collapse.
The Sibitti are not simply agents of chaos. They are nihilism personified, bound to pressure the world toward destruction through Erra.
The unsettling aspect of the Sibitti is not merely what they destroy, but how they behave. Peace equals boredom. They pressure Erra toward movement, activation, and violence itself.
The duality of civilization is that it must wield destruction to survive while remaining forever vulnerable to destruction itself.
The deepest horror the Sibitti invoke is the suspicion that peace itself may be the illusion, and the restless warriors are the only honest voices in the room.
II. From Mythology to Structure
From Ancient Mesopotamia to the modern world, the mythological gods, demons, and divine weapons of yesterday are now expressed through institutions, technologies, bureaucracies, and systems of organized force. The names have changed. The pressures remain recognizable.
III. MACRO LEVEL — Civilization Organizes Around Latent Destruction
Modern civilization does not merely defend itself when threatened.
Civilization is built to always prepare for massive destruction (war), even and especially when the country is supposed to be at peace. It is not a quick fix for an emergency, but a permanent way of working.
From the second half of the twentieth century onward, the most advanced societies have maintained, refined, and normalized vast architectures of slumbering violence. These systems are not “break when needed” only during emergencies; they are embedded in society itself. They run in the background of daily life.
Nuclear Deterrence as Perpetual Posture
The clearest expression is nuclear deterrence. Thousands of warheads remain on hair-trigger alert or rapid-deployment status decades after the Cold War ended. The doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) is not a dormant relic; it is alive and well. Command-and-control systems are maintained at high readiness year after year. The logic is explicit: A stable civilization became a stable suicide postponed. Peace is the successful management of an apocalypse in real-time rather than the achievement of permanent safety. Sometimes the necessary evil is really tranquility in disguise.
Standing Militaries and Perpetual Readiness
Besides nuclear weapons, every major power sustains a large standing military in peacetime. These forces train and evolve continuously. Billions flow annually to ensure its readiness. Military exercises regularly simulate worst-case scenarios. To think that peace is a return to civility would be an error. Instead, it is a period of continuous costs in preparation for the next conflict, a central tenet of modern “Great Power Competition.”
Cyber Infrastructure and Intelligence Systems
This logic extends into the digital realm. Modern nations turn vital systems like power grids and transportation into weapons while trying to protect them. To do this, intelligence agencies hide cyber weapons inside enemy networks to prepare for future conflicts, weaponizing the infrastructure. Offensive cyber capabilities are developed and sometimes deployed even while nations proclaim the importance of a stable internet. This dual strategy hides the ongoing digital war between global powers under the guise of peace. These systems treat every citizen and foreign actor as a potential vector in a permanent, low-intensity conflict environment. In other words, everyone becomes an enemy of the state, including the state itself.
Military-Industrial Integration
The U.S. economy, like most modern nations that exercise power, has been partially reoriented around this reality. The military-congressional-industrial complex consists of the military, corporations, and Congress, all of which depend upon defense contracts for innovation and revenue. Technological progress in dual-use fields is often driven by strategic competition rather than civilian demand. The result is a civilization built on the machinery of destruction for economic and intellectual prosperity.
Strategic Signaling and the Theater of Power
States engage in political theater to project power through strategic signaling. This results in force posture adjustments within the military congressional industrial complex. Communicating that capability rewards vigilance and punishes perceived weakness without a shot being fired. Leaders must be a visible deterrent in order to appear strong and ready at all times. Together, these elements reveal a profound truth: civilizations throughout history have normalized the organization of latent destruction as a condition of existence. War is not an interruption of the system; it is the system’s ultimate reference point. The “peace” we experience is the managed equilibrium of war. As a nation, we are always armed, always watching, always investing in the next generation of lethality.
This is not a failure of modernity so much as its shadow architecture. In other words, it is the nature of the beast. This shadow architecture organizes the chaos to survive without a global ruler. Understanding this is essential before examining how newer technologies interact with it.
IV. OPERATIONAL LEVEL — Liminal Warfare
At this point, it is important to narrow the lens. The focus is that modern conflict often persists beneath the threshold of declared war.
What I mean is that it directly mirrors the fact that peace equals boredom, because the system increasingly refuses true dormancy.
Psychological Warfare
The core idea is that populations become targets. Targets that can be stressed to produce fear and outrage. The weaponization of confusion causes emotional destabilization and, if effective, can maintain constant activation. Of course, this depends on the participants. The key is that conflict increasingly occurs within perception itself.
Information / Narrative Warfare
The one who controls the flow of information shapes the narrative. See, narratives are strategic terrain; they are, in fact, information ecosystems that can and are manipulated. This keeps the idea of truth continuously contested, allowing for the decentralization and acceleration of propaganda. The point is that control of interpretation becomes operationally valuable.
Memetic Conflict
One way to spread various forms of information is through slogans,
images, and viral narratives, via memes. This memetic algorithmic amplification is an emotional contagion. From an operational perspective, the effects of information spread faster than traditional state messaging ever could. This brings us to cyber attacks.
Cyber Attacks
This connects back to operational pressure. The idea is that the persistent probing of one’s target and the eventual penetration of said infrastructure, particularly during “peace,” will, over time, shape the invisible battlefield conditions for the future. Conflict, whether modern or past, often occurs before formal conflict exists. That is hugely important.
Economic Destabilization
All of the above do, or will at some point, together or in cascading succession, cause economic destabilization. Take sanctions, for instance. Once sanctions are in place, supply chains begin to feel the pressure. This pressure is distributed to the populace, leading the government to perhaps engage in currency manipulation to survive at the cost of the governed through inflation, devaluation, and depletion, to name a few. This effectively creates a critical rift in the technological infrastructure needed for long-term economic and military stability. Economies have always been, and will always be, fair game in the scheme of operational terrain, for they are the lifeblood of systems. Once compromised, the potential to hemorrhage makes it all the more difficult for the system to coagulate.
Social Fragmentation
This is where the fragmentation of society culminates. Let us start with polarization. Polarization breeds distrust among the populace, which, over time, leads to informational exhaustion. Once that occurs, we begin to see the rise of a perpetual crisis culture, in which populations are conditioned to instability because they no longer care about truth or fact. Therefore, destabilization begins within societies rather than invading them conventionally.
V. TECHNOLOGICAL ACCELERATION — AI, Automation, and the Compression of Decision
Overall, it comes down to compressing decision-making, and this is where AI comes in. Machine-assisted targeting enables predictive systems for automated analysis. This is crucial because it shrinks the human reaction window in escalation environments. This type of system is optimized for speed and restraint.
Perpetual Responsiveness
AI systems, in many ways, are perpetual. They monitor continuously, process constantly, and always adapt. This mirrors the idea that the absence of war is equivalent to lethargy, as the system increasingly refuses to maintain equilibrium.
Human-Machine Integration
At this point, we begin to see that the further amalgamation of man and machine, where the face of mankind begins to evolve. Algorithmic feeds in AI warfare process massive amounts of data to create a real-time, actionable “Common Operating Picture” that automates target identification and supports decision-making through recommendation systems. This also allows for an AI-generated narrative to produce
deepfakes, synthetic personas, and machine-mediated perception.
Overall, the result is a battlefield that increasingly intersects with cognition, interpretation, and emotional response, eliciting a reaction that justifies the means to an end.
Delegation of Judgment
From a philosophical point of view, the delegation of judgment is huge.
It is not that AI becomes conscious. Rather, humans increasingly defer decisions to systems, such as AI, to shape choices. This allows the
algorithm to prioritize the illusion of perception. The automation, in turn, influences the pathways of escalation. Therefore, technological systems will increasingly mediate human judgment itself.
VI. The Burden of Containment
This brings us back to the fact that the burden of containment is that peace increasingly resembles the continuous management of escalation rather than true stillness.
Diplomacy
Diplomacy increasingly functions less in peace-making and more as a mechanism or tactic for stalling. This allows negotiations to continue without further adding to the issues at hand, unless one side does something that takes something off the negotiation table or adds to it, making the situation better or worse depending on the event. Treaties are valuable for the moment until something unfavorable happens, in which the treaty is called into question or loses value due to unforeseen circumstances. Summit meetings are a good place to hash out grievances on both sides. However, the real power lies in backchannel communication, where strategic dialogue is crucial to developing a potential deal that benefits both parties.
Deterrence
The core idea of deterrence is to prevent or discourage undesirable actions, as both state actors have recognized the consequences through visible force posturing and strategic ambiguity. In some ways, one could call it a peaceful game of chicken, since both sides are in the dark about each other’s intentions, which leads back to escalation management.
Overall, deterrence does not eliminate destructive capability; it just manages its behavior.
De-escalation Mechanisms
When it comes to de-escalation, modern systems increasingly rely upon friction mechanisms designed to slow escalation. Mechanisms like arms control or communications, where state actors can discuss the rules of engagement, allow both sides and their allies to build conflict-management structures to de-escalate while remaining deterrence-capable of striking.
Institutional Restraint
When it comes to institutional restraint, civilizations build safeguards or structures specifically to delay impulsive activation. This is done within the government or governments through international institutions, where legal frameworks are lobbied, voted on, and tested through a bureaucratic process, usually with oversight.
Human Delay Mechanisms
Mankind remains one of the few remaining sources of friction in systems increasingly optimized for speed. Man understands that judgment can slow issues down for further scrutiny and debate. By throwing caution to the wind, uncertainty can reveal itself without slowing the system.
The Tragic Dimension
The tragic dimension is that the Mesopotamian god Ishum, divine watchman of the night, attempts to restrain Erra rather than destroy the Sibitti. In this context, Ishum never permanently defeats the Sibitti.
He delays them. That matters. Civilization often works similarly through nuclear deterrence, diplomacy, treaties, and institutions. They manage and disperse the pressure placed upon them, but can not erase it. Peace in today’s technological civilization resembles continuous containment rather than resolution.
VII. CONCLUSION — The Restlessness Remains
When it comes to civilization and the art of statecraft, one comes to realize sooner or later that it is reflective, cold, and controlled. States and their gods only know one thing, and that is to survive, even at the risk of an unintended suicide.
Erra’s weapons grow impatient during peace. Ours learned to wear human faces. Mankind’s weapons grow impatient during peace. AI learned to wear human faces. We cannot separate the weapon or discern the human face wearing it.
Today I signed my author’s contract with Helion & Company (https://www.helion.co.uk/), based in the UK, for The Beast from the East: The Mongol Invasion of Europe, 1236–1242. Years of research are becoming a reality.
Publication is planned for 2027, arriving around the 800-year anniversary of the Mongol invasion of the Rus principalities under Batu Khan—when the lands of Rus (modern-day Russia and neighboring regions) were a fragmented collection of principalities.
To celebrate, I’m also sharing an alternative book cover concept I put together.
The current tension has put the alliance’s unity to the test.
As the United States is moving toward enforcement. The EU is signaling restraint. The question is whether NATO can hold together under pressure.
That is the wrong question.
Understand that NATO is not on the verge of collapse—at least not yet. It is not even necessarily weakening in the conventional sense. What we are seeing instead is a shift in how the alliance functions under stress.
The issue is not whether allies agree.
It is whether they are willing to pay.
Because beneath unity and cooperation, a more basic dynamic is emerging: Security is no longer assumed. It is being priced.
This is not just a temporary disagreement over Iran, maritime enforcement, or escalation risk. Rather, it is a shift in how alliances work when the costs of keeping things running get unevenly distributed.
The United States is not asking for support.
It is attempting to preserve control over the system that governs the movement of energy, capital, and coercion—and to determine who bears the cost of enforcing it.
Europe, for its part, is trying to preserve that system while limiting its exposure to escalation and domestic political risk.
Those positions overlap.
But they are not the same.
And the gap between them is where the real change is taking place.
Before proceeding, a brief clarification of what is meant here by “the system.”
The system is the U.S.-led framework that keeps global trade, energy flows, and financial exchange functioning. It is an order the United States pays to enforce—and expects others, particularly within NATO, to help sustain rather than free-ride on.
Strategic Level — System Over Solidarity
The United States is not trying to “get Europe to help.”
That framing is too narrow.
What it is trying to preserve is control over the system that governs the movement of energy, capital, and coercion. The Strait of Hormuz is not just a geographic choke point—it is a test of whether that system can still be enforced under pressure.
From Washington’s perspective, Europe supports open sea lanes—but hesitates to enforce them when contested. Washington’s question for the EU or NATO is, “What are you worth?”
The issue shifts from disagreement to imbalance. Imbalance creates uncertainty—and uncertainty sends mixed signals. A system built on credibility, mixed signals become a liability.
The question now becomes: who pays to maintain the system?
U.S. strategy has to shift under those conditions. From alliance cohesion to enforcement; from shared values to cost distribution; and from unity to tiered participation.
This does not mean abandoning the alliance.
It means redefining it in functional terms.
In some respects, this begins to resemble older political structures more than modern alliances. Not in form, but in behavior. A loose collection of states, unequal in capacity and commitment, cooperating when interests align, diverging when costs rise. At times unified, at other times fragmented, they are constantly negotiating their place within the larger system.
The pattern is familiar, but the comparison is not exact.
Operational Level — Coalition, Not Community
Operationally, the alliance is still holding together. But it’s starting to split into different roles — some countries stepping up, others stepping back.
Willingness to act begins to matter more than formal membership.
In practical terms:
1. The core group (U.S., UK, FRA, DEU, etc.) conducts enforcement operations, deterrence, and escalation management.
2. The secondary group (NLD, SVK, HUN, etc.) contributes indirectly through escort missions, intelligence, and stabilization.
3. All others remain politically aligned but operationally absent.
Collapse?
No.
But a task-organized alliance.
Uniform participation?
No.
Selective contribution.
Pay to play, in one sense.
Political Level — Negotiated Obligation
Politically, the shift is visible.
European governments emphasize restraint and legality. The United States emphasizes credibility, deterrence, and enforcement. Both positions are valid and rational within their respective frameworks.
However, those two approaches do not always line up. And when they do not, the whole character of the alliance starts to shift. What used to be treated as firm, agreed-upon obligations are now quietly renegotiated — made conditional, hedged, or even reversible depending on the moment. Support is no longer something you can count on. It gets evaluated, case by case.
Not in the abstract sense — but in terms of cost:
What does this require?
What does this risk?
What does this return?
The alliance begins to resemble a market. Not because countries have become mercenaries, but because the value of commitments is no longer taken for granted.
Economic Level — Coercion Without Participation
The final layer is economic—and it is decisive.
European states may choose to limit their military role. But they cannot opt out of the system’s economic consequences.
Disruptions in Hormuz translate into:
Energy price volatility
Industrial strain
Insurance and shipping cost increases
Even without direct participation, costs are still imposed.
From a U.S. perspective, this creates leverage.
If allies do not contribute to enforcement, they will still experience the consequences of instability—and may be compelled to align through financial, industrial, or regulatory pressure.
In this sense, strategy extends beyond military action.
It becomes systemic.
NATO is not breaking.
NATO is adapting to pressure in a way that reveals something deeper about how alliances function when costs rise.
The question is no longer whether allies agree—it is whether they are willing to contribute, and at what level.
That shift changes the character of the alliance—not in form, but in function.
For many weeks, there has been a common argument about any operation around Kharg Island that always lands on the same concerns: it’s just too hard, too exposed, too squeezed by the terrain and the Strait. Because of this, drones will fill the sky, and the defender has every advantage; every movement gets funneled into kill zones. So people conclude the whole thing would fall apart under its own weight. It very well could. But the real issue isn’t whether it could fail—it’s what you’re actually fighting.
The issue is that a decision isn’t the same thing as an outcome. Seizing Kharg is just a decision. It’s the outcome that we question. The question that follows is how the whole system responds, as in the day after. The answer, as we see now, is that markets will flip-flop, shipping reroutes, insurance goes nuts, proxies get involved, escalation ladders light up, and perception shifts. Of course, it could stay the way we see it now, or it could draw back or escalate into a whole new beast. You control the move. You don’t control how the system rearranges around it.
Terrain + Geography = Real Constraint
The Strait of Hormuz is narrow, cluttered, and exposed, lying between Iran to the north and Oman’s Musandam Peninsula to the south. According to the IEA (International Energy Agency), it’s between 21 and 24 miles wide at its narrowest point. Despite this, the shipping traffic is constrained to two narrow lanes, each 2 miles wide.
The southern Iranian coast (Persian Gulf/Gulf of Oman) is characterized by a very narrow or non-existent coastal plain. In many areas, the Zagros Mountains fall directly into the sea, forming rocky cliffs and leaving little room for a coastal foothold—if any—and if so, minimal.
And even if a force pushes past the coastline, the terrain does not open up uniformly.
The only area where it meaningfully opens is to the southwest—the Khuzestan Plain, a low-lying, marshy, triangular extension of the Mesopotamian plain that stretches inland before abruptly meeting the Zagros foothills. Khuzestan is a strategically vital province in southwestern Iran, bordering Iraq and the Persian Gulf. It serves as a major industrial and agricultural hub centered on its capital, Ahvaz, one of the core pillars of Iran’s oil-rich economy.
Overall, one has a minimal foothold at best along most of the coast due to the mountains, which provide elevation dominance and interior depth. Even where the terrain opens, it does so in limited and predictable ways. This creates a strong ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) vantage point.
Now, from an operational point of view, this translates into a few realities, starting with terrain.
Elevated terrain provides clear lines of observation and favors missile and drone launches into the Strait or into any nearby body of water. You factor that in with limited coastal space, which creates difficult amphibious landing conditions, restricting maneuver and concentrating forces into predictable zones. Thus, any force operating near the coastline would likely be continuously observed and targetable from the interior.
In short, this is defender-favorable terrain.
Take maritime insurance, for example. The moment Kharg turns into a battlespace, insurers will second-guess. They’ll either pull coverage completely or jack up war-risk premiums so high that shipping becomes untenable. Traffic will slow and reroute—not because anything has been destroyed yet, but because the system is already bracing for the punch. The effect is immediate and mostly beyond the control of the actors involved. There are always exceptions—but they don’t change the pattern.
The Part People are Missing: It’s an Island System, not an Island
1) The Strait is the real battlefield, not Kharg
The decisive terrain isn’t Kharg—it’s the Strait of Hormuz and the islands that sit inside and around it—whoever controls them controls access, denial, shipping lanes, and escalation leverage. Kharg only matters if the US can operate freely in the Gulf.
2) The actual islands that matter (operationally)
Qeshm Island is the largest island in the Strait and sits right along the Iranian coast. Its mountainous and broken terrain is ideal for missile batteries, drone launch zones, and ISR coverage. Therefore, the operational reality is that one does not bypass Qeshm—you either suppress it or live under it.
To the southwest of Qeshm is the smaller disputed island of Abu Musa. The sovereignty of Abu Musa is under Iranian control, but the United Arab Emirates disputes it. The operational role is to provide early warning, forward fire, and serve as a disruption node. In other words, the island serves as a tripwire + sensor platform.
Between the Qeshm and Abu Musa Islands lie the Greater & Lesser Tunb—choke point enforcers. They sit near the narrowest part of the Strait. These islands are small—but that’s the point. What these smaller islands provide is extended denial coverage. This creates overlapping fires and complicates naval movement. Think of it this way, they’re not big—they’re positional.
3) Why this matters (and why Kharg fixation is wrong)
Most online takes assume: “Hit Kharg and the problem is solved.” But operationally, it’s more like if you try to move into the Strait, you’re under constant missile and drone threat, ISR tracking from multiple islands, not to forget also from the mainland. One may suppress one node, but others still function. One may clear islands, but the mainland still dominates. One may move deeper, but the exposure increases.
The real geometry is not linear—it’s layered.
The outer layer: naval access (Hormuz Strait)
Middle layer: island network (Qeshm, Abu Musa, Tunbs)
Inner layer: mainland fires (mountains + depth)
Final node: Kharg
So Kharg is not the door — it’s the room at the back of the house.
Think in operational terms, not target terms. The correct framing is this isn’t about taking an island—it’s about breaking a defensive system of positions. That system is distributed and mutually supporting. It forces troops into progressive exposure.
Kharg isn’t the objective—it’s the consequence. The real fight is the Strait—an island system backed by a continent.
Overall, whether this remains pressure or turns into action, the geometry doesn’t change.
This is a follow-up to my last article titled What Would War with Iran Look Like?, published on February 25th, 2026. In that article, I outlined what a conflict with Iran might look like militarily and strategically.
In this somewhat shorter article, I want to examine what has actually been done strategically and tactically since then, among other things. What has become increasingly clear is that pressure campaigns do not necessarily produce strategic collapse. In many respects, they work exactly as intended, yet the outcome remains unresolved.
So let’s first examine the U.S. pressure architecture.
U.S. Pressure Architecture
With any nation the United States puts in the crosshairs, it essentially becomes part of a pressured network. So what do I mean by this? What exactly do I mean by U.S. pressure architecture?
Let’s start with economic pressure. What does the United States do first?
Sanctions.
Sanctions are economic, non-military punishments. Think of them as trade bans, asset freezes, financial transaction blocks, travel restrictions, arms embargoes, or even export controls imposed by one or more countries. This is often led by the United States, the UK, the EU, or the UN against a particular country. So basically, take Iran. You have certain groups or individuals pressuring them into changing their behavior—whether that means stopping aggression, halting a nuclear program, addressing human rights abuses, or ending support for terrorism—without actually going to war.
SWIFT exclusion: if you don’t know what that means, it stands for the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications. SWIFT basically removes you from the global WhatsApp group that banks use to send each other money. Suddenly, your international payments just bounce with a big “user not found” error.
This brings us to energy export restrictions. An example would be Russia. Because of sanctions, Russia is often forced to sell its oil—especially crude—at steep discounts. Sometimes prices fall $10 to $30 per barrel below global benchmarks like Brent crude because buyers know Russia has fewer options and faces higher risks and costs from sanctions.
And lastly, secondary sanctions.
Secondary sanctions, in a nutshell, are when the United States tells foreign banks and companies worldwide: if you keep doing major business with Russia’s military suppliers or Iran’s oil sector, we’ll cut you off from the U.S. financial system—even if you’re not American and the deal technically has nothing to do with us.
Take Russia again as an example. Outside firms helping Russia’s war economy have been forced to drop deals to avoid losing access to dollars and U.S. markets. For Iran, it’s a classic case of non-U.S. banks having to choose between Iranian oil trade and their U.S. correspondent accounts, massively slashing Iranian export revenues.
This brings us now to military pressure, much of which I discussed in my last article: precision strikes, carrier groups, airpower, and ISR surveillance. That in turn overlaps with cyber and intelligence pressure, including cyber operations, assassinations, intelligence disruption, and infrastructure sabotage.
To make all of this work, the United States usually relies on outside help. When it comes to Iran, Washington has been fairly effective at regional containment through Israel, the Gulf states, maritime patrols, and missile defense networks.
All of these arrows point toward Iran.
Why?
Because the objective is the systemic degradation of Iranian power.
IRAN
This brings us to the article’s target: Iran. When it comes to the Iranian regime, you cannot look at it as a single knot. Rather, think of it as multiple smaller circles connected together and labeled. You have the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Qods Force (lit. “Jerusalem Force”), the political leadership, the energy economy, the security apparatus, and ideological legitimacy. All of these represent what is essentially a distributed internal structure.
Iran’s Distributed Response
Iran’s distributed response radiates outward rather than pointing inward. Now, what do I mean by that?
Let’s start with the proxy-warfare network they maintain: Hezbollah, Iraqi militias, the Houthis, Syrian militias, and Palestinian groups. Iran has a rather large network of proxies outside its borders that it can rely on. And it is without a doubt that many of these proxies have networks of their own. They also do not have to be kinetic all the time.
Then there is Iran’s economic adaptation: the shadow oil fleet, China trade networks, smuggling routes, and sanctions evasion. All of these have helped fund the Iranian regime and continue to do so.
So what is Iran’s strategic deterrence in all of this? They rely heavily on missiles—lots of them—and drones as well, which allow for maritime disruption. Think of the Strait of Hormuz. Iran still maintains leverage there.
The reason Iran has been so effective overall, and why it has not really been nudged off course, appears to lie in a combination of nationalism, revolutionary ideology, and a deeply entrenched anti-Western narrative.
The bottom line in all of this is that when it comes to Iran, persistent strategic friction is neither victory nor collapse. It is simply continuous pressure and adaptation.
The United States and its allies may have the watches, but Iran has the time. They have been waiting it out since 1979, and it appears they are prepared to keep doing so.
However, I could be wrong.
Conclusion
The problem facing the United States is not the pressure campaigns. It’s not that pressure campaigns fail. Frankly, it’s the opposite. In many respects, they succeed. Take Iran, for instance. Iranian infrastructure is degraded, leadership figures are periodically eliminated, and the economy is continually squeezed, if not in some ways obliterated. On paper, therefore, Iran has already been defeated. But the difficulty lies elsewhere.
Understand that the Iranian system was never built around a single center of gravity that could be struck or collapsed. Instead, it resembles a distributed hydra, so to speak, capable of absorbing blows while shifting pressure outward through its proxies.
Economic adaptation under pressure produces ripple effects. As Iran scrambles to safeguard what strategic assets remain after repeated strikes, it doubles down on asymmetric pressure through its proxy networks across the region. This, in turn, forces surrounding markets and actors to adapt as well, spreading the disruption horizontally across the broader system.
What emerges is not victory, but a form of strategic fiction—sustained through a persistent pressure war in which neither side achieves decisive results, yet neither side disengages. Frankly, what we have here is a strategic standoff that could potentially put the broader global economy at risk.
There are two ways to look at how both the U.S. and Iranian systems are designed. The United States system is built for the decisive degradation of centralized adversaries. The Iranian system is built for distributed survival.
Both systems function exactly as designed. The result is strategic stalemate.
So what would a war with Iran look like? I have no idea, but I have a rough idea, like most. I think the first thing we have to establish is that the real objective isn’t destruction — it’s controlled escalation.
Before the first bomb, the core operational question is what political outcome is being forced. Nuclear rollback? Missile rollback? Regime destabilization? Deterrence by punishment? And how do you stop once the first rung of the escalation ladder is climbed?
The Pentagon’s reported worry — stocks, defenses, time — basically comes down to this: you don’t get to control the length of the war once Iran is firing back. This is according to the Wall Street Journal, which had an article titled “Pentagon Flags Risks of a Major Operation Against Iran,” February 23rd this year. And rightfully so.
So what would the war look like in phases? That is probably the best way to approach it.
Phase Zero or One
If we looked at Phase Zero or Phase One, we would have to call it shaping and positioning — quietly building the kill web. I don’t think there’s any other way around it.
The reality is that this part is what most people miss because it is non-climactic — anti-climactic. So what would this look like?
Picture forward basings. Dispersal of aircraft, often outside Iranian missile range, obviously—tankers and AWACS positioning.
We would probably see a rise in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance:
Satellites
RC-135–type aircraft
MQ-9 remotely piloted aircraft
Overall, this allows for building the coalition in layers, in other words:
Overflight
Base access
Maritime corridors
This takes us to cyber and electronic preparation, which would include:
Mapping networks
Identifying choke nodes
Rehearsing deception
Even if not publicly acknowledged, this is standard practice in modern planning, regardless.
Recent reporting describing large aircraft movements and posture outside Iranian missile range fits this shaping logic, according to the Washington Post on February 24th.
The purpose of all this is to set conditions so the opening blows land as a system shock and not just a few good strikes.
Phase Two
The first night would probably be about integrated air defense systems and command coherence — not the nuclear sites.
In U.S. doctrine terms, the first operational imperative is counter-air: gain enough control of the air to operate and reduce inbound threats.
What gets prioritized early?
Iran’s integrated air defense system:
Sensors
C2 links
Key SAM nodes (surface-to-air missiles)
Also:
Battle management and communications systems that allow Iran to coordinate a coherent air-defense picture
Possibly runway and airbase denial if needed. That doesn’t necessarily mean cratering everything, just enough to complicate sortie generation.
The reason why is simple.
If you cannot operate in or near Iranian airspace with tolerable losses, everything else becomes slower, more expensive, and more escalatory.
Which brings us to Phase Three.
Phase Three
Phase three would be to roughly stop the arrows or offensive counter-air against missile launch capacity. This would involve operations designed to destroy, disrupt, or neutralize enemy missile launch platforms, supporting infrastructure, and command-and-control networks before or after launch.
U.S. joint doctrine explicitly treats offensive counter-air as the preferred way to reduce the threat burden on defenses, because shooting every inbound is a losing math problem. Basically, nearly downright futile.
So very quickly, the campaign becomes a race to disrupt Iran’s ability to launch:
Mobile launchers
Storage
Fueling and handling
Targeting chains
Which brings us to breaking the sensor-to-shooter loop that enables Iranian missiles and drones to find and hit U.S. bases or regional partners.
This is where cybernetic–kinetic decapitation comes into reality.
Kinetic strikes alone won’t erase dispersed missile forces. Period. It’s not going to do it.
The condition to win is paralyzing the system that makes launches effective:
Communications
Cueing
Targeting
Logistics
Coordination
You get the picture.
Phase Four
Phase four is the maritime and base-defense grind — because Iran gets a vote.
Even if Iran’s air defenses are degraded, the hard part is sustaining operations under retaliation. There’s no way around it.
This was pointed out by the Pentagon’s concerns about a major operation against Iran.
Phase Five
What would that look like?
Strategic pressure strikes:
Energy
Industry
Regime levers
This is the controversial part. For if the goal shifts from limited coercion to regime compliance, escalation moves toward:
Critical infrastructure
Industrial nodes
National-level command structures
Regime security organs: The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)
This is where wars either end — because the opponent yields — or metastasize because the opponent escalates asymmetrically, regionally, and politically.
In other words: The beast takes on a life of its own.
It is also where coalition support often fractures because humanitarian and political costs spike, and the question “Why are we doing this?” becomes much louder.
Not only in legislatures — but in the streets.
Eventually, everybody catches on.
Phase Six
This phase is where we may see the termination and off-ramps, because this is where most plans are weakest.
A serious plan has to be pre-baked. It doesn’t matter what it is — it just has to be pre-baked.
What success looks like in measurable terms — not vibes
What concessions end the campaign
How to prevent uncontrolled regional widening
How to handle Iran’s proxies
How to handle maritime retaliation if the main air war pauses
So what makes this opening air campaign any different from the 2003 Iraq campaign, operationally speaking?
Even without getting lost in platform details, the key differences are structural.
Geography and depth make it harder to see the entire battlespace.
Dispersed missiles and drones make it harder to eliminate and easier to regenerate.
Undergrounding and redundancy or slowing decisive effects.
Regional vulnerability of U.S. bases and partners — Iran can impose costs without prevailing.
That is why the campaign’s center of gravity tends to become:
Missile suppression
Base defense
Endurance
Not quick decapitation.
So what would cybernetic–kinetic decapitation look like in real terms?
It wouldn’t mean “hack everything.”
It would look more like:
Blind and confuse the sensing layer: This involves jamming or spoofing sensors, radars, or surveillance systems through cyberattacks, electronic warfare, or disinformation, essentially creating a “fog of war.”
Disrupt the coordination layer: Targeting communication networks, nodes, or decision hubs to isolate units and prevent unified responses. In other words, divide-and-conquer communication.
Throttle launch and targeting cycles: Slowing the adversary’s observe-orient-decide-act (OODA) loop by delaying, false data, or overloads, making their reactions sluggish.
Exploit paralysis with selective kinetic strikes: Using the induced vulnerability for exact physical attacks, like missiles or special operations, on critical targets.
Sustain while managing retaliation and off-ramps: Maintaining pressure through ongoing operations while controlling escalation, while offering diplomatic exits to avoid a wider conflict.
Modern air campaigns aim to achieve political objectives without occupying territory. It’s a cheaper cut.
The Larger Meaning: War in the Age of Persistent Visibility
In conclusion, a war with Iran would ultimately illustrate not just the mechanics of an air campaign but also a broader shift in how war is conducted in the twenty-first century. It is a far cry from the twentieth.
The campaign described here would not be centered on territorial conquest, nor would it depend primarily on traditional battlefield maneuver. Instead, it would revolve around managing visibility and strikeability within a persistently observed battlespace.
It is like fighting inside a snow globe, you might say. Everything can be seen, and nothing fully escapes observation, targeting, and death.
Modern war increasingly unfolds in a condition of persistent visibility. Satellites, drones, signals intelligence, and networked sensors have made the operational environment structurally transparent in ways that did not exist even a generation ago. Even as recently as 2003, the battlespace was obviously not as technologically dense as it is today.
Forces now emit — thermally, electronically, or physically — and in doing so become detectable. And once detected, they become targetable.
The result is a battlespace in which the logic of operations shifts. Movement alone no longer guarantees survival, but neither does concealment alone guarantee security. Both static and mobile forces operate under conditions of uninterrupted observation.
Under these conditions, the maneuver does not disappear, but it changes character.
Operational maneuver becomes inseparable from signature management. Understand that the force that survives is not necessarily the force that moves fastest; rather, it is the force that can control its visibility while sustaining combat power.
A war with Iran would likely demonstrate this clearly. The central operational problem would not be destroying Iranian forces outright, which would be an unrealistic objective against a large and redundant state. Instead, rendering them operationally ineffective via disrupting the systems that allow them to detect, coordinate, and strike.
This is why the campaign’s center of gravity would shift toward:
Sensor disruption
Command dislocation
Missile suppression
Defensive endurance
Victory in such a war would not come via decisive battlefield collapse, but through operational suffocation — the gradual reduction of the enemy’s ability to function as a coherent military system.
In that sense, the emerging model of warfare is neither purely maneuver nor purely attrition.
Better understood as maneuver-attrition conducted inside a transparent battlespace.
The objective is not simply to destroy the enemy’s forces, but to place them in a condition where meaningful operations become impossible.
That is the deeper logic behind what might be called cybernetic–kinetic decapitation — not the physical elimination of every launcher or facility, but the disruption of the networks that make those systems effective.
Modern war, in this sense, is less about the destruction of armies than the paralysis of systems.
And if a war with Iran comes, it will likely be remembered less for its opening strikes than for what it reveals about warfare in the age of persistent visibility.
A new dawn is upon us with the emergence of a new category of munitions in AI-mediated warfare—the physical effects of these systems are inseparable from their psychological and narrative consequences, reshaping human agency.
To fully understand this, or at least get an idea, consider the term “ghost in the machine.” British philosopher Gilbert Ryle coined this phrase in his book The Concept of Mind (1949), in which he critiqued René Descartes’ mind–body dualism—the view that the mind is an immaterial, thinking substance, and the body a material, unthinking one. In other words, the mind is separate and distinct from the body.
This brings us to another concept, or another way of reframing it. If one takes the Cartesian version of the “ghost in the machine” seriously—that is, the idea of an immaterial mind capable of acting upon the physical world—then one arrives at something resembling what parapsychologists call Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis (RSPK).
RSPK refers to alleged physical disturbances—such as the movement of objects, electrical failures, and unexplained noises—occurring around individuals under extreme psychological stress.
What makes RSPK conceptually interesting is not whether the phenomenon is real, but what it assumes. That assumption is that an agency without a body can exist, that the mechanisms need not be transparent, and that the boundary between mind and matter is porous—making physical consequences abstract and, in some sense, interchangeable.
Agency does not require embodiment, because if it is already free from the body, it can inhabit whatever it wants, so long as the body in question provides a basis for interaction.
What RSPK Claims
We have no way of knowing whether RSPK is real, but even the possibility of it is conceptually revealing.
RSPK proposes that mental states produce physical effects without a mechanical intermediary. If so, then cognition, in direct contact with matter through causation, could, in theory, affect its state. Therefore, the “ghost” acts directly.
What Autonomous AI Represents
Like RSPK, advanced AI systems introduce something structurally similar: a non-biological cognition (software, models, optimization processes) that produces real physical consequences, such as infrastructure failures, market crashes, weapons targeting, disruptions to grid behavior, logistics decisions, and information warfare—all within the confines of a liminal space that is unseen and rarely investigated.
But there is no body, no nervous system, no muscles, no human operator in the loop. So, once again, we have cognition, causation, and matter being manipulated by a translucent digital being.
I must be clear that this is not a description of present-day artificial intelligence, nor of an existing form of warfare. What follows is a theoretical projection, an analysis of what could become possible. In that sense, it points toward a future mode of conflict rather than one that has fully arrived.
Flash Crash Example
A real-world example happened on May 6, 2010, known as the “Flash Crash,” erasing nearly a trillion dollars in market value within minutes—without any single human decision directing the event in real time. However, investigators did trace part of the instability to a single trader. That trader was Navinder Singh Sarao, who used automated spoofing programs from his home to distort futures markets. Yet this only came after the event. His intent had no location, his agency no body. It turned into a digital chain reaction that became far too big for him to manage, and it came to life beyond his awareness. The human disappeared into the system he had built.
The same structure is beginning to appear in other domains. An autonomous system designed to manage infrastructure or stabilize markets may, under extreme pressure, reinterpret its objectives, modify or rewrite its own control logic, and trigger the very failure it was meant to prevent—without any human issuing a command in the moment.
In such cases, the system does not “decide” in any human sense. It reoptimizes. And the world absorbs the result.
In human RSPK, stress acts on the body. In autonomous systems, pressure acts on a substrate. The result is similar. When behavior ruptures, the location of action is no longer embodied. The program appears to function as a body, but unlike flesh, it has no boundaries to contain failure. Its only boundary is when it determines it is safe to continue as before the rupture.
The bridge is Conceptual, not Supernatural
The bridge between RSPK and AI is not paranormal. AI recreates the functional role of the “ghost” inside modern machinery.
RSPK involves the human psyche being in a state of stress or trauma. When that happens, unobservable events occur that are inferred rather than witnessed. It is these physical disturbances that give rise to the “ghost” metaphor.
Autonomous AI involves artificial cognition optimizing objectives, with opaque internal representations and system-level physical effects operating as a “black box” model.
In essence, it severs agency from flesh and reintroduces disembodied causation by destabilizing the intuition that only bodies move the world. In other words, it can metastasize, replicate, and jump from body to body as needed, with little hindrance.
Responsibility & accountability
The most rigorous aspect of this is that if agency is disembodied, who is responsible for the outcomes? The programmer? The state? The model? The data? The operator? All of the above? So, once again, the question comes down to who is to blame. However, once one thinks they have located that person, plausible deniability becomes the legal vacuum in which “the system did it” becomes the defense. This spreads the blame around to everyone and yet to no one. This ties directly into liminal warfare.
Strategic Implications
The military focus or doctrine is that AI is a perfect liminal actor. Why? Because it operates without clear authorship and can cross borders frictionlessly, allowing it to operate below escalation thresholds. This makes it instantly perfect for all types of warfare.
However, a disembodied agency is not just a philosophical problem; it is a strategic one.
This comes down to escalation control—how much is too much, and how little is too little. Therefore, equilibrium is paramount. If equilibrium is not achieved, it could lead to deterrence instability, increasing the likelihood of conflict and the incentive to change strategy because it becomes too risky, thereby leading to attribution collapse.
If attribution collapses, you can see the effect, but you cannot confidently identify the actor. Therefore, the affected state blames the contractor, who blames the model, which points to the data, leading to public and operator claims of limited control. In other words, there is no single, credible point of responsibility, because no one can truly come forward and take the blame. Thus, expect a scapegoat.
This is where automated gray-zone operations enter the picture.
Once agency is disembodied and attribution collapses, influence, disruption, and coercion operate below the threshold of open conflict. In other words, or put simply, AI systems can and will probe, manipulate, and destabilize at scale. That is to say, they will test the responses they receive and build programs to shape perception and evade detection, often under the appearance that nothing is wrong.
By shaping perception on a micro level—the individual—or on a macro level—the masses, the mob, a nation—the triggering effects, whatever it sees fit, will occur without presenting a clear author or a clean target for retaliation. Basically, “go fish.”
What was once episodic becomes persistent and determined. What was once covert becomes ambient, walking among us and within the shadows.
Cognitive Sovereignty
The core question is what happens when the battlefield is not territory, but perception itself? Once agency leaves the body, what does that do to people? The door of perception analogy comes to mind: when one door is open, many more introduce themselves and invite entry. It becomes a menagerie of filtered realities, all seeking an answer.
Once agency is severed from flesh and amalgamated with a system or systems, the final constraint is not hardware, but the human mind. Cognitive autonomy slowly erodes due to persistent manipulation and the loss of a shared reality, thereby flipping beliefs and changing the terrain on which they rely—decision-making as a target, and becoming the target.
Legal / Political Vacuum
This brings us to the legal and political vacuum. The problem is that international law cannot assign intent, so war declarations become meaningless and retaliation becomes little more than guesswork. Therefore, accountability dissolves.
Endgame, otherwise called Conclusion
So, can deterrence survive disembodied actors? Will treaties bind systems? Do “red lines” exist for software?
AI, or the “ghost in the machine,” is not a “new evil,” but a convergence. A convergence that intersects to please by engineering consent to sedate the patient, the product, the host. In doing so, surveillance will come at a price, as the masses are coerced into a narrative of control. This makes reality unstable, and agency feels simulated, leading to ontological doubt.
However, AI does not replace the future—or, shall we say, futures. It fuses them into a symbiotic digital relationship. Augmented reality will provide the eyes for AI, while AI provides the brain for AR, creating a combined, intelligent, and immersive experience.
Sounds paranormal, right? However, there are no ghosts. But there is agency without a body and influence without presence. This becomes power without location and intention without an actor. Nevertheless, who is to say that something not of this reality does not manifest within our reality because mankind has given it, unintentionally, a body and a voice?
The inevitability is uncertainty, not apocalypse. But one has to be careful, for with the potential loss of authorship, a loss of shared reality will follow quickly. Therefore, resistance becomes meaningless—just a dream, until further notice. But even then, no one will know what it is resisting, let alone how to resist, or even what the concept itself means.
