Karen...spooky times, yes...BUT... reading carefully...and keeping your head is the "magic" potion antidote...so you're ALREADY doing the important part.
Thank you for the restack...and YOU go have a real weekend as well.
Meriby...okay...after a brief look...if one is asking, "Is Greece becoming a staging area for a possible wider war with Iran?" the answer is most definitely "yes."
Greece IS more an more every day... serving as a platform from which the United States could support a broader regional war if one develops.
Meriby...appreciate you passing it along...and thank your friend for me.
But...let me be straight about how I handle this kind of thing...because it matters more with this subject...than almost ANY other.
I can't run with a troop movement I haven't been able to verify.
Deployments get reported...misreported...garbled secondhand...and...sometimes floated deliberately.
If a regiment moved to Greece...there'll be a sourceable trail...a unit, a date, a DoD or NATO notice, wire coverage...and I'll go looking for it.
If I find it...I'll excitedly write it up...with the receipt attached. If I can't...I'll wait until I can. Meriby...please know that's not me doubting your friend. It's the standard I'd want held to my own reporting...in the JHN newsletter.
If you hear anything else from your friend, please send it along.
To a citizen, a layman, a concerned person all of this seems to be leading to more problems than just pulling out and packing it in. I’m sure there’s enough BS to explain the failures, find the bright side, or change the subject. Sadly, the damage to the US has been done and will continue but without more billions spent, lives lost, and reputations destroyed. We’re good at moving on.
Douglas MacKay...you've nailed down the ugliest part of the escalation trap:
The rational move...pull out, cut losses...is the one thing that becomes politically IMPOSSIBLE...because withdrawal...forces someone to admit the whole damn thing was a MISTAKE...and admitting mistakes...with this merry band of morons..is NOT...is NOT the skillset.
So...the sunk cost KEEPS compounding. More billions...more lives...precisely because stopping...would mean OWNING IT. It's simply not going to happen.It just isn't.
You're also right that we're good at moving on. That's not really a strength, though... it's how the same error...gets to run AGAIN with a fresh cast of actors.
Remembering is the harder...more useful thing. You're DOING IT!
It is an unsettling read. After watching Hegseth's congressional testimony for more money, I am more convinced then ever that we are being governed by idiots. I will certainly be watching this closely to look for the signals and patterns. Unfortunately, getting back to the aforementioned idiots, they seem incapable of assessing a situation a serious as Iran. My take away is they thought they could go blow up somethings and Iran would cave. No thought or strategy as who they were dealing with, or the strategic leverage the Strait of Hormuz is for Iran. What a cluster we have at the highest levels of our government. Thanks for the information.
Kristine...you summarized Pape's whole thesis without needing him: they mistook blowing things up for a STRATEGY...assumed the other side wanted the same kind of victory we did...and NEVER priced in that Iran gets to CHOOSE the terrain; and the STRAIT is terrain they've been preparing for TWENTY-YEARS
"Degraded" was supposed to mean "finished." Of course, it did NOT.
Whether it's idiocy...or just the arrogance...(or both) that comes from never being told no...the result on the GROUND is the same. FUBAR.
Keep watching the indicators. You've ALREADY got the right frame for reading them!
Hegseth and his minions have always been dangerously out of their depth. They clearly underestimated Iran as well as world sentiments and dynamics. They are not experienced, wise or dhrewd.. and they tossed out any competent experienced players. Even as a simple civilian I can see ghastly strategic mistakes on every level.
Sher'..your last line is the whole thing: when a "simple civilian" can see the strategic errors from the CHEAP SEATS...that's not you being unusually sharp...(although, I've come to learn that you ARE) it's them having thrown out EVERYONE whose job was...to catch these things BEFORE they happened.
Competence looks boring...right up until it's GONE...and then...you notice it all at once.
Purging the experienced players isn't a side effect of the mess. It's the CAUSE of it.
Keep watching...your eyes are working beautifully!
I think Iran has the ultimate power to severely cripple world economies. This could be far more powerful than a mass casualty event. Trump, hinted at this, when he gave Iran everything in the last MOU.
File the date: July 24, 2026. Note what Hopkins has actually done here, because it is rarer than it looks. He has taken a credentialed forecast and refused to convert it into either reassurance or hysteria. That refusal is itself a historical marker, because most societies facing this exact juncture do one or the other, and both failures are well documented.
Note which phrase does the real work in Pape’s argument: “escalation trap.” A trap, by definition, is not a single decision. It is a structure that makes each subsequent decision feel like the only sane option, given the one before it. This is precisely the mechanism by which democracies enter wars they did not choose and cannot end. Jack is correct that the danger is not the individual strike, missile, or casualty count. The danger is the staircase — the sequence in which no single step looks like a decision for war, and yet the society arrives at war regardless, because turning back has been made to look like weakness at every landing.
File the date on the phrase “degraded.” Governments have used variations of this word for a century to describe military outcomes that fall short of victory while sounding like victory. It appeared in Vietnam. It appeared in the war on terror. It will appear again, because it performs a specific function: it allows a public to believe an enemy has been defeated without requiring anyone to define what defeat means. Hopkins is right to flag it as a warning sign rather than a status update.
The section that deserves the most attention is “the attack after the attack.” This is the correct historical category, and it has a name in the literature Hopkins does not use but should: the reflex arc. A mass-casualty event does not simply kill people. It collapses the distance between stimulus and policy. Congress moves faster than deliberation should allow. Journalists narrate rather than question. Citizens who would ordinarily demand evidence accept assertion instead, because grief has been substituted for judgment, and grief does not ask for citations. Every authoritarian consolidation of the last century has used some version of this mechanism, not because the grief was insincere, but because insincerity was never required. Genuine fear works just as well, and often better, because it recruits itself.
Note which failure Hopkins is trying to prevent in advance: the failure of a citizenry that decides, in the hour after catastrophe, that the moment for careful thought has passed. Jack is correct that the only defense against this is decided in advance, not in the moment — his own postscript makes the point plainly, and it is the correct point. You cannot out-think a reflex arc while inside it. You can only pre-commit to standards before the emotional flood arrives, the way a sailor lashes himself to the mast before the sound of the sirens, not after.
What Hopkins understates, and what the history of escalation traps consistently shows, is that the ground-war threshold is not merely a military problem. It is an information problem. Occupations fail not for lack of firepower but for lack of any legitimate answer to the question “who governs now.” Every empire that has crossed this threshold since 1945 has discovered the same thing at the same moment: capturing territory and administering it are different skills, and the second is the one that determines whether the occupation becomes a decade or a headline.
The indicators list is the most useful thing in the piece, and it is useful for a reason worth naming directly: it converts fear into observation. Fear wants a verdict. Observation only wants evidence. A citizen who is watching embassy staffing levels and shipping insurance rates is doing something categorically different from a citizen who is doomscrolling for reassurance, even though both may look, from the outside, like people staring at the same news feed.
File the date on one more thing, because it will matter later regardless of how this resolves: a society that could watch a credentialed twenty-year forecast arrive, absorb it without panic, and adjust its attention rather than its blood pressure, is a society that has retained something most wartime societies lose early and never recover — the capacity to be informed without being governed by the information. Whether that capacity holds past the next explosion is the actual question. Pape gave the forecast. Hopkins gave the discipline. Neither one gave you permission to stop paying attention.
One of my biggest concerns is how our "Secretary of Defense" manages incoming intelligence, whether he actually listens to, or comprehends, or actually responds in an appropriate manner. If this were a more reasonable administration with a ''Secretary of Defense" who possessed an IQ higher than his shoe size I wouldn't be quite so alarmed. I'll wait for further information from you. Thank you, Jack and Robert Pape.
I’d be curious whether Pape’s analysis adequately accounts for the individuals currently driving decision-making in the United States. We were led into this war by a president who accepted a foreign government’s assurances that victory would be quick and painless, despite years of analysis by the U.S. military, intelligence, and strategic-policy communities warning otherwise.
The civilian leadership of the Pentagon appears committed to a warfighting mindset and public image, but not to defining achievable strategic objectives or planning for what follows each tactical success. Senior military leadership has been hollowed out and replaced by yes-men who appear more concerned with currying favor and padding their post-government résumés than with challenging civilian leaders or serving the country.
As we have seen with the president and his secretary of WAR, rational decision-making is not a priority. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently described 47’s policy as not an eye for an eye, but “a head for an eye.” That is not a promise of proportional retaliation; it is an explicit promise of disproportionate retaliation.
War crimes apparently are not a concern. The administration has already made clear that civilian infrastructure is not off limits, and the intentional targeting or destruction of civilian infrastructure is a war crime. Achievable strategic objectives appear unnecessary. Facts appear optional. And with much of the media failing to challenge this administration with anything approaching the intensity it brought to Benghazi or the Afghanistan withdrawal, who is positioned to hold it accountable?
I see Pape’s spiral already happening, and no mass-casualty event has yet occurred. The president has failed to achieve his stated objectives and now appears increasingly boxed in. Meanwhile, Iran has begun playing the long game, using horizontal escalation and attacks on critical infrastructure to impose political and economic costs far beyond the immediate casualty count.
Targeting desalination infrastructure threatens the water supply of countries supporting 47—not merely today, but potentially for years. Damage to refineries, ports, and shipping affects the economic well-being not only of these allies, but of the world generally. When the citizens of America’s Middle Eastern allies begin experiencing the real pain of this war, how long will those governments remain allies?
There was never broad public support for this misadventure. What support exists appears little more than the MAGA base that would support 47 almost regardless of what he did. If allied support begins to fray and the president interprets every off-ramp as weakness, we are being set up for something even worse.
Would a mass-casualty event involving American troops or civilians be met with a proportional response? Unlikely. Unless officials capable of strategic restraint regain a meaningful voice within the White House, Pentagon, and Congress very soon, a nuclear response is not as unthinkable as rational people would like it to be.
If the United States used even a low-yield tactical nuclear weapon, how would China or Russia respond? What about Pakistan or India? Would the United States become such an international pariah that it was treated like the North Korean regime? Or would the nuclear genie finally be out of the bottle?
Does Pape’s analysis account for a president who may experience every off-ramp as a personal humiliation and every call for restraint as evidence of weakness? If not, the escalation trap may be even more dangerous than his historical model suggests.
Is the posited attack coming from Iran, which has something to lose with escalation? Or a false flag from the zealots in the administration, which needs something to whip up war fervor domestically to suppress dissent and stiffen the flagging resolve of those who have proclaimed their willingness to suffer as long as it keeps Iran from having a nuke?
I follow what Shane Yirak writes, Jack. Are you familiar with his Substack? It takes me awhile to sort it out generally, so I haven’t made quite enough time to read his latest post. Gonna do that right now, as well as
Scary Times 😱 TGIF to you and your readers, Jack. Thank you for your hard work,we appreciate you. Have a good weekend, and will reStack ASAP 💯👍
Karen...spooky times, yes...BUT... reading carefully...and keeping your head is the "magic" potion antidote...so you're ALREADY doing the important part.
Thank you for the restack...and YOU go have a real weekend as well.
The watching keeps till Monday!
-Jack
Jack, a suggestion: ask why a regiment has just been quickly deployed to Greece. (From a friend.)
Meriby...okay...after a brief look...if one is asking, "Is Greece becoming a staging area for a possible wider war with Iran?" the answer is most definitely "yes."
Greece IS more an more every day... serving as a platform from which the United States could support a broader regional war if one develops.
I'll stay on this as it develops further.
-Jack
Meriby...appreciate you passing it along...and thank your friend for me.
But...let me be straight about how I handle this kind of thing...because it matters more with this subject...than almost ANY other.
I can't run with a troop movement I haven't been able to verify.
Deployments get reported...misreported...garbled secondhand...and...sometimes floated deliberately.
If a regiment moved to Greece...there'll be a sourceable trail...a unit, a date, a DoD or NATO notice, wire coverage...and I'll go looking for it.
If I find it...I'll excitedly write it up...with the receipt attached. If I can't...I'll wait until I can. Meriby...please know that's not me doubting your friend. It's the standard I'd want held to my own reporting...in the JHN newsletter.
If you hear anything else from your friend, please send it along.
-Jack
To a citizen, a layman, a concerned person all of this seems to be leading to more problems than just pulling out and packing it in. I’m sure there’s enough BS to explain the failures, find the bright side, or change the subject. Sadly, the damage to the US has been done and will continue but without more billions spent, lives lost, and reputations destroyed. We’re good at moving on.
Douglas MacKay...you've nailed down the ugliest part of the escalation trap:
The rational move...pull out, cut losses...is the one thing that becomes politically IMPOSSIBLE...because withdrawal...forces someone to admit the whole damn thing was a MISTAKE...and admitting mistakes...with this merry band of morons..is NOT...is NOT the skillset.
So...the sunk cost KEEPS compounding. More billions...more lives...precisely because stopping...would mean OWNING IT. It's simply not going to happen.It just isn't.
You're also right that we're good at moving on. That's not really a strength, though... it's how the same error...gets to run AGAIN with a fresh cast of actors.
Remembering is the harder...more useful thing. You're DOING IT!
-Jack
I've had recurring thoughts of an eventual event similar to 9/11 .
as a possibility. I also would not put it past this Regime to turn the military fully on any large revolt. Now. There..I said it.
It is an unsettling read. After watching Hegseth's congressional testimony for more money, I am more convinced then ever that we are being governed by idiots. I will certainly be watching this closely to look for the signals and patterns. Unfortunately, getting back to the aforementioned idiots, they seem incapable of assessing a situation a serious as Iran. My take away is they thought they could go blow up somethings and Iran would cave. No thought or strategy as who they were dealing with, or the strategic leverage the Strait of Hormuz is for Iran. What a cluster we have at the highest levels of our government. Thanks for the information.
Kristine...you summarized Pape's whole thesis without needing him: they mistook blowing things up for a STRATEGY...assumed the other side wanted the same kind of victory we did...and NEVER priced in that Iran gets to CHOOSE the terrain; and the STRAIT is terrain they've been preparing for TWENTY-YEARS
"Degraded" was supposed to mean "finished." Of course, it did NOT.
Whether it's idiocy...or just the arrogance...(or both) that comes from never being told no...the result on the GROUND is the same. FUBAR.
Keep watching the indicators. You've ALREADY got the right frame for reading them!
-Jack
Hegseth and his minions have always been dangerously out of their depth. They clearly underestimated Iran as well as world sentiments and dynamics. They are not experienced, wise or dhrewd.. and they tossed out any competent experienced players. Even as a simple civilian I can see ghastly strategic mistakes on every level.
Sher'..your last line is the whole thing: when a "simple civilian" can see the strategic errors from the CHEAP SEATS...that's not you being unusually sharp...(although, I've come to learn that you ARE) it's them having thrown out EVERYONE whose job was...to catch these things BEFORE they happened.
Competence looks boring...right up until it's GONE...and then...you notice it all at once.
Purging the experienced players isn't a side effect of the mess. It's the CAUSE of it.
Keep watching...your eyes are working beautifully!
-Jack
Thank you Jack! You certainly have a way with words.. 😉.
I think Iran has the ultimate power to severely cripple world economies. This could be far more powerful than a mass casualty event. Trump, hinted at this, when he gave Iran everything in the last MOU.
File the date: July 24, 2026. Note what Hopkins has actually done here, because it is rarer than it looks. He has taken a credentialed forecast and refused to convert it into either reassurance or hysteria. That refusal is itself a historical marker, because most societies facing this exact juncture do one or the other, and both failures are well documented.
Note which phrase does the real work in Pape’s argument: “escalation trap.” A trap, by definition, is not a single decision. It is a structure that makes each subsequent decision feel like the only sane option, given the one before it. This is precisely the mechanism by which democracies enter wars they did not choose and cannot end. Jack is correct that the danger is not the individual strike, missile, or casualty count. The danger is the staircase — the sequence in which no single step looks like a decision for war, and yet the society arrives at war regardless, because turning back has been made to look like weakness at every landing.
File the date on the phrase “degraded.” Governments have used variations of this word for a century to describe military outcomes that fall short of victory while sounding like victory. It appeared in Vietnam. It appeared in the war on terror. It will appear again, because it performs a specific function: it allows a public to believe an enemy has been defeated without requiring anyone to define what defeat means. Hopkins is right to flag it as a warning sign rather than a status update.
The section that deserves the most attention is “the attack after the attack.” This is the correct historical category, and it has a name in the literature Hopkins does not use but should: the reflex arc. A mass-casualty event does not simply kill people. It collapses the distance between stimulus and policy. Congress moves faster than deliberation should allow. Journalists narrate rather than question. Citizens who would ordinarily demand evidence accept assertion instead, because grief has been substituted for judgment, and grief does not ask for citations. Every authoritarian consolidation of the last century has used some version of this mechanism, not because the grief was insincere, but because insincerity was never required. Genuine fear works just as well, and often better, because it recruits itself.
Note which failure Hopkins is trying to prevent in advance: the failure of a citizenry that decides, in the hour after catastrophe, that the moment for careful thought has passed. Jack is correct that the only defense against this is decided in advance, not in the moment — his own postscript makes the point plainly, and it is the correct point. You cannot out-think a reflex arc while inside it. You can only pre-commit to standards before the emotional flood arrives, the way a sailor lashes himself to the mast before the sound of the sirens, not after.
What Hopkins understates, and what the history of escalation traps consistently shows, is that the ground-war threshold is not merely a military problem. It is an information problem. Occupations fail not for lack of firepower but for lack of any legitimate answer to the question “who governs now.” Every empire that has crossed this threshold since 1945 has discovered the same thing at the same moment: capturing territory and administering it are different skills, and the second is the one that determines whether the occupation becomes a decade or a headline.
The indicators list is the most useful thing in the piece, and it is useful for a reason worth naming directly: it converts fear into observation. Fear wants a verdict. Observation only wants evidence. A citizen who is watching embassy staffing levels and shipping insurance rates is doing something categorically different from a citizen who is doomscrolling for reassurance, even though both may look, from the outside, like people staring at the same news feed.
File the date on one more thing, because it will matter later regardless of how this resolves: a society that could watch a credentialed twenty-year forecast arrive, absorb it without panic, and adjust its attention rather than its blood pressure, is a society that has retained something most wartime societies lose early and never recover — the capacity to be informed without being governed by the information. Whether that capacity holds past the next explosion is the actual question. Pape gave the forecast. Hopkins gave the discipline. Neither one gave you permission to stop paying attention.
#HOLDFAST
One of my biggest concerns is how our "Secretary of Defense" manages incoming intelligence, whether he actually listens to, or comprehends, or actually responds in an appropriate manner. If this were a more reasonable administration with a ''Secretary of Defense" who possessed an IQ higher than his shoe size I wouldn't be quite so alarmed. I'll wait for further information from you. Thank you, Jack and Robert Pape.
I’d be curious whether Pape’s analysis adequately accounts for the individuals currently driving decision-making in the United States. We were led into this war by a president who accepted a foreign government’s assurances that victory would be quick and painless, despite years of analysis by the U.S. military, intelligence, and strategic-policy communities warning otherwise.
The civilian leadership of the Pentagon appears committed to a warfighting mindset and public image, but not to defining achievable strategic objectives or planning for what follows each tactical success. Senior military leadership has been hollowed out and replaced by yes-men who appear more concerned with currying favor and padding their post-government résumés than with challenging civilian leaders or serving the country.
As we have seen with the president and his secretary of WAR, rational decision-making is not a priority. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently described 47’s policy as not an eye for an eye, but “a head for an eye.” That is not a promise of proportional retaliation; it is an explicit promise of disproportionate retaliation.
War crimes apparently are not a concern. The administration has already made clear that civilian infrastructure is not off limits, and the intentional targeting or destruction of civilian infrastructure is a war crime. Achievable strategic objectives appear unnecessary. Facts appear optional. And with much of the media failing to challenge this administration with anything approaching the intensity it brought to Benghazi or the Afghanistan withdrawal, who is positioned to hold it accountable?
I see Pape’s spiral already happening, and no mass-casualty event has yet occurred. The president has failed to achieve his stated objectives and now appears increasingly boxed in. Meanwhile, Iran has begun playing the long game, using horizontal escalation and attacks on critical infrastructure to impose political and economic costs far beyond the immediate casualty count.
Targeting desalination infrastructure threatens the water supply of countries supporting 47—not merely today, but potentially for years. Damage to refineries, ports, and shipping affects the economic well-being not only of these allies, but of the world generally. When the citizens of America’s Middle Eastern allies begin experiencing the real pain of this war, how long will those governments remain allies?
There was never broad public support for this misadventure. What support exists appears little more than the MAGA base that would support 47 almost regardless of what he did. If allied support begins to fray and the president interprets every off-ramp as weakness, we are being set up for something even worse.
Would a mass-casualty event involving American troops or civilians be met with a proportional response? Unlikely. Unless officials capable of strategic restraint regain a meaningful voice within the White House, Pentagon, and Congress very soon, a nuclear response is not as unthinkable as rational people would like it to be.
If the United States used even a low-yield tactical nuclear weapon, how would China or Russia respond? What about Pakistan or India? Would the United States become such an international pariah that it was treated like the North Korean regime? Or would the nuclear genie finally be out of the bottle?
Does Pape’s analysis account for a president who may experience every off-ramp as a personal humiliation and every call for restraint as evidence of weakness? If not, the escalation trap may be even more dangerous than his historical model suggests.
Its logical.
Is the posited attack coming from Iran, which has something to lose with escalation? Or a false flag from the zealots in the administration, which needs something to whip up war fervor domestically to suppress dissent and stiffen the flagging resolve of those who have proclaimed their willingness to suffer as long as it keeps Iran from having a nuke?
The logistics are in place at the time of this article
I follow what Shane Yirak writes, Jack. Are you familiar with his Substack? It takes me awhile to sort it out generally, so I haven’t made quite enough time to read his latest post. Gonna do that right now, as well as
check out what you’re telling us about here.
Thanks for the heads-up. Restacking, as well.