April 8, 2026
Kharg-a-Lago Whiplash; Cease Fire? Israel Hung Out To Dry?
I don’t know about you but I’m really whiplashed by the events of the last few days, and especially, this ceasefire.
Ironically, yesterday I was about to backtrack on my prediction of a few days ago:
This is all water under the bridge now (or not, who knows what will happen with this ceasefire?) but I think it’s important to confess the reason I was about to backtrack: while I factored in the immense complications of the new, fluid, drone-and-hypersonic missile battlefield, I didn’t take into account that Iran is right across a thin body of water and that the Marines would be sitting ducks once having taken these islands (and yes, they would have to occupy them - read on).
But conceptually I don’t think I was wrong at all. Quite likely the difficulty of the op factored into the decision to call it off (or postpone it, again, we don’t know).
This is small potatoes in the big scheme, but I want to say something about a mini-ruckus it caused with a commenter.
My prediction was based on facts, and it ended with an emotional flourish. You can disagree with me about the emotional flourish, but not the facts. I enjoy being corrected on the facts. That’s why I keep my comments open. When I’m wrong, as I was here, I acknowledge it. I enjoy reality. It grounds you and gives you the opportunity to rethink premises.
What I won’t do is allow my Substack comments to degenerate to shouting, sneering, and hostile one-upmanship. I won’t tolerate that. You’ll get banned.
The modern battlefields is a labyrinth of complicated technology and a million moving parts. People can scoff at it all they want. “War has always been terrible. How would you like facing a 6’5” Gaul swinging a long sword?” My answer: “I’d rather face one of them than a runt with a bunch of drones.”
Someone who made a habit of pestering me here and in “Notes” since May 2024 took umbrage at my comparison of Kharg with Iwo Jima. In no way was I discounting the difficulty of Iwo Jima and the bravery of the Marines, but in 2026 the reality is different.
It’s perfectly fine to say that the human cost of Iwo (26K casualties; 7K dead) puts it in a different category — that’s legit. That’s the value system speaking. I acknowledge that. I even share it on one level! But that wasn’t what I referring to. I was referring to the operational difficulty of taking Kharg and the other islands in the Gulf.
There are some claims that are “not even wrong,” i.e., they are unfalsifiable and not even worthy of the effort of proving them unfalsifiable. This is falsifiable but apologies to Pauli, I’m using it:
TL;DR:
On Ballistics: The “unalterable trajectory” is a myth; modern missiles use calculus and terminal seekers to hit moving targets with surgical precision. (Honestly, there’s no reason to proceed. This is such a blooper there’s no need to continue. But I will…)
On Drones: You don’t need to sink a ship to win; you just need to blind its sensors, and modern drones are built specifically for that “mission kill.”
On Airheads: Trading naval gunfire for helicopter landings is a death sentence in an age of shoulder-fired missiles and dense air defenses.
On Tunnels: Leaving an enemy force in a tunnel complex is providing them with a permanent, fortified ambush point overlooking the world’s most critical chokepoint.
Non-TL;DR
Ballistic missiles aren’t a threat to warships because they follow “unalterable” trajectories - WRONG. Just stop. This is wrong.
Anti-Ship Ballistic Missiles (ASBMs), use terminal guidance and maneuverable reentry vehicles to successfully track and strike moving naval targets.1 Iran possesses several operational ASBMs, most notably the Khalij Fars and the Hormuz-2, which are specifically designed with terminal seeker technology to hit moving naval targets at ranges of approximately 300 km.
The commenter appears to be obsessed with the notion that missiles can’t be adjusted to hit moving targets. Jesus, has he never heard of calculus? This is an engineering problem that was solved decades ago. Imagine an admiral in WW2 on the deck saying, “Get me a weapon that can change coordinates in mid-flight and take those suckers out.” Well guess what Admiral, we did it!2 Calculus applied to this problem works in two stages:
The Intercept: The computer solves for the predicted position of the ship based on its current vector.
The Adjustment: Once the missile re-enters the atmosphere, its onboard seeker (optical or radar) “locks on” to the actual ship. If the ship has moved from the predicted spot, the software calculates the error and adjusts the missile’s fins or thrusters in real-time to close the gap.
My commenter is stuck in 1944 thinking a missile is just a bigger artillery shell. In reality, it’s a flying computer that does the math at Mach 5.
Landing Marines via helicopter (”airheads”) against a defended island without heavy suppressive fire is a recipe for a massacre. Helicopters are extremely vulnerable to MANPADS (shoulder-fired missiles) and basic anti-aircraft guns, both of which Iran has in abundance on those islands.
IRGC troops in tunnels could “simply be left to sit there.” In modern warfare, you don’t leave an enemy sitting behind your lines on an island that controls a strategic chokepoint like the Strait of Hormuz. They have eyes, they have radios, and they have anti-ship missiles of their own. Bypassing heavy fire support in favor of helicopter would turn “airheads” into a graveyard before the first Marine touched the ground.
“Leave them in tunnels.”
These aren’t just guys with rifles hiding in holes. Iranian “tunnel complexes” on islands like Abu Musa or Sirri are underground fortresses housing anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCMs), drone launchers, and radar arrays. They’re nodes in a sophisticated military network. They serve as the “eyes” for the mainland’s long-range missile batteries.
Even if the guys in the tunnels don’t fire a single shot, they are providing real-time targeting data on every ship that passes. You can’t “prevent military use” of an island while the enemy is still using it as a forward observation post.
Because they are in contact with the mainland, they can coordinate a “saturated” attack—waiting for the mainland to fire a volley of missiles, then popping out of their tunnels to fire their own locally-stored missiles at the same time to overwhelm a ship’s defenses. Leaving them there is like leaving a burglar in your basement just because you’ve locked the kitchen door. He’s still got a phone, he’s still got tools, and he’s definitely not “sitting there” doing nothing.
You cannot claim to “prevent Iranian forces from using [the islands] for military purposes” while those same forces are literally still there, armed, and holding the high ground (or the “low” ground in this case).
Leaving armed IRGC units inside fortified tunnels isn’t “ignoring” them; it’s leaving a loaded gun pointed at your own fleet’s head in a region where every square inch of the island acts as a launch platform for anti-ship missiles.
For this brilliant reasoning, I award the commenter this medal.
My commendation:
“For ignoring basic mathematics and modern engineering, for steadfast commitment to the military technology of 1944 combined with an impressive display of sneering ignorance, for services to obsolete logic and ballistics, and for demonstrating a tactical awareness best suited for Antiques Roadshow, I hereby award you the Congressional Booby Prize for Armchair Generalship.”3
Finally, given the cease-fire, if Kharg et al was so comparatively easy, why didn’t we do it? Why did Trump agree to this cease-fire?
Perhaps because it’s a really knotty problem that we don’t want to tackle just now? How about this: Because at this point Trump wasn’t willing to pay the price of the ticket in manpower. We’d have lost men, and to modern Americans, in this context, that’s unacceptable. You armchair generals can wail all you want, but very few Americans were willing to risk Marine lives for Kharg Island.
Here’s the situation as I see it. It’s subjective but I think a lot of Americans share it.
On February 28, 2026 I woke up and we were bombing Iran. No idea why. No one had said anything. There was no argument in the Congress. To compound the weirdness, it was the US and Israel - “allies.” I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.
I had supported the 12-day June war on complete “America First” grounds and I was thoroughly unconcerned about it provoking a groundswell of antisemitism. I honestly can’t even remember my reasoning for the whole thing and I’m damned if I’m going to look up a bunch of old posts to prove a point that doesn’t need to be made. Suffice it to say I support the 12-day war.
But “Epic Fury” shocked and disconcerted me. I put up a “Note” explaining that I hoped it wouldn’t backfire and result in something even worse than what we have.
My friendly commenter responded to my note with this: Nothing could be worse than the Mullahs, expressed with his trademarked sneering contempt.
We had an unproductive exchange which ended with my removing his final double down.4
Well, I think there could be worse things than the Mullahs and to say that there can’t be shows want of imagination and zero historical knowledge.
Two that come to mind are “Somalia on the Gulf,” and a military junta made up of hard core Persian nationalists who are smart enough to cut the “Death to America” crap and focus on being a real pain in the ass in the Gulf, as Iran was before 1979. They would have the added disadvantage (to Israel) of being totally acceptable to the rest of the world, while functioning as one of the chief nodes of Palestinian nationalism. (I’m conjecturing here. I’m creating worst case scenarios.)
I hope that someone in the Pentagon is thinking about this.
Oh, my other reason for that sick feeling was because I thought this alliance was bad for Israel.
When a small country joins up with a big country and that big country is a damn superpower, the smaller country gives up independence of action. Its strategy now depends on midterms and scandals and the whims of a mercurial President who has all sorts of motives, not to mention popularity in a demographically changing society.
This ceasefire has put Israel in the position of having to hold its fire with respect to Iran while accepting missile fire. You could say Trump hung Israel out to dry. Maybe he had good reason to but I’m not happy about that.
Cards: I checked this w/various AI engines. Got a problem with that? Prove the facts wrong, not how I got them.
I remember an uncle who designed optical systems for submarines in WW2 talking about this maybe 30 years ago. It was a subject of discussion even during WW2.
I decided to ban this commenter, who had been pestering me for nearly two years with his psych issues. His comments were deleted (not by me); I guess he decided to slink off and babble somewhere else.
But I didn’t ban him. That came later.