The Pentagon barred press photographers from Iran war briefings because Defence Secretary Hegseth’s staff thought his March 2 photos didn’t flatter him. AP, Reuters, and Getty were all shut out. Only DOD staff photographers have been allowed since.
Not a joke. Not even North Korea.
Speaking of which, Kim Jong Un’s personal photographer was once expelled from the Workers’ Party when he cast an unflattering shadow on the leader’s neck. Camera flash and done.
Every government that controls its photographic record is a totalitarian state, an authoritarian regime, or a democracy generating a major press freedom scandal and promising to never do it again. There is no precedent in any democratic country for a defence official banning press photographers during a war because he can’t handle the truth. The closest parallels are personality cults.
The stupidity of Hegseth isn’t even incidental either, it’s the diagnostic for Trump team incompetence. Competent authoritarians offer some kind of policy rationale. Haw Haw Hegseth can’t even be bothered.
A Tesla in “Full Self-Driving” mode crashed through a bright red railroad crossing barrier in West Covina, California on March 8th. NBC has documented over 40 similar incidents, but watching a barrier’s reflective surface filling the entire camera frame as it crashes is a sight to behold. Tesla’s latest and greatest “self-driving” design is the equivalent of “I can’t see and DGAF.”
The Sequence
At 09:57:14 the car is doing 25 MPH in Self-Driving mode, cruising towards a giant white X and approaching lowered high visibility barriers.
Four seconds later at 09:57:18 the entire camera frame is red because the barrier’s reflective surface is flush against the lens.
Speed only dropped to 22, meaning no braking intervention from FSD at all. The camera didn’t just fail to classify the barrier. The barrier occluded the entire camera view!
The system’s primary sensor was physically blocked by the obstacle it was driving into, and the system interpreted that as… nothing to see here.
Nada.
No emergency stop, no uncertainty flag, no alarm and handoff to driver. A complete loss of visual input was registered as normal driving conditions.
That’s not an edge case in object detection.
Tesla is an abject failure in the most basic perceptual logic: if your camera suddenly goes from road scene to solid red, something is wrong. Even without classifying what — barrier, wall, vehicle, tarp — the total loss of scene coherence should trigger an emergency response. The Tesla design for safety has no safe concept of “I can’t see.”
And in the frames before the crash into the barrier, the visual signals are stacked: flashing lights, lowered gates, white X railroad crossing sign, painted road markings. Every redundant safety indicator that exists at a railroad crossing was active.
FSD missed all of them and then missed the barrier itself as it filled the frame.
NHTSA’s investigation of Tesla has specifically covered this problem, and the data deadline was the same day this went viral. Tesla faced 8,313 records to review at 300/day and couldn’t handle it. That’s 28 days of review for a deadline they’d already extended twice.
Meanwhile, Tesla FSD keeps crashing and people still try to act surprised.
Donald Trump bombed Iran claiming he would achieve overnight success just like the 24-hour victory he promised in Ukraine. Two weeks of open-ended waste later, his administration is leaking three “small” ground operation plans to Axios like a contractor explaining why the bathroom remodel now requires structural work on the foundation.
Former intelligence analyst Harrison Mann writes in Zeteo that all three options risk dragging the US into a forever war.
He’s right.
And I’m here as a historian to tell you this pattern is older than he suggests. We aren’t just seeing bad plans. We are seeing failed plans, the exact same three mistakes Mussolini made in North Africa in 1940.
Anyone remember that guy? His military bravado failed for the same structural reasons that Trump will.
Three Plans DOA
The options leaked to Axios and elaborated across Bloomberg, NBC, and Semafor are:
Plan 1: SOF raids on nuclear sites — seize Iran’s near-bomb-grade enriched uranium with commandos and nuclear scientists. Secretary of State Rubio told Congress that to secure the material, “people are going to have to go and get it.” The problem, as a US official admitted: “The first question is, where is it?” UN inspectors haven’t verified the stockpile’s location in nine months.
Plan 2: Seize Kharg Island — a strategic terminal handling roughly 90% of Iran’s crude oil exports. Take the revenue chokepoint, squeeze the regime.
Plan 3: Seize the Strait of Hormuz islands — take the islands flanking the strait to force it open for commercial shipping. Trump told CBS he was “thinking about taking it over.”
Each plan is the opposite of what is being described, because it is a trap.
History tells us why.
September 1940
Mussolini ordered Marshal Graziani to invade Egypt from Libya in September 1940. Italy had roughly five-to-one numerical superiority over the British garrison. The plan was limited: advance to Sidi Barrani, establish a forward position, consolidate. A contained operation with a defined objective.
The British response, Operation Compass, was initially planned as a five-day raid with about 30,000 troops. Within two months it had destroyed the Italian 10th Army and captured 130,000 prisoners. The “limited” Italian advance created a “limited” British counterattack that metastasized into a three-year, multi-nation theater stretching supply lines across the entire Mediterranean.
Italy’s failure most famously sucked Hitler to deploy Rommel and the Afrika Korps — an entanglement Germany couldn’t afford led by a bombastic aggressor who couldn’t stop losing. What began as Mussolini’s colonial adventure burned resources that the Axis depended on, accelerated Axis defeat, and created the confidence and conditions for Allied liberation of Southern Europe.
Every one of those consequences was produced by very simple logic: seize a point, then defend the point, then supply the defense, then defend the supply lines, then supply the defense of the supply lines.
The three Iran plans reproduce this logic exactly without asking the higher-order question of whether the position is necessary or defensible.
Plan 1 Is an SAS Raid That Requires an Occupation
The commando raids deep behind Axis lines in North Africa — SAS, LRDG, Popski’s Private Army — worked precisely because they were hit-and-run. The moment any raid required holding a position, it needed conventional forces to follow.
You don’t “seize and dilute” enriched uranium with a quick raid. You penetrate hardened underground facilities with sparse intelligence. You establish a security perimeter. You bring in scientists and equipment. You run a multi-day technical operation. You extract under fire. Every hour on the ground is an hour the perimeter can be probed, the extraction route interdicted, the political cost escalated.
This isn’t a raid. It’s a temporary occupation of an unknown number of fortified positions deep in hostile territory. Graziani also thought he was running a limited forward operation.
Israel just ran this on a micro level to open a grave and return the bones of Ron Arad. They not only didn’t find the bones, they barely survived.
Plan 2 Is Tobruk
Axis and Allied obsession with Tobruk and Benghazi in the North Africa campaign came down to a single principle: whoever held the sea port controlled the logistics of the entire theater. Despite air capabilities, vulnerable slow ships and thirsty truck convoys bogged down the strategy. Kharg Island is the same calculus because it is believed to control 90% of Iran’s oil export revenue, and you control the regime’s survival.
But Tobruk taught the corollary: holding a strategic point 25 kilometers off a hostile coast means permanent exposure to shore-based fire, and the garrison becomes a logistics sink that devours resources disproportionate to its strategic value. The Siege of Tobruk lasted 241 days. The Australians held it, but holding it consumed shipping, air cover, and reinforcements that couldn’t be used for offensive operations elsewhere. And when they lost control the centralized retribution campaigns were devastating.
Kharg Island sits 25 kilometers off the Iranian coast. Iran has an estimated stockpile of up to 6,000 sea mines, suicide drones, fast attack boats, and anti-ship missiles. The island becomes a target the moment you take it, and every ship supplying the garrison runs a gauntlet.
Plan 3 Is Fortified Coastal Libya
Malcolm Nance planned this exact scenario on USS Coronado in 1988 when he served with Commander, Middle East Force. His assessment: the US could take all the islands flanking the Strait of Hormuz, but “the cost in American lives would be horrific.” The islands are overlooked by mountains on the Iranian mainland, and ships passing through would still face mines, suicide boats, drones, and combat swimmers with limpet mines.
This is the Italian fortification of coastal Libya — static positions that look formidable on a map but become traps when the adversary can interdict supply from the mainland and the high ground. The Strait of Hormuz could be “pried open,” Nance concluded, but the ships passing through would still be at overwhelming risk from asymmetric threats. You hold the point, but holding the point doesn’t secure the lines of communication that make the point worth holding.
The Italians built an elaborate chain of fortified coastal positions across Libya. The British drove through them in weeks.
The Recursive Trap
Mann identifies the core paradox: the closer US forces get to Iranian soil, the more US technological and firepower advantages are negated. Air superiority doesn’t protect a commando from an IED. A carrier strike group doesn’t stop an RPG aimed at a landing helicopter.
North Africa in WWII demonstrated this point repeatedly.
Rommel’s entire campaign was ultimately throttled by his unsound tactics of ignoring logistics; the impossibility of overextended high cost operations at the end of lines that were themselves under attack. The obedience of the Afrika Korps evaporated the moment their fight became attritional rather than maneuverist.
Mann also names the reason the paradox isn’t treated as such: for Iran hawks in Israel and the US, the quagmire is their strategy. Trapping Trump in a ground commitment raises the odds of Iranian state collapse. This puts Netanyahu in the Mussolini role, a junior partner who launches the provocation, expecting the senior partner to provide the escalation force that prevents collapse. Hitler didn’t expect to focus on North Africa. He got it anyway, because Mussolini failures were trumped up as a critical southern flank.
The EuroIntelligence assessment published today frames Trump’s three actual choices starkly: declare mission accomplished and leave (with the Strait still insecure), keep bombing as if the Strait will open (with no regime change), or conclude that the Strait is never safe while this regime exists and send in ground troops. They believe we’re in scenario two. The markets aren’t able to decide. But scenario two has a structural tendency to become scenario three, for the same reason Graziani’s advance to Sidi Barrani became Operation Compass became the Afrika Korps became El Alamein became the liberation of Sicily.
A “limited” seizure of a strategic point creates a requirement to defend that point, which easily creates a requirement for more forces, which extends supply lines, which creates new vulnerabilities requiring yet more forces.
That’s the documented history of what happens when leaders who expected an overnight victory to “accomplish” a mission start looking for small, palatable next steps.
Mussolini said his options were small. He ended up hanged for it.
Italian dictator Mussolini was hanged (with his mistress) before he could be tried for his war crimes.
September 25, 2025 seems like forever ago. The U.S. Navy held a ceremony at Naval Support Activity Bahrain to decommission USS Devastator, the last of four Avenger-class minesweepers that had operated in the Persian Gulf for 35 years. Vice Admiral George Wikoff, then commander of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command spoke fondly of the technological defense achievement:
They are “true trailblazers” who had defended freedom of navigation and deterred efforts “by adversaries to harm the innocent.”
USN Avenger-class mine countermeasure ship. Source: USN photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Charlotte C. Oliver.
On January 9, 2026, the four decommissioned hulls — Devastator, Dextrous, Gladiator, and Sentry — were physically loaded onto a contracted heavy-lift vessel, the M/V Seaway Hawk, and removed from Bahrain. They are slated for dismantlement.
A little over a month later, defenses gone, on February 28 the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran. And it goes without saying that Iran’s primary asymmetric response is mining the Strait of Hormuz.
Mind the Gap
That sequence of self-inflicted weakness is documented. For some reason the connection is not yet headline news.
Stars and Stripes covered the September ceremony. USNI News covered it the same day. The War Zone covered the January physical departure and noted, only in passing:
the continued critical importance of naval mine-clearing capacity in the Middle East is underscored now by a new surge in geopolitical friction between the United States and Iran.
Naval News ran the best report so far: the replacement Independence-class littoral combat ships:
…have struggled to meet the requirements of operational mine countermeasures missions.
Struggled.
CNBC mentioned the decommissioning in two sentences buried inside a March 11 piece on the mine strikes.
No major outlet has run the timeline as a single story about the administration removing the directly applicable dedicated mine-clearing force, while it started the war where mines are the threat.
Avengers in Brief
The Avengers were purpose-built for this exact mission. Wooden hulls were sheathed in fiberglass, using oak, Douglas fir, and Alaskan cedar chosen specifically to minimize magnetic signature and reduce vulnerability to the magnetic-influence mines Iran stockpiles.
At 68 meters and 1,312 tons, they were small enough to operate close to mined areas. They carried sonar, video systems, cable cutters, and remotely detonated mine-disposal devices.
The Navy built 14 of them between 1987 and 1994. The four at Bahrain had been forward-deployed since 2012. At the decommissioning ceremony, Lt. Commander Alex Turner told his sailors to take home their piece of Douglas fir plank and remember what they carried with it.
Now the best American minesweeper ships in history are well on their way to Philadelphia for disposal, if not already gone.
What Has Come Since
The Independence-class LCS is an aluminum trimaran built by Austal USA, which I blogged here 16 years ago… time sure flies! It is significantly larger than the Avengers. The War Zone noted at the time of departure a size problem:
…could impose limits on how close they can get to mined or potentially mined areas.
Someone wrote down “networked, agile, stealthy surface combatant capable of defeating anti-access and asymmetric threats in the littorals” and this giant floating soccer field filled with video game monitors popped out.
Aluminum ships are obviously metal-hulled, which is the exact opposite design choice from the superior design of wooden Avengers. As someone who has sailed across an ocean on aluminum let me be the first to say it’s the worst, the worst, hull material for many reasons not least of all corrosion.
It rapidly develops electrochemical reactions in saltwater, requires far more maintenance, and has lousy magnetic signature management. Plus it is loud and cold, a condensing drum that diminishes comfort. It’s the worst, most annoying, vessel material for open water.
And the late-addition mine countermeasures mission (MCM) package for these ships was not even installed until 2025, which means untested. The USS Canberra received it in April 2024 and arrived in Bahrain in May 2025. USS Santa Barbara and USS Tulsa followed. The whole program had been delayed by more than a decade of failed systems, equipment failures, and integration problems.
Naval News documented the specifics at the time of the Avenger retirement: during one test of the MCM package on USS Tulsa, a tow bracket broke, leaving an unmanned surface vehicle unrecoverable and requiring another ship to retrieve it. The sensors in the current suite are ineffective in turbid or deep water. Pre-mission preparation takes approximately six hours. Any single equipment failure in the design renders the entire thing inoperable: the platform lift, the tow hook, the crane frame for deploying unmanned vehicles.
PowerPoint procurement process. So much war fighting capability per dollar it can’t even… fight.
The Navy and Pentagon labeled this transition unenthusiastically, as if it was boredom with what works driving the mistakes:
…a much needed step towards modernizing the fleet.
Needed. Much needed.
The current situation
CNN reported March 10 that Iran has begun laying mines in the strait, already a few dozen. According to U.S. intelligence, Iran still retains 80 to 90 percent of its small boats and mine-layers, and could feasibly deploy hundreds more. CBS News reported that while Iran’s total mine stockpile is not publicly known, estimates over the years have ranged from 2,000 to 6,000 naval mines of Iranian, Chinese, and Russian manufacture.
Reuters reported the same day that the U.S. Navy has refused near-daily requests from the shipping industry for military escorts through the strait since the start of the war, telling industry briefings the risk of attacks is too high.
Three shipping industry sources confirmed the Navy’s position has not changed regardless of Trump propaganda: escorts will only be possible once the risk of attack is reduced. A maritime security source told Reuters that securing the strait could require taking control of Iran’s vast coastline.
There are not enough naval vessels to do that and the risks remain high even with an escort. One or two vessels can be overwhelmed by a swarm.
Trump meanwhile keeps saying that the United States is prepared to escort tankers through the strait whenever needed. How? On March 10, Energy Secretary Chris Wright posted on X that the Navy had successfully escorted an oil tanker through Hormuz. He deleted the post within 30 minutes. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters shortly after:
I can confirm that the US Navy has not escorted a tanker or a vessel at this time.
On the same day, Trump posted on Truth Social that if Iran had put mines in the strait — “and we have no reports of them doing so” — he wanted them removed immediately or Iran would face military consequences “at a level never before seen.” U.S. Central Command then announced it had destroyed 16 Iranian mine-laying vessels… laying mines.
Avengers Deactivated
Seasoned, capable minesweepers were ripped out by Trump January 2026, and then he unilaterally started a mine war in February.
The Avengers were the tool for this specific problem. They existed for exactly this threat environment in the Persian Gulf for Iranian mines, and close-in clearance work. They had 35 years of operational history in the region. The decision to remove them is as if naval decommission and commission calendars were never in the same room.
The LCS replacement has abruptly been pressed into service as justification for retiring Avengers? The “go fast” aluminum boondoggle has spent two decades trying to justify its existence. The MCM package’s first two operational installs happened only in 2025, and still offers no demonstrated operational mine countermeasures capability.
Mindless.
Trump is now threatening Iran with real-estate baron language of “never before seen” consequences, as he always does to everyone for everything. But the real calculus is that Iran very, very predictably is mining the strait that Trump just removed his own capacity to clear.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
