That's the gap Lt. Col. Anthony Aguilar keeps returning to. Back in early March, the administration laid out 7 objectives for this war:
Destroy Iran's missile defenses, cripple its navy, seize its nuclear material, trigger regime change, isolate it economically and militarily.
Aguilar's count, 5 months later: none achieved. Several reversed outright.
And the Strait of Hormuz, the "elephant in the room" that wasn't even mentioned in the original war plan, is now the entire conflict.
Aguilar draws the comparison straight from his own service record: Afghanistan, Iraq, deployments that were supposed to end in 12 months and stretched to 18, wars where the exit kept sliding because no one wanted to be the one who called it.
The military picture backs him up. The carriers holding this war together (Lincoln, Bush, the incoming Washington) were all designed in the early 1980s.
Crews are running short on food, medication, and basic supplies after deployments pushed well past their limits, while command is split: the Joint Chiefs chairman wants an off-ramp, CENTCOM wants more targets.
But the deeper problem, in Aguilar's read, is that Iran reverse-engineered a downed U.S. drone over a decade ago and used this war to field an asymmetric capability nobody, not Ukraine, not the U.S., had seen before.
He frames it as the 6th revolution in military affairs: a conventional power trying to catch up to an asymmetric one, the same pattern that's now handing outsized leverage to the Houthis, Hezbollah, and anyone else paying attention.
He predicts that escalation will get deadlier before this ends, and the treaty that eventually closes it out won't be written on Washington's terms.
So if the side holding all the technology doesn't hold the timeline, who actually wins a war like this?
