Last week, an email landed in the inboxes of a larger group of military analysts asking for suggestions. A senior officer from the intelligence division of U.S. Central Command, CENTCOM, wrote that they were looking for new, creative, and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran. One source familiar with the text described it that way, while a second confirmed that a high ranking officer had been asking for fresh ideas over the past week. Other officers say it is unusual to send something like that out so broadly by email. It is a suggestion box hanging on the wall of a war that no longer knows how it ends.
The request shows just how few options the president has left to force Iran into an agreement on his terms. There are only a few paths left, and the ones that remain are unpleasant. According to a second source, the command is examining every option because the strategy has to be reassessed. So the officer asked the group whether anyone knew a better way, the same way you ask coworkers for advice when you can no longer think of an answer to a difficult problem.
One person familiar with the discussions says it almost apologetically. In the end, the president wants a deal, so he keeps looking for ways to act tough while also finding a way out. Sometimes, they said, you need creative minds, especially when the usual options are running out. The sentence sounds harmless until you follow it to its conclusion. What is being sought here is not a creative way out. What is being sought is a new form of punishment because the planners themselves have run out of ideas. A country is supposed to be punished, and the system responsible for delivering that punishment no longer knows how.
The command's spokesman, Capt. Tim "Timothy" Hawkins, elevated it into something noble. He said the command has always believed in thinking and working creatively, and that Admiral Cooper reaches out to the team regardless of rank in order to achieve the highest operational performance. That is what it sounds like when asking for suggestions on how to punish another country is presented as a living culture of an open door policy. What sounds like teamwork in that language is, in reality, a search for new ways to hurt people, asked in the tone of a survey among coworkers.
For weeks now, the Air Force has been striking Iranian targets in an effort to weaken Tehran's ability to threaten shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and bring Iran back to the negotiating table. No agreement is in sight. Shortly after the email was sent, Trump threatened another round of military strikes, only to call them off again over the weekend after leaders from the region intervened, led by the Saudi crown prince, who personally called the president and urged deescalation.
Trump is weighing whether to escalate the campaign, possibly with another wave of heavy strikes against the remaining nuclear facilities that he declared destroyed last summer. Anyone who targets facilities again after personally claiming they had already been wiped out is admitting that the earlier declaration of success was false. According to two sources, the military is preparing attacks against Pickaxe Mountain and other locations where nuclear material or equipment is believed to be stored. Yet even the most powerful conventional weapons are unlikely to accomplish much because the facilities are buried deep underground. Anyone determined to destroy them would need ground troops, an enormous risk the president has so far refused to take, while it remains unclear how honest his administration has been about America's own casualties. Eighteen American service members have been killed so far. Exactly how many have died and under what circumstances is only slowly becoming public. Our reporting on that part of the story is still ongoing.
Another option under consideration is something that resembles a fireworks show, striking the same or similar targets that were attacked a year ago - a symbolic victory that would make it possible to walk away from the war without achieving any of its original objectives, namely stripping Iran of its nuclear program. Even that would not resolve the actual dispute, Iran's claim to the Strait. The fireworks show is the most honest part of that idea. It is not meant to destroy. It is meant to put on a show, an image of strength for the audience back home, loud enough to make a retreat look like a triumph. But an image changes nothing beneath the ground, where the facilities remain, and nothing about the Strait that the conflict is really about. The war would simply be handed an ending, while the reason for it would remain exactly where it was.
War has long been regarded as the continuation of politics by other means. What we are seeing here turns that sentence upside down. The political purpose has been exhausted. There is no agreement, and the nuclear program lies too deep underground to truly eliminate. The dispute over the Strait remains unresolved as well. All that is left is the instrument, searching for a purpose of its own. A fireworks show that no longer impresses anyone, a punishment for which the idea still has to be found. This is what it looks like when violence becomes self sustaining and the justification has to be delivered afterward. A punishment that no longer serves any achievable objective is not politics, it is a roulette wheel of suffering. The one spinning the wheel hopes the ball lands on the number that saves him, yet it is always other people who bleed for someone else's inability to find an answer.
The reporting is blunt. The CIA and military intelligence reportedly concluded that the ongoing bombing campaign has done little to shift Iran's negotiating position. The president's highest ranking military adviser, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine, publicly acknowledged that bombs alone cannot accomplish everything Trump set out to achieve. Air power has its limits, he told lawmakers last month. The people whose job it is to assess the war professionally and the man making the final decisions are no longer saying the same thing, and every bomb that still falls lands somewhere between those two positions.
The options for escalation have been sitting on the table for months, discussed down to the smallest detail, while additional military assets have been moved into the region in anticipation of an order. One CENTCOM plan reportedly calls for one or two weeks of heavy bombing aimed at destroying Iran's missile capabilities. Trump held back, partly because Caine warned that interceptor missile stockpiles were running low. Others worried about large numbers of civilian casualties if the president followed through on his threat to strike bridges or seawater desalination facilities.
The option of putting boots on the ground would remain, a threat Trump has repeated many times, along with the idea of seizing the strategically important island of Kharg or removing Iran's highly enriched uranium from the country. But doing so would break a promise he made to his own supporters. During a campaign rally in Pennsylvania in 2024, he declared that he would not send anyone into stupid foreign wars that never end. The other path leads to a dangerous stalemate, endless strikes and counterstrikes that continue to cost American lives while keeping the Strait in a permanent state of danger, exactly the kind of endless wars he himself condemned. It is the trap the president created with his own words. Anyone who promises a great victory while also swearing never to send American troops into another foreign war has no answer for the moment when both promises cannot be kept at the same time.
On Friday, during the Cabinet meeting, the president reduced it to one of his many familiar lines. We just want to win. We are going to hit them very hard, and eventually they will say they cannot take it anymore. What exactly that is supposed to mean, he apparently does not know himself. Otherwise, he would not have to ask for the answer by email. The idea that could end this war has yet to be found. Until then, the note remains in the suggestion box, waiting for the person who knows something better.
To be continued ...
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