Words & Phrases

No, we don’t have ‘complete control’ of the skies

Epitomizing the contrast between the U.S. military’s technical brilliance, on one hand, and Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s strategic malpractice, on the other hand, U.S. forces were able to complete a daring rescue mission of the remaining airman missing for 36 hours after a fighter jet was shot down on Friday. A second plane was also shot down, although the pilot managed to return to Kuwaiti airspace and ejected. Two Black Hawk helicopters attempting to rescue the airmen from the first incident were also struck.

As the Wall Street Journal put it, “Trump’s repeated declarations that the war is nearly over are colliding with the gritty battlefield reality.” Moreover, he and his juvenile, misogynistic, dim-witted defense secretary have consistently exaggerated and distorted “air superiority,” suggesting U.S. planes are untouchable. While our aircraft were uncontested in Iraq and Afghanistan wars, “the air campaign the U.S. is now carrying out is far more challenging…due to Tehran’s longstanding investment in air defenses and the duration of the conflict.”

Hence, the gap between Trump’s hyperbolic chest-thumping and the grim reality of the quagmire he has put us in. Beyond that, his mental and moral depravity, if not insanity, was on full display in his obscene Truth Social threats to commit war crimes: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

In his incoherent remarks from the White House last week, Trump insisted, “They have no anti-aircraft equipment. Their radar is 100% annihilated. We are unstoppable as a military force.” He previously declared, “They don’t have any spotters, they don’t have anti-aircraft, they don’t have radar, and their leaders have all been killed at every level.”

Over a month ago, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth proclaimed, “I hope all the folks watching understand what uncontested airspace and complete control means.” He lectured the press that we would enjoy “uncontested airspace.” He prattled on:

It means we will fly all day, all night, day and night, finding, fixing and finishing the missiles and defense industrial base of the Iranian military, finding and fixing their leaders and their military leaders, flying over Tehran, flying over Iran, flying over their capital, flying over the IRGC. . .Iran will be able to do nothing about it.

A week later, he announced, “Iran has no air defenses.” On March 24, he again announced that “we literally have planes flying over Tehran and other parts of their country; they can’t do a thing about it.” On March 31, the New York Times reported, “The United States has achieved such unchallenged control of Iran’s skies that it is flying B-52 bombers directly over Iranian territory for the first time since the war began, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters at a Pentagon briefing.”

In short, we must be skeptical when “the administration’s claims about its military dominance in the skies have been absolutist, with phrases like ‘complete control’ and ‘uncontested airspace,’ even casting Iran as not even having the weaponry necessary to respond,” as CNN reports. Instead, we should view such hyperbole as “merely the latest example of Trump and those around him apparently exaggerating military success.” (As Michael O’Hanlon of Brookings explained to me, general control of airspace or even domination of airspace does not amount to “air immaculateness,” which the Trump regime seems to have implied.)

Thanks in part to his fixation on Hegseth’s adrenaline-pumping videos showing U.S. forces blowing stuff up, Trump mistakes tactical success for “victory” as he jettisons the goals he originally offered for this unnecessary war (e.g. regime change, removing all uranium) and seizes on immaterial developments (e.g. destroying Iran’s navy does not prevent Iran’s holding the Strait of Hormuz). Meanwhile, Iran ratchets up the pressure by recycling and quickly repairing its missiles, undercutting Trump’s declarations of victory.

Not even our intelligence community buys what Trump says. “The Pentagon and White House this week claimed to have made substantial progress against Iran,” the New York Times reports. “But American intelligence agencies have cast doubt on how close the United States is to destroying Iran’s missile capability, a key goal in the war.” It turns out: “While U.S. intelligence agencies have not estimated the number of remaining launchers with high confidence, Iran retains the ability to use its remaining arsenal of ballistic missiles and missile launchers to attack Israel and other countries in the region.” In other words, Trump, Hegseth, and whoever was cheerleading for the war (looking at you, South Carolina war-mongering Sen. Lindsey Graham) utterly miscalculated how Iran would respond to an existential threat.

It is hard to quibble with Mohammad Javad Zarif, a career Iranian official, when he argues that Iran “has maintained continuity of leadership even as its top officials have been assassinated, and it has repeatedly hit back at its aggressors even as they strike at its military, civilian, and industrial facilities.” Likewise, his conclusion — “The Americans and the Israelis who started the conflict with delusions of forcing capitulation thus find themselves in a quagmire without an exit strategy” — bears a greater resemblance to reality than the chest-thumping and deranged threats we hear from Trump. At the very least, we can infer this represents the current Iranian leadership’s assessment of the war.

The legacy media’s taking at face value Trump’s declarations that the U.S. has achieved “total and complete control over the skies” amounts to stenography. Frightfully, Trump lacks any semblance of control even over himself. (If anything, Iran understates the depth of the problem in declaring he is on “the brink of madness.”) We need less sane washing, more explanation of Iran’s surprising resilience/determination to wait us out, and increased attention to Trump’s serious mental deterioration, emotional unraveling, and incapacity to make rational decisions.

We and our allies remain vulnerable to Iran’s easily refurbished missiles and drones — and at the mercy of a president whose chances of removal under the 25^th Amendment have betting markets buzzing.