So Daniel sent us this one, and I have to say it's perfectly timed. He's asking about Pyrrhic victories — the term, its history, where it comes from — and then whether that framework actually defines what we're watching play out right now with Israel, Iran, and the United States. We're on day forty-five of Operation Epic Fury, Operation Roaring Lion, and as of this morning, the US naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has taken effect. Daniel wants to know: is this a Pyrrhic victory in the making? And more broadly, is this a pattern — something that keeps repeating across Israel's military history? There's a lot here. Where do we even begin?
I want to start with the term itself, because I think most people use it loosely without appreciating how precisely it fits. And once you see the original story, the modern parallels become almost uncomfortably clear.
Alright, give me Pyrrhus.
So Pyrrhus was a Greek general-king of Epirus, roughly three hundred nineteen to two hundred seventy-two BC. He invades Italy to help the city of Tarentum fight Rome. At the Battle of Heraclea in two hundred eighty BC, and then at Asculum in two hundred seventy-nine BC, he defeats the Romans. Tactically, he wins both engagements. But his losses are catastrophic — his best officers, his most experienced soldiers, his war elephants. And after Asculum, when someone congratulates him on the victory, Plutarch records him saying: "Another such victory and I am undone." He eventually withdraws from Italy. He won every battle. He lost the campaign.
And the core insight there is that tactical success and strategic success are not the same thing.
That's the whole thing. And what makes it such a durable framework is that it captures something militaries keep failing to learn — that winning engagements doesn't automatically translate into winning wars, and winning wars doesn't automatically translate into achieving the political objectives you went to war for in the first place. Clausewitz spent most of his career trying to articulate exactly this. War is politics by other means, which means the military instrument only makes sense in relation to the political outcome you're trying to achieve.
I should mention, by the way — today's script is being powered by Claude Sonnet four point six. Just our little AI disclosure for the episode.
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Now, let's get into Israel, because this is where it gets genuinely complicated. Because Israel's military record is extraordinary by any conventional metric. They've won every major war. And yet here we are.
The pattern starts to become visible when you look at the campaigns since two thousand six. The Second Lebanon War — thirty-four days, Israel achieves tactical gains, but Hezbollah survives, rebuilds, and eventually fields two hundred thousand rockets. UN Resolution 1701 ends the war without Israel's stated goals being met. That's widely considered Israel's first major modern strategic failure.
Then Gaza, repeatedly.
Operation Cast Lead in two thousand eight and nine, Protective Edge in two thousand fourteen — Hamas survives each time, rebuilds each time. Robert Pape at the University of Chicago wrote in Foreign Affairs in June twenty twenty-four that nine months of Israeli operations in Gaza had not only failed to defeat Hamas but that Hamas was, by the measures that actually matter, stronger on October seventh's anniversary than it was when the war began. They killed an estimated fourteen thousand Hamas fighters. Hamas added roughly fifteen thousand new recruits during the war.
So the military operation was functionally a Hamas recruitment drive.
That's Pape's argument, and it's grounded in his broader research on asymmetric warfare — that heavy military operations against insurgent groups tend to strengthen community support for those groups. The more people killed, the faster the insurgency grows. He documented this in Iraq, in Vietnam, and now in Gaza.
Which sets up the Iran question. Because the June twenty twenty-five twelve-day war was supposed to be different, right? Israel actually hit Iran's nuclear facilities directly. Netanyahu stood at the Knesset lectern and said, "We have removed the Iranian sword hanging over our heads."
And then eight months later they were back at war. Shira Efron at RAND pointed this out in Foreign Affairs in March of this year with almost surgical precision. She noted that after the initial successes of Operation Epic Fury, Netanyahu's language was nearly identical to what he'd said eight months earlier. Almost word for word. "The Iranian regime's ability to threaten Israel has been permanently degraded." The euphoria, she wrote, "feels hauntingly familiar."
There's something almost tragicomic about that. Same speech, different war.
And that's the "mowing the grass" critique in a single image. Israel degrades the adversary, declares victory, the adversary rebuilds, and the next campaign is larger and more expensive than the one before. You can chart this across 2006, 2008, 2012, 2014, 2021, 2023, 2025, and now 2026. Each iteration costs more. Each declared victory is followed by a larger war.
Let's get into the numbers on the current war, because this is where the Pyrrhic framework stops being abstract.
The military achievements are genuinely significant — I want to be fair about that. Khamenei was killed on day one. Two hundred fifty-plus Iranian leaders killed, including almost the entire senior military leadership. Seventy percent of Iran's ballistic missile launchers destroyed within the first sixteen days. Ninety percent of Iran's navy sunk. Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile capability degraded by roughly seventy percent. The GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators — eight of them — used against the deeply buried nuclear sites. By the conventional metrics of an air campaign, this is extraordinarily effective.
And yet. Tell me the "and yet."
The US has burned through approximately twenty-eight percent of its entire THAAD stockpile in thirty-two days. One hundred seventy-five-plus THAAD interceptors expended. Fourteen hundred-plus Patriot interceptors fired, which is somewhere between five point six and eight point four billion dollars just in interceptors. Six hundred-plus Tomahawk cruise missiles launched. Three F-15E Strike Eagles destroyed, twelve-plus MQ-9 Reapers shot down, one KC-135 tanker lost with six crew killed. The first F-35 ever hit in combat. Total US expenditure through the end of March: between thirty-five and forty-seven billion dollars. That's roughly one point one to one point five billion dollars per day.
Per day.
Per day. And the Pentagon has submitted a two-hundred-billion-dollar supplemental funding request to Congress. Now here's the geopolitical dimension that makes the stockpile numbers especially alarming — South Korea and Taiwan publicly expressed concern about the THAAD redeployments from their region. CSIS's Daniel Byman put it directly: the US has burned through difficult-to-replace munitions, leaving other theaters like Europe and Asia short. That's not a theoretical future problem. That's a current strategic liability.
So Iran fires missiles not necessarily to win militarily, but to drain interceptor stockpiles. That's a deliberate strategy.
Foreign Policy ran a piece in early March by Amos Fox and Franz-Stefan Gady that made exactly this point. Iran launched over twelve hundred missiles and drones in the first forty-eight hours of the war. Not to achieve a military breakthrough, but to force the US and Israel to expend interceptors at a rate that's unsustainable. Fox and Gady wrote something I keep coming back to: "Advanced technology and doctrinal innovation cannot wish away the fundamental dynamics of attrition that have haunted conventional warfare for centuries." Iran is doing what Rome did to Pyrrhus — absorbing the blows, accepting the tactical losses, and letting the attacker exhaust himself.
And the same piece had that line about the clock, right?
"Israel, the United States, and their regional allies may have the clock, but Iran has the time." Which is the Iran version of the Vietnam exchange that Shlomo Ben-Ami opens his Project Syndicate piece with — the North Vietnamese colonel telling the American colonel: "You never defeated us on the battlefield." And the American replies: "That may be so, but it's also irrelevant." Iran is explicitly playing the same attritional game.
Ben-Ami's piece is interesting because he's not exactly a dove. Former Israeli foreign minister. And he's calling it Iran's strategic victory.
He published it on April ninth, referencing a two-week ceasefire agreement, and his argument is that the war will be remembered as "another episode of powerful countries falling into the trap of asymmetric warfare." His most pointed line is about the asymmetry of consequence — he notes that while the US might be able to absorb the shock of another strategic defeat, Israel is no superpower. The US has deep reserves of economic and military capacity. Israel does not.
And Israel's numbers reflect that. Eleven point five billion in direct budgetary expenses as of the Finance Ministry's April twelfth report. Three billion per week in economic damage. Defense spending projected at four point five to six point five percent of GDP this year, versus a pre-war average of four point one. Sixty percent tourism collapse since October twenty twenty-three. And the IDF Chief of Staff issued what they called ten red flags to the Cabinet in late March — saying the current pace of simultaneous operations in Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank, and Iran is "not sustainable" after nine hundred days of continuous war.
Nine hundred days. Think about what that means for a country of Israel's size. And today, as we're recording this, there's an Israeli soldier killed in Lebanon. Hezbollah is rejecting any Lebanon-Israel deal. The Strait of Hormuz blockade took effect this morning. Iran has threatened retaliation. And the IDF is still fighting on four simultaneous fronts.
So let's actually have the debate that the experts are having, because there is a serious counter-argument to the Pyrrhic framing. And I think it deserves a fair hearing.
The strongest version comes from Brigadier General Danny Van Biran writing in Ynet, and he's proposing a different analytical framework entirely — what he calls "decisive victory," drawing on Basil Liddell Hart's definition. Liddell Hart argued that victory is achieved not by destroying enemy forces but by disrupting their plans. And Van Biran's case is that Iran's plan — to destroy Israel through nuclear weapons and proxy warfare — has been genuinely disrupted. Khamenei is dead. The nuclear program is set back by years. The proxy network is degraded. By that definition, it's not Pyrrhic at all.
That's actually a pretty compelling reframe. Because if the goal was to prevent Iran from going nuclear, and you've set that program back by seventy percent...
The question is duration. Shira Efron's response to exactly this argument is the twelve-day war of June twenty twenty-five. Iran rebuilt rapidly enough that within eight months the threat had returned at sufficient scale to require a second, much larger war. So the disruption was real but temporary. And the cost of the second disruption is dramatically higher than the first. That's the Pyrrhic dynamic — each iteration of "disruption" costs more than the last.
The AEI crowd would say the cost is still worth it if the nuclear threat is genuinely off the table for a decade.
And that might be right. But here's the structural problem the Israel Policy Forum identified — neither the US nor Israel have articulated what comes after. Rachel Brandenburg quoted General Mattis: "Targetry never makes up for lack of strategy." You can destroy every launcher, kill every general, and still have no answer to the question of what Iran looks like in five years, who leads it, and whether the next government is more or less hostile. The Stimson Center's Chuck Freilich put it bluntly: "It is becoming increasingly likely that the war will end without any of its primary objectives having been fully achieved — a military success but strategic failure."
Which brings us to the political economy question, because I think this is the layer that most coverage skips.
Netanyahu's political situation is genuinely relevant here, and I say that not to reduce the conflict to domestic politics — the security threats are real — but because Foreign Affairs makes a serious analytical point. Netanyahu has faced a corruption trial, accountability questions over October seventh, the judicial overhaul controversy. Each major military operation provides a rally-around-the-flag dynamic. A mid-February poll showed fifty-nine percent of Israelis supported joining a US strike on Iran. After the operation began, that surged to eighty-one percent in INSS polling and ninety-three percent of Jewish Israelis in Israel Democracy Institute polling. That political dynamic doesn't explain the war, but it does explain why a leader might choose escalation over negotiation at key junctures.
And the "mowing the grass" doctrine institutionalizes that dynamic, in a way. If the strategy is periodic campaigns to degrade rather than decisive political settlements, then there's always a next campaign. The doctrine itself creates the perpetual war.
West Point's Modern War Institute published a piece in February twenty twenty-five that I think frames this really well — they invoke Clausewitz's trinity, the dynamic interaction between government, military, and the people in shaping war's outcome. The unexpected divergence between the Lebanon campaign in twenty twenty-four — where Hezbollah was genuinely defeated militarily — and the Gaza campaign — where Hamas demonstrably was not — shows that the same military can produce completely different strategic outcomes depending on the political and social context. Hezbollah's defeat was real but partial; as of today, they're still active and an Israeli soldier died in Lebanon this morning. Hamas's resilience was almost complete.
So the military instrument is necessary but not sufficient. And Israel keeps treating it as sufficient.
That's the core critique across basically every analyst we've read for this episode. CSIS, Stimson, Israel Policy Forum, Foreign Affairs — they all arrive at the same place from different directions. Military success is real. Strategic success is elusive. And the gap between the two is where the Pyrrhic dynamic lives.
Let me push on the global economic angle, because I think this is underappreciated as a Pyrrhic cost.
It's enormous. The Strait of Hormuz blockade that took effect today halts approximately twenty-one million barrels per day of crude oil. That's roughly a fifth of global oil supply. The UN Development Programme estimates Asia-Pacific output losses of somewhere between ninety-seven and two hundred ninety-nine billion dollars from rising transportation, electricity, and food costs. Oxford Economics has warned that a prolonged conflict could tip the global economy into recession. Gas prices in the US are at their highest since twenty twenty-two. And Iran's attack on Qatar's LNG infrastructure wiped out seventeen percent of Qatar's LNG export capacity for three to five years.
So the United States is potentially triggering a global recession to degrade Iran's nuclear program. That's a hell of a cost-benefit calculation.
And it feeds directly into Iran's strategic logic. CSIS's Byman wrote that by destabilizing global energy markets, straining US alliances, and exposing the limits of American coercive power, Tehran has ensured that even a tactically successful campaign carries significant strategic liabilities for Washington. The Houthis entering the conflict on March twenty-eighth adds another layer of complexity. The conflict has already spread beyond the bilateral US-Iran-Israel framework.
There's something almost elegant about Iran's strategy, in a dark way. They can't beat the US militarily. So they don't try to. They close the Strait, they drain interceptor stockpiles, they force negotiations, they make the economic cost of continuing the war higher than the economic cost of stopping it.
And they launched a fifteen-point ceasefire counter-proposal. The US lifted sanctions to allow fourteen billion in Iranian oil sales as part of the negotiating process. Iran is actively shaping the diplomatic end-state even while losing militarily. That's the Vietnam template precisely. The North Vietnamese lost every major engagement. They won the war by outlasting American political will.
The question for Israel specifically is whether they can afford to be in a situation where they need American political will to sustain their security. Because that will is not unlimited.
That's the existential dimension that Ben-Ami is pointing at when he says Israel is no superpower. The US can absorb a strategic setback in the Middle East and redirect attention to the Pacific. Israel cannot redirect. There's no alternative geography. Every Pyrrhic victory — every campaign that degrades the enemy temporarily but fails to achieve a durable political settlement — leaves Israel in a slightly more exposed position for the next round. And the next round keeps coming.
Let's talk about what the practical takeaways actually look like, because I don't want to just leave this as "the experts are gloomy." There are real choices being made here, and some of them might actually work.
The Liddell Hart framework Van Biran is using is worth taking seriously on its own terms, separate from whether it applies to this specific case. If you define success as disrupting the enemy's plan rather than destroying their forces, then the relevant question is: what does Iran's plan actually require, and how durably has it been disrupted? If Iran's nuclear program requires specific technical personnel, specific facilities, and specific supply chains — and those have been destroyed — then the disruption might be more durable than critics assume. The twelve-day war precedent is worrying, but Iran's reconstruction capacity after a much larger campaign may be genuinely limited.
The bunker buster question is interesting here. Eight GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators against deeply buried sites. Those aren't sites you rebuild in eight months.
Probably not. The Fordow enrichment facility is buried under eighty meters of rock. The GBU-57 is specifically designed to defeat that kind of hardened target. If those strikes were effective — and the US claims they were — then the nuclear timeline has been genuinely set back in ways that the June twenty twenty-five campaign, which didn't use those munitions, couldn't achieve. That's a meaningful difference. The question is whether the political and economic costs of achieving that were proportionate.
And whether the successor Iranian government — whoever emerges from this — is more or less likely to reconstitute the program.
Which is the "no plan B" problem. The Israel Policy Forum's critique is that there's no articulated strategy for the day after. You've killed Khamenei, you've killed Larijani, you've killed two hundred fifty senior officials. Iran will have new leadership. What's the theory of how that new leadership behaves differently? Regime change wasn't officially the goal, but leadership decapitation at this scale is functionally regime change. And the historical record on externally-imposed regime change producing more stable, peaceful states is not encouraging.
Iraq. Libya. Afghanistan to some extent.
The pattern is consistent enough that it's hard to treat it as coincidence. Decapitating a regime's leadership without a plan for what fills the vacuum tends to produce either prolonged instability or a successor regime that's equally hostile and has the additional grievance of having been attacked.
So what does a non-Pyrrhic outcome actually look like from here? Is there a version of this that ends well?
The most optimistic scenario — and I want to be clear this is speculative — is that the combination of nuclear program degradation, leadership decapitation, and economic pressure through the Strait of Hormuz blockade forces a successor Iranian government into a genuine renegotiation of its regional posture. Not just a ceasefire, but a structural change in Iran's relationship to proxy warfare and nuclear ambitions. That would require diplomatic follow-through on a scale that hasn't been demonstrated yet. But it's not theoretically impossible.
The pessimistic scenario is that Iran reconstitutes within five years, the new leadership is more radical because the moderates were all killed, and Israel is fighting this war again in twenty thirty-one at even greater cost.
That's the "mowing the grass" extrapolation. And the data from previous cycles — 2006, 2014, 2025 — all point in that direction. The burden of proof is on those arguing the cycle has been broken this time.
Here's what I keep coming back to. The Pyrrhic framework is useful not because it tells you the outcome — we don't know the outcome yet — but because it forces you to ask the right question. Which is: what are the costs relative to the durable gains? And that question has to be asked across multiple timeframes simultaneously. Short term, the military achievements are real. Medium term, the stockpile depletion, the economic damage, the simultaneous four-front war — those are serious liabilities. Long term, whether Iran reconstitutes and whether a political settlement is achievable — genuinely unknown.
And there's one more dimension that I think the historical frame helps with. Pyrrhus won every battle against Rome but lost the war. Rome didn't win because they were militarily superior — they weren't, not initially. Rome won because they had deeper reserves, greater political resilience, and a willingness to absorb losses that Pyrrhus's smaller kingdom couldn't match. The question for Israel is whether, in the long run, it's playing the role of Pyrrhus or Rome in this conflict. Israel has the military superiority. But Iran has the demographics, the geography, the regional depth, and an explicit attritional strategy. The structural asymmetry is uncomfortable.
And the US is in this as a co-belligerent, which changes the calculus — but also introduces the question of how long American political will sustains. Because the US public's tolerance for one point five billion dollars a day and THAAD stockpiles being depleted has a limit.
Trump was briefed on the dwindling stockpile situation before launching the operation and ordered the attack anyway. That's a significant decision. Whether it's vindicated depends entirely on whether the strategic outcomes materialize. If Iran's nuclear program is genuinely set back for a decade and a successor government is more accommodating, it was probably worth it. If Iran reconstitutes and the US enters the next crisis with twenty-eight percent less THAAD capacity and South Korea and Taiwan feeling exposed, then the Pyrrhic verdict looks very solid.
I think the honest answer to Daniel's question is: we don't know yet. The Pyrrhic framework is the right framework for asking the question. But the answer depends on variables that are still being decided — what happens in the ceasefire negotiations, what Iran's successor government looks like, whether the Strait of Hormuz can be reopened without a recession, and whether Israel can actually sustain four simultaneous fronts without the IDF breaking under the strain.
What we can say with confidence is that the pattern is real. The "mowing the grass" cycle across 2006, 2008, 2014, 2023, 2025, and 2026 is not a series of coincidences. Each campaign has been larger, more expensive, and less conclusive than the one before. The costs — economic, human, diplomatic, military — have compounded with each iteration. And the political settlements that would break the cycle have not materialized. Whether this war is the one that breaks the pattern or the one that confirms it most definitively is the question we'll be asking for years.
And as of this morning, the US naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is in effect, Iran has threatened retaliation, an Israeli soldier died in Lebanon, and Hezbollah is rejecting any deal. So the situation is still very much live.
Which is its own kind of answer to the question. On day forty-five of a war that was supposed to be decisive, the strategic picture is still deeply uncertain. Pyrrhus would recognize the feeling.
That's a good place to leave it. Really appreciate Daniel sending this one — it's a topic that deserves more rigorous framing than it usually gets in the daily news cycle, and the Pyrrhic lens is genuinely the right tool for it.
Good one from Daniel. And this is exactly the kind of thing that looks different depending on which timeframe you're analyzing — which is what makes it so hard to call in real time.
Thanks as always to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for keeping this whole operation running. And big thanks to Modal for providing the GPU credits that power this show — genuinely couldn't do it without them.
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