Month: March 2026

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To Kharg, or not to Kharg—that’s the Question. But Kharg is not a solution—it’s a trigger.

For many weeks, there has been a common argument about any operation around Kharg Island that always lands on the same concerns: it’s just too hard, too exposed, too squeezed by the terrain and the Strait. Because of this, drones will fill the sky, and the defender has every advantage; every movement gets funneled into kill zones. So people conclude the whole thing would fall apart under its own weight. It very well could. But the real issue isn’t whether it could fail—it’s what you’re actually fighting.

The issue is that a decision isn’t the same thing as an outcome. Seizing Kharg is just a decision. It’s the outcome that we question. The question that follows is how the whole system responds, as in the day after. The answer, as we see now, is that markets will flip-flop, shipping reroutes, insurance goes nuts, proxies get involved, escalation ladders light up, and perception shifts. Of course, it could stay the way we see it now, or it could draw back or escalate into a whole new beast. You control the move. You don’t control how the system rearranges around it.

Terrain + Geography = Real Constraint

The Strait of Hormuz is narrow, cluttered, and exposed, lying between Iran to the north and Oman’s Musandam Peninsula to the south. According to the IEA (International Energy Agency), it’s between 21 and 24 miles wide at its narrowest point. Despite this, the shipping traffic is constrained to two narrow lanes, each 2 miles wide.

The southern Iranian coast (Persian Gulf/Gulf of Oman) is characterized by a very narrow or non-existent coastal plain. In many areas, the Zagros Mountains fall directly into the sea, forming rocky cliffs and leaving little room for a coastal foothold—if any—and if so, minimal.

And even if a force pushes past the coastline, the terrain does not open up uniformly.

The only area where it meaningfully opens is to the southwest—the Khuzestan Plain, a low-lying, marshy, triangular extension of the Mesopotamian plain that stretches inland before abruptly meeting the Zagros foothills. Khuzestan is a strategically vital province in southwestern Iran, bordering Iraq and the Persian Gulf. It serves as a major industrial and agricultural hub centered on its capital, Ahvaz, one of the core pillars of Iran’s oil-rich economy.

Overall, one has a minimal foothold at best along most of the coast due to the mountains, which provide elevation dominance and interior depth. Even where the terrain opens, it does so in limited and predictable ways. This creates a strong ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) vantage point.

Now, from an operational point of view, this translates into a few realities, starting with terrain.

Elevated terrain provides clear lines of observation and favors missile and drone launches into the Strait or into any nearby body of water. You factor that in with limited coastal space, which creates difficult amphibious landing conditions, restricting maneuver and concentrating forces into predictable zones. Thus, any force operating near the coastline would likely be continuously observed and targetable from the interior.

In short, this is defender-favorable terrain.

Take maritime insurance, for example. The moment Kharg turns into a battlespace, insurers will second-guess. They’ll either pull coverage completely or jack up war-risk premiums so high that shipping becomes untenable. Traffic will slow and reroute—not because anything has been destroyed yet, but because the system is already bracing for the punch. The effect is immediate and mostly beyond the control of the actors involved. There are always exceptions—but they don’t change the pattern.

The Part People are Missing: It’s an Island System, not an Island

1) The Strait is the real battlefield, not Kharg

The decisive terrain isn’t Kharg—it’s the Strait of Hormuz and the islands that sit inside and around it—whoever controls them controls access, denial, shipping lanes, and escalation leverage. Kharg only matters if the US can operate freely in the Gulf.

2) The actual islands that matter (operationally)

Qeshm Island is the largest island in the Strait and sits right along the Iranian coast. Its mountainous and broken terrain is ideal for missile batteries, drone launch zones, and ISR coverage. Therefore, the operational reality is that one does not bypass Qeshm—you either suppress it or live under it.

To the southwest of Qeshm is the smaller disputed island of Abu Musa. The sovereignty of Abu Musa is under Iranian control, but the United Arab Emirates disputes it. The operational role is to provide early warning, forward fire, and serve as a disruption node. In other words, the island serves as a tripwire + sensor platform.

Between the Qeshm and Abu Musa Islands lie the Greater & Lesser Tunb—choke point enforcers. They sit near the narrowest part of the Strait. These islands are small—but that’s the point. What these smaller islands provide is extended denial coverage. This creates overlapping fires and complicates naval movement. Think of it this way, they’re not big—they’re positional.

3) Why this matters (and why Kharg fixation is wrong)

Most online takes assume: “Hit Kharg and the problem is solved.” But operationally, it’s more like if you try to move into the Strait, you’re under constant missile and drone threat, ISR tracking from multiple islands, not to forget also from the mainland. One may suppress one node, but others still function. One may clear islands, but the mainland still dominates. One may move deeper, but the exposure increases.

The real geometry is not linear—it’s layered.

The outer layer: naval access (Hormuz Strait)

Middle layer: island network (Qeshm, Abu Musa, Tunbs)

Inner layer: mainland fires (mountains + depth)

Final node: Kharg

So Kharg is not the door — it’s the room at the back of the house.

Think in operational terms, not target terms. The correct framing is this isn’t about taking an island—it’s about breaking a defensive system of positions. That system is distributed and mutually supporting. It forces troops into progressive exposure.

Kharg isn’t the objective—it’s the consequence. The real fight is the Strait—an island system backed by a continent.

Overall, whether this remains pressure or turns into action, the geometry doesn’t change.

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Pressure Without Victory: The Strategic Stalemate with Iran

Introduction

This is a follow-up to my last article titled What Would War with Iran Look Like?, published on February 25th, 2026. In that article, I outlined what a conflict with Iran might look like militarily and strategically.

In this somewhat shorter article, I want to examine what has actually been done strategically and tactically since then, among other things. What has become increasingly clear is that pressure campaigns do not necessarily produce strategic collapse. In many respects, they work exactly as intended, yet the outcome remains unresolved.

So let’s first examine the U.S. pressure architecture.

U.S. Pressure Architecture

With any nation the United States puts in the crosshairs, it essentially becomes part of a pressured network. So what do I mean by this? What exactly do I mean by U.S. pressure architecture?

Let’s start with economic pressure. What does the United States do first?

Sanctions.

Sanctions are economic, non-military punishments. Think of them as trade bans, asset freezes, financial transaction blocks, travel restrictions, arms embargoes, or even export controls imposed by one or more countries. This is often led by the United States, the UK, the EU, or the UN against a particular country. So basically, take Iran. You have certain groups or individuals pressuring them into changing their behavior—whether that means stopping aggression, halting a nuclear program, addressing human rights abuses, or ending support for terrorism—without actually going to war.

SWIFT exclusion: if you don’t know what that means, it stands for the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications. SWIFT basically removes you from the global WhatsApp group that banks use to send each other money. Suddenly, your international payments just bounce with a big “user not found” error.

This brings us to energy export restrictions. An example would be Russia. Because of sanctions, Russia is often forced to sell its oil—especially crude—at steep discounts. Sometimes prices fall $10 to $30 per barrel below global benchmarks like Brent crude because buyers know Russia has fewer options and faces higher risks and costs from sanctions.

And lastly, secondary sanctions.

Secondary sanctions, in a nutshell, are when the United States tells foreign banks and companies worldwide: if you keep doing major business with Russia’s military suppliers or Iran’s oil sector, we’ll cut you off from the U.S. financial system—even if you’re not American and the deal technically has nothing to do with us.

Take Russia again as an example. Outside firms helping Russia’s war economy have been forced to drop deals to avoid losing access to dollars and U.S. markets. For Iran, it’s a classic case of non-U.S. banks having to choose between Iranian oil trade and their U.S. correspondent accounts, massively slashing Iranian export revenues.

This brings us now to military pressure, much of which I discussed in my last article: precision strikes, carrier groups, airpower, and ISR surveillance. That in turn overlaps with cyber and intelligence pressure, including cyber operations, assassinations, intelligence disruption, and infrastructure sabotage.

To make all of this work, the United States usually relies on outside help. When it comes to Iran, Washington has been fairly effective at regional containment through Israel, the Gulf states, maritime patrols, and missile defense networks.

All of these arrows point toward Iran.

Why?

Because the objective is the systemic degradation of Iranian power.

IRAN

This brings us to the article’s target: Iran. When it comes to the Iranian regime, you cannot look at it as a single knot. Rather, think of it as multiple smaller circles connected together and labeled. You have the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Qods Force (lit. “Jerusalem Force”), the political leadership, the energy economy, the security apparatus, and ideological legitimacy. All of these represent what is essentially a distributed internal structure.

Iran’s Distributed Response

Iran’s distributed response radiates outward rather than pointing inward. Now, what do I mean by that?

Let’s start with the proxy-warfare network they maintain: Hezbollah, Iraqi militias, the Houthis, Syrian militias, and Palestinian groups. Iran has a rather large network of proxies outside its borders that it can rely on. And it is without a doubt that many of these proxies have networks of their own. They also do not have to be kinetic all the time.

Then there is Iran’s economic adaptation: the shadow oil fleet, China trade networks, smuggling routes, and sanctions evasion. All of these have helped fund the Iranian regime and continue to do so.

So what is Iran’s strategic deterrence in all of this? They rely heavily on missiles—lots of them—and drones as well, which allow for maritime disruption. Think of the Strait of Hormuz. Iran still maintains leverage there.

The reason Iran has been so effective overall, and why it has not really been nudged off course, appears to lie in a combination of nationalism, revolutionary ideology, and a deeply entrenched anti-Western narrative.

The bottom line in all of this is that when it comes to Iran, persistent strategic friction is neither victory nor collapse. It is simply continuous pressure and adaptation.

Taliban commanders once made the point clearly: “You have the watches, but we have the time.” Ambassador Ryan Crocker later echoed this sentiment when discussing Afghanistan: “Americans have the watches; the Taliban have the time—we ran out of patience… Failing to be ready to stay the course is a huge problem for American diplomacy.“

The same logic applies to Iran.

The United States and its allies may have the watches, but Iran has the time. They have been waiting it out since 1979, and it appears they are prepared to keep doing so.

However, I could be wrong.

Conclusion

The problem facing the United States is not the pressure campaigns. It’s not that pressure campaigns fail. Frankly, it’s the opposite. In many respects, they succeed. Take Iran, for instance. Iranian infrastructure is degraded, leadership figures are periodically eliminated, and the economy is continually squeezed, if not in some ways obliterated. On paper, therefore, Iran has already been defeated. But the difficulty lies elsewhere.

Understand that the Iranian system was never built around a single center of gravity that could be struck or collapsed. Instead, it resembles a distributed hydra, so to speak, capable of absorbing blows while shifting pressure outward through its proxies.

Economic adaptation under pressure produces ripple effects. As Iran scrambles to safeguard what strategic assets remain after repeated strikes, it doubles down on asymmetric pressure through its proxy networks across the region. This, in turn, forces surrounding markets and actors to adapt as well, spreading the disruption horizontally across the broader system.

What emerges is not victory, but a form of strategic fiction—sustained through a persistent pressure war in which neither side achieves decisive results, yet neither side disengages. Frankly, what we have here is a strategic standoff that could potentially put the broader global economy at risk.

There are two ways to look at how both the U.S. and Iranian systems are designed. The United States system is built for the decisive degradation of centralized adversaries. The Iranian system is built for distributed survival.

Both systems function exactly as designed. The result is strategic stalemate.