Tag: Strategy

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Russia’s War of a Thousand Cuts

Introduction

Recently, I watched an interview with military analyst Michael Kofman, conducted by Perun, concerning Russia’s military evolution since 2022. The interview raised several interesting questions. These are my takes, not challenges to his assessment.

Micromaneuvering, Economy of Force, and Political Attrition

When observing Russian military operations in Ukraine, particularly through battlefield footage and maps such as DeepState, it is easy to conclude that Russia is suffering from resource constraints. Perhaps it is. But another possibility is worth considering. Russia may have considerably more resources than it is willing to commit, and what we are witnessing may not be a limitation in Russian military capability, but a deliberate economy-of-force approach.

There are several ways to examine this.

First, Russia may lack the resources to equip and sustain larger formations capable of fully conducting coordinated offensive maneuver. Second, Russia may possess those resources but lack the secure logistical system necessary to sustain such operations across the battlefield. Third, Russia may possess both capabilities but prefer to continue its present method of warfare because it serves a larger strategic purpose.

That purpose, I would suggest, is attrition, not merely military attrition, but political attrition as well.

Micromaneuvering and Economy of Force

What makes Russia’s present method of warfare interesting is the scale at which it conducts offensive operations. Rather than consistently employing battalion- or company-sized formations, Russian forces increasingly rely on small assault groups, sometimes consisting of only two or three soldiers.

At first glance, this may suggest an inability to concentrate forces. But does it?

When the economy of force is properly employed, it allows a commander to allocate the minimum necessary resources to secondary tasks while preserving greater combat power for the main effort. It works alongside the principle of mass, balancing risk, resources, and effectiveness across the battlefield.

If done without significantly compromising its own operations, it holds the cards in that respect. It can determine where to apply pressure, where to delay, where to deceive, and where to concentrate its supporting capabilities.

This is where operational fluidity becomes important.

Imagine multiple two-man assault teams operating across a broad front. Individually, they possess little combat power. Collectively, however, they may create numerous simultaneous problems for Ukrainian defenders.

Where are these teams operating? How far apart are they? What zones of responsibility are assigned to them? Are they independent infiltration teams, or are another ten or twenty teams following behind them?

A two-man team might seem insignificant until it becomes clear that reconnaissance drones, artillery, electronic warfare, and other strike capabilities support it.

The maneuver element may be small, but the supporting military apparatus is not.

In that sense, we could argue that Russia is dispersing its maneuver elements while concentrating its firepower and operational effects.

This creates something of a reciprocal relationship between economy of force and mass. Resources saved on secondary tasks can be concentrated elsewhere, while numerous localized actions may collectively produce operational effects far greater than their individual size suggests.

In other words, the micro becomes macro.

Training, Leadership, and Battlefield Initiative

One often-overlooked factor is the length of training soldiers receive before entering combat, especially as both Russia and Ukraine struggle to replace experienced personnel.

Training periods are often too short, and the loss of experienced officers and NCOs creates another problem. Soldiers must learn on the fly, and on a battlefield like Ukraine, that can be deadly, assuming they survive long enough to learn anything.

Now consider a two-man assault team.

What happens when one man is killed?

The surviving soldier is now in charge. He must decide whether to advance, withdraw, hold his position, or wait for further instructions. He may have little training or experience, but the circumstances still demand a decision.

In that sense, battlefield initiative isn’t always developed through extensive training or a well-established command structure. Sometimes necessity imposes it.

This arrangement offers flexibility, but it comes at a cost. What one soldier sees as an opportunity, another might see as an unnecessary risk. Without experienced leadership, the outcome can depend heavily on an individual’s judgment.

This raises another interesting question about micromaneuvering. Are we witnessing a deliberate effort to decentralize tactical decision-making, or has the nature of small-unit warfare forced that responsibility onto soldiers who might otherwise never have been expected to exercise it?

Perhaps it is a little of both. There are no wrong orders.

The military may enter the war with a professional fighting force. But once the war ends, it’s left with volunteers and conscripts, who now become the new professional class. Period.

Death by a Thousand Cuts

This brings me to what I consider the larger significance of micromaneuvering.

It reminds me of death by a thousand cuts.

If Russian forces can threaten multiple positions at once, Ukrainian commanders must decide which threats demand immediate attention and which they can contain.

This uncertainty shapes decisions.

Does a Ukrainian commander reinforce a threatened position? Does he commit reserves? Does he redirect artillery? Does he allocate additional drone operators to locate and destroy an infiltration team?

What happens if that infiltration team is only a diversion?

What happens if Ukrainian forces commit more resources than necessary and thereby weaken another sector?

Of course, Ukrainian commanders have considerable experience dealing with these small groups by now. They won’t necessarily overreact to every two-man team that appears.

But that is precisely where the larger supporting system matters.

A two-man team by itself may pose little danger. Twenty such teams, operating across several locations and supported by artillery, drones, and reconnaissance, present a different problem. Think of the game “Whac-A-Mole.”

The defender must continually assess what is happening, determine where the main effort exists, and respond accordingly.

This can strain command and control, logistics, reserves, and response times.

It also raises an important question about resource consumption. How much does Russia expend conducting these operations, and how much must Ukraine expend to counter them?

If Russia can consistently impose greater defensive costs than it incurs offensively, then its economy-of-force approach becomes especially significant.

The question is not simply how much territory Russia captures in a given day or week. It is what those operations are doing to Ukraine’s ability to sustain its defensive system over time.

Industrial Capacity and the Scale of Operations

This also brings us back to Russia’s industrial capacity.

When I previously argued that Russian industrial mobilization could prevent its army from being starved of munitions, I was considering the small scale of the assault formations being employed.

A two-man or four-man assault team does not have the same immediate logistical requirements as an entire mechanized battalion.

Granted, those teams may depend on considerable artillery and drone support, and those supporting systems consume resources of their own.

But the relationship between industrial production and the scale of force employment remains important.

Russia does not necessarily need to equip every formation for simultaneous large-scale offensive maneuver. It needs to sustain the formations actually conducting operations while maintaining the larger force supporting them.

This may help explain why Russia can continue applying pressure along an extensive front without committing its entire military establishment to large offensive operations.

However, this does not automatically mean Russia has unlimited resources or that every supporting formation is adequately supplied. Those are separate questions.

What interests me is whether Russia has deliberately organized its offensive operations around the resources it can sustain most effectively.

If so, does this arrangement also serve its larger political strategy?

Political Attrition: The Larger Objective

Military attrition is only part of this argument.

The other part is political attrition.

Russia does not necessarily need to destroy the Ukrainian military outright if it can progressively exhaust the political and financial system sustaining Ukraine’s war effort.

This includes Ukraine, but also the European Union, NATO member states, and the United States.

Under this interpretation, the objective is to keep increasing the costs of continued resistance and external support.

Drain their coffers. Force governments to find additional funding. Create recurring financial obligations. Make supporting states repeatedly reconsider what they can provide, when they can provide it, and how long they can continue.

Europe has repeatedly shown it can finance Ukraine, whether through borrowing, budgetary mechanisms, or other arrangements. That demonstrates financial capacity and political commitment.

But neither guarantees assistance will arrive at the scale or pace needed to achieve Ukrainian military objectives.

Four variables matter most: speed, predictability, completeness, and political sustainability.

These are not merely financial considerations. They directly affect military planning.

A government might approve billions in assistance, but that does not necessarily mean Ukraine receives the equipment it needs when it needs it.

A promised weapon system does little good if it arrives after the operational circumstances that prompted the request have changed.

Likewise, uncertainty about future support complicates Ukraine’s ability to plan sustained military operations.

And behind all of this are the domestic political commitments of the supporting states.

Governments must balance foreign assistance against their own defense requirements, public services, economic problems, and the expectations of their populations.

The longer the conflict continues, the more often those competing priorities must be reconciled.

This is where financial strain can become political strain, and political strain can develop into internal political attrition.

The Erosion of Institutional Confidence

Political attrition does not necessarily require elections or a change of government.

It can emerge through exhaustion.

A government may continue publicly supporting Ukraine while becoming increasingly reluctant to assume additional financial commitments or political risks.

Political leaders may begin questioning whether continued assistance can produce the desired outcome.

Institutions may remain intact while confidence in their decisions, commitments, and effectiveness gradually diminishes.

This is where the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back comes into play.

If enough political and financial strain accumulates, governments may become more willing to pursue a negotiated settlement simply because the costs of continuing the war have become increasingly difficult to sustain.

That does not guarantee a rapid peace. Political exhaustion may encourage negotiations without resolving the underlying disagreements between Russia and Ukraine.

Nevertheless, the strategic possibility remains.

Russia might seek to achieve through political attrition what it has been unable to achieve through decisive large-scale military maneuver.

And that brings us back to the battlefield.

From Micromaneuvering to Grand Strategy

If Russia’s objective is to exhaust Ukraine and its supporting states politically, then micromaneuvering may be more than an adaptation to battlefield conditions.

It may be an operational method suited to a strategy of prolonged attrition.

Small assault teams maintain pressure. Reconnaissance and firepower disrupt Ukrainian defenses. Localized advances force continued military responses. Ukraine expends personnel, equipment, and ammunition. Its external supporters must repeatedly provide additional assistance.

That process creates recurring military, economic, and political demands.

Whether Russia can sustain those demands more effectively than Ukraine and its supporters remains a separate question. Attrition cuts both ways, and Russia also pays a high price.

Nevertheless, the strategic logic is worth considering.

Perhaps Russia’s present method of warfare is not simply the consequence of an inability to conduct larger offensive operations. It may reflect a deliberate decision to preserve flexibility, avoid overcommitment, and maintain pressure until political circumstances become more favorable.

Or perhaps it reflects both military limitations and strategic preference.

That distinction matters because it changes how we interpret Russian operations.

The absence of large-scale maneuver does not necessarily mean the absence of operational purpose.

Nor does the slow accumulation of territorial gains necessarily mean those gains are the primary objective.

The ultimate objective may be to exhaust the political will and institutional capacity sustaining the enemy’s resistance.

And if that is the case, then micromaneuvering, economy of force, industrial production, and political attrition are not separate features of Russia’s war. Rather, they are interconnected, compartmentalized elements of a broader strategy designed to exhaust Ukraine militarily, economically, and politically, while simultaneously placing increasing financial and political pressure on the nations supporting it.

References and Further Reading

The Evolution of the Russian Military – Its Strengths and Shortfalls in 2026 (With Michael Kofman)

The Stalin-Putin Parallel: The War of Attrition as Strategy both Militarily and Politically

Find, Fix, and Maneuver

DRG

Military Failure, the Need for Innovation, and the Day After

Neo-Deep Battle Fires: How Artillery and Drones Are Rewriting Depth Warfare

The Day After: The Peace No One Is Prepared For

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Interpositive Warfare

I. Introduction: The Problem in Brief

In war, an action can accomplish its immediate purpose while simultaneously altering the surrounding environment in ways that strengthen, weaken, reverse, or transform the original success.

Take counterinsurgency, or COIN, as an example. The United States employed COIN extensively in Iraq and Afghanistan. Its immediate purpose was often to secure territory and protect the population from insurgent activity. In the process, forces gathered intelligence, identified and removed insurgents, and attempted to build relationships with local communities. One operation could accomplish all of these objectives and therefore appear successful.

However, that same operation could also generate resentment, dependency, political distortion, and further resistance. Resentment could arise simply because foreign forces were present, regardless of whether they intended to protect the population. Local groups that allied with those forces could also become dependent on their protection, money, intelligence, or logistical support. Once that happened, they might struggle to operate or maintain their political position without outside assistance.

This dependency could then produce political distortion. Alliances were fragile. A tribe might cooperate with American forces against one enemy while remaining hostile toward another tribe that was also cooperating with them. A local ally could therefore become connected to a network of rivalries and obligations that extended well beyond the immediate operation. The question was no longer simply who supported the counterinsurgency effort, but why they supported it, whom they opposed, and what they expected to gain.

Over time, these relationships could generate further resistance. While American forces might not initially feel the brunt of that resistance, it could eventually turn against them. It might begin as an intertribal conflict, in which support for one group could indirectly alienate another, turning a local rivalry into resistance against the outside force itself. An operation might secure an area, remove insurgents, and protect part of the population while simultaneously remodeling the surrounding environment in ways that create new enemies, strengthen old rivalries, or transform the original success. Successful distortion is risky.

II. So, what is an interpositive?

An interpositive is a positive image printed directly from the original camera negative. In simple terms, the original image is reproduced as a copy. That copy resembles the original, but it is no longer the original itself.

Defining Interpositive Warfare

Warfare comes from human decisions. Humans interpret, implement, manipulate, and respond to everything involved. Technology does not choose its objective; humans determine its purpose and how it will be used. Terrain does not formulate strategy, but it can redirect human action. Institutions are also made up of people making decisions, and those decisions shape what happens next.

Interpositive warfare shares a basic premise with praxeology: war begins with purposeful human action. The difference is that interpositive warfare is concerned not only with the intention behind an action, but with what happens after that action passes through human relationships, political institutions, and the wider environment of war. Along the way, the original intention is filtered and transformed.

Effects Are Recursive

A response not only changes the conditions under which the next action is planned and understood, but may also manipulate them. The process is not merely a linear exchange of action and reaction. Instead, it frequently returns to the past, reinterprets it through the present, and carries that altered understanding into the future.

In a linear model, action produces reaction, and the past provides a fixed baseline. In a recursive model, action and reaction form a continuing loop. The event remains fixed in the past, but its meaning changes as actors reinterpret it. Control therefore produces not only an intended result but also an emergent transformation that shapes what follows.

Success Can Produce Its Own Negation

An action may succeed according to its immediate measurement while producing consequences that weaken the larger objective. A tactical success can create operational difficulties. An operational success can produce strategic failure. Political success can also create future military liabilities.

Effects Can Be Delayed or Indirect

As for effects, they may return through memory, resentment, institutional behavior, doctrine, ideological change, economic dependency or lack thereof, and technological adaptation. While some of these may not appear in the current generation, they may appear in the next. In either case, the original action need not produce an immediate or direct response. It may simply nudge events in a particular direction, leaving later actors to carry the effect forward without recognizing where it began.

Actors Transform and Reposition Relationships

Whether it is soldiers, commanders, civilians, government workers, media organizations, allies, enemies, or institutions, they do not merely react; they interpret, transform, and retransmit effects. Think of it this way: improvise, adapt, and overcome.

Lastly, there are relationships. An action changes not only the actors involved but also the relationships among them. Once again, think of praxeology, the study of human action. Every interaction produces a response, which then produces another. The result is a chain reaction. Watch people moving through a crowded mall, constantly adjusting their paths to avoid colliding with one another. Each person’s movement causes others to reposition themselves.

Warfare operates in much the same manner. Allies may become less dependable. Populations may become hostile. Who needs conspiracies when you have bureaucracies growing defensive? Meanwhile, enemies may adapt in unexpected directions. Every action repositions the relationships surrounding it, changing how the actors respond to one another and what they may do next.

III. The Problem with Existing Models

Multi-Domain and Systems Models

Land, maritime, air, space, cyberspace, physical, informational, and human categories remain useful for organization, planning, and analysis. The problem begins when these analytical categories are treated as independent parts of reality.

Multi-domain models generally show effects moving across or between domains. Interpositive warfare asks how those exchanges transform the actors, relationships, institutions, and boundaries through which later action must pass. The boxes do not merely exchange effects. The boxes themselves, and the people who operate through them, are altered by the exchange.

Think of the Columbian Exchange. It did not simply transfer people, goods, diseases, and ideas between otherwise unchanged worlds; it transformed the worlds involved.

Linear and Geometric Assumptions

A diagram captures the structure of a particular moment, but it cannot represent the transformation that follows. Interpositive warfare focuses on the organized chaos beyond the diagram: one action creates a vacancy, the opening passes through intermediaries, and the entire field rearranges itself—rather like a line of hermit crabs exchanging shells.

Distinctions from Existing Concepts

Interpositive warfare overlaps with many concepts, but it is not identical to any of them. Its purpose is not to replace established military theories, but to identify a particular feature of war. That feature is the study of human action and the institutions through which it operates, both on and off the battlefield.

Second- and Third-Order Effects

Second- and third-order effects describe consequences that extend beyond the immediate result of an action. A tactical decision may produce a cascade of operational, strategic, political, or social consequences that were neither intended nor immediately visible. In other words, blowback.

Interpositive warfare is built for these consequences but places greater emphasis on the process through which they emerge. The issue is not merely that one action causes another effect later. Instead, the action passes through intermediaries that interpret, redirect, delay, strengthen, weaken, or transform it, sometimes making it stronger while causing it to appear weaker. Intermediaries also change in the process. The result is not merely a chain of consequences, but a continuing alteration of the environment through which future history must pass.

Feedback, Complexity, and Friction

Feedback and complexity explain how actions produce responses that alter the conditions of later action. Clausewitzian friction explains how the human element disrupts intention.

Interpositive warfare shares these concerns but focuses on the reproduction of action in altered form. Friction may obstruct an action, and feedback may return information or consequences to the original actor. Interpositive warfare asks what the action becomes after it has passed through the wider field of war. In doing so, it may return in a misinterpreted form or even work against the purpose for which it was originally produced.

Praxeology

Praxeology begins with purposeful human action. Human beings choose objectives, employ means, and interpret circumstances, all in pursuit of a preferred outcome. Warfare likewise begins with human decisions, even when those decisions operate through various institutions.

Interpositive warfare begins with the same premise but extends the action beyond its original intent. Once purposeful action enters war, it passes through other human beings and the institutions they represent. Along the way, it is filtered, bottled, and transformed. Praxeology explains why the action begins; interpositive warfare examines what that action becomes after it enters a conflict, reshapes the surrounding conditions, and influences what happens next.

IV. Historical or Contemporary Illustrations

Counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan

Counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan offers a clear example of self-negating success. In theory, COIN seeks to protect the population, secure territory, and win the confidence of local communities rather than simply destroy the enemy. It also attempts to address the political, economic, and social grievances that sustain insurgent movements, including poverty, corruption, weak infrastructure, and the absence of legitimate government.

COIN also depends heavily on intelligence. The more trust military forces establish with the population, the more information they hope to gather. That information helps identify insurgents, map relationships, and build case-by-case dossiers on individuals and networks. In the long term, the goal is to leave behind a legitimate and self-sustaining host-nation government capable of maintaining security without foreign assistance.

On paper, these are obvious strengths. In practice, however, they also reveal the doctrine’s self-negating character. COIN is extremely resource-intensive. It requires large numbers of personnel, money, and time, as well as repeated deployments. The longer forces remain, the more vulnerable they become to ambushes, IEDs (improvised explosive devices), and other forms of asymmetric attack. What begins as counterinsurgency can gradually expand into nation-building, creating an open-ended mission funded by outside taxpayers and carried out in a political environment that may never have possessed a strong sense of national unity to begin with.

A prolonged focus on COIN can also erode conventional military readiness. A force that spends years preparing for patrols, population security, intelligence collection, and small-unit engagements may become highly experienced in one form of warfare while allowing other capabilities to weaken.

The greatest difficulty, however, lies in human loyalty. Loyalties shift. Local actors may cooperate because the money is right, because one rival poses a greater threat, or because foreign support temporarily strengthens their position. That relationship may change as soon as another tribe, militia, political faction, foreign government, or outside economic interest enters the picture. An ally in one situation may become an obstacle in another. Trust remains conditional, and intelligence gathered through those relationships may be incomplete, manipulated, or directed against local rivals.

Counterinsurgency could therefore succeed tactically while undermining itself strategically. American forces won engagement after engagement, secured territory, removed insurgents, and often built enough trust to gain intelligence and local cooperation. In that immediate sense, COIN worked.

The strategic problem was that the groups involved were not unified in any meaningful way. In many areas, the real political units were tribes, militias, religious factions, local power brokers, and patronage networks. American forces were trying to win their support, but these groups were also competing among themselves for money, influence, protection, and position. The United States became another actor within the same field of rivalries rather than a power standing above it.

Winning the hearts and minds of one tribe did not necessarily strengthen the larger political order. It could weaken another tribe, deepen an existing rivalry, or make one group dependent on American protection. There was no true unifying apparatus capable of turning these separate tactical relationships into a lasting national settlement. COIN could therefore create local success without producing strategic unity.

This leads to COIN’s central weakness: the absence of a clearly defined end state. What does victory look like? How much stability is enough? When does a host-nation government become self-sustaining? At what point does the foreign force leave without undoing the gains it helped create? Without clear answers, tactical and operational success can continue indefinitely while strategic success remains undefined and elusive.

COIN could therefore protect populations, remove insurgents, gather intelligence, and secure territory while simultaneously creating dependency, weakening conventional readiness, distorting local politics, and extending the mission without a measurable end. Its successes were real, but they often altered the environment in ways that made those successes difficult to preserve. In that sense, counterinsurgency became a self-negating success.

V. The Military Mechanics of Interpositive Warfare

Inside the Box of Mirrors

A tactic is never static. It exists inside a box of mirrors, multiplied, distorted, and reinterpreted by every observer. The box represents the operational environment. Its six faces represent six primary sides that refract the tactic: enemy forces, allied partners, command structures, institutional logistics, populations within the domain, and the physical and cultural terrain itself. These six faces are illustrative rather than fixed. Depending on the conflict, there may be many more.

Each reflection differs because perspective warps it. A flanking maneuver may appear to the enemy as a vulnerability, to an ally as resolve, to commanders as data, and to populations as a narrative. When the tactic is executed, adapted, or redirected, every reflection changes with it. There is no isolated action.

The Negative–Interpositive Cycle

The photographic analogy of the negative and interpositive beautifully captures how one effect becomes the source of the next. The original negative is the intent: the plan as conceived. The interpositive is the first-order effect, or how reality develops the image through human action, interpretation, and Clausewitzian friction.

The interpositive then becomes the new negative. The altered reality—enemy adaptations, unintended consequences, alliances, and fractures—becomes the baseline for the next cycle. Each iteration inverts and evolves the tactic. What begins as deception may harden into a predictable pattern if it is not refreshed. What once looked like strength may reveal fragility under a different light.

This is why rigid doctrines fail and why truly effective operators treat every success as a potential trap. The environment has already begun adapting to yesterday’s move.

Adaptation, Deception, and Predictability

In warfare and beyond, this dynamic helps explain several enduring principles. Take the OODA loop developed by U.S. Air Force Colonel John Boyd (observe, orient, decide, act): observe the reflections, orient to their distortions, decide when and how to turn, act, and immediately begin the next loop before the enemy’s reflections stabilize.

Reflexive control deliberately shapes what the mirrors show the adversary so that the adversary’s reflected decisions serve one’s intent. Emergent strategy operates through a similar process. Real plans are not simply executed from the top down; they coevolve with the reflections that conflict produces.

The best commanders do not merely impose a plan. They design systems that learn from inside the box of mirrors faster than their opponents do. Entropy and surprise are useful only for a short time because repeated tactics lose their contrast. The box becomes familiar. New light, such as novelty, deception, and tempo, must be introduced before the reflections flatten into predictability.

Tactical Reproduction

At the tactical level, a single action—an ambush, feint, or drone strike—does not merely succeed or fail. It alters local conditions: enemy morale, alertness, ammunition stocks, small-unit trust, terrain usability, electromagnetic signatures, and civilian perceptions.

The result becomes a new negative. Tomorrow’s patrol operates in the world that today’s action helped create. Even inaction reproduces the same dynamic. Hesitation becomes data that the enemy develops into the next interpositive.

A battle does more than produce a result. It reproduces the actors who must fight the next battle. Enemy soldiers learn. Allied forces form new expectations. Commanders revise their judgments. Populations assign new meanings to what they have witnessed. The tactic survives not as an unchanged event, but as a series of altered interpretations carried forward by everyone involved.

Operational Reproduction

At the operational level, the mirrors multiply. An operation—a campaign phase, major offensive, or sustained air interdiction effort—reshapes force ratios, logistical nodes, command relationships, intelligence advantages, and political will. It changes what future operations can accomplish and what courses of action remain possible.

A successful breakthrough may advance too far without secure flanks, creating a vulnerable salient while also establishing a new base for further action. A deliberate withdrawal may cede ground but preserve forces, restore operational tempo, or strengthen political cohesion.

In either case, the altered battlefield, alliance dynamics, and resource picture become the fresh negative. Future operational art must develop from this plate rather than from the original plan. The operation that follows does not begin where the previous one began. It begins inside the environment that the previous operation helped manufacture.

Strategic Reproduction

Strategy is the highest-order darkroom. It does not merely win battles or campaigns; it redefines the war itself. Every strategic choice—forming alliances, imposing economic sanctions, conducting information campaigns, or changing war aims—reconfigures the enemy’s options, the home front’s endurance, third-party involvement, and even the conflict’s moral and legal framing.

The interpositive of one strategic decision becomes the negative for the next. Expanding war aims after early victories, for example, may make later restraint or de-escalation more difficult. A strategy of attrition, as seen in the Russo-Ukrainian war, may exhaust the enemy while also exhausting one’s own military and society, altering the political terrain upon which any negotiated settlement must eventually rest.

The introduction of new domains, including cyberspace and economic warfare, changes the purpose and character of the conflict. At this level, recursion can become self-referential. Strategy begins to reproduce the nature of the war, which in turn reshapes strategy. Wars begun for limited objectives may metastasize into existential struggles, or existential struggles may eventually contract into limited settlements. The means shape the ends, and the ends reshape the means.

The Recursive Loop

Tactics alter conditions and create the basis for new operations. Operations alter the conditions from which new strategies emerge. Strategies alter the conditions for a different war or for a different peace. Each level is both produced by and productive of the levels above and below it.

This is why linear planning eventually collapses. Effective practitioners treat every outcome as provisional source material rather than final validation and design for adaptability across tactical, operational, and strategic levels.

Victory belongs less to the side with the best initial negative than to the side that masters the repeated development process: the side that sees the reflections clearly, turns at the right moment, and develops cleaner, more useful interpositives faster than its opponent.

VI. Conclusion

War is often planned and analyzed in terms of action and reaction. Objectives are identified, forces are assigned, and operations are conducted. As for success and failure, well, those are measured through the outcome. Yet war does not remain still, nor do its conditions remain stable long enough for this process to unfold exactly as intended. Every reaction changes the actors, their relationships, the institutions they represent, and the conditions through which later action must pass.

Interpositive warfare does not promise control over this process, nor does it offer a formula for predicting every consequence. Human action cannot be predicted with certainty. Its value lies in recognizing that action and environment cannot be separated; that is its strongest suit. The battlefield is not simply the place where war occurs. It is continually reproduced by the people acting within it.

Humans are interpositives: 360-degree transparent images of time and space, drawn inward toward a center that looks back from every direction. Conflict lives in a geometric box of mirrors that never sits still.

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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.