Every time a drone crosses a border or a missile impacts a concrete barrier in the Middle East, Washington treats it like a novel crisis requiring a fresh theological debate.
The standard narrative plays out with predictable clockwork precision. A base gets hit. Casualties mount. The cable news talking heads dust off their maps of the region, squint at cities they cannot pronounce, and demand a proportional response. Then comes the predictable presidential address, the midnight sortie of long-range bombers, and the self-congratulatory press releases about degraded capabilities and restored deterrence.
It is theater. Expensive, dangerous, and utterly detached from the structural reality of modern asymmetrical warfare.
When three American service members were killed at Tower 22 in Jordan, the lazy consensus in media and political circles framed it as an intolerable escalation that demanded a massive American kinetic retaliation to re-establish credibility. That framing gets the entire dynamic backward. The strikes inside Jordan were not a sudden departure from a stable status quo. They were the predictable, mathematical output of a broken strategic framework that treats symptoms while feeding the disease.
The Myth of Proportional Deterrence
For decades, foreign policy orthodoxy has clung to a comforting fiction: if you hit them twice as hard as they hit you, they will stop hitting you.
This works brilliantly against traditional nation-states with fixed territory, centralized infrastructure, and a population that can be held hostage by economic and military pressure. It fails completely against decentralized militia networks embedded within sovereign states across the Levant and the Gulf.
I spent years analyzing defense logistics and regional proxy networks, and the fundamental blind spot in Washington is a persistent refusal to understand cost asymmetry. When the United States launches multi-million-dollar cruise missiles or flies B-1 bombers halfway across the globe to strike a warehouse in western Iraq or a truck depot in eastern Syria, we measure success by the tonnage of ordnance dropped. The adversary measures success by how cheap the transaction was for them versus how expensive it was for us.
A drone cobbled together from off-the-shelf commercial components costs a few thousand dollars. Intercepting it with a Standard Missile-2 costs upwards of two million dollars. Striking the launch site requires refueling tankers, carrier strike groups, intelligence assets, and geopolitical capital that strains alliances.
When you respond to a ten-thousand-dollar drone attack with a multi-million-dollar bombing campaign, you are not re-establishing deterrence. You are subsidizing the adversary's attrition model. You are showing them exactly how much resources you are willing to burn to achieve zero long-term political change.
The Wrong Question Framing the Debate
The mainstream media loves to ask: How hard should the United States hit back to restore deterrence?
It is the wrong question entirely. It accepts the premise that kinetic retaliation is a solution rather than a recurring subscription fee.
The better question is: Why do we maintain a sprawling network of vulnerable outposts in regions where our strategic objectives remain chronically undefined?
Tower 22, located in the remote northeastern corner of Jordan near the Syrian and Iraqi borders, is a logistics support hub. It exists to sustain a residual footprint whose original justification—the territorial defeat of ISIS—has long since devolved into an open-ended occupation without a clear exit strategy or a viable political endgame.
When you place military personnel in static, isolated positions within shooting distance of hostile actors backed by a regional power, you are creating a shooting gallery. Complaining that the targets are getting shot at is like leaving raw meat on a park bench and expressing shock when predators show up for lunch.
The Cost of Chronic Motion
Political leaders choose kinetic strikes because doing nothing looks weak, and withdrawing looks like defeat. Striking targets offers immediate political velocity. It allows an administration to look decisive on the evening news without having to answer the harder questions about grand strategy.
This is the definition of operational motion disguised as strategic progress.
Real strategy requires trade-offs. It requires the willingness to absorb tactical friction without overreacting, or conversely, the courage to alter your posture entirely rather than doubling down on a failing deployment. By treating every militia attack as an existential test of American resolve, Washington allows minor non-state actors to dictate the tempo of United States foreign policy.
Think about the strategic inversion at play. Tehran and its aligned networks do not need to defeat the United States military in a pitched battle. They only need to keep us engaged in an endless cycle of provocation and reaction until domestic fatigue, financial strain, and strategic distraction force a disorderly retreat. They are playing a multi-decade game of strategic exhaustion, while we are playing a four-year game of electoral damage control.
Breaking the Cycle
If Washington actually wanted to change the dynamic in the region, the playbook would look radically different.
First, it would require a ruthless audit of our forward-deployed footprint. If a base does not directly serve a vital, non-negotiable national security interest—and no, keeping an indefinite tripwire force in a hostile desert does not qualify—it needs to be closed. Vulnerable outposts should either be heavily hardened, heavily defended with short-range air defense systems that actually match the threat profile, or evacuated.
Second, retaliation must be decoupled from domestic political theater. If a strike is necessary for operational security, it should be cold, calculated, and asymmetrical in ways that target economic or political leverage points rather than empty warehouses that get rebuilt by next Tuesday.
Instead of another round of midnight air raids designed to appease cable news anchors, the real test of leadership is having the discipline to walk away from traps designed by adversaries who profit every time we take the bait.
Stop funding the attrition loop. Stop confusing motion with mastery. And stop pretending that hitting a desert bunker changes the arithmetic of a failed strategy.
