Garrison Davis

And on March 30th, 2026, which is the day that I started sitting down to write the episode that you're listening to right now, Reuters published an article announcing the arrival of another 2,500 United States Marines in the Middle East as the Trump administration, quote, considers options for Iran operations.

As you all know, Operation Epic Fury, it's nothing to call it, but its name, was launched a little over a month ago with, the administration insists, an expected duration of four to six weeks.

And we're coming up to the end of that timeline.

Trump announced the day I record this, March 31st,

that he's expecting combat operations to end in two weeks or less.

So we'll see what happens.

Tomorrow, there's supposed to be a speech by the president on Iran, so we'll know more then.

But relevant reporting indicates the Trump administration is at least seriously weighing the feasibility of sending Marines in to take and hold Iranian territory, namely Karg Island and potentially other islands in the Strait of Hormuz, most of which are inhabited and all of which are heavily defended.

If they go through with this, we might be about to watch in real time one of the most consequential disasters in military history, a modern-day Gallipoli in which hundreds or thousands of American soldiers and billions in materiel get chewed up in an unsustainable and unwinnable war of attrition.

There's no real way for the average American to know what kind of stockpile our military maintains of the most advanced munitions.

We're talking precision-guided missiles like the Tomahawk cruise missile, but also the interceptor missiles used by our various missile batteries.

Estimates suggest the U.S.

has already expended about a thousand Tomahawks in a month of combat operations, which would be around a third, maybe a little less, of the total stockpile.

That doesn't sound so bad until you realize that our present stockpile of tomahawks was built up over more than a decade.

We're only capable of making about 150 a year at present levels, which means our military already burned through around seven years' worth of these things.

Maybe more, because in 2025, the U.S.

defense budget included something like 56 tomahawks, even though our largely ineffectual war against the Houthis had already depleted the stockpile.

This is a story that you'll hear over and over again in this episode.

The U.S.

military is actually quite bad at knowing and asking for what it will need, and even worse at predicting accurately what it's going to need in the immediate future.