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As the conflict with Iran continues to oscillate between combat operations and diplomacy, it is worth remembering why we are doing this. The goal is to end Iran’s ability to make a nuclear weapon, and while we don’t know if diplomacy can achieve this, it is never too early to plan for success.

Plenty has been said about how Iran could build a handful of uranium bombs. Less has been said about the hundreds of bombs Iran could make using the plutonium located at its nuclear-power reactor in Bushehr. This is a major oversight.

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It is well known that drones are helping Iran wage asymmetric warfare against a superior opponent — yet less visibly, but just as importantly, satellites are playing the same role. On July 27, Iranian lawmaker Ahmad Ardestani said, “it is natural for China and Russia to say they do not help Iran, but in reality, they do … their satellites help us.” In today’s world, though, it is no longer just state actors that are active in space. Commercial space efforts are advancing globally, often to America’s detriment.

Throughout the Iran war, commercial space has played a key — and troubling — role. Chinese commercial firms have, on a regular basis, publicly posted high-resolution, close-up satellite imagery of U.S. military platforms at Middle East bases for American adversaries to see and use. The good news is that the United States has ample opportunities to better leverage its own commercial space advances, and those of its allies and partners, to strengthen U.S. national security as the space race heats up.

For decades, military advantage in space depended almost entirely on government-owned satellites and national intelligence organizations. The high cost of launching spacecraft, developing sophisticated sensors, and maintaining global satellite networks meant that only major global powers could exploit space for military purposes.

Commercial space has altered that equation, fundamentally changing how wars are fought and how military power is projected. Put simply, the government monopoly on space has disappeared, increasingly shifting key military space capabilities from exclusive government control to the private sector. Defense planners will have to grapple with this evolution. Future conflicts will likely be shaped by commercially-owned satellite constellations that provide communications, intelligence, and data services to governments worldwide.

One of the most significant developments is the rapid growth of commercial satellite imagery. U.S. companies such as Maxar Technologies and Planet Labs operate constellations of high-resolution Earth observation satellites capable of producing imagery with refresh rates rivaling many government systems. Intelligence that once required access to classified national systems is increasingly available through commercial providers.

Another revolutionary capability comes from commercial synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems, which, unlike conventional optical satellites, generate high-resolution imagery regardless of cloud cover, smoke, or darkness. This capability reduces one of the traditional limitations of space-based reconnaissance. American and European companies like Capella Space and ICEYE now provide persistent, all-weather surveillance of adversary military activity around the clock.

Commercial space-based communications have become equally transformative. SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation has demonstrated that resilient satellite communications no longer require dedicated military networks. By providing broadband connectivity through thousands of low Earth orbit satellites, Starlink has maintained communications in contested environments where traditional terrestrial infrastructure was damaged or destroyed. Military forces have used commercial connectivity for command and control, intelligence sharing, logistics coordination, and unmanned system operations. The resilience created by thousands of distributed satellites also makes such constellations significantly more difficult to disable than traditional military communication satellites.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has further accelerated the military value of commercial space systems.  Modern satellite constellations generate enormous quantities of imagery and sensor data that would overwhelm human analysts. AI-enabled analytics platforms automatically identify vehicles, aircraft, ships, missile launchers, construction activity, and changes in terrain within minutes of image collection.  Rather than replacing analysts, AI enables them to process vastly greater amounts of information and rapidly identify militarily significant changes. The result is dramatically faster intelligence production and decision-making, compressing the observe-orient-decide-act (OODA) loop that underpins modern military operations.

With America’s partners — chiefly the European Union, India, South Korea, and Israel — also making advances in AI-satellite fusion, there are significant opportunities for the Pentagon to leverage. For example, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) has already made strides in integrating pattern-detection AI with a range of satellite platforms. In recent years, roughly 50 different Israeli startups have entered the space sector as well, many of which are also developing AI capabilities for satellites.

The convergence of commercial satellite imagery, resilient communications, SAR space platforms, and AI-enabled analysis demonstrates a fundamental shift in military space power that the United States should work to harness. U.S. military effectiveness increasingly depends upon leveraging commercial providers whose technologies often evolve faster than traditional government acquisition programs.

This transformation creates both opportunities and challenges. The U.S. government needs to seize the former and overcome the latter.

The main challenge to overcome is an old way of thinking, and the old way of Department of War procurement. While the United States once accounted for roughly 90 percent of all satellites launched, it now accounts for less than half — a reflection not of American decline, but of a commercial space sector that has changed the economics and tempo of spaceflight. SpaceX can put dozens of satellites into orbit in a single launch, and the company views rockets like commercial airplanes: “reusable, serviceable, fly-again machines.” Instead of discarding hardware after a single flight, the company treats space travel as a mode of transportation that requires rapid repeatability and full reusability to lower costs. By contrast, the Pentagon still favors “gold Cadillacs into the sky” — bespoke decade-long programs that produce extraordinarily capable, but highly vulnerable, satellites.

Kickstarting an alternative to the slow-moving Pentagon acquisition process should undergird U.S. space policy. First, the Pentagon should streamline how commercial actors win contracts, lowering barriers to entry so innovative firms are not dissuaded from trying in the first place. Second, acquisition timelines must be compressed to match the pace at which commercial industry can already deliver. Third, the United States needs better integration — including aligning standards and improving command-and-control linkages — of commercial platforms into the military’s space efforts. Fourth, Washington should leverage the private, and public, sector capabilities of partners already active in space — like Israel, India, South Korea, and the United Kingdom — whose satellite advances can be utilized to the American military’s advantage.

The proliferation of low-cost launch, small satellites, and commercial remote sensing has handed the United States a strategic opportunity — but one also afforded to its adversaries. The new space race is on.

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Coordinating Israel’s and Ukraine’s collective knowledge in mastering drone warfare could help both nations gain an edge in future conflicts.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were both in Washington last week, a missed opportunity to collaborate against Iranian drones targeting both their countries. The two leaders spoke only briefly on July 28 at Senator Lindsey Graham’s funeral, their first conversation since January 2025 and their first in-person meeting since September 2023.

When the war with Iran began earlier this year, the majority of counter-drone expertise against Iranian systems was in Ukraine, not the Middle East. Kyiv had spent four years fighting those systems and rushed more than 200 specialists to the Gulf once the fighting started. With Iran continuing to threaten shipping and Gulf nations, the United States should establish a drone defense mechanism to channel systems and expertise among US forces and partners for the next fight.

Since the Iran War began on February 28, Iran and its proxies have launched roughly 5,600 drones alongside over 2,500 ballistic and cruise missiles across the Middle East, according to data from the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA). Iran fired Shahed one-way-attack drones, including a jet-engine-powered variant, while its proxies used first-person-view (FPV) drones for precision strikes and fiber-optic drones, whose cables make them immune to electronic jamming. Israel has faced these threats from Hezbollah since April, prompting rapid development of portable lasers, new radar, and emergency funding for improvised defenses (even fishing nets).

The war with Iran this year and the operations in 2024 and 2025 to defend Israel showed that multinational cooperation can blunt Iranian attacks. However, defenders still expended costly interceptors against cheap projectiles. Russia has fired Iranian-designed Shaheds at Ukraine since 2022 and developed the jet-powered and fiber-optic variants that appeared in the Gulf, forcing Ukraine to build an integrated drone architecture that flips the cost curve toward the defender.

Zelensky has separately claimed Russia is now returning the favor, feeding Iran satellite targeting data against US forces and Gulf targets. Ukraine’s surveillance network combines acoustic sensors, mobile intercept teams, electronic warfare, cheap interceptor and strike drones, and AI tools that ingest millions of hours of footage to update tactics within days. To counter fiber-optic FPVs, which are unaffected by jamming, Ukrainian forces added netting to vehicles and deployed net-launching interceptors.

No nation matches Ukraine’s expertise in drone offense, defense, production, and adaptation. Ukraine has consistently shared lessons, including through the recent launch of its TrophyLab platform, which provides technical details from captured Russian weapons, including Iranian drones.

Facing a counter-drone shortage in the Middle East, Ukraine sent specialists and capabilities to the Gulf during the war. Israel has accepted Ukrainian help in limited ways, but these have been crisis-induced changes, not the more formal exchanges that must be developed. Washington and Kyiv signed a framework drone cooperation agreement in July that sets conditions for improved Ukraine-US collaboration on joint production ventures, speeding weapons to warfighters.

The United States has the relationships to coordinate Ukrainian systems and expertise to support our Middle East and Pacific partners at scale. The US-led Security Assistance Group-Ukraine (SAG-U) and NATO Security Assistance and Training for Ukraine (NSATU)—both led by the same three-star US general—have spent more than three years coordinating training and learning with Ukraine, giving Washington direct access to relevant technology, tactics, and procedures.

NSATU has over 30 partner nations supporting Ukraine against Russian attacks, including several Pacific allies who could extend these hard-earned lessons to the Pacific. US Pacific Command (PACOM) and regional allies should draw on these lessons and integrate them now into our marquee exercises to reinforce deterrence against China.

The United States could repurpose and expand the senior-level Israel-EUCOM-CENTCOM (ICE) dialogue to form a drone defense center of excellence within the Air Warfare Center in the United Arab Emirates, which already brings Gulf air forces together. The hub would help Kyiv exchange cutting-edge classified data beyond its open-source TrophyLab project, improving tactics for fiber-optic-guided systems, combined missile-drone salvos, long-range strike routes, decoys, and attacks on drones before their launch.

While the Iran War tested US, Israeli, and Gulf defenses against the Iranian systems Ukraine has fought for years, none has matched the counter-drone expertise Kyiv built under fire. Washington should help our partners gain that edge before the next fight starts.

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The United States must reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Failure to do so will reverberate far beyond the Middle East, emboldening America’s adversaries worldwide.

Although both sides appear to be de-escalating, Iran claims nothing has changed about the status of the strait. The U.S. military can restore freedom of navigation through the critical waterway, but it will require determination and patience to implement and stick with a three-pronged campaign: opening a protected corridor through the strait so commerce can move now; cutting off Iran’s overland supply routes; and signaling a willingness to reescalate if Iran resumes targeting ships.

Hormuz is too important to global commerce to remain closed. Roughly a quarter of the world’s oil trade and a fifth of global liquefied natural gas trade normally transit the waterway. More than 30% of the world’s traded urea and roughly 20% of the world’s fertilizers also transit through Hormuz. Disruption of these commodities threatens much of the world’s food supply.

The economic pain and political leverage that Iran can extract by closing the strait became clear this spring. The need to alleviate that pressure led the United States to declare a ceasefire and then accept a deeply problematic memorandum of understanding.

Yet that agreement fell apart, resulting in the recent round of fighting, precisely because Washington, by signing it, showed it was unwilling to reopen the strait itself but would pay almost any price to get traffic flowing through it again. It should be no surprise that Iran quickly resumed throttling shipping to gain further leverage over the United States.

Moreover, Tehran was not the only one that learned this lesson. China and Russia have now seen that a determined adversary can choke off a critical waterway using relatively cheap drones. They have also seen that the United States is unwilling to do what it takes to protect its economic interests, instead backing down when confronted with pressure. This lesson will undermine U.S. deterrence globally. If Iran can hold Hormuz closed against a much superior U.S. military, China could grow bolder in the South China Sea and Russia in the Black Sea or the Baltic Sea.

The United States must not just break Iran’s hold on the strait but also convince other adversaries that they will not be able to replicate Iran’s strategy.

Since CENTCOM Commander Adm. Brad Cooper reportedly indicated that the United States had already hit most of its targets along the Iranian coast, reopening the strait now requires enabling commercial traffic to transit through safely, while continuing to undermine Iran’s ability and will to deny passage through it. The U.S. military can accomplish this, ideally with its partners, through a three-part strategy that will require equal measures of force and perseverance.

First, now that CENTCOM has struck most of its targets, the United States should open a daily, time-limited protected transit corridor. The United States could, for example, establish a six-hour daily window during which U.S. forces accompany and protect shipping and operate largely from the air, with less need for a large naval presence in the Gulf, which Iran could target. Blanketing the area with drones and airborne early-warning aircraft would provide necessary intelligence to detect launches, mines and other threats.

Constant armed surveillance over the strait would let U.S. forces strike the moment Iran tries to lay mines or attack shipping. Fighter jets should fly combat air patrol over the corridor to defend against larger drones and cruise missiles, while A-10 attack aircraft and Apache helicopters should provide close air support against smaller drones and attack boats. A U.S. commitment to compensate any U.S.- or partner-nation ship that Iran hits would also encourage shipping companies to risk transits.

Second, deny Tehran the oil revenue and military resupply it needs to keep fighting. This requires tightening the blockade of Iranian ports, expanding it to Iran’s shipping networks in the Caspian Sea and cutting off overland rail and bridge routes to Russia and China.

Finally, maintain the capability to eliminate Iran’s ability to target ships with missiles and drones if Tehran escalates again. The United States recently expanded its strikes from coastal launch and radar sites to reach command centers, air defenses, communications and inland launch sites. Counter-battery fire can provide additional ground-based offensive capabilities against Iranian launchers. Cyber operations and electronic warfare aircraft should also seek to jam the flow of Chinese and Russian targeting data, including satellite surveillance. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy indicated that Russia has supplied Iran with targeting data that reportedly helped Iran target U.S. troops.

Iran has shown it can hold one of the world’s most important waterways hostage. The longer Washington delays reopening the Strait of Hormuz, the more time Tehran gets to write the rules for a new order in the Gulf at the expense of the United States.

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At Pickaxe Mountain, Iran thinks it has built a nuclear fortress America can’t destroy. President Donald Trump can’t afford to let that illusion survive another week.

Fortunately, he has options.

Tehran has followed the same playbook for decades, secretly building underground nuclear sites that become the workhorses of its drive for the bomb.

Pickaxe appears to be the latest and potentially most dangerous.

Back in 2020, Tehran’s nuclear chief warned that workers were excavating the site for “a more modern, vaster, and inclusive building” — “working 24/7 to move all our sensitive work into the heart of this mountain.”

Since then, Iran has spent six years carving Pickaxe into what it hopes will be an indestructible nuclear sanctuary.

This is more than double the time it spent secretly building its enrichment plants at Fordow and Natanz before being caught.

Both those sites were already in “an advanced stage of construction” when inspections occurred.

By attacking Iran, President Donald Trump triggered a crisis over the Strait of Hormuz that he’s struggled to resolve as commander-in-chief. His only way out now may be as a statesman — but the window to avoid uncontrolled escalation could be closing.

Multiple U.S. troops were recently killed in Iranian missile strikes. The memorandum of understanding whose key job was reopening the strait lies in tatters. The sides are now exchanging expanded strikes to impose their competing visions of Hormuz’s future. The prospect that the war could enter an even more dangerous phase is growing by the day.

Shutting down Hormuz has been Iran’s greatest achievement of the war. A successful U.S. operation to liberate it would represent a huge strategic reversal — not just dramatically strengthening Washington’s leverage in future negotiations but transforming the conflict’s current narrative of U.S. defeat into one of American success in restoring deterrence.

Given those advantages, if a unilateral U.S. military option exists that could, with high confidence and acceptable cost, free Hormuz and — crucially — keep it free, Trump should give the order. The problem is that despite knowing for five months how central the strait’s disposition is to the war effort and America’s global standing, the order hasn’t come.

Which strongly suggests that the option doesn’t exist — in no small part because as Trump has observed, one “guy with a drone can shut [the strait] down.” Last week, Vice President JD Vance offered his version of the dilemma: “You can bomb them, you can take away their radar, you can take away some of their drones and some of their missiles,” he said, “but it’s just too easy to fire at ships in the straits.”

The likely costs of seizing Hormuz are daunting. The battle could take months, involving ground forces, high casualties, and the dangerous depletion of critical munitions stocks. Iran could unleash its remaining firepower to devastate Gulf energy infrastructure, while its Houthi allies shut down shipping through the Red Sea — potentially ruinous for the global economy. Meanwhile, any U.S. military gains could be undone by Trump’s “guy with a drone.”

There is a fundamental asymmetry of interests and pain thresholds at work. For Iran’s rulers, the stakes in Hormuz are existential — the essential lever they need to deter future attacks once this war concludes. They seem determined to fight as long as necessary, absorbing devastating costs without regard to the immense suffering of their own people.

The United States, in contrast, is a democracy with midterm elections looming. Trump’s war has been deeply unpopular from the start, exacerbated by spikes in gas prices and inflation. Expanding the war now would carry enormous military, economic, and political risk, with no guarantee of sustainable victory.

If the honest assessment is that a military solution remains unavailable at a price either Trump or the American people are prepared to pay, the clear-eyed response is to accept reality, however regretfully, and develop an alternative strategy to make the best out of a horrible situation.

That strategy would use aggressive diplomacy to weaponize the widespread international consensus on restoring freedom of navigation. Washington’s most powerful allies in the Gulf, Europe, and Asia already reject Iranian control of Hormuz and are primed to be forged into a more forceful multinational coalition.

The missing piece has been China, which vetoed a UN Security Council resolution on Hormuz in April on grounds that America’s military attacks and blockade of Iran should end. Nevertheless, Chinese officials have repeatedly called for a rapid return to free, safe, and unimpeded navigation, rejecting efforts to militarize the strait or charge tolls.

Between 40% and 50% of China’s oil imports transit the Gulf, and its economic relations with the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Qatar, Kuwait, and Oman dwarf its ties to Iran. Once the guns fall silent, a U.S.-organized, Gulf-led offensive to pressure and incentivize Chinese cooperation might succeed in isolating Iran by shifting the dynamic from Iran vs. Trump to Iran vs. the world.

The sequencing might work as follows: an initial Security Council resolution calling for the urgent restoration of Hormuz as a free and open international waterway and authorizing a multinational naval coalition to work with Iran and Oman in clearing it for safe passage. Britain and France have already volunteered to lead such an effort. Should the coalition report back that Iran is impeding the resolution, the Security Council would reserve the right to take additional action, including condemnation, sanctions, and, ultimately, authorization to reopen Hormuz by force.

It would not be easy or quick. It would require tremendous diplomatic skill, patience, and presidential leadership — none of which have been hallmarks of this administration. Even then, pulling it off will be a long shot. But in a world of terrible options, where further military escalation courts disaster and success in equal measure, a Plan B focused on an American diplomatic push could be the least bad path forward.

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The view through the windshield of the Israeli armored vehicle was surreal. Hosted by the 99th Division under Southern Command, our small group entered Gaza through the same breach the Israel Defense Forces used during the opening stages of the ground offensive following the Oct. 7 attacks.

The road wound through shattered neighborhoods whose homes concealed entrances to an underground tunnel network. Rubble covered everything. The signs of fighting were unmistakable. Over the next several hours, I saw compelling signs of tactical success while a second campaign, fought across screens and headlines, slipped away.

There is a lesson in this that the U.S. should not ignore: Success in modern conflict demands far greater emphasis on the information domain than we have been willing to give it. This lesson is even more relevant now, in real time, as hostilities in Iran flare anew.

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When Secretary of State Marco Rubio touched down in Abu Dhabi on June 23 for his first visit to the Gulf since the Iran war began, he offered a telling description of his purpose. “We want to make sure their views are taken into account in every decision that we make,” he told reporters.

It was a welcome sentiment — albeit long overdue. Collectively, the Gulf states took the brunt of Iranian missiles and drones fired during the war. Critical energy, transportation and tourism sites were struck. Their economies suffered massive disruption from Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

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When Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa officially assumed power after the fall of Bashar al-Assad in January 2025, he pledged to preserve “civil peace,” rebuild Syria’s military and security institutions, and restore state authority after years of fragmentation and civil war. It was an appealing proposition. Under Assad, weak state control and ungoverned territory allowed jihadist groups like the Islamic State in Syria (ISIS) to seize and hold ground. At the same time, Iran exploited eastern Syria’s porous borders to sustain a land corridor to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Restoring coherent state authority offered a credible path toward long-term stabilization of Syria and the region.

But Syria’s ongoing transition reveals a dangerous contradiction. As Damascus consolidates military and political authority, some of the policies intended to strengthen the state risk weakening its ability to secure it. Chief among them is the marginalization of the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the US-backed force that spent the last decade dismantling ISIS’ territorial caliphate, governing former jihadist strongholds, and building the intelligence networks that kept eastern Syria from sliding back into insurgency. As the SDF has lost operational control over key terrain in the northeast following clashes in January 2026 with Damascus, resurgent ISIS cells, escaped jihadist detainees, and Iran-backed Iraqi militias are taking advantage of a growing security vacuum.

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