The Costco War

Did nobody tell the mad clown that billion dollar warships against $50,000 drones is no way to win a war of choice?

Image of Iranian Shahed 136 Drone by Idmental, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Image of Costco by Stu pendousmat at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

“If we’re shooting down a $50,000 one‑way drone with a $3 million missile, that’s not a good cost equation,”

— Bill LaPlante, Pentagon chief weapons buyer, May 2024

The Strait of Hormuz is about 25 miles wide at its narrowest point. As I mentioned in a prior post, one of the most absurd fundamentals of the mad clown’s war against 90 million Iranians is that nothing I say about the strategic arguments against a major war is news.

No, the Iran War Is Not About Trump Incompetence

As you can see by the quote at the top of this post by Pentagon arms buyer Bill LaPlante, who testified about the challenges faced by modern armed forces against nations equipped with jillions of cheap drones, we’ve known since the Ukraine War (at least) that lumbering sea tanks, also known as U.S. naval vessels, are rendered nearly useless by drones in a 25-mile-wide strait.

Screenshot of Strait of Hormuz on Google Maps; labeling by author

Huge naval vessels in a narrow strait are not much more than targets.

I call them sea tanks because tank warfare was made obsolete by the Ukraine War when Ukraine knocked out Russian tanks with cheap suicide drones and ended any hopes Putin had of a quick blitzkrieg.

It’s been more than four years since Putin launched his attack on Ukraine, thinking he’d take the capital, Kyiv, within a few weeks.¹ Instead, his massive tank assault got bogged down by $50,000 drones² and light arms fire from angry Ukrainians firing portable anti-tank grenades from their shoulders.

Russian tanks were defenseless against cheap drones because tanks move so slowly that they may as well be stationary when a drone pilot, who guides the drone from miles away, is viewing it from the drone’s camera.

One of the poorest countries on Planet Earth, Yemen, is home to a band of impoverished and perpetually angry desert insurgents called the Houthis. Even they can afford $50,000 drones. They buy a lot of them. Then they fire them at ships trying to traverse the waters along the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula, the same place oil masterminds want to build a $100 billion oil canal.

Reuters describes the U.S. response to the Houthis’ low budget attacks:³

Since late 2023, the U.S. Navy has expended around $1 billion or more in munitions defending ships in the Red Sea from low‑cost Houthi drones and missiles, according to U.S. officials and defense analysts.

The missile price is only part of the cost. Each interception also depends on the presence of warships and their escorts, fuel and maintenance, trained crews, intelligence and surveillance assets, and command‑and‑control networks needed to detect and defeat incoming threats.

The Arleigh Burke class destroyer, USS Preble, could conceivably deal with drones cheaply with its onboard laser weapons system, but it’s in Japan right now.⁴

The Preble is currently the only U.S. Naval vessel equipped with a laser system, called HELIOS, which is a high-energy laser weapon platform designed to combat drones and the types of swarming speed boats that military analysts expect Iran to eventually deploy in larger numbers than they have so far.⁵ But it’s still not truly been battle-tested. The potential exists for its deployment to result in a sunken destroyer, which is probably why it’s hanging out just outside Yokosuka, Japan.

Ever since Operation Epstein Fury began, the mad clown has been yammering about escorting oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz in response to Iran’s declaration that the strait is closed for business.

It’s very possible he doesn’t know better, but his admirals and generals do. They’ve proven this by staying away from the coast of Yemen since the Houthis started lobbing drones at ships several years ago, choosing instead to hit the Houthis with long range missiles. If they have any sense, they’ll continue to steer clear of the Strait of Hormuz, too.

What are the alternatives to the Strait of Hormuz?

The alternatives to container ships trying to haul vats of oil from the Middle East to Europe and the United States are costly:

• Send container ships around the Cape of Good Hope, in other words, around the bottom tip of South Africa. Very costly and time intensive.

• Use an existing pipeline like the Saudi East-West crude oil pipeline, which will reach its 5 million barrels per day capacity moments after the first oil transit begins.⁶

• Build a massive new canal. Lindsey Graham, whose mind is smaller than that little white mark you sometimes see on your fingernail, proposed using nukes to create one. Such a good timeline this is, no? More serious proposals do exist, but the estimated costs run to about $100 billion for a canal through Oman, which is on the southern edge of the Arabian Peninsula. And, as I mentioned, that is within range of Houthis, who like to blow things up.

I have an idea, oil drug pushers. Give me just one of those billion dollars. That way, I can purchase two million laptops⁷ and never have to worry about one breaking down again.

Alternatively, I could purchase 20,000 Iranian Shahed 136 drones.

So can Iran, of course. You can be certain that they have.

None of this information is new. It has been at the fingertips of every war planner in the U.S., including, and especially, Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine, for a long time. Yet they forged ahead with their wild, unplanned plans.

Some reports in the mainstream media have tried to claim that Caine warned the mad clown about the folly of a war with Iran. If he did, he sure has gone gung-ho on it since.

This is a man who loves his military toys. He’s sending massive naval vessels, including the mini-aircraft carrier USS Boxer, into the war zone to expose young American armed services personnel to extreme danger for only one reason I can think of: To help prop up an aging pedophile wannabe dictator whose popularity is dropping faster than Pee Wee Herman’s did after he got caught with his pants down in an adult movie theater. What a patriot.

He’s also sending 2,000 paratroopers from the elite 82nd Airborne. This is in addition to (we think) about 4,500 marines who are already on their way.

Caine will belong in the same court dockets as Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, Dan Bovino, and others like them when this is all over, and the 2027 Trump Crime Commission is convened by a new, Democratic Congress.

What’s next?

Military bloggers are climbing over each other’s massive computer monitors trying to forecast where the troops are going.

There are several guesses floating around:

• Tehran, to take out the leaders. This ties in with unverified reports that mobile strike teams like Navy Seals and Army Rangers have access to a new sonic weapon that renders opponents helpless and does nasty things like make them bleed from their eyeballs. Those rumors flew after the Venezuelan presidential kidnapping. If a similar operation succeeds in Tehran, what seems crazy now may end up being true, because it is the only way American troops will be able to engage the Iranian military in Tehran and win.

• Kharg Island, to take the oil depots there. That seems pointless to me, since Iran could simply blow them up before or after, and turn off the spigot that feeds them, but who knows? It’s Pete Hegseth’s war, too, and he drinks a lot.

• The Iranian naval and oil port of Bandar Abbas, where Israelis killed Iran’s Revolutionary Guards navy commander Alireza Tangsiri in a bombing run yesterday. Bandar Abbas also sits along the Iranian coast right at that narrowest width of the Strait of Hormuz I mentioned earlier.

• All three simultaneously (that would have been my choice when I was a teenager playing wargames with nerdy friends).⁸

None of these will swing Operation Epstein Fury in Trump and Hegseth’s favor. The best-case scenario is that Iran is on its heels for a few days as it scrambles to recover. Israel killed the leader of the Iranian Navy, but he’ll be replaced in a day or two. Iran can play the attrition game better than almost any nation on earth.

In a best case scenario, holding onto any of these positions will be incredibly difficult.

The worst-case scenario envisions massive U.S. losses as Iranians respond with a counterattack involving thousands of troops and swarms of small boats and drones. For our young enlisted personnel’s sake, we need to hope and pray against that. They don’t deserve to die for the lurid purpose of deflecting against Trump’s legal problems.

Hegseth, as stupid as he is, isn’t blind to the potential of a worst case scenario. Today, he raised the Army’s draft eligibility and maximum enlistment age from 35 to 42.

Thanks for reading!

Footnotes

1. Putin’s attack on Ukraine really began with his invasion and occupation of Crimea about ten years earlier.

2. To be fair, they were also bogged down by poor planning. The tanks got stuck on narrow roads on the way to Kyiv, which gave Ukrainians a fantastic opportunity to wipe out many of them with small arms, beginning with a shoulder-based anti-tank weapon called the NLaw.

3. Arranz, Adolfo, Ally J Levine, Arathy J Aluckal, Mike Stone, Sudev Kiyada, Han Huang, and Travis Hartman. “Cheap Drones Are Reshaping the War in the Sky.” Reuters, March 17, 2026. https://www.reuters.com/graphics/IRAN-CRISIS/DRONES/dwpkyamxqpm/.

4. Cruising Earth. “Cruising Earth,” 2026. https://www.cruisingearth.com/ship-tracker/united-states-navy/uss-preble/.

5.

6. Pacheco, Marta. “What Are Europe’s Oil Route Alternatives to the Strait of Hormuz?” euronews. euronews.com, March 4, 2026. https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/03/04/what-are-europes-oil-route-alternatives-to-the-strait-of-hormuz.

7. I asked AI how many laptops I could buy for one billion dollars and that was what it told me.

8. I was really good at playing Avalon Hill (now Noble Night) wargames when I was a teenager, so I know what I’m talking about!