As a former Assistant Secretary of State and senior military officer who served in Iraq and at CENTCOM, he has watched campaigns that looked decisive on paper but far less so in practice — wars where early battlefield success masked a much harder question: what comes next?
That’s why it was worth talking to him this week, at a moment when the conversation around the war with Iran is increasingly dominated by noise, rhetoric, and a striking lack of clarity about where this is actually going.
By any conventional military measure, the United States has done what it set out to do in the opening phase of the war. Air and naval dominance are firmly established. Hundreds of strike missions have been carried out. Iranian military infrastructure has been significantly degraded. Not a single U.S. aircraft has been lost.
On paper, it looks like a clean success. In reality, it looks like the beginning of a much more complicated problem. Because for all that operational progress, the central question remains unanswered: where is this headed?
Kimmitt’s answer is telling. So far, he says, the war has been defined by Israel’s attempt at leadership decapitation and a massive U.S. bombing campaign. What we are entering now is something far less defined — a transition point where military pressure continues, but strategic clarity does not.
That uncertainty isn’t a sideshow. It’s the story.
The administration has been careful — almost to the point of semantic gymnastics — in how it describes the deployment of ground forces. They provide “options.”
At a certain point, though, you wonder if “options” are flexibility or a placeholder for a decision that hasn’t been made.
To Kimmitt, what makes this conflict particularly difficult is that the United States and Iran are not fighting the same kind of war. America is fighting a war. Iran is playing for time.
The U.S. approach is familiar: degrade capabilities, destroy infrastructure, reduce the adversary’s ability to fight until it concedes. Kimmitt describes it as a war of “annihilation” — in its reliance on overwhelming force. Iran, by contrast, is fighting something closer to a war of endurance, or what he calls a war of “exhaustion.
“They don’t have to win,” Kimmitt said. “They win by not losing. By living another day.”
That distinction matters more than any individual strike. It explains why the destruction of targets does not necessarily translate into strategic progress — and why the idea of a short, decisive war may be more aspirational than real.
There is a familiar trap in wars like this: the belief that if you can measure it, you’re winning.
In Vietnam, it was body counts. Today, it may be the number of strikes, missiles intercepted, or facilities destroyed. But Kimmitt warns these metrics are a “fallacy.” Tactical success, he notes, can create the illusion of progress without changing the underlying dynamics.
None of this is to discount the military campaign itself. By Kimmitt’s assessment, it has been extraordinarily effective — one of the most precise bombing efforts he has seen. But breaking things, as it turns out, is not the same as achieving something.
That disconnect becomes most visible when you look at what “success” is supposed to mean. For Kimmitt, the answer is straightforward and consistent with decades of U.S. policy: no nuclear capability, no ballistic missiles, and no network of regional proxies.
“All this other stuff is noise,” he said.
Overlaying all of this is a messaging environment that is, at best, confusing.
Kimmitt is careful here. There is a case for unpredictability in war — for keeping the adversary off balance. Confusing the enemy can be useful. But there is also a second audience: the American public and U.S. allies.
“It’s okay to confuse the enemy,” he said. “It’s not okay to confuse your own country.”
Right now, both may be happening at the same time.
For now, the United States is winning the part of the war it knows how to fight. Iran is playing the part it knows how to endure. How this is supposed to end is a question neither side seems in a hurry to answer.
Thank you Emily Kopp, VickijH78, Don Buckter, Herman Jacobs, Tee Ree, and many others for tuning into my live video with Mark Kimmitt! Join me for my next live video in the app.
