Timeline: Iran

July 17, 2026 - America Will Be Renting An Army: Why the Iran Ground War Will Be Fought by Men Who Never Swore the Oath

By the time the post-9/11 wars wound down, more American contractors had died in them than American soldiers. Roughly 8,000 contractors against roughly 7,000 troops, by Brown University’s Costs of War accounting. Almost nobody noticed. There were no folded flags on the evening news, no presidential trips to Dover, no names read on the House floor. The headline would say ‘three troops killed’ and never mentions the twelve contractors also died beside them. This is not a footnote of the last war. I believe it will be an expanded concept of operation for the next war with Iran. Here is the contrarian call. As I have articulated on Substack and X for the past months, the United States will eventually have to put boots on Iranian territory in the Q3 to Q4 window of 2027, whether on an island, a coastal enclave, or a border corridor. But the majority of those boots will NOT belong to the US military. Washington is preparing to do what Moscow was forced to learn in Ukraine, and what Ankara and other Gulf States perfected years earlier. It will rent the ground war. Continue reading →