WASHINGTON, D.C. — The United States has been at war with Iran for eleven days. Congress has attended multiple classified briefings about this war. Multiple senators have emerged from these briefings and told reporters, in various phrasings, that they still do not know why the war started, what it is trying to accomplish, or when it will end — information that, in previous conflicts, was generally considered the minimum viable content for a war briefing.
“Here we are well into the second week,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., departing Tuesday’s closed-door Senate Armed Services Committee session on Operation Epic Fury, “and it is still the case that the Trump administration cannot explain the reasons that we entered this war, the goals we’re trying to accomplish, and the methods for doing that.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer described the administration’s messaging as changing “by the hour,” which is a rate of change that meteorologists consider appropriate for weather forecasts and military historians do not generally consider appropriate for wars.
The administration, for its part, has described the war as: a response to Iran’s growing ballistic missile program; a response to Iran’s naval fleet; a response to Iran’s network of terror proxy groups across the Middle East; a response to Iran’s nuclear ambitions; a response to 47 years of Iranian aggression; and, from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, something that will not be “endless” — a characterization that stops meaningfully short of explaining when it will end and what “not endless” looks like in practice when you are actively conducting major combat operations in a country the size of Iran.
These justifications are not mutually exclusive. They are also not a strategy. Strategy, as military planners will note, requires objectives that are specific, measurable, and connected to an endpoint. “Not endless” is a vibe, not a strategy. The vibe is noted. The strategy has not been located.
The Classified Briefing System, Explained
The administration has held classified briefings with congressional leadership. These briefings are classified, which means the senators who attend them cannot tell their constituents what was said, which means the constituents of the country currently at war cannot find out from their elected representatives what the country is at war for.
This is the classified briefing system working as designed. The design raises questions that Patricia Unnamed-Source, Washington Bureau, has been asking for some time, specifically: if the war’s objectives cannot be stated publicly, are they objectives or are they aspirations, and if they are aspirations, are we at war or are we just very intensely hopeful, and if we are very intensely hopeful, does that require an aircraft carrier.
The answer to the last question is apparently yes.
Senator Chris Murphy, D-Conn., warned that the conflict could expand beyond air and naval operations. “They refuse to take off the table the insertion of ground troops,” Murphy said. “This is going to make the operations in Libya look like child’s play.” Senator Josh Hawley, R-Mo., countered that ground troops would require congressional authorization, and that ground troops do not appear to be on the immediate horizon, which is a reassurance that is technically not the same as the administration saying ground troops are not being considered, which is a distinction that Murphy and several other senators appear to have noticed.
The Senate Vote That Happened
Senator Tim Kaine, D-Va., introduced a war powers resolution to require Trump to withdraw U.S. forces without congressional authorization. The resolution failed. The decisive vote in its favor came from Senator Rand Paul, R-Ky., who is constitutionally consistent on this issue, and Senator Jon Fetterman, D-Pa., who voted against the resolution — a vote he explained on social media with the sentence: “My vote is Operation Epic Fury” — which is a sentence that does not contain a verb in a way that is either poetic or incomplete and possibly both.
Congressional Republicans, with those two exceptions, voted to let the war continue without further congressional input. Some expressed frustration that Kaine kept introducing resolutions about it. The Constitution’s Article I, Section 8 gives Congress the power to declare war. This has not been discussed as frequently as Kaine’s procedural persistence, which several Republicans found, in the words of one unnamed source, “exhausting.”
“The Constitution,” Patricia Unnamed-Source would like to note for the record, “does not have an exhaustion clause.”
What The Administration Says The War Is For, Updated As Of Press Time
As of this morning, Operation Epic Fury is, depending on which official you ask and at what time: a campaign to eliminate the imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime; a campaign to destroy Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal; a campaign to degrade its proxy terror networks; a campaign to cripple its naval forces; a campaign for regime change; a campaign that is not for regime change; a campaign that is going well; a campaign whose progress the president gave mixed signals about on Monday; a campaign that will not be endless; a campaign for which the day-after plan has not been presented to Congress; and, per the White House website, “Peace Through Strength.”
These descriptions are all on the record. They were released by officials of the same government. They were released within the same eleven days. They are available publicly, which is more than can be said for the classified briefing content, and they are less coherent collectively than any individual classified briefing is presumably required to be.
Democrats have demanded public hearings. The hearings have not been scheduled. The war is in its eleventh day. The objectives remain classified, or evolving, or both, or neither, depending on which briefing you attended and what time it was.
Supposedly News will continue to report on this story as objectives become available. We expect objectives will become available. We are not certain when. We have submitted a FOIA request. Gerald is reviewing it.
Patricia Unnamed-Source covers the Washington Bureau for Supposedly News. Her sources are classified. Her confidence level of 38% reflects her assessment of the information environment and not her assessment of the underlying events, which are unambiguously occurring. The war is real. The objectives remain, as of press time, a work in progress.