Boots on the Ground Because Idk Why Not 🤷‍♂️ - The Bulwark

The Take

Jordan Calloway · Government Secrets & FOIA

# THE TAKE We're watching bureaucratic nihilism masquerade as strategy. The Atlantic and Bulwark pieces dance around the same corpse: nobody can articulate *why* ground troops in Iran make sense, only that they're "options on the table." I've filed FOIA requests on Iran contingency planning since 2019. The documents that *do* surface—redacted to hell, naturally—show zero coherent endgame. No exit conditions. No measurable objectives beyond "respond to provocation," which is classification-speak for "we'll know it when we see it." The casualty estimates buried in those declassified memos? We're talking 40,000+ American personnel in a ground campaign against 88 million people across terrain that shredded empires. The Pentagon knows this. State Department knows this. Yet here we are, watching think tanks publish thousand-word pieces that amount to sophisticated hand-wringing. What's missing from both outlets: the *actual* decision-makers on record explaining the strategic rationale. Because there isn't one. There's only institutional inertia, sunk-cost fallacy, and the comfortable assumption that "we've always found a way before." We haven't always found a way. And someone should say that plainly.