Tehran’s Cognitive Offensive and the American Second-Generation Trap: An Analysis of Gregg Roman’s “Tehran’s War on American Morale”

The remaining question is whether we will finally treat the cognitive battlespace with the seriousness we already claim to apply to the kinetic one.

Falling into the 2nd Generation Warfare Trap

Gregg Roman, Executive Director of the Middle East Forum, has produced a timely and clear-eyed essay that should be required reading for every American military professional, policymaker, and citizen concerned with the character of contemporary conflict. Published on 17 August 2026 and made freely available, “Tehran’s War on American Morale” documents a deliberate Iranian information operation built around the prolonged deployment of USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72).

Iran’s state media organs and affiliated amplifiers fabricated the deaths of seven American sailors, invented a near-mutiny, and recycled genuine crew and family grievances into a sustained narrative of a “floating prison” whose sailors are breaking under the strain of fighting for “the Holy Land.”

Roman correctly insists that this is not a media story or a public-relations inconvenience. It is a military operation aimed at the one center of gravity Tehran can reach: the will of the force and the families that sustain it. His diagnosis is precise, his evidence detailed, and his prescriptions, transparent data release, platform accountability, sanctions review, professional consequences for launderers, and civil-society pre-bunking, sound.

Yet the deeper significance of the essay lies in what it reveals about the generational character of the war we are actually fighting and the cultural lag that prevents the United States from competing effectively in it.

While the United States has largely avoided the classic “tar pit” of protracted fourth-generation warfare on the ground in the Middle East, it is losing the fifth-generation fight for perception and morale. It does so despite undisputed dominance in the technical domain of cyber operations.

The reason is institutional and cultural: the American military and its associated information apparatuses remain trapped in a second-generation warfare mindset of centralized control, industrial-age personnel practices, risk aversion, and the belief that information is a supporting public-affairs function rather than a primary warfighting domain.

Generations of Warfare: A Brief Orientation

The framework of successive generations of modern warfare, first articulated by William S. Lind and colleagues in 1989 and refined by Thomas X. Hammes and others, remains the most useful intellectual tool for understanding the problem.

• First-generation warfare was the ordered line-and-column combat of the smoothbore musket era after the Peace of Westphalia (1648), when the state monopolized legitimate violence.

• Second-generation warfare, perfected by the French in World War I, is attrition warfare organized around massed firepower, centralized control, detailed plans, and the linear synchronization of resources. Its cultural hallmarks are hierarchy, predictability, process compliance, and the treatment of soldiers as interchangeable parts in an industrial machine.

• Third-generation warfare is maneuver warfare: decentralized initiative, mission-type orders (Auftragstaktik), speed, and the collapse of the enemy’s system rather than its sequential destruction.

• Fourth-generation warfare returns war to non-state or transnational actors who attack the political will of their opponents through protracted, networked, often low-intensity means that blur the distinctions between war and peace, combatant and civilian.

• Fifth-generation warfare, still contested in definition but increasingly observable, is primarily non-kinetic. It is a war of information and perception, social engineering, deepfakes, narrative shaping, and cognitive influence aimed at the decision-making processes and morale of populations and forces. Daniel Abbott and subsequent analysts describe it as the deliberate manipulation of an observer’s context to achieve desired outcomes without, or before, decisive kinetic engagement.

The United States has spent two decades trying (with mixed and often unsatisfactory results) to adapt to fourth-generation realities. It has largely stepped back from large-scale nation-building occupations that invite classic 4GW quagmires. Yet the cognitive and informational campaigns now directed against American service members and their families represent a clear evolution into the fifth generation.

Tehran is not trying to sink the Lincoln with missiles (though it has tried that narrative). It is trying to sink the will that keeps the ship at sea and the recruiting pipeline that will man the next one.

The Iranian Operation as Textbook Fifth-Generation Warfare

Roman lays out the architecture with clinical clarity.

The campaign begins with a true kernel: the Lincoln departed San Diego in November 2025 on what was expected to be a routine deployment and found itself in sustained combat operations. By mid-2026 the carrier had logged more than 200 consecutive days at sea without a meaningful port call, flown thousands of sorties, and expended enormous quantities of ordnance.

Crew and family complaints about food, showers, mail, and exhaustion were real enough that senior commanders eventually acknowledged and addressed some of them. Parallel extended deployments, including the Gerald R. Ford’s 326-day cruise, confirm that long deployments are becoming a structural feature of naval force generation rather than an aberration.

Tehran’s method is classic: take the true kernel, inflate it beyond recognition, fabricate decisive events that never occurred (seven dead sailors, an invented mutiny, spikes in suicidal ideation contradicted by Navy data), and then launder the product through multiple layers. State wires (Mehr, Tasnim, IRNA) originate the lie under anonymous sourcing. English-language outlets such as PressTV convert it into meme-ready form.

Diplomatic accounts in third countries serve as billboards. Western aggregators and individual influencers—most prominently the Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi—amplify unverifiable “field” artifacts that feed precisely the same narrative lane at the same moment. The result is a self-reinforcing information cascade that outruns official denial by days or weeks.

Roman’s dossier on Parsi is careful and documented. It rests on the public record of the 2008–2015 defamation litigation against Hassan Daioleslam, the summary judgment against Parsi and the National Iranian American Council, the $183,480.09 sanction for a “disturbing pattern of delay and intransigence,” and the district court’s observation that Parsi’s work was “not inconsistent with the idea that he was first and foremost an advocate for the regime.”

Roman explicitly declines to claim formal agency; the point is functional.

In wartime, fluent, credentialed American voices that supply enemy-convenient framing and unverifiable material at scale become force multipliers for the adversary’s cognitive campaign whether or not they take orders. The historical analogies to Axis Sally and Tokyo Rose are apt not as legal verdicts but as descriptions of a recurring wartime function: the native-speaking transmitter that reaches the target audience in its own accent and with its own cultural credibility.

The five strategic purchases Tehran seeks are equally clear: domestic legitimacy at home, exploitation of collapsing American public support for the campaign, polarization along the Israel wedge, long-term degradation of the recruiting base, and narrative dominance in the Global South. None of these objectives requires a successful kinetic strike on a carrier. All of them are advanced by the perception that the Americans are already breaking.

The American Second-Generation Response

Here is the core of the problem. The United States possesses unmatched technical capacity in cyber operations, electronic warfare, and the collection and analysis of information. Yet its institutional response to a sophisticated cognitive campaign remains characteristically second-generation.

Second-generation culture prizes control, synchronization, and the suppression of bad news until it can be managed. When families first raised concerns about conditions aboard the Lincoln, the initial institutional reflex was denial or minimization. When the fabricated massacre appeared, CENTCOM’s public response lagged by days—ample time for the lie to circulate, harden, and be laundered through Western channels.

Subsequent official statements that the problems were “completely misrepresented” or that the sailors had not been deployed “nearly long enough” supplied Tehran with precisely the fuel its denial-inversion machine requires: every cracked blanket denial becomes evidence of cover-up, and every subsequent genuine grievance video becomes the “brave truth” the authorities tried to suppress.

This is not a failure of individual officers. It is the predictable output of a system still organized around industrial-age assumptions. The personnel system continues to reward ticket-punching, risk aversion, and the management of appearances over adaptive initiative.

Information remains largely the province of public affairs rather than a primary warfighting function integrated into the operational design. Transparency is treated as a public-relations risk rather than force protection. Data that would devastate the “floating prison” narrative—the Lincoln’s 84.4 percent reenlistment rate, among the highest in the carrier force—was released only after the fabrication cycle had already peaked.

In third-generation terms, the American OODA loop is too slow and too centralized. In fifth-generation terms, the United States is fighting a perception war with an industrial-age toolkit. Cyber Command can degrade Iranian networks; it cannot, under current cultural constraints, rapidly and credibly shape the cognitive battlespace in which American families and potential recruits actually live.

I have argued for more than two decades that the American military’s deepest vulnerability is not technological but cultural: the persistence of second-generation assumptions about hierarchy, control, and the interchangeability of people long after the character of conflict has moved on.

Mission Command and true maneuver culture are the necessary foundations for competing in fourth- and fifth-generation environments. They require leaders selected and developed for judgment under uncertainty, units that trust one another because they have trained and lived together, and an institutional willingness to publish the data that undercuts the adversary’s narrative before the adversary can weaponize the vacuum.

Roman’s Prescriptions and the Path Forward

Roman’s concrete recommendations align closely with what an adaptive, third-generation approach to a fifth-generation problem would demand:

1. Standing public release of granular readiness, mental-health, retention, and logistics data by hull. Transparency is force protection against an enemy whose theory of victory is the gap between official adjectives and lived experience.

2. Enforcement of platform rules against state media and sanctioned entities.

3. Review of designations for outlets functioning as instruments of a wartime information campaign.

4. Professional accountability—corrections, provenance questions, institutional scrutiny—for those who launder fabrications at scale.

5. Independent civil-society archiving, forensic analysis, and pre-bunking, because official messengers will always be discounted.

These are not censorship. They are the ordinary disciplines of professional accountability and operational security applied to a domain the adversary already treats as decisive. The sailors of the Abraham Lincoln have absorbed missiles, drones, and now sustained cognitive assault and have held. Their 84.4 percent reenlistment rate is the most powerful rebuttal to the floating-prison narrative. The institutions behind them must now match that discipline.

Morale is a warfighting domain.

Tehran already operates as if it understands this. The United States will continue to lose the fifth-generation fight—regardless of its cyber advantages—until its military culture, personnel system, and information posture escape the second-generation trap that still defines them. Roman has described the enemy’s campaign with unusual clarity. The remaining question is whether we will finally treat the cognitive battlespace with the seriousness we already claim to apply to the kinetic one.

Endnotes

1. William S. Lind et al., “The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation,” Marine Corps Gazette 73, no. 10 (October 1989): 22–26; Thomas X. Hammes, The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century (St. Paul, MN: Zenith Press, 2006).

2. Daniel H. Abbott, ed., The Handbook of 5GW: A Fifth Generation of War? (Ann Arbor, MI: Nimble Books, 2010); see also the evolving literature on cognitive warfare in NATO and U.S. doctrinal discussions.

3. For contemporaneous reporting on the Abraham Lincoln deployment strain, see Peter Suciu, “USS Abraham Lincoln Faces Poor Morale From Twice-Extended Deployment,” Forbes, 6 August 2026; Alison Bath, “Navy carrier in Mideast at sea for more than 200 days, testing crew resilience,” Stars and Stripes, 9 July 2026.

4. Parsi v. Daioleslam, 890 F. Supp. 2d 77 (D.D.C. 2012); Parsi v. Daioleslam, 778 F.3d 116 (D.C. Cir. 2015); the $183,480.09 sanction and the district court’s language on advocacy are a matter of public record.

5. Donald E. Vandergriff, The Path to Victory: America’s Army and the Revolution in Human Affairs, 2nd ed. (Presidio Press / CreateSpace, 2013); Adopting Mission Command: Developing Leaders for a Superior Command Culture (Naval Institute Press, 2019); and related essays on the persistence of second-generation culture.

Begin Article: Tehran’s War on American Morale

It is a military operation. Treat it like one. Plus: the file on Tehran Trita. Free for every reader.

Gregg Roman

Aug 17, 2026

MIDDLE EAST INSIDER

Monday, August 17, 2026 · Special Edition

From Gregg Roman, Executive Director, Middle East Forum

This Edition

Two special editions in two days is not a habit; it is a week that demanded them. Yesterday I told you about the book. Today’s subject found me: this past week, the Islamic Republic invented the deaths of seven American sailors, and the machinery that spread the invention ran better than most Americans realize, some of it running through Washington. The Insider’s pause holds, the Dispatch carries the dailies, and this essay goes to every reader, free and premium alike.

Tehran’s War on American Morale

It is a military operation. Treat it like one.

By Gregg Roman

Seven Dead, in Print

On August 11, Iran killed seven American sailors. It killed them in print. Mehr News, a wire service of the Islamic Republic, reported a violent clash aboard USS Abraham Lincoln: seven dead, several wounded, an adviser to the CENTCOM commander booed and pelted with water bottles on the deck of America’s flagship in the Arabian Sea. The source was Tasnim, an outlet tied to the Revolutionary Guard, citing one anonymous “informed military source.”

The story ran for two days before US Central Command said a word. By the time CENTCOM called it what it was, false, zero deaths, the one sailor who went overboard on August 3 recovered safely, an English-language newsletter had already dressed the massacre up as analysis, complete with knives. Within two days of the denial, an Iranian embassy was selling “America’s floating prison at sea.” The lie had lapped the truth twice.

No sailors died. That is not the point. The point is that a state at war with the United States manufactured their deaths, on a schedule, for an audience, and most of Washington still discusses it as a media story. It is not a media story. It is a military operation aimed at the one American system Tehran can actually reach: the will of the force, and the families behind it.

The True Kernel

Tehran deserves its due here: the targeting is intelligent. The Lincoln’s deployment is genuinely brutal. The carrier left San Diego in November 2025 for a routine cruise and got a war instead. More than 260 days at sea. A record stretch of more than 200 days without a port call. Ten thousand aircraft flights, a million and a half pounds of ordnance expended, an extension with no announced end.

Families raised real complaints, about food that ran thin last spring, about showers, mail, and exhaustion, and some were real enough that CENTCOM’s commander acknowledged problems “raised months ago” and fixed them. American reporters covered it, as they should. Senators demanded answers, as they should.

Nor is the strain an aberration. USS Gerald R. Ford logged 326 days before returning in May, the longest American carrier deployment since Vietnam. The extended cruise is becoming a feature of naval force generation, not a fluke of this war. None of that is disinformation. That is a democracy metabolizing the cost of a long conflict.

The Pivot

What Tehran built on top of it is something else. The method takes the true kernel, tired crew, long deployment, worried families, and inflates it past recognition. “America’s floating prison at sea,” in the words of Iran’s embassy in Kenya, which decorated the phrase with an anonymous spouse’s quote lifted from Western press coverage and a graphic of a sailor behind bars. “Worse than a public toilet! … No wonder troops want to jump overboard!” from PressTV, over a shaky bathroom video that an IRGC-adjacent account recycled a day later, same footage, new caption, as proof that sailors were defying CENTCOM’s denial. A Lego cartoon mocking the crew, captioned “Four Score! No Shore!” And beneath the mockery sit the hard fabrications: the seven dead, the invented mutiny, the claimed spike in suicidal ideation that the Navy says its data does not show.

We have seen this movie. Tehran produced the first reel in the spring. In February and March the same apparatus manufactured a different collapse: the Lincoln struck by four ballistic missiles, the Lincoln burning, the Lincoln sunk, the Lincoln “forced to retreat” under the avenging fire of the Iranian navy. Fact-checkers rated the videos Pants on Fire. The footage turned out to be recycled clips and video-game renders. The New York Times logged more than 110 unique pro-Iran deepfakes in two weeks; the Foundation for Defense of Democracies traced the campaign to regime-linked networks.

The carrier kept flying. So Tehran did what propagandists do when the lie about the battle fails: it started lying about the men. The pivot from “we sank the ship” to “the ship is destroying its own crew” preserves the claim, American defeat, while removing the evidence requirement.

“You cannot photograph a sinking that never happened. A rumor about morale needs no photograph at all.”

The Architecture

Axis Sally needed a transmitter. Tokyo Rose needed a studio. Tehran needs neither, because we built its distribution system for it and called it a social network. The Islamic Republic’s morale operation runs on a layered architecture that any student of Soviet active measures would recognize, updated for the algorithm.

State wires, Mehr, Tasnim, IRNA, originate the fabrication under gray sourcing. PressTV translates it into meme-grade English. Diplomatic accounts in Nairobi and Freetown, of all places, serve as billboards; last April it was Iran’s embassy in Sierra Leone sneering that there were “no goodies on the table for Israel’s foot soldiers… They sure get to die for them, though!”

Then comes the laundering layer, and this is the part Americans need to understand, because it happens here. The seven-dead fabrication reached American readers through a Substack calling itself “Middle East Report,” a name that free-rides on a long-established journal, and it sourced its “Lincoln Massacre” story entirely, and I mean entirely, to Tasnim, PressTV, and IRNA.

Tehran Trita

The widest-reaching artifact of the August cycle did not come from a state wire at all. It came from a Washington think-tank executive. Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, published a photograph he said was “sent to me from the field”: graffiti written in the dust of an aircraft, “Operation Epstein Fury,” “ALL THIS FOR THE HOLY LAND,” plus an anonymous serviceman declaring the operation “has no morale behind it.” It drew 13.7 million views in under a day. Within hours, aviation-literate readers identified the aircraft as an apparent land-based KC-135 tanker, a plane that cannot operate from a carrier, photographed over what looks like concrete. He did not claim the image came from the Lincoln. It did not matter. The post fed the exact lane Tehran was working, at the exact hour, and as of this writing the provenance questions sit unanswered while aggregation accounts strip his hedging and repost the image as fact.

Wars on morale produce a particular voice: the fluent one, the credentialed one, the one that reaches the home audience in its own accent. Americans named the genre in the 1940s, Axis Sally, Tokyo Rose, and the names outlived the courtrooms because they described a function, not a verdict; America later pardoned Iva Toguri, and kept the name. This war’s version does not need a transmitter in Berlin. It has a podium three blocks from the White House, and the shorthand writes itself: Tehran Trita.

The file runs longer than one photograph. Parsi was born in Ahvaz and raised in Sweden from age four, in a family that fled the regime; his father was jailed by the Shah and then by Khomeini, a history he tells himself. He took his doctorate at Johns Hopkins under Francis Fukuyama, and in 1997 founded a group called Iranians for International Cooperation, whose stated goal, in internal documents the Forum’s writers have published, was to “pressure U.S. lawmakers to pose a more Iran-friendly position.” In 2002 he founded the National Iranian American Council and ran it for seventeen years. In 2019 he co-founded the Quincy Institute on seed money from George Soros and Charles Koch, and moved one door down from advocacy into scholarship’s clothing.

The court record is where the file gets specific. In 2008 Parsi and NIAC sued an Iranian-American researcher, Hassan Daioleslam, for writing that they lobbied for the regime. The suit ended in 2012 with summary judgment against Parsi on every claim. Discovery pried NIAC’s files open along the way, and what fell out included Parsi’s role arranging meetings between Javad Zarif, then Iran’s UN ambassador, and members of Congress, and an internal NIAC email conceding “I believe we fall under this definition of ‘lobbyist.’” The court found by a preponderance of the evidence that Parsi’s side intentionally altered a produced document, the old IIC charter, in which the word “lobby” had become “advocacy” seven years after the group went defunct. The judge sanctioned Parsi and NIAC $183,480.09 for a “disturbing pattern of delay and intransigence,” a penalty upheld on appeal, in a defense the Forum’s Legal Project helped fund. And the district court wrote a sentence that has followed Parsi since: his work was “not inconsistent with the idea that he was first and foremost an advocate for the regime.”

Neither NIAC nor Parsi has ever registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. In 2020, three senators asked the Justice Department to review whether they should. NIAC called the accusations “slanderous,” said it takes no money from any government, and noted that it routinely condemns the regime’s human-rights abuses; no investigation was ever announced. The network has a European wing as well: a second Parsi, Rouzbeh, left the Swedish Institute of International Affairs after an internal review of his undisclosed role in the “Iran Experts Initiative,” a network that leaked foreign-ministry emails showed was guided from Tehran. He denies collaborating with the regime.

The Line

Precision is the whole ballgame here, so let me be precise. I am not saying these Americans take orders from Tehran. I have no evidence of that, and neither does anyone else. The court never ruled Parsi an agent of Iran; it ruled that the researcher who called him one could not be proven malicious, and it priced the way Parsi litigated at $183,480.09. Those are different findings, and the difference matters. Amplification is something propagandists do to a target ecosystem, with or without its consent. A senator quoted inside Iranian propaganda is evidence about the propaganda, not about the senator.

Criticizing this war is every American’s right; I have my own criticisms of how Washington has fought it. But there is a difference between opposing a war and supplying, at scale, unverifiable artifacts and enemy-convenient framing that a hostile state is actively weaponizing against American families, and then declining to answer basic questions about where the material came from. The first is dissent, and it needs no one’s permission. The second is negligence with a reach of millions, in wartime, on the exact terrain where a hostile state is operating. And the negligent have names, platforms, and institutional affiliations that confer the credibility Tehran cannot buy for itself. An American University professor sat for an interview with Al Mayadeen, a Hezbollah-aligned channel, to tell its audience the Lincoln was becoming “unlivable” and a “desperate” American president might go nuclear. The channel got exactly what it booked him for.

Five Purchases

Tehran spends this much on morale warfare because it is buying five things at once. It signals effectiveness to its own battered public: we are breaking the Americans. It rides a real collapse in American support for the war; by July only 12 percent of Americans told Marquette pollsters the campaign had achieved its goals, down from 21 in April. It drives the Israel wedge, framing every hardship as a price paid “for the Holy Land,” a message engineered for the far left and the isolationist right simultaneously.

It seeds the recruitment well, telling every military mother that the Navy is a floating prison, sabotage aimed at next year’s enlistment lines. And it plays to the Global South, where embassy accounts in English tell Nairobi and Johannesburg that the American century is ending in moldy showers. What Tehran never had to do is invent the raw material. American reporting, family testimony, and political conflict supplied it. Tehran selected, inflated, fabricated on top, and re-exported.

The Fuel

Here is the uncomfortable part for our side: Washington keeps handing Tehran its best material. In April, when families circulated photographs of thin rations, the Navy’s response was that the reports were “false.” Some of the problems turned out to be real. In August, the secretary of war dismissed the conditions reporting as “completely misrepresented” while the president declared the sailors had been deployed “not nearly long enough.”

Every blanket denial that later cracks becomes a permission slip to believe the next fabrication. Tehran’s denial-inversion machine runs on exactly this fuel: CENTCOM says “false,” and within days the machine presents any new grievance video as the brave rebuttal of a cover-up. You do not beat that machine with adjectives. You beat it with data.

Strike the Colors

So publish the data. The Pentagon should release, on a standing basis, the granular numbers it currently doles out under duress: mental-health caseloads by hull, retention by ship, resupply logs, port-call schedules against historical baselines. The Lincoln’s reenlistment rate, 84.4 percent by CENTCOM’s own accounting, among the highest of any carrier in the fleet, is the single most devastating rebuttal to the “floating prison” narrative in existence. The command disclosed it only after the fabrication cycle peaked. Transparency is not a public-relations nicety. Against an adversary whose entire theory of victory is the space between official adjectives and visible facts, transparency is force protection.

Second, make the platforms do what their own rules promise. Iran’s embassy accounts are state media by any honest definition; they should carry state-affiliation labels and the reach penalties that follow. PressTV, an arm of a state broadcaster the Treasury sanctioned years ago, romps through American feeds unlabeled. The deepfake archive from the spring sits in plain view of synthetic-media policies that go unenforced. Congress should ask X and Meta, in writing and in public, why.

Third, review the designations. Treasury and State should examine whether Mehr, Tasnim, and Al Mayadeen’s current sanctions posture matches their documented wartime conduct. That is not punishment for speech; instruments of a hostile state’s military-information campaign should be treated as what they are. And the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force should publish an unclassified assessment of Iranian operations targeting American military families. The families are a targeted population. They deserve to be told so by their own government, not left to discover it in their Facebook groups.

Fourth, impose professional costs on the laundering layer, lawfully, publicly, with the proof attached. Editors who ran the seven-dead story owe their readers corrections, and those who refuse should be listed by name in a public scorecard of outlets that laundered a state fabrication and shrugged. Commentators who post “field” artifacts to thirteen million people should answer basic provenance questions or wear the refusal permanently. Universities whose faculty perform for Hezbollah-aligned cameras should be asked, on the record, whether they have a view. None of this is censorship. It is the ordinary machinery of professional accountability, applied to people who have grown comfortable assuming it would never reach them. This is the Daylight Doctrine applied to wartime: force the foreign hand, and the hands that launder for it, into the light, and let Americans judge what they see.

Finally, civil society has to do what government cannot. Official Washington will always be a suspect messenger on its own behalf; the proof has to come from outside. That means independent trackers that archive every state-media fabrication before deletion, and Tehran does delete. It means forensic analyses of viral artifacts, published whatever they conclude. It means prebunking the next narrative before it lands, and it will land: the Navy has ordered USS George Washington to relieve the Lincoln, and Iranian outlets have already begun framing the relief as retreat. Above all, it means a message to military families that takes their grievances seriously precisely because it refuses to let Tehran own them. Raising real problems through real channels is patriotic. Letting a hostile state wear your worry as a costume is the enemy’s whole plan.

The sailors of the Abraham Lincoln spent nine months absorbing everything the Islamic Republic could throw at them: missiles, drones, and finally this, the slander of their own breaking. They held. The 84.4 percent held. The question is whether the institutions behind them, the Pentagon, the platforms, the press, the professoriate, can manage even a fraction of that discipline. Tehran is sailing under false colors, flying our families’ grief as its battle flag. Strike those colors. Do it with data, with labels, with corrections, with names. Morale is a warfighting domain now. The enemy already knows it. The only question is when we start acting like we do.

Gregg Roman

Executive Director, Middle East Forum

The Long View, Free Again

The Long View runs every Sunday for premium members. This week it has run free twice, because I am on vacation and the week refused to cooperate. Premium membership is $12 a month or $100 a year, and it now includes first access to excerpts from Alone in the Ranks, the book I told you about yesterday. Every MEF donor reads free; if your invitation has not arrived, write mefnews@meforum.org.