(Photo by ATTA KENARE / AFP via Getty Images)

Americans know about the London Blitz because of Edward R. Murrow’s “This is London” broadcasts in the early 1940s. Americans know about the leadup to war in Vietnam because in 1962 David Halberstam exposed the government’s false confidence in Diem’s government. The same goes for torture at Abu Ghraib, NSA surveillance against U.S. citizens, and reportedly inflated casualty counts in Afghanistan –– all uncovered by journalists.

This looks different in the Iran War. Hundreds of people were reportedly arrested in the Gulf States for sharing videos of damage, live skyline views over Israel were shut down by the IDF, and Iranians caught filming the war could be considered foreign agents. That’s why Americans hoping to “monitor the situation” must resort to uncontextualized clips of the war in bursts of extreme violence: acid rain over Tehran, a torpedo sinking a warship, aerial footage of missile strikes intermingled with scenes from Braveheart and Top Gun.

A lack of reporting from the frontlines, paired with stark divisions between those who serve in the military and those who don’t, creates a gamified vision of war. Americans are fine supporting endless wars because for many Americans they exist exclusively on their phone screens. A gamified war is a popular one. (RELATED: US Aircraft Crashes Amid Iran War And Prompts Rescue Efforts, CENTCOM Says)

Since the military draft ended in 1973, the share of U.S. adults who are veterans declined from around 18% to roughly 6%. Oral histories of military service, like your grandfather telling you about D-Day, are harder to come by. But it’s more than just the overall share of veterans, it’s where in society those warfighters come from.

Brown University’s 2019 Cost of War Index finds five of the ten states that contributed the largest share of their population to America’s post-9/11 wars were in the Southeast. Washington D.C., on the other hand, sends a smaller proportion of its residents to the military than any other U.S. jurisdiction, as of 2018. Troops are struggling financially as well –– one quarter of active-duty service members are food insecure, 2.5 times more than the civilian population, as of 2024. The result, summarized by Doctor Brandan Buck, is that America’s combat fatalities during the Global War on Terror have “become disproportionately rural and underrepresented among America’s upper class.”

Because of this it is easy to sell Americans on the idea of a bloodless war –– a “cakewalk” as former diplomat Ken Adelman infamously predicted in Iraq. Even when over 30,000 veterans since Sept. 11, 2001, have committed suicide, entire swaths of the country, including its capital, don’t see it firsthand. The media becomes all the more necessary to explain this conflict to Americans at home.

But there is no Edward R. Murrow or David Halberstam in Iran. Even in Israel, where international news outlets are stationed, law requires “every person who prints or publishes printed matter or a publication concerning state security… must submit it to the censor before printing or publishing it.” (RELATED: ‘We’re Not Going To Put Up With It Any Longer’: President Trump Announces ‘Massive And Ongoing Operation’ Against Iran)

In the United States, there is no formal censorship, but there is calculated distortion. Hype videos released by the White House are bound to get more views than in-depth reporting from sources in Iran. TikTok is now the second most popular social media site for news consumption, which lends itself exclusively to short-form content. If there was a David Halberstam reporting live from Tehran, I’m not sure many Americans would care.

All this contributes to the gamification of war. This isn’t new (Vince Vance and The Valiants wrote their hit song “Bomb Iran” 46 years ago) but it is at new levels. The Trump Administration refuses to provide an endgame for the war, and they won’t give a consistent reason for it beginning in the first place. But don’t fret, because the only ones who need to be worried, as Secretary of War Pete Hegeseth said on 60 Minutes, “are Iranians that think they’re gonna live.”

For many Americans, the Iran War will appear even more remote than Iraq and Afghanistan. The physical and psychological burdens carried by troops returning home will be mostly borne by communities far away from the D.C. intelligentsia. Footage of the war will be subjected to strict censorship, and clips of destruction will be posted for sport by those far from the frontlines.

As of publication, Operation Epic Fury has already claimed the lives of at least 13 U.S. servicemembers. 140 are wounded. War, despite what you may see and hear, is still not a game.

Jack Verrill is a Young Voices Contributor from Falmouth, Maine. A Sophomore at the University of Michigan, Jack can be reached at jverrill@umich.edu or on X @jack_verri11

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.

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