Checkers Vs. Three-Dimensional Chess:

On August 30, the Washington Post reported something that had been building in the Secretary of Defense Orders Book since at least August 14: senior US military leaders formally logged “non-concur” positions against extending force deployments associated with the Iran war, some of them through 2027. The dissent did not come from commanders refusing to carry out their orders. They will comply. Nor was it a public rebellion over Iran policy. It was something more consequential: the military leadership formally recording its judgment that sustaining the war is imposing unacceptable costs on US readiness elsewhere.

That distinction matters. A classified planning document is not a hearing room, a press conference or an anonymous leak. It is where military leaders are expected to put their professional judgment on the record. And what they recorded was essentially a warning about the kind of war Washington thinks it is fighting—and the number of wars it may actually have to be prepared to fight.

The Iran war has been running, in one form or another, since the February 28 strikes that killed Ali Khamenei. Trump, Netanyahu and Hegseth have approached it primarily as a contest between the United States and Israel on one side and Iran on the other, with success measured by Iranian capitulation, restraint or collapse. That is checkers: one board, one opponent, one immediate objective.

The commanders responsible for the rest of America’s military posture do not have that luxury. Their job is to look across the entire board simultaneously. They have to worry about what Moscow is doing in Europe, what Beijing is doing in the Indo-Pacific and what Pyongyang is doing on the Korean Peninsula while the Pentagon is concentrating forces, aircraft, ships, missile defenses and munitions on Iran. They are not objecting to the existence of the Iran war. They are warning about its opportunity cost. That is what makes the August 14 non-concurs so significant.

The Board Is Bigger Than Iran

The mechanics reported by the Post make the problem concrete. Forces and equipment assigned to sustain the Iran campaign have been pulled from other commands, reducing their ability to train, maintain readiness and respond to contingencies in their own theaters. The issue is not simply whether the United States possesses enough military power to fight Iran. It is whether it possesses enough immediately available power to fight Iran and remain ready for everything that happens while it is doing so. That is a different question.

America’s adversaries do not have to defeat the United States in the Middle East to benefit from this situation. They only have to recognize that American resources are finite. This is where the increasingly consequential relationship among Russia, China, Iran and North Korea becomes relevant. Researchers at the Center for a New American Security and elsewhere have described these four states as an “axis of upheaval”—not a formal military alliance, but a loose strategic convergence among governments that share an interest in weakening US power and challenging the international order Washington has dominated since the end of the Cold War.

The significance of the relationship is not that Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and Pyongyang have suddenly become a unified military command. They have not. The significance is that each can create problems for the United States that make the others’ problems easier to pursue. China benefits when American military resources and political attention are concentrated........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)