We’re Already Starting the ‘War Could Last Longer Than We Thought’ Routine in Iran

All of one day after Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby sat before Congress, testifying to the Senate Armed Services Committee that U.S./Israeli war with Iran was “not nation building,” an attempt at regime change, or “endless war,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is already walking back his underling’s words. What we’re hearing should be familiar to all of us—after all, we’ve been here before. At the launch of hostilities, it’s suggested that the war will be over in mere days. Within a few days, it’s weeks. And now, straight from Hegseth’s mouth, comes the first reference to a war lasting months. Speaking to reporters at a Wednesday news conference, the Secretary of Defense began the not-so-subtle Move The Goalposts operation.

“We’re going to ensure through violence of action and our offensive capabilities and our defensive capabilities, as I said, that we set the tone and the tempo of this fight,” Hegseth said. “The only limits we have in this is President Trump’s desire to achieve specific effects on behalf of the American people. We could say four weeks, but it could be six, it could be eight, it could be three.”

I like how the estimate inches forward and then back there, like the Secretary is dipping a toe into the sea of public opinion and then recoiling after finding it frigid indeed. It’s also fun how they continue to use “weeks” as the measuring tool, even at “eight weeks,” which could also be accurately described by the term “months.” When we’re half a year into this thing, will they be referring to it as a “26-week” operation?

The admin started off by saying the war would last a few days, then a few weeks, then four weeks. Now, Hegseth is saying eight weeks

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— Josh Kovensky (@joshkovensky.bsky.social) Mar 4, 2026 at 10:30 AM

We’re only five days into the war with Iran, and already the goalposts are in full retreat. Over the weekend, as the U.S. and Israeli bombs began to fall, immediately killing nearly 200 schoolchildren in the process, the MAGA twitter bot hoards strongly resisted any use of the term “war” at all, insisting that the conflict would begin and end with such lightning-quick efficiency that the word was unwarranted. Trump then immediately shot those efforts full of holes, saying that the war was projected to last for at least four or five weeks, and that we should expect American casualties. Tragically, this came to pass, as six Americans have been killed to date in the conflict in an Iranian strike on a command center in Kuwait. Four have been named so far: Captain Cody Khork, 35; Sergeant Nicole Amor, 39; Sergeant Declan Coady, 20; and Sergeant Noah Tietjens, 42.

Everywhere, the indications are rolling in that people on all sides increasingly expect some kind of long, drawn-out quagmire in which the heavily fortified and independent Iranian fighters and missile launch sites continue sporadic operations, forcing the U.S. and Israel to continue deploying counter-strikes and expending their own incredibly expensive defensive munitions. Israel’s military leaders reportedly believe that a “months-long” campaign will be necessary to fully destroy Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities and underground nuclear program, raising questions of whether negative U.S. public response and cratering approval numbers might make Donald Trump pull the plug on U.S. operations before such a point is ultimately reached. There’s even valid questions of whether the U.S. even has the necessary stockpiles of munitions, both offensive and defensive, to keep up a long-term conflict involving these kinds of air-based strikes … which is utterly insane, given our nearly $900 billion defense budget.

So yeah, it’s all clearly going extremely well. The war is already generating the most wonderful headlines for the image of the United States abroad–such as the fact that our navy apparently torpedoed and sank an Iranian ship in international waters in the Indian Ocean overnight, which Hegseth (incorrectly, of course) claimed was the first ship sunk worldwide by a submarine since the end of World War II. Sri Lanka’s navy stated that it recovered 87 bodies and rescued 32 people from the wreckage or the IRIS Dena, after the U.S. strikes had left them there to die.

You know, we’re starting to think that Iran’s military capabilities perhaps weren’t actually “obliterated” last year, as Trump claimed at the time. Now the only question is how long we’ll ultimately be locked in combat, watching our own jets fall from the sky due to “friendly fire” incidents as “weeks” quickly turn to “months” and beyond. Who could have thought that a war in the Middle East wouldn’t be quick and simple?