After a month-long lull in fighting with Iran, the United States this week struck Iranian missile batteries allegedly preparing to fire mine-laying missiles into the Strait of Hormuz. It comes as US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll abruptly resigned amid long-simmering clashes with Secretary of War Pete Hegseth over plans to modernize the military. The Armed Forces appear to be fracturing during wartime when the need for a unified vision of the future is most needed.

The Washington Post reported on Sunday that senior military leaders throughout the US armed forces told Secretary of War Pete Hegseth that, “prolonging large-scale operations against Iran is unsustainable and risks weakening the US military’s ability to confront threats elsewhere, including the homeland.” If anything, that may be an understatement of the true scale of the problem.

Behind the polished public statements coming out of the Pentagon, a quiet crisis is consuming the US military from within. The war with Iran — now grinding past the six-month mark — has become a remarkable drain on the readiness of the military. It has stretched logistics networks and ammunition stockpiles, most notably Patriot interceptors, to near the point of depletion. And the military is expending high-end, irreplaceable precision ordnance at a rate the country’s manufacturing base cannot replenish on any relevant timeline.

The human toll is even worse. The conflict is wearing America’s limited number of deployable troops — soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines — to unsustainable levels of stress. The fundamental truth that senior leaders refuse to acknowledge is that the US military was not designed to sustain multiple simultaneous, high-intensity conflicts indefinitely. Its force structure, logistics networks and munitions stockpiles are built around the assumption that wars can be brought to a decisive conclusion before prolonged attrition exhausts them. The current conflicts in the Middle East and between Russia and Ukraine are testing that assumption to its limits.

Families of deployed service members aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln reported they are “outraged” at the conditions endured by the crew members aboard the ship. When the President dismisses reports of the grim conditions and the Secretary of War blames the “shameless and reckless ‘American’ media”, morale plummets even further.

The truth is that the war against Iran cannot be won militarily. Since 28 February, the US has had two distinct attempts to knock Iran out of the war, first with a roughly 40-day air and missile campaign, and then a second 13-day tit-for-tat exchange. Both failed. Though some maritime traffic has returned to the Strait of Hormuz, transit remains roughly 85% below the prewar transit rate.

Iran is a mountainous nation of nearly 90 million people with a vast arsenal of low-cost offensive systems, and a political structure designed to withstand external pressure. Buried under those mountains are “missile cities” where Iran can both produce missiles and drones and fire them without having to expose launchers, at depths America’s missile arsenal struggles to reach.

In military terms, there appears to be no plausible path to unconditional Iranian capitulation short of a full-scale ground invasion and regime change — an undertaking that the American public would be unlikely to support.

Washington must confront the reality of the situation before the damage to the force becomes irreversible. The strategy currently being pursued offers no path to a successful conclusion. The only real question remaining for Washington is not whether this policy will succeed, but how bad its eventual failure will be — and how much unnecessary damage America can inflict on its own armed forces before finally choosing to change course.