Iran, as anyone who has been paying attention since 1979 knows, is the major source of woes in the Middle East. They sponsor terror groups, they supply weapons to Islamic rebels, and they are trying to obtain nuclear weapons, a prospect which nobody wants to see realized.

On Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth took to his official X account to put Iran on notice.

Message to IRAN:

We see your LETHAL support to The Houthis. We know exactly what you are doing.

You know very well what the U.S. Military is capable of — and you were warned. You will pay the CONSEQUENCE at the time and place of our choosing.

— Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (@SecDef) May 1, 2025

We certainly do know what Iran is doing. We may not know all that Iran is doing, but we know the broad strokes, and we know that they are bad actors.

But how much action can the administration take unilaterally?

Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, which power they have not used since 1941. Article II, Section 2 assigns the president the status of Commander-in-Chief of all the armed forces, but the actions he can take are limited without Congress.

In 1973, though, Congress passed the War Powers Act, which allows the president to take the country to war with "statutory authorization," or in the event of a national emergency. Armed forces cannot be deployed for more than 60 days without Congressional action.

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So, Secretary of Defense Hegseth and his boss, President Trump, are restricted in what action they can take without Congressional authorization, but even after four years of the Biden administration's malfeasance, the United States armed forces could wreak a lot of havoc on Iranian forces and facilities in under 60 days.

There is a very real danger, though, of provoking a serious regional conflict. The United States, if we are to strike at Iran directly, should be careful to evaluate that possibility. Iran, where the United States and allied nations decide to hit them directly, wouldn't be the easiest nut to crack. Their major political centers are protected by mountains, and they have a considerable force of armed lunatics in the form of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which may have as many as 125,000 fighters. The U.S. could hit airbases, logistical centers, nuclear processing facilities, and even political centers from the air, and the U.S. Navy could probably eliminate Iran's little coastal speedboat "Navy" in a matter of hours. 

Anything more than that would be a major undertaking.

I have an old friend who was in Tehran in 1979 when the balloon went up. He was working at the time for a government agency that begins with a "C" and ends with "Agency." He has a lot of stories about Iran, and some of them he can even talk about, but his caution, despite his having spent a lot of time in the Islamic Republic, is that nobody from the West is capable of understanding the leaders of that terror-sponsoring rogue state. 

And, candidly, we shouldn't be able to understand them. They are brutal Bronze-Age barbarians, and such people should be incomprehensible to the civilized.

Thanks to President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's leadership, the warrior ethos is coming back to America's military.

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