The Trump administration’s struggle against Iran entered a new phase on August 23, when Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declared that an “economic D-Day” is coming for Iran. That is, embargoes and tough talk, but not bombs. The New York Times described President Donald Trump’s situation: “He finds himself stuck in a maddening purgatory between full-fledged combat and genuine peace.” (As we know, the administration regards the Times as not only fallacious, but failing.)
But then, on August 30, came a newer phase: The U.S. and Iran are back to trading fire—at least a little bit. For his part, Trump seems eager to avoid a full-scale, market-roiling, gas-price-hiking, resumption of the fighting. Of course, the Iranians, reportedly backed with hot tech from the Russians, also get a say.
In the meantime, not surprisingly, oil prices are the highest they’ve been in six weeks, and interest rates are up as well. But at the same time, the American stock markets, powered by a force seemingly stronger than geopolitics (the human desire to build and acquire), keep going up.
Amid this muddle, it seems likely there’ll soon enough be a newer new phase. Meanwhile, as wiseguys are split-screening videoclips from the Iraq War and the Iran War, our thoughts might drift back to that earlier conflict. As a leading protagonist put memorably back then, there are a lot of unknown unknowns.
So now today, speaking of unknowns and defense secretaries, another Times headline: “Hegseth’s Purge of Top Generals Leaves the Army Rudderless.” Rudderless? The Times isn’t normally so concerned about possible drift in the top ranks, although it’s peculiarly interested in everything about Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. We might note that the Army numbers almost a half-million uniformed personnel, as well as hundreds of thousands of reservists, civilian employees, and contractors; all in all, it has a pretty strong culture. So even if Hegseth has been making changes at the top, it would seem that the Army will be able to carry on.
That same story’s subhead tipped the true intention: “The leadership vacuum comes as the Army is trying to adapt to a new kind of war dominated by deadly drones.” So that’s the Times’ plan: pin the drone issue on Hegseth. It’s certainly true that the U.S. military is struggling to adapt to drones—aren’t we all? Heck, even the dronemeisters in Ukraine are struggling.
Interestingly, the Times article made no mention of the Pentagon’s chief adaptationist, Emil Michael, undersecretary for research and engineering. Michael, boasting a deep Silicon Valley background, has been vocal, declaring (his caps): “AMERICAN DRONE DOMINANCE,” and adding, “The @DeptofWar’s Office of Strategic Capital is leveraging its over $200 billion in lending authority to onshore our drone supply chain and scale American manufacturing.” It seems almost gratuitous to observe that $200 billion is a lot of money; just one of the companies in this space, the defense-tech newbie Anduril, seems quite active.
Okay, but what about the resignation of Army Secretary Dan Driscoll? As The American Conservative’s Joseph Addington notes, Driscoll “was a major proponent of increasing the military’s use of drones and other next-generation military technologies.” But here the thing: Maybe Hegseth, too, is a proponent. In fact, Driscoll himself Xed of his just-ended stint, “We could not have made the progress we did without the support of Secretary Hegseth.”
So is the Pentagon doing right by drones, or not? Until there’s some new war somewhere, we simply won’t know. Obviously, plenty have loud opinions, but the paucity of hard facts—the proof is in the fighting—has inspired one savant, abiding in the immortal empyrean, to warn against bad methodology: “One begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”
Who is this sage? Why, Sherlock Holmes, of course. Okay, Holmes is a fictional character, and yet his methods—pattern recognition, omission analysis, structured inference—are timeless. The CIA cites him in its books; cyber-spooks and forensic experts work from his premises; and, in 2012, a British publication, reporting on the engagement with the detective’s oeuvre to remediate Iraq War deceptions, asked, “Can Sherlock Holmes restore the reputation of our bungling spies?” To be sure, there’ve been plenty of technical updates since Holmes solved his last case, but logical principles are platonic in their permanence, or, as Holmes liked to say, “elementary.”
And Holmes’ creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, was so real that he wrote a memoir, recounting the inspiration for Holmes: “I thought of my old teacher Joe Bell, of his eagle face, of his curious ways, of his eerie trick of spotting details.” This was at the University of Edinburgh, where the young Doyle was a medical student. The mentee continued about his mentor, “His strong point was diagnosis, not only of disease, but of occupation and character.” Doyle added, “If he were a detective he would surely reduce this fascinating but unorganized business to something nearer to an exact science.” Presto! Sherlock Holmes was born, although he was this close to being “Sherringford” rather than “Sherlock.”
By whatever name, this new character was no Renaissance man. In the very first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, his friend John Watson jots down Sherlock’s weaknesses and strengths: His knowledge of politics is “feeble,” and his ken of literature and philosophy “nil.” On the other hand, his understanding of chemistry is “profound” and further, he knows “every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century.” So that’s the Holmes we all know: An angular and intense figure, forever counterpointing the rounder and jollier sidekick, Watson.
Yet there was another Holmes. In “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans,” Sherlock informs Watson about his brother, Mycroft: “You are right in thinking that he is under the British government. You would also be right in a sense if you said that occasionally he is the British government.” That story concerns stolen submarine blueprints; Germany is not mentioned directly, but the villain is one Hugo Oberstein.
Adding the two characters together, the analytical Sherlock and the political Mycroft, one gets a better appreciation of their creator, Doyle.
Early in his life, Doyle had been tutored by Jesuits, from whom he learned to organize his thoughts—or else. And after his tutelage with Bell at Edinburgh, he practiced medicine for a decade. So Doyle knew plenty about bodies, how they might have ended up dead, and where they might be buried.
Moreover, all his adult life, Doyle was a keen observer of both technology and politics—such topics were, for him, additional mysteries to solve. To be sure, he wasn’t always successful; he stood twice for Parliament and lost both times. Still, Doyle led a rich public life. Knighted in 1902, he was friendly with prime ministers, grandes dames, and top generals, opining frequently on matters of state, including in the august pages of the London Times. In 1913 he started a piece with:
I am a member of the Anglo-German Society for the improvement of the relations between the two countries, and I have never seriously believed in the German menace. Frequently I have found myself alone in a company of educated Englishmen in my opinion that it was non-existent—or at worst greatly exaggerated.
That opening was a bit of Doyle’s classic hidden-handedness—because, just as Holmes had done to Watson so many times, Doyle then shifted gears: Having never believed in the possibility of war with Germany, he now believed. What changed? Doyle had read a recent book by the prominent Prussian general Friedrich von Bernhardi, Deutschland und der Nächste Krieg (Germany and the Next War). In that intemperate, even unhinged, tome, Bernhardi championed war against Albion—a war that, the author assured his readers, Germany would win.
Doyle’s response was Great Britain and the Next War. But, Doyle being Doyle, he didn’t just hurl bombast. He laid out careful arguments that an island nation needed to hear and heed: “New forms of naval warfare…may completely revolutionize the conditions,” he warned Britons. “These new factors are the submarine and the airship.”
Doyle focused most on the underwater threat: “What exact effect a swarm of submarines, lying off the mouth of the Channel and the Irish Sea, would produce upon the victualling of these islands is a problem which is beyond my conjecture.” But actually, he did conjecture: “We should suffer privation…. It would be a débâcle—an inversion of the Spanish Armada.”
Doyle, true to the form of his mysteries, offered an enlightening solution. Three of them, in fact: first, build a railroad tunnel under the English Channel to allow food to come in from the continent; second, improve domestic food production; third, build a fleet of foodstuff-carrying cargo submarines. (From our perspective more than a century later, we can retcon a useful “Britain First” focus on the fundamentals of domestic well-being.)
Doyle records in Memories and Adventures, “The article attracted some attention, but I do not suppose that it had any actual influence upon the course of events.” And so he continued, “To reinforce it I wrote an imaginary episode called ‘Danger’ in the ‘Strand Magazine,’ to show how even a small Power [a fictionalized and miniaturized version of Germany] might possibly bring us to our knees by the submarine.”
Immodestly, but not incorrectly, Doyle added, “It was singularly prophetic.” He added, “It all worked out in exact detail in my mind—so much so that Admiral Capelle mentioned my name afterwards in the Reichstag, and said that only I had accurately seen the economic form which the war would assume.” Doyle was referring to Eduard von Capelle, Germany’s top admiral for two-and-a-half years during the First World War.
U-boats were, indeed, a major factor in the Great War. Winston Churchill, in his own memoir, The World Crisis, recalled his own dread during his stint as First Lord of the Admiralty: “a whole array of constant gnawing anxieties about the safety of the Fleet from submarine attack at sea and in its harbors.” And, too, the threat to civilian shipping: Since Doyle’s concerns about materiel had not been adequately acted upon prewar, Britain did, indeed, during the war, risk being starved into submission.
Always, the world is full of scary knowns and unknowns. Yet events, for all their unpredictability, ride on the rails of technology. And that’s where Doyle’s method—synthesizing the analytics of Sherlock and the politics of Mycroft—proved so valuable.
Here again, and not without justification, Doyle toots his own horn. Having sketched his work on behalf of lifeboats and life vests for sailors, he quotes a newspaper report:
The Navy has to thank Sir Conan Doyle for the new lifesaving apparatus the Admiralty are supplying. Some weeks ago he asked if it was not possible to manufacture a simple and easily inflatable life-belt, and, thanks to the enterprise of a rubber-manufacturing firm, a swimming collar is now being supplied to the men of the fleet in the North Sea as fast as they can be turned out.… There is little doubt that this swimming collar will result in the saving of many lives.
A bit of self-attaboying there for Doyle, but who would begrudge him?
After all, for him, as for every Englishman, the war was personal. One of his sons died in the war, as well as a brother, two brothers-in-law, and two nephews. Those were, in Doyle’s mournful words, “days of universal sorrow and loss, when the voice of Rachel was heard throughout the land.”
Thus Doyle’s further efforts to protect the troops take on poignancy. He figured that if a helmet was a good idea for soldiers, so was other body armor, as well as perhaps steel fortifications for trenches. And also mobile fortifications—soon to be called tanks.
In 1917, Doyle had breakfast at Number 10 with the British prime minister, David Lloyd George. “I talked to him about my views as to the use of armour, and found him very keen upon it. He said he had no doubt that in the problem of armour lay the future of warfare.” Doyle reports further, “He said that the soldiers always obstructed the idea—which was my experience also—with a few notable exceptions.” One might wonder whether Lloyd George was just being agreeable, and yet the premier’s own written recollections show him to be far more critical of the reluctance of generals (and admirals) to think new thoughts.
The point is not that the brass is always wrong, but rather, that nobody is always right. What’s needed is a healthy interplay of perspectives, including those of outside-expert well-wishers, modern-day Doyles, offering their own fresh solutions.
Yet in the First World War, that constructive balance had not been found. The results of imbalanced military mulishness—donkeys leading lions—can be seen, for instance, in Flanders field, where the poppies blow between the crosses, row upon row.
Today, amidst all the unknowns about Iran, we know a few things. To name one, the war rates as small—American fatalities being 1/250th of what they were in Iraq. (And 1/1000 of Britain’s first day at the Somme.)
Is the current Iran toll the final tally? Alas, neither Sherlock nor Mycroft would dare say. For his part, Doyle, grieving the loss of so many in the Great War, reflected on its unending repercussions:
I can never forget, and our descendants can never imagine, the strange effect upon the mind which was produced by seeing the whole European fabric drifting to the edge of the chasm with absolute uncertainty as to what would happen when it toppled over. Military surprises, starvation, revolution, bankruptcy—no one knew what so unprecedented an episode would produce.
Yes, even that well-read master of inference and deduction had not foreseen all the disasters ahead. Which should be a reminder to warriors, and to the rest of us, today: In peacetime, we can and should take practical precautions, and yet if a war starts, when and where it truly ends is an unknown unknown.
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