Washington's silence on the IRGC missiles invites aggression
By Grant Colby · Reporting from Amarillo ·
The IRGC just threw a punch and missed, and the bureaucrats in Washington are treating it like a non-event.
Twenty Missiles and a Pat on the Back
The IRGC just threw a punch and missed, and the bureaucrats in Washington are treating it like a non-event. On September 9, 2026, Iran fired 20 ballistic missiles at a US military base near Al Azraq in eastern Jordan. According to RTÉ and France 24, Jordan’s air defenses intercepted 18 of them, while the remaining two fell in unpopulated areas. US officials were quick to label the strikes "ineffective," noting that all American troops were accounted for.
From a ledger perspective, the math looks clean: zero casualties, zero structural damage. But in the business of deterrence, you don't count the rubble; you count the intent. The IRGC didn't accidentally launch a volley of ballistic missiles; they signaled that American soil—or the soil of our allies where our boys sleep—is a legitimate target. To call this "ineffective" is to mistake a failed attempt for a lack of ambition.
The High Cost of Doing Nothing
There is a school of thought in the State Department—the kind of thinking that believes "stability" is achieved through patience and a polite request for restraint. The most capable advocate for this approach would argue that since the attack caused no harm, a military response would be an unnecessary escalation, potentially triggering a full-scale war that would spike oil prices and destabilize the region. They’d say that by ignoring a "failure," we deny Iran the prestige of a conflict.
That logic is a fantasy. I spent my youth watching the Cold War and my career in logistics; I know that weakness is a vacuum that invites aggression. We saw this pattern during the Iranian missile attack on Israel in 2024, where the goal was to test the ceiling of regional tolerance. When we don't punish a provocation, we aren't "preventing escalation"—we are subsidizing it. We learned this lesson the hard way before the assassination of Qasem Soleimani in 2020, when the world realized that the only thing the IRGC respects is a direct, kinetic cost.
Calibrated Strength is the Only Language They Speak
This isn't a new game; it's the same mechanism we saw during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1962, the world didn't avoid nuclear war because both sides were polite; it avoided it because President Kennedy used calibrated pressure to signal that the cost of the Soviet missiles in Cuba was higher than the benefit of keeping them. The Cuban Missile Crisis proved that you manage a superpower—or a regional aggressor—not by hoping they stop, but by demonstrating that your resolve is absolute and your response is inevitable.
The current situation is a mirror image. Iran is using limited strikes to see if the US has the stomach for a fight. If we treat this as a "non-event," we tell Tehran that they can fire 20 missiles at our bases with total impunity.
The US must respond with targeted strikes against IRGC assets in Syria or Iran. We don't need a ground war, but we do need to balance the ledger. By hitting back with superior precision and force, we transform an "ineffective" Iranian strike into a costly mistake. If we don't, we aren't keeping the peace; we are just waiting for the next volley to be the one that actually hits.