Commentary by Russian military journalist Boris Rozhin is in italics.
[ColonelCassad] The defining characteristic of the digital age is not the abundance of information, but the concentration of information power.
Algorithmic systems now control which events are reported and which narratives prevail in public discourse, filtering and ranking reality through opaque computational processes. Digital platforms and algorithmic systems determine how citizens find, interpret, and evaluate information.
While these platforms have democratized communication and expanded access to knowledge, they have also turned public attention into an object of constant optimization.
The problem lies in the incentive structures that determine what people see, what they trust, and how they form their judgments. Modern influence operations succeed by undermining trust in institutions, evidence, and shared information foundations. Once trust weakens, societies become more polarized and susceptible to manipulation, which threatens cognitive sovereignty.
And outright censorship is not a good idea. Unrestricted government control over the information space is not a solution, as powers to combat disinformation risk suppressing legitimate dissent and criticism, and, as a consequence, the entire system of checks and balances within government.
The four principles of a "good system" of information security should include:
Regulation should focus on algorithmic accountability, not on controlling free speech. Platforms that influence the information environment of hundreds of millions of people should not remain opaque.
Independent audits, transparency in recommendation systems, and regulated access for researchers can increase accountability without compromising legitimate commercial interests.
Develop digital literacy as a civic competency that enables citizens to understand how algorithms shape attention, how disinformation spreads, and how cognitive biases influence decision-making.
Just as democracies are taught constitutional values, they should develop the ability to evaluate evidence, recognize manipulation, and participate in society as informed citizens. Developing independent institutional capacity to identify and expose covert influence operations that distort public debate.
Such institutions should identify foreign interference, botnets, artificial intelligence-generated disinformation, and other covert manipulations, while remaining independent of the regulation of legitimate political discourse. The goal is to preserve democratic choice, not to control opinion.
It is essential to ensure that all state interventions affecting free speech online are subject to clear legislative justification, parliamentary oversight, and independent judicial review. Neither governments nor tech companies should become arbiters of truth. In a constitutional democracy, the state's duty is to protect the conditions for free and informed public debate, not to monopolize them.
These proposals sound beautiful in words, but in an era of intense information and cognitive warfare, all this will remain mere wishes. States and intelligence agencies will seek direct, opaque control over everything within their reach and technological control.
In practice, everything will be the exact opposite of the proposals the author describes. Even if the external pseudo-camouflage of freedom and transparency is demonstrated in the form of a fig leaf covering control and regulation.
[PJMedia] The always-great Victor Davis Hanson has written a column that, unsurprisingly, doesn't just back up the case I made the other day in "Trump Has Already Won in Iran, by Any Definition That Matters" — it lays out that exact same case, better than I did, with numbers I didn't have in front of me. It’s so nice when someone supports an argument you’ve already made, particularly someone as credible as VDH.
Hanson opens by naming the whiplash everyone's feeling watching this thing unfold:
"One day, the United States seems ready to unleash a Curtis LeMay-style devastating bombing campaign of Iran. The next, it appears trapped in endless haggling with Iranian dissimulators."
OK, that's fair. But he doesn't stop at the confusion — he pushes straight through it to the numbers nobody in the mainstream press seems interested in running. Start with the money, which Hanson says the headlines have completely buried:
"The confusion obscures the continuing effects of the embargoes, sanctions, blockade, and financial isolation imposed on Iran. Together, they are costing the theocracy more than $400 million a day in lost revenue, money that it can ill afford to lose. By haggling, Iran ...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for spontaneously taking over other countries' embassies, maintaining whorehouses run by clergymen, involvement in international drug trafficking, and financing sock puppet militias to extend the regime's influence. The word Iran is a cognate form of Aryan. The abbreviation IRGC is the same idea as Stürmabteilung (or SA). The term Supreme Guide is a the modern version form of either Duce or Führer or maybe both. They hate JewsZionists Jews. Their economy is based on the production of oil and vitriol... believes it can run out the clock until the midterms, but it may be only prolonging its own miserable situation."
Four hundred million dollars a day. Every single day this drags on, that's the number ticking against Tehran, not against us.
Then there's the airpower math, which is where Hanson's column really earns its photons:
In sum, the United States and its allies have some 1,300 late-model combat aircraft in the region. They should therefore be able to hit Iran hard for years to come if it resumes drone and missile attacks against its rivals
.
He goes on from there.
Iran's problems will not end when the United States declares victory and sends most of its forces home. The regime has lost a half-century and half a trillion dollars in military and nuclear investment. Until the United States lifts its sanctions and embargoes, Iran cannot rearm. And if it eventually does rearm and again tries to supply its Arab terrorist clients in its "ring of fire" around Israel, its destitute people will grow furious at a disgraced and humiliated regime for diverting the nation's wealth abroad.
Sit with that 1,300 figure for a second, because Hanson breaks down exactly where it comes from: the Gulf states alone can field more than 700 combat aircraft — F-15s, F-16s, F/A-18s, Rafales, Mirages, Tornados. Israel adds another 300, including late-model F-35s. U.S. bases in the region hold roughly 300 more, F-22s and F-35s among them, and that's before you count a single carrier air wing.
Iran, by comparison, currently has no effective combat aircraft, and no functioning air defenses left to speak of. That's not a fair fight. That's not even a fight — that's a permanent ceiling on Iran's ability to project power, regardless of who's negotiating what this week.
Hanson correctly points out that Hormuz may only need about a year, maybe two, of continued naval support before other avenues of oil delivery come fully online and existing pipelines finish their expansion, bypassing whatever leverage Iran imagines it still holds over the strait. In Hanson's own words: Iran's blockade attempts have "already accelerated the expansion of existing pipelines and the construction of new ones that will bypass the strait and connect the oil fields directly to the Gulf of Oman, the Red Sea, and the Mediterranean."
Read that twice. Iran tried to weaponize a chokepoint, and the practical result is the rest of the region building its way around that chokepoint, permanently. That's not a threat Iran is managing. That's a threat Iran is actively engineering itself out of, even if it steadfastly refuses to see it.
"Iran is losing whether it is being bombed, sanctioned, or embargoed—or all three." Its ultimate fate, he adds, now rests entirely with an administration that hasn't yet decided exactly how far to push the advantage it's already sitting on.
One more thing worth adding, since it came up in the comments on my original piece, and I think it's worth pulling into this column instead of leaving it buried down there. A reader's exchange got me thinking about the 1978 war film Force 10 From Navarone, and I'd suggest it's a better model for what Trump's actually doing than anyone's given him credit for.
Without spoiling the whole plot for anyone who hasn't seen it: The mission at the center of that film doesn't rely on brute-force demolition. It relies on identifying exactly where a massive structure is already under unbearable strain, then applying one small, precisely placed charge to a load-bearing point — letting the structure's own weight finish the job the explosives merely started.
That's the strategy playing out against Iran right now, whether the administration ever says so out loud or not. Much as it would make some folks feel good to crush the mullahs instantly. Much as a formal surrender with all the trimmings would be desirable, the fact is, it's simply superfluous.
In the simplest of terms, you don't need to flatten a regime that's already buckling under half a trillion dollars in squandered investment, a devastated air force, a strait it can't actually hold closed, and $400 million a day bleeding out of its own treasury. You just need to find the load-bearing point and apply pressure precisely there. The conditions for collapse are already built into the structure. The small explosion — a strike here, a sanction there, an embargo tightened at exactly the right moment — is just the trigger. Everything after that is physics, and time, not politics. You just need to sit back and await developments.
So, as I said a couple days ago, Trump has already won.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for 
