350: Chapter 350 The First Moment of the Empire's Twilight

Washington, Capitol Hill.

The hearing hall of the US Senate Armed Services Committee was packed to capacity. Outside the window, the sky was a murky gray with scattered cold rain falling, creating a discordant contrast with the searing white incandescent lights inside the hall. The committee members sat in a row behind a long, curved table; standing on the platform was a four-star Army general—the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley.

This was a day during the third week of the US Military's invasion of Persia. To be precise, it was the nineteenth day since the official launch of the ground offensive.

General Milley wore a crisp Army service uniform with four rows of ribbon bars pinned to his chest. His face beneath the brim of his cap was gaunt and weary. His hair was whiter than usual, and the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes seemed deeper under the hearing room lights. Seated to his left and right were the Minister of Defense and the Commander of Central Command, yet the focus of the questioning was almost entirely concentrated on him alone.

This was the moment when the cost of war was laid out on the table for Liquidation.

“General Milley, please answer the committee and the American people directly: where exactly is our ground advance in Persia currently stalled?”

The questioner was the Democratic Senator from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Collins. She was known in the Senate for being outspoken and had frequently cornered high-ranking military officials during hearings, forcing even those generals famous for evading questions into a corner.

General Milley hesitated for a second. This second would be replayed and interpreted repeatedly during the live television broadcast. Then he spoke: “Senator, the 1st Cavalry Division has been blocked along the Karun River Valley line in Khuzestan Province. The air assault operations of the 101st Airborne Division suffered heavy casualties, and tactical plans are currently being reassessed. The flank offensive of the 1st Marine Division encountered stubborn resistance in the Khorramshahr region of southern Khuzestan Province, and progress has not met expectations.”

“General, you say ‘blocked,’ which is a formal term. But front-line soldiers and their families are calling us to say that a battalion of the 1st Cavalry Division lost more than half of its tanks in the Karun River Valley, with over a hundred casualties in a single ambush last Thursday. Is this being ‘blocked’? Or is it a massacre?”

Milley’s Adam's apple bobbed once. “We encountered a well-planned ambush in the Karun River Valley. Casualties were indeed severe.”

“How severe?”

“Since the ground offensive began, the Army and Marine Corps have suffered a total of three hundred and thirty-two killed in action and approximately one thousand seven hundred wounded in Khuzestan Province. The 101st Airborne Division suffered the heaviest losses—one hundred and forty-four killed in helicopter crashes and subsequent ground skirmishes, with over two hundred wounded.”

A collective gasp erupted from the gallery. This figure was far higher than the ‘light casualties’ previously reported by the Pentagon to the media. The mother of a fallen soldier—wearing her late son's unit T-shirt and sitting in the front row of the gallery—bowed her head and wept silently. Her sobbing was picked up by the microphones and broadcast across the nation via CNN and Fox's live signals.

Senator Collins picked up a document from the table and adjusted the reading glasses on the bridge of her nose. “General Milley, please tell the committee: why have our ‘Iron Dome’ anti-drone systems, our electronic warfare capabilities, and our GPS-guided munitions frequently failed on the Persian battlefield? The Army Times published an anonymous interview from the front lines yesterday in which a 1st Cavalry Division officer said, ‘Our communications were cut off by an interference system we’ve never seen before; we became blind and deaf in the desert.’ What is this ‘never-before-seen interference system’? What is its source?”

General Milley did not speak. It wasn't that he couldn't answer, but rather that it was inconvenient to do so. He knew that intelligence—technical analysis from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency clearly showed that the waveform characteristics of the jamming signal had an eighty percent similarity to the interference system recorded previously on the Gaza battlefield. He also knew that Gaza's system came from Sinwar. He further knew that behind Sinwar was Zhang Cheng. He knew that two weeks ago, there was a secret intelligence briefing—Central Command had presented evidence tracing the electronic warfare threats on the Persian battlefield to a third-party source, but the White House Situation Room chose to suppress the briefing. Because making it public would be tantamount to admitting that the USA was fighting a proxy war against an opponent it had never faced head-on, and was currently losing.

Today, that briefing was marked ‘For the President's Eyes Only’ and lay in a safe in the Oval Office.

Seeing Milley’s silence, Senator Collins pressed further: “General, are you aware that the technical source of this interference system might be the Federation of Myanmar?”

The hearing room instantly fell silent, save for the sound of camera shutters from the press gallery.

General Milley took a deep breath and spoke slowly: “Senator, it is not appropriate for me to discuss specific intelligence sources in a public hearing, but I can tell you that our electronic warfare systems have indeed encountered unprecedented challenges in these theaters of operation. The adversary has mastered capabilities that even our closest allies do not yet possess.”

He paused and added: “And the proliferation of this technology is changing the military balance in the Middle East and even globally.”

A low, noisy murmur drowned out the hearing room. Aides whispered to one another, and reporters typed rapidly on their laptops. A Fox News commentator later referred to this moment on his program as ‘the first time the hands on the clock of the empire's twilight were seen to move.’

“General Milley.” Seated at the head of the committee, Republican Senator Paul Carter of Virginia interrupted the noise, leaning forward solemnly, “Please answer directly a question that every American family is asking: given the current military situation, can we achieve the military objective of overthrowing the current Persian regime at an acceptable cost?”

General Milley did not evade. Nor did he use the usual ‘it depends on several variables’ platitude favored by defense officials. He took off his military cap, placed it on the table, and looked Senator Carter directly in the eye with his bloodshot eyes.

“Senator, I must be frank: given the current military situation and foreseeable reinforcement capabilities, we cannot achieve this military objective at an acceptable cost. Persian resistance is far more stubborn than we anticipated. The asymmetric warfare methods they possess—particularly drone Swarms, tunnel networks, and electronic jamming equipment—have greatly offset our technological advantage. The casualty rates of the 1st Cavalry Division and the 101st Division have reached a critical point where the feasibility of the campaign must be reassessed. If we continue to advance, casualties are expected to multiply, and we cannot guarantee that we can break through the tunnel defense system in Khuzestan Province to enter the Persian heartland.”

The room erupted in an uproar.

This was the first time a sitting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had publicly admitted in Congress that a war ‘could not be won at an acceptable cost.’ The last time a general had said something similar dated back to 1968, when General Westmoreland, then commander of US forces in Vietnam, was recalled to Washington during the Vietnam War. That day, President Johnson suffered the heaviest blow of his political career. Decades later, the same words echoed once again in the halls of Congress.