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Feeling pretty pessimistic about America's progress in the Iran war. Regime change will require killing 10%+ of the IRGC and Basij (~1 million for easy math, there's also police and others), and the majority (all?[1]) of the clergy (statistics from 1980s have them at 185,000, but I've seen the number 33,000 thrown around on Twitter), but only 3000 Iranian fatalities were reported in the past week. It'll take months (or years, if the IRGC and Basij are particularly stuborn) to make progress at the current rate. It's actually pretty sadly ironic that the US + Israel are a single order of magnitude from being able to do real regime change.
Maybe this is exactly why Anthropic was getting pushed so hard by the DoD/DoW for autonomous kill chains. Those provide a real shot at being able to do psychological and organizationally incapacitating levels of damage. Imagine if 90% of all Iranian clerics died to autonomous quadcopters in a 24 hour period! And the next day, it happens to every commisioned officer in the IRGC, and then the noncoms, ect. That's real regime change, without needing negotiations. Yeah, if I'm Hegseth, I'd be furious if I knew these capabilities exist, but Anthropic just refuses to deploy them. I think that's pretty unlikely, but it would certainly explain the recent row.