Watchtower Intel

If you’re trying to understand this conflict with any depth, Robert Pape is someone you should be listening to. He’s a political scientist at the University of Chicago who has spent two decades studying the strategic logic of military coercion, and his appearance on the Diary of a CEO podcast is genuinely some of the best public analysis available on how we got here in the Iran conflict.

But here’s the thing: he’s a career academic, and I take issue with some of his analysis… And that’s ok! You can learn from people you disagree with.

Pape’s argument, compressed: the MOU fell apart because the United States violated paragraph one and paragraph five, and Iran responded by striking commercial vessels. I also read the document. I know, crazy, right?

Listen to the full podcast:

To understand why the MOU mattered, you need to understand what Iran did in the opening days of the conflict. Within the first 2 days of Operation Epic Fury, Iran moved to seize and mine the Strait of Hormuz as a deliberate strategic response to an air campaign the IRGC knew they could not match symmetrically. Before February 28th, 120 to 140 commercial vessels transited the strait every day. That traffic represented about 20 percent of global oil supply. Closing it was a form of economic coercion on a global scale, and it handed Tehran leverage that no air campaign could completely neutralize.

Here’s the honest reality of a large-scale air campaign: it can significantly degrade command and control networks, radar systems, ballistic missile launchers, and fuel production infrastructure. Those objectives are real, and they matter. What air power cannot feasibly do (and what real professionals have never claimed it could) is completely eliminate thousands of dispersed coastal defense missiles and drones, some sitting in warehouses, some hidden in caves, etc. It’s a nearly impossible targeting problem. Dismissing the air campaign for failing to accomplish something it was never designed to do is unfair. But it does mean that Iran entered the MOU negotiations still holding meaningful military and economic leverage.

By June, after roughly 110 days of active conflict and multiple rounds of negotiations, the Islamabad MOU was supposed to be the off-ramp. It lasted eleven days before the first tanker got hit.

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On Paragraph One

Here’s the exact language from the MOU, as disclosed by a senior U.S. official and published in full on June 17th:

“The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran and their allies in the current war are signing this MOU to declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and undertake from now on not to initiate any war or any military operation against each other...”

The phrase that became the fault line: “and their allies in the current war.” Iran’s argument was that Israel, as a US ally in the conflict, was bound by the Lebanon ceasefire clause. When Israel conducted independent strikes in southern Lebanon in late June — continuing its clearing operations against Hezbollah rocket sites and tunnels south of the Litani River, as it had been doing for months — Tehran cited this as a US violation of paragraph one.

I understand Pape’s technical argument. The language is there. But I think it’s a stretch to call that a US violation… and here’s why.

Israel was not a signatory to this agreement. Neither was Hezbollah. Neither was Lebanon. The Islamabad MOU was a bilateral document between Washington and Tehran. Iran can (kinda) speak for Hezbollah because the IRGC Quds Force largely commands Hezbollah. The United States cannot compel Israel’s independent military decisions in the same way. And everyone at that negotiating table knew that. The “allies” language created an asymmetric obligation from the moment it was written: Iran signed on behalf of a proxy it controls; the US was being held responsible for the sovereign choices of a state it doesn’t control in the same way.

To call what happened in Lebanon a US violation of paragraph one is a defensible reading of a vague and poorly-drafted clause. It is not, I think, a fair characterization of what actually happened. The more honest framing is that paragraph one contained a structural defect from day one. By including Lebanon without getting Israel to the table, the drafters created a ready-made Iranian grievance that was always going to materialize. Whether it was genuinely a US violation or a pretext depends on a factual question about Israeli intent that we do not know. What I’m confident about is that it wasn’t the United States unilaterally choosing to break the agreement.

On Paragraph Five — Where the Deal Actually Died

This is the more important one, and it’s where I think the “US violated it” framing is most unfair.

Paragraph five reads:

“Upon the signing of this MOU, the Islamic Republic of Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge, for 60 days only, from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Oman and vice versa... The Islamic Republic of Iran will conduct dialog with the Sultanate of Oman to define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz in discussion with other Persian Gulf littoral states in line with the applicable international law and the sovereign rights of coastal states of the Strait of Hormuz.”

What Iran did with this paragraph in the days following the MOU’s signing was ludicrous. The IRGC announced that the only “authorized route” through the strait was the northern corridor through Iranian territorial waters. They proposed tolls of more than a million dollars per vessel. And they warned that ships not complying with IRGC instructions would be subject to attack.

Their justification: the phrase “60 days only, with no charge” means the free passage obligation expires after 60 days, after which Iran controls everything. The “sovereign rights of coastal states” language means Iran has the right to define routing, access, and pricing.

This is simply not what paragraph five said.

More fundamentally: the Strait of Hormuz is an international strait under maritime law. Commercial vessels have the right of transit passage through international straits. No bilateral agreement between two countries should unilaterally create a new legal regime for a waterway that affects 20 percent of global oil supply and dozens of non-party states.

When the US and CENTCOM accompanied commercial vessels to enforce basic transit rights, Iran treated it as a violation of the agreement. But the US wasn’t violating paragraph five; it was enforcing international maritime law. Two parties signed the same document and read two completely different agreements. Within eleven days, the first tanker got hit. Then the ceasefire collapsed. Then, on July 7th, the US airstrikes resumed.

Why Getting This Right Matters Today

We are on Day 148. Last night was the first night without announced US strikes since July 11. The Houthis recently fired missiles at Yanbu and Jazan, Saudi Aramco infrastructure on the Red Sea, which has become the primary bypass route for Saudi oil that can no longer transit Hormuz. Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline is maxed out at 7 million barrels per day. The UAE’s Habshan-Fujairah pipeline is running at capacity. Those two pipelines are the reason global oil markets haven’t collapsed.

I think Pape makes a compelling argument about the escalation trap. But his framing that the United States broke this deal papers over an adversary that moved almost immediately to use the ambiguity in paragraph five to assert a claim over the Strait of Hormuz that no reasonable reading of the MOU actually supports.

The Watchtower Intel podcast episode accompanying this analysis, including my segment with Scott Ryfun’s show on July 24th, is available wherever you listen. The Diary of a CEO interview with Robert Pape is here — watch it!

The views expressed are my own and do not represent the U.S. Air Force or the Department of Defense.

Iran’s Parliament Speaker was preparing for the funeral of his country’s supreme leader. So why was he posting about American food stamps? That is the central question of this week’s podcast recorded on the ground at FreedomFest in Las Vegas. There are three segments: a breakdown of why the Iran ceasefire fell apart (spoiler: it’s theological, not just tactical), a full conversation with Justin Robert Young of Politics Politics Politics, and a behind-the-scenes look at where Watchtower Intel stands a few months in.

There’s a moment in my conversation with Justin where he pointed out how much Iranian information operations on social media have evolved. The day before the funeral ceremonies began, when the Islamic world would watch state television coverage of the burial of the Ayatollah, whose office places him as the vicegerent of God on earth, Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf was on X, trolling the American food stamp program.

Not the martyred Imam.

Not the “Great Satan.”

SNAP benefits.

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It was a direct shot at President Trump, who had made comments about Iran’s economic struggles and floated the idea of eventually supplying Iran with American food commodities. Ghalibaf’s response: “Imagine having forty-something million of your own citizens on food stamps and calling another nation hungry.”

Justin’s read on the broader pattern: “I go to people like you, and I go to people like Ryan McBeth, and I look for Iranian sources, and I’m like — how much of this is them glomming on to things? In the way that the Russians understood on Facebook. Let’s find these wedge issues and let’s blow them up. Or are these being fed? Are these little things that are then being blown up by these outside forces?”

Justin is asking the right question. Effective influence operations do not always invent falsehoods. Often, they take something real, strip away its context, and amplify it until it becomes tribal ammunition. While I can’t peer into the man’s soul, I think it’s safe to say Ghalibaf probably doesn’t care about American poverty. He's tweeting about SNAP because he knows which wounds to pour salt into.

In short, is the SNAP issue reflective of a genuine crisis or simply tribal politics exploited in the information space? It’s the kind of question central to Justin’s work.

I’ve been a longtime listener of Politics Politics Politics, and Justin’s approach is deceptively simple: politics, at its core, is about who pushes the button in the voting booth. Not the culture war du jour. The mechanics. Who votes, and why they vote.

Balls and strikes.

His political awakening, he told me, came after the 2000 election. He grew up in South Florida during the time of the hanging chad controversy and the Clinton scandals.

But Bill Clinton, while many things… was the proverbial political duck. Despite the scandals and impeachment, he maintained high job approval ratings during his second term, presiding over a booming economy and demonstrating the unflappable charm of a web-footed water bird unfazed by the controversies rolling off its feathery dorsal.

“Everybody’s got opinions, but the thing that really moves, that stirs the drink, is tactics, strategy, execution, follow-through. And to me, that’s objective.”

Objective is the operative word in Justin’s framework. And I want to spend a minute on it because I think it’s the most misunderstood thing about what he and the rare political animals like him do.

People assume political journalists are objective when they treat both sides equally. That’s not objectivity; that’s symmetry. Justin’s version is something closer to what an intelligence analyst tries to do: identify what is actually happening, in terms of measurable outcomes and key indicators, and resist the gravitational pull toward the particular answer he wants.

He told me his reason for avoiding partisanship is explicitly selfish: “I don’t want to be wrong. And I know that the way that I would be wrong is if I was rooting for somebody.”

It’s a rare discipline in political media.

That discipline matters more now than ever. Justin put it plainly:

“Every penny that is spent in politics is meant to radicalize you as much as you can be radicalized. That is the name of the game — because you want the most surefire voter you can have, and that means the most foaming-at-the-mouth radicalized person. There’s no doubt they’re going to vote. They’re going to vote and bring friends.”

This is the architecture of modern politics, not just the content but the fundraising model and the engagement algorithm; all of it is biased towards intensity. The most useful voter to a campaign is an unquestioning true believer. So that’s what the system produces.

Justin’s other observation was grim: we don’t really have anywhere else to go. America, he argued, runs on two entertainment destinations: football and politics. Everything else — movies, art, music — is diminished. “There’s not a lot of release valve aside from football.” So people who might have spent their passion writing a 4,000-word forum post about Lord of the Rings are writing a 400-word Facebook screed about *insert hated political figure here instead. The same psychological energy, the same tribal intensity, is redirected into politics.

I’ve spent a lot of my professional life studying how influence works, how adversaries (and algorithms) shape what people believe is true. The broad term is information warfare. But the manipulation tactics are similar to what Justin describes: find the person’s identity, their tribe, their fear, their grievance… and then pull. The lever is the same whether you’re a foreign intelligence service running a social media operation or a super PAC running a targeted ad.

That’s what made the Ghalibaf SNAP comments so clarifying. God’s funeral is a geopolitical event. SNAP benefits are a domestic wedge. The operational goal is to increase the fractures in American civil society, to flood the zone with information that increases mutual distrust, that confirms existing grievances, that keeps people embedded in the partisan ecosystem rather than stepping outside it to… touch grass, as the kids say.

In this week’s episode you’ll hear:

The real reason the Iran ceasefire keeps falling apart — and why it’s as much a theological crisis as a military one. (This builds on the piece I already published on Substack last week, so if you’ve read that, you’ll have the context. If not, the episode stands on its own.)

The full conversation with Justin Robert Young — his origin story and his read on where political media is going next.

And finally — a behind-the-scenes look at where Watchtower Intel stands a few months in.

Also here’s a fun picture of Justin and me from Dragon Con like 12 years ago:

[Podcast also available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you listen.]

MTFBWY

-Riley

The views expressed here are my own and do not represent the U.S. Air Force or the Department of War.

Thanks for reading Watchtower Intel! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Whoever controls the narrative controls the battlefield.

Apparently, a 30-year-old YouTuber from Los Angeles gets this concept more than a 300-franchise Lego-adjacent corporation. This is the Reckless Ben story. And if you haven’t seen the videos, it be crazy; here’s the compressed version.

The Setup

Ed Mansell is 83 years old. Since the ‘90s, he’s been building a Star Wars Lego collection. 780+ sealed sets, 1,200+ minifigures, estimated somewhere between $60,000 and $200,000, depending on who’s doing the estimating. His son Brian consigned the collection to a Bricks and Minifigs franchise location in Kaiser, Oregon.

Then the store changes hands in November 2024. New owners — Brandon Best and Joshua Johnson — claim no knowledge of the consignment agreement. Payments stop. When Brian tries to terminate the arrangement and retrieve his father’s collection, the new owners counter with an offer: issue a public apology, and maybe they’ll discuss returning the Star Wars merch.

Brian declines. They keep the Legos.

Enter Benjamin Snyder.

The Campaign

Reckless Ben (appropriately named) makes a 1:40-minute documentary that goes to levels of insanity that feel absurd to even write about. Ben drives all the way to the Oregon store to question the new manager. He shows up at corporate headquarters in Utah to confront the CEO. He is theatrical, confrontational, and completely uninterested in settling for anything short of getting Brian’s Legos back. He builds a fake rival business. (We Steal From Old People) He organizes a raffle to test the State of Oregon's criminal code. He posts a sign outside the franchise owner’s home. He gets arrested by a small-town SWAT team at his Airbnb in Utah on misdemeanor charges, flees to Mexico, and keeps posting.

Yes.

You read all that right…

Here’s what every institution in this story missed: they saw Ben as a content creator chasing clicks. But Ben wasn’t the threat.

The story was.

A Note: The institutions in this story lost plot. They lost sight of what actually matters. That’s what great stories tell us, and it’s my debut book, Great Escape, is about. If you want to be the first to know when preorders open, plus get exclusive bonus content from me and my co-author Stephen Kent, head to GreatEscapeBook.com.

Why the Story Won

No cease-and-desist letter makes you feel something. Ben’s story did what corporate crisis PR cannot: it worked on a human level.

An old man. A Lifelong collection. A big company that inexplicably refuses to give it back.

You don’t need to understand Oregon franchise law or the specifics of the consignment agreement. Because we all know what it feels like to lose something you love. And it’s Star Wars Legos. The greatest Star Wars toys ever made.

I’ll be honest about the nuance here, because Ben’s version of events was probably cleaner than the actual messy legal reality. The consignment arrangement’s legitimacy under the Bricks and Minifigs franchise model appears to be gray-ish. The collection’s value is disputed. The inventory management was apparently a disaster on multiple sides. And Ben’s tactics crossed societal, cultural, and likely legal lines.

But here’s the thing about narrative warfare: you don’t have to be factually detailed to resonate. You have to be true enough. And the story of a corporation using every legal lever available to avoid accountability for an old man’s Lego collection was compelling. Once a story like that gets momentum, the detailed corrections from a petty corporation simply cannot keep pace with a passionate YouTuber willing to flee the country in service of his Minifig mission.

How Bricks and Minifigs Lost

A leaked internal memo to all franchise locations tells the story better than I can.

The memo instructed franchises to use verbatim scripts when speaking to customers. Disable comments on social media. Pursue platform takedowns on YouTube, Patreon, and GoDaddy. Keep everything confidential to not “compromise the active legal case.”

The memo also predicted an outrage cycle lasting a few weeks before dying down.

The memo got leaked and read on camera.

Patreon CEO Jack Conte responded to the takedown notice publicly, stating that Bricks and Minifigs could, in his words, stuff it — and that if they didn’t like Ben’s page staying up, they were welcome to sue Patreon. The screenshots of disabled comments went viral within hours.

The Kaiser store is now permanently closed. The franchise owners have been cut loose. The GoFundMe exceeded $400,000.

This is what happens when you fight a narrative war with lawyers and corrupt law enforcement tactics.

The law depends on facts, timelines, and evidence. Narrative runs on emotion, identity, and story. These are separate battlefields. Bricks and Minifigs brought a legal team to an information fight.

The Point

I want to be careful here. The court of public opinion should not replace the actual court system. That’s not a healthy outcome for anyone.

But if you take one thing from this story: if a company, a government agency — or even just an individual — is facing a story that’s gaining traction, the response cannot be silence, suppression, and legal intimidation. Every institution in this story made the same mistake. They identified Ben as the threat and moved to eliminate him. They got him arrested. They pursued takedowns on every platform they could find.

He wasn’t the threat. The story was the threat. And the story exposes real problems in the legal system, in law enforcement, in how difficult it is for ordinary people to fight for themselves.

Ben crossed lines to tell this story. But without his antics, Ed Mansell gets nothing. Bricks and Minifigs move on.

Sometimes, the only leverage when you feel powerless is a compelling story in the public arena.

May the Force be with you.

-Riley

Sources

* Reckless Ben vs. Bricks & Minifigs: $200K Star Wars LEGO Collection Dispute Explained — Geeks + Gamers

* Keizer Bricks & Minifigs shut down after viral LEGO collection controversy — KEZI News

* Bricks and Minifigs closes Keizer store amid Star Wars Lego collection dispute — KOIN News

* Bricks & Minifigs vs Reckless Ben Lego drama explained: Full timeline — Dexerto

* Patreon CEO tells Bricks & Minifigs to “sue us” after refusing to remove Reckless Ben — Dexerto

* Bricks & Minifigs–Reckless Ben controversy — Wikipedia

President Trump’s heated call with Prime Minister Netanyahu over Israeli strikes on Hezbollah exposes the fault lines between U.S., Israeli, and Iranian interests during a “ceasefire in name only.” In this episode, Riley breaks down the strategic fallout from Operation Epic Fury, the stakes in the Strait of Hormuz, an Air Force recruiting experiment in authentic storytelling, and why Star Wars is stuck in an identity crisis.Timestamps:

* [00:00] Trump–Netanyahu call & Hezbollah strikes

* [02:30] Competing interests: Iran, Israel, and the U.S.

* [05:20] Aftermath of Operation Epic Fury

* [07:40] A ceasefire “in name only”

* [10:20] Altitude Live & Air Force storytelling

* [13:00] The Mandalorian & Grogu review

* [18:00] Star Wars’ identity crisis & prequel‑kid nostalgia

I’m back on the Watchtower Intel pod with a two-part episode. First, I joined Scott Ryfun on WGIG’s Straight Talk to answer a deceptively simple question about the Iran war: Did we win Operation Epic Fury?

Drawing on my Air Force intelligence background, I’ll break down what “success” really means, why airpower and diplomacy both have limits, and how Iranian propaganda (and other foreign disinfo) is shaping what you see online.

Then I’ll pivot to Star Wars, arguing that Disney’s Mandalorian marketing is culturally blind, alienating legacy fans and families while leaning hard into online influencer aesthetics, and making a concrete box office prediction I’ll be revisiting.

* [0:00] Episode Overview

* [3:23] Did We Win? Operation Epic Fury Explained

* [11:09] Iran’s Regime, Long-Term Strategy & Propaganda

* [24:37] From War to Star Wars: Mandalorian Marketing

* [30:42] Culture War Optics, Box Office Bet & Closing

Adheres to AFI 1-1, USAF Social Media PolicyViews expressed in this video are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Air Force or Department of Defense.

It’s a video this week!

The Department of Defense is now the Department of War.Open the 2026 National Defense Strategy, and that’s what you’ll see. A Memo signed by the Secretary of War.

I read the whole thing, so you don’t have to.

Some called the focus on the Western Hemisphere “isolationism.” Foreign policy wonks warned about abandoning allies and ceding global leadership.

Here’s what actually happened in the past year:

* Operation MIDNIGHT HAMMER — we struck Iran’s nuclear program

* Operation EPIC FURY — sustained combat against Iranian forces across multiple theaters

* Operation ABSOLUTE RESOLVE — direct action in Venezuela

This Document Is Different

National Defense Strategies are usually boring. Written by committee. Staffed through interagency meetings. The goal is consensus, to make sure everyone from the Department of State to NATO can sign off.

The 2022 version was exactly that. It called China a “pacing challenge.” Iran got mentioned in one section.

The 2026 version?

It calls out “grandiose nation-building.” It names previous administrations for squandering our advantages. It calls China the second most powerful country in the world and lists Iran’s Axis of Resistance by name — Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the IRGC.

What It Means for the Budget

The National Defense Strategy drives the budget. If it’s in the NDS, it gets funded.

So when this document says:

* Defend the Homeland (top priority)

* Deter China in the First Island Chain

* Allies take primary responsibility for their own regions

* Rebuild the defense industrial base

You can expect:

* Hypersonics and long-range strike systems

* Missile defense — the document calls for “Golden Dome for America.”

* Autonomous systems and AI — Anduril, Palantir, software-driven warfare

* Munitions production at scale

What gets cut? Legacy platforms. Europe-heavy force posture. Anything optimized for the old counterinsurgency fight.

Where We Actually Are

This is a strategy that says we’ll defend American interests with overwhelming force when necessary. The tone shift from 2022 to 2026 isn’t purely partisan. It’s a significant doctrinal shift in national policy. Whether you think that’s good or bad, you should at least know what the document actually says. Because most people don’t.

MTFBWY,

-Riley

Adheres to AFI 1-1, USAF Social Media PolicyViews expressed in this video are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Air Force or Department of Defense.

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The most dangerous leader you’ll ever work for isn’t incompetent; they’re actually competent enough to advance their career while caring about all the wrong things. Mission and people become tools for personal gain.

In this episode, I break down:

* What a careerist bureaucrat actually is (and why they’re so hard to spot)

* The trap: how good people get caught optimizing for a bad leader

* When to recognize you’re in it — and when to get out

This is a case study in institutional failure. It’s also why I’m leaving active duty Air Force Intelligence.

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@rileyblanton Contact: [email protected]Follow on X: https://x.com/therileyguyThe gram: https://instagram.com/therileyguy

This week I appeared on Scott Ryfun Straight Talk — coastal Georgia’s most-listened-to talk radio show — to cut through the noise on the Iran ceasefire extension.

We covered:

* Why the “indefinite ceasefire” shows how the IRGC has consolidated power

* The strategic difference between operational success (obliterating Iran’s conventional military) and impossible problems (securing nuclear material without boots on the ground)

* Why flippant commentary about “just solving it” ignores the actual cost in American lives

* The moral question nobody’s asking: How is a radical Islamist theocratic regime with nuclear weapons different than North Korea, Russia, or China?

Scott gets it; he’s rightly skeptical of the hot-take industrial complex and wants to understand what’s actually happening, not telling his audience what to think about it.

(This is why Watchtower Intel exists: to bridge the gap between how military operations are planned and executed, and the circus happening in the commentary class.)

-Riley

On March 27, Iran struck Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia — damaging KC-135 tankers and an E-3 Sentry AWACS.

That last one is a big deal. The E-3 is one of the highest-value assets in the theater. It doesn't get hit by accident. So how did Iran know where to look?In this video, I break down what actually happened at PSAB, why the precision of these strikes point to something bigger than Iranian capability alone, and what the Washington Post, CNN, and Bloomberg have all now confirmed about Russian intelligence sharing — and what China may be providing on top of that.Read my full piece with sources: