An insidious strategic blindness afflicts victors — the “winner’s trap” — an assumption that lessons of war belong only to the loser. In 1783, America won the Revolutionary War, defeating the British military — the most formidable force on earth at the time — who had stumbled into every trap that terrain, distance, domestic politics, and strategic confusion could lay. The colonists won not just because they were brave. They won because Britain was making strategic blunders. Two and a half centuries later, in March 2026, the United States launched a war against Iran. The weapons are unrecognisably sophisticated. The geography has shifted. But the structural failure modes — the same five that destroyed Britain’s campaign in America — have returned. America seems to have inherited the British Empire’s blind spots along with its territories. Start with logistics — the Achilles heel of sustaining force across distance.…