ALLAHU AKBAR COMING TO AMERICANS?

■  Op-Ed • National Security • March 7, 2026

Nine Days of War, $2.5 Billion in Losses, and a Government Hiding the Truth From Its Own People

As boots near Iranian soil and sleeper cells stir, the White House is blocking the agencies meant to protect you from telling the cops on your street what they need to know.

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You thought you were watching a Tom Cruise movie. F-18s off supercarriers, stealth bombers over Tehran at 3 a.m., precision missiles vaporizing nuclear bunkers. It looked clean from a thousand miles away—the kind of war that happens to other people, on other continents, while you fill up your gas tank and catch the highlights on your phone. Well, the ticket is still in your pocket. The movie just moved from the screen to your neighborhood. And the usher has been told to keep his mouth shut.

That’s not hyperbole. That’s this week’s news.

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury—a coordinated air assault that, by any measure, constitutes the most consequential U.S. military action in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is dead. Iran’s top leadership has been decapitated. CENTCOM Chairman Dan Caine stood at a Pentagon podium alongside Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and said the quiet part loud: “This is not a single overnight operation.” He called it “difficult and gritty work.”

Within nine days of the first strike, Foreign Policy published a detailed accounting of confirmed U.S. military equipment losses across the theater. The numbers are staggering—and that word is not used loosely.

Source: Foreign Policy / confirmed open-source reporting, March 2026  •  Note: 98% of gallium required to replace these systems is sourced exclusively from China.

Over $2.5 billion in irreplaceable military hardware—gone in nine days. And here is the detail the Pentagon’s press briefing won’t linger on: 98% of the gallium required to manufacture these radar and missile defense components comes from China. Replacing an AN/FPS-132 radar isn’t like ordering a part off Amazon. It takes years. China hasn’t fired a shot. It doesn’t need to.

“98% of the gallium for these defense systems comes from China. They haven’t fired a single shot—and they’re already winning.”

Meanwhile, Russia is actively feeding Iran intelligence on the location of U.S. warships and aircraft. Reports confirmed this week that Moscow has been providing real-time satellite targeting data to Tehran, while a Chinese private firm called Mizarvision has been tracking American military deployments with precision that security analysts have described as alarming. Our adversaries are not sitting this one out. They’re running the scoreboard.

Here is the development that should stop every American cold, regardless of where you stand on the war.

The FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the National Counterterrorism Center had prepared a joint public safety bulletin for state and local law enforcement across the country. The five-page document—officially titled “A Public Safety Awareness Report: Elevated Threat in the United States during US-Iran Conflict”—detailed specific threats from the Iranian government to U.S. military personnel, government facilities, Jewish and Israeli institutions, and Iranian dissidents on American soil. It outlined exactly how Iranian proxies might carry out attacks here and how local police could respond. Standard. Professional. Necessary.

The White House killed it.

According to reporting by the Daily Mail, confirmed by multiple senior officials, DHS broke its own protocol by alerting the White House hours before the bulletin’s scheduled release. Top Trump officials immediately placed it on “hold.” The FBI—which had opposed the White House being notified in the first place—was overruled. The bulletin never went out. As of this writing, the DHS National Terrorism Advisory System website has not been updated since February 17th. A prior NTAS bulletin from September 2025 has expired and not been replaced.

“Intelligence products for law enforcement are supposed to be neutral and fact-based. The White House is now inserting themselves. This has a chilling effect.”
— Senior DHS Official, Daily Mail, March 7, 2026

The White House response, delivered by spokeswoman Abigail Jackson: they were simply “coordinating closely with all government agencies to ensure information being disseminated is accurate.” The White House did not deny blocking the bulletin.

Read that again. The three agencies that exist specifically to warn your local police chief about the next terror threat had their warning intercepted and suppressed. Your sheriff doesn’t know what the FBI knows. Your state National Guard hasn’t been fully briefed. North Carolina Governor Josh Stein told reporters this week he isn’t certain exactly which of his state’s 100,000 service members are deployed or in what capacity. Governors are operating in the dark. So are their cops.

There are only two explanations. Either the administration fears the political optics of acknowledging that the war they chose to start has elevated the threat to American civilians at home. Or there is a deeper concern about who within the apparatus might be compromised. Both possibilities should keep you awake tonight.

For years, that phrase was treated as background noise in American pop culture—something you heard in a movie, then forgot. Then came San Bernardino. Orlando. The Boston Marathon. The New York truck attack. Each time, the phrase preceded carnage. Each time, the national debate pivoted to gun control or immigration reform, and the ideological infrastructure that produced the killer was left unexamined.

What’s different now is scale and state sponsorship.

The threat isn’t theoretical—it already has a name. On Thanksgiving Eve 2025, Rahmanullah Lakanwal—an Afghan national admitted under the Biden administration’s Operation Allies Welcome program—drove cross-country from Washington State and opened fire on two West Virginia National Guard members stationed two blocks from the White House. Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, 20, died of her wounds. Staff Sergeant Andrew Wolfe, 24, was critically wounded. The FBI launched a terrorism investigation. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem confirmed that U.S. officials believe Lakanwal was radicalized while living inside the United States. He is one of thousands of Afghan nationals admitted under Operation Allies Welcome—a program DHS’s own Inspector General found had “fragmented” vetting procedures. The House Homeland Security Committee called the attack a warning that “the terror landscape is evolving fast and becoming more dangerous every single day.”

Iran has maintained operational networks inside the United States since the 1980s. Hezbollah-linked cells, embedded over decades, represent what intelligence professionals call a “latent infrastructure”—assets dormant until activated. The 2025 DHS Homeland Threat Assessment warned explicitly that Iran was advancing plots against U.S. officials. The FBI made over 70 arrests tied to foreign intelligence threats in 2025 alone. Following Operation Midnight Hammer—the June 2025 strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities—Iranian-linked activity on U.S. soil increased measurably. Now those same networks are operating under a decapitated regime vowing “intense” revenge, with Russian satellite support and Chinese surveillance overhead.

And Iran isn’t the only threat vector. ISIS-Khorasan—the Islamic State’s most lethal surviving branch—publicly voiced support for attacks inside the United States in 2025. A 2025 UN Security Council Sanctions Monitoring report found approximately 2,000 ISIS-K fighters operating in Afghanistan, with an additional 600 recruits drawn from Central Asian diaspora communities in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Many are already embedded in Western countries. The 2017 New York bike-path attack that killed eight people was carried out by an Uzbek national acting in ISIS’s name. The threat is real, documented, and growing.

The activation isn’t limited to the American interior. On March 1st—within hours of Operation Epic Fury’s opening strikes—suspected Iranian-linked operatives fired 17 bullets into the boxing gym of Salar Gholami, a prominent Iranian-Canadian dissident activist in Richmond Hill, Ontario. The attack occurred on the same night Khamenei’s death was confirmed. Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand stated publicly she is “deeply concerned” about Tehran activating sleeper cells on Canadian soil, targeting Iranian dissidents and Jewish communities. Security analysts cited by U.S. intelligence note that Canada represents a “serious place of concern for Iranian activity,” with hundreds of IRGC-linked operatives estimated to be present. Separately, Qatar arrested approximately 10 individuals identified as an active IRGC sleeper cell—confirming this is a coordinated global activation, not isolated incidents.

The border dimension compounds everything. U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott warned in a memo that “gotaways”—border crossers who evaded apprehension entirely—number approximately two million since 2021, including an unknown subset from terror-linked countries. Their identities and intentions remain completely unresolved. These are not hypothetical entries in a policy paper. These are people who are already here.

Sources: DHS, FBI, ODNI, CBP, Congressional testimony, 2025–2026  •  Compiled from publicly confirmed intelligence assessments

On March 1st—the day after Operation Epic Fury began—a gunman in Austin, Texas opened fire outside a bar on West Sixth Street, killing two and wounding fourteen. Authorities identified the suspect as Ndiaga Diagne, a 53-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen born in Senegal. He was wearing a sweatshirt reading “Property of Allah” and a shirt bearing the flag emblem of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Inside his apartment, agents recovered an Iranian flag and photographs of Iranian regime leaders. The FBI launched a terrorism investigation. The pro-Iranian social media ecosystem was churning with operational rhetoric. The NYPD Joint Terrorism Task Force was monitoring threat streams. And the federal bulletin that should have told local law enforcement exactly what to look for was sitting in a White House inbox on hold.

To be precise: the intelligence community has not assessed that a large-scale coordinated attack on the homeland is imminent. But “imminent” has a way of becoming “yesterday’s tragedy” very quickly when the machinery for prevention is deliberately hobbled.

Social media lit up this week with reports of 100,000 paratroopers airlifted into the heart of Iran. Let’s be precise about what is confirmed and what is speculation—because in a fog-of-war information environment, the line between the two matters enormously.

What is confirmed: More than 50,000 U.S. troops are already engaged in the broader Iran campaign. The 82nd Airborne Division—the Army’s premier rapid-deployment force at Fort Bragg—had a major headquarters training exercise abruptly cancelled this week, a move the Washington Post reports has “fueled speculation within the Defense Department” about a potential ground deployment. B-2 stealth bombers have reportedly struck underground Iranian ballistic missile launchers. Trump told the New York Post publicly that he “doesn’t have the yips” about boots on the ground, and NBC News confirmed he has privately expressed “serious interest” in deploying a contingent of U.S. troops inside Iran for specific strategic objectives.

What is not confirmed: A mass airdrop of 100,000 troops. Trump’s private discussions have focused on a small contingent for targeted strategic purposes—not a full ground invasion. The White House has stated ground troops are not part of the current operational plan.

What should concern you: The optionality itself. When Washington says “we’re not doing X” while canceling training for the unit best suited to do X, and the President publicly won’t rule it out—X is on the table. Iran’s mountainous terrain, dense urban belts, and decades of asymmetric warfare preparation make a large-scale ground invasion a catastrophic proposition. The question is whether this administration’s appetite for escalation has outrun its strategy.

On Friday, March 6th, President Trump signed an Executive Order directing Justice, DHS, and State to aggressively dismantle transnational criminal organizations behind cyber-enabled fraud, extortion, and infrastructure attacks. Simultaneously, the White House released its first National Cyber Strategy—a seven-page document outlining a six-pillar approach to cyber defense and offensive capability, including sanctions against nations that “tolerate” cybercrime.

Given that Russia has been feeding Iran satellite intelligence on U.S. military assets, and that Iran has a documented record of cyberattacks on U.S. financial institutions, hospitals, and energy infrastructure, this EO arrives not a moment too soon. The timing is not coincidental.

Here’s the critical caveat: CISA, the nation’s primary cyber defense agency, has lost roughly one-third of its staff since January 2025. The administration’s CISA director nominee has had his security clearance pulled. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem was fired this week. The architecture for defending American infrastructure from Iranian or Russian cyberattack has never been thinner at precisely the moment when the threat has never been higher.

If you filled up your gas tank this week, you felt it. Crude oil prices have surged approximately 30% in seven days, reaching levels not seen since 2023. The national average hit $3.41 per gallon on Saturday. The Strait of Hormuz—through which roughly 20% of global oil traffic flows—is in a war zone. Iran fired over 500 ballistic missiles and nearly 2,000 drones in the opening days of conflict. Iranian naval assets and mines represent a direct threat to global energy shipping.

Oil is up 30% in one week. The Strait of Hormuz is a war zone. And Washington’s answer is a seven-page cyber strategy and a blocked terror bulletin.

Economists were already warning of what one analyst called “a once-in-50-years oil shock” risk. That was before the war started. The combination of military equipment losses, Chinese gallium dependency, oil price shock, and looming ground escalation represents a fiscal exposure that no one in Washington is publicly accounting for.

America has been living in a Top Gun movie. We watched the F-22s scream over Tehran on our phones, watched the Tomahawks hit their marks, watched the ticker tape of geopolitical dominance scroll across our screens. We cheered. Some of us were right to.

But the movie doesn’t end when the credits roll. Iran has networks here. They have state backing from Russia, passive intelligence support from China, and forty years of strategic patience. Hezbollah doesn’t need satellite coordinates to know which synagogue is on your block. And the agency that should have warned your local police chief had its bulletin killed by the people running the war.

America First doesn’t mean America Blind. It means we tell the truth—including when the truth is uncomfortable for the people in power we support. The suppression of that domestic terror warning is indefensible. The depletion of CISA while cyber threats escalate is indefensible. The oil shock nobody’s calling a crisis yet, the gutted DHS leadership mid-war, the opacity around troop deployments—these are not abstract policy debates.

They are the conditions under which attacks happen.

Allahu Akbar is not a phrase from a distant world anymore. It is a rallying cry being spoken right now by people who have been in your country for years, waiting. And the people responsible for telling your cop, your mayor, your sheriff what to watch for—were told to stand down.

Wake up, America. The movie came home.

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