San Diego is a Navy town. Ships leave our harbor carrying sailors and Marines into dangerous waters half a world away, and families gather along the waterfront to watch them disappear over the horizon. They hope the deployment ahead is routine and that the ship will return the same way it left.
Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t.
That reality is why decisions about war in the Persian Gulf matter deeply here.
The Trump administration says it spent months planning military operations against Iran. If that is true, it raises an obvious question: Why weren’t Americans evacuated before the strikes began?
Instead, thousands of U.S. personnel, diplomats, citizens and wartime allies were left inside Iran’s missile threat envelope when hostilities started. For anyone who has served in that region, that sequencing immediately raises alarms.
During my time in the Navy, I stood behind crew-served weapons on the deck of the USS Thach while we transited the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway separating Iran from the Arabian Peninsula. From that deck, Iran is not an abstraction. It sits directly across the water.
The horizon there still carries reminders of earlier conflicts. Oil infrastructure damaged during the first Gulf War burned in the distance, scars that lingered long after the fighting stopped. Wars in that region rarely stay contained.
History offers another reminder. In 1988, the USS Samuel B. Roberts struck an Iranian mine in the Persian Gulf, nearly sinking and leaving sailors scrambling to save their ship. One moment the mission seemed routine. The next, the crew was fighting for survival.
Experiences like that teach you something important. The early decisions in a conflict matter enormously. War is always messy, but poor planning makes it far more dangerous than it needs to be.
If the administration truly spent months preparing for this operation, there was time to move Americans, diplomats and partners out of harm’s way. The United States has evacuation systems for exactly this purpose.
In this case, they were not used.
The president and his secretary of defense launched military operations while Americans and wartime allies were still inside the missile zone. If months of planning produced that sequence of decisions, it raises serious questions about how this conflict is being managed.
These are human lives, not pieces on a game board.
Nowhere is that more evident than at Camp As Sayliyah in Doha, where more than 1,100 Afghan wartime allies and their family members remain under U.S. authority. Many are fully vetted refugees already approved to travel to the United States, including hundreds of women and children and family members of active-duty American service members.
Missile debris has already landed inside residential areas of the camp.
These are people who fought alongside American troops during our last forever war. Today they are watching missile intercepts overhead while living in temporary housing with little protection.
We promised them safety. Right now, we are failing to deliver it.
Many of the same political leaders directing this war spent years criticizing the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. That criticism was justified. But leadership requires learning from past mistakes, not repeating them.
If you argued that American citizens and partners should never be left behind in a war zone, then launching another conflict before evacuations are complete is not just inconsistent. It is dangerous.
San Diego understands the stakes of that danger. When Washington escalates conflict in the Persian Gulf, it is often sailors and Marines from this region who deploy into that environment.
Every war Washington starts eventually passes through San Diego Harbor.
Veterans have seen how easily limited operations can become long wars. Iran can retaliate through missiles, proxies and asymmetric attacks across the region. What begins as a limited strike can quickly pull the United States deeper into another Middle East conflict.
After 20 years of war there, we should recognize the warning signs.
Starting wars is easy. Living with them is harder.
And the people who pay the price are the sailors leaving San Diego Harbor, the families waiting for them to return and the allies who trusted us enough to fight at our side.
VanDiver is a U.S. Navy veteran, president of AfghanEvac, and immediate past chairman of the San Diego Convention Center. He lives in Clairemont.