Kubrick’s ‘Paths of Glory’ and CENTCOM’S Price of a Hill
In the vein of Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 anti-war cinematic masterpiece, paths of glory lay just ahead for U.S Central Command (CENTCOM) in a, or nearly in a, full war-making posture by massive military escalation in the Persian Gulf region, including the formal declaration of a blockade on Iranian ports in the theater of war.
EVIDENCE FOR WAR-MAKING POSTURE
- Starting April 13, 2026 and enforced with U.S. naval assets, CENTCOM implemented a blockade against all vessels transiting via Iranian ports.
- U.S. strategic forces have been conducting heavy, ongoing strikes into Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, with reports of engaging and disabling vessels.
- By April into the first weekend of May, the U.S. has three aircraft carrier strike groups–-USS Abraham Lincoln, USS Gerald R. Ford, and USS George H.W. Bush– deployed by the CENTCOM area of responsibility (AOR) in concert, a trio of U.S. military power rarely seen on international waters in decades.
- Official CENTCOM releases tout the “Operation Epic Fury”campaign as a sustained, glorious path to destroy Iran’s well-hidden drone, missile, and naval capabilities.
- Haven taken to paths of glory. the U.S. has increased its military footprint with f-15e strike eagles deployed in Jordan and military hardware across the Middle East.
While the U.S. official topsy-turvy posture at times emphasizes deterrence and stability, the overall 2026 operational tempo of CENTCOM as America’s modern military hub of digital bureaucratic warfare shares themes with Kubrick’s Paths of Glory regarding the dangerous chasm between command decisions, characterized by direct naval blockades and kinetic strikes, the prioritization of self-image, with Trump showing his true colors by posting an image of himself wearing dark shades and holding an assault rifle in the foreground of explosive desert battle on his Truth Social platform, and dehumanization, inherent in high-level military bureaucratic detachment towards unpopular Middle East demographics and manifested in Trump’s anti-Palestinian administration.
The “Chateau” vs. White House Situation Room and CENTCOM
In Paths of Glory, shrewd generals (like Mireau) operate from luxurious chateaus, not unlike the White House Situation Room following a $50 million, year-long gut renovation to add high-end mahogany wood paneling, leather-bound chairs, and polished stone countertops, oblivious to the mud and death in the trenches, and most at ease in opulent French decor.
CENTCOM, with its comfortable, data-driven tech command centers, represents a modern, digitized version of detachment from war waged in the Middle East, where the ugliness of it is often managed like a “scientific” spending habit, reducing violent realities to intelligence feeds engaged by the products and services provided by the military-industrial complex, with Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump staked in the rising US-based military tech drone sector.
A Path to “Glory” vs. Inhumanity of Command
In Paths of Glory, General Mireau orders a suicide mission for personal reputation, with an attack on the impregnable “Ant Hill” to secure a promotion, knowing it is purely suicide.
Similarly, a ground mission in Iran by U.S. troops, against dire warnings from clear-headed U.S. military brass terminated by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, may be viewed by skeptics among TOI readers as a truly high-risk, high-stakes gamble ordered to achieve political or career, rather than strategic, victory, allowing personal ambition to wage war on humanity.
The undeniable through-line of catastrophic, hubris-driven military overreach is undeniably present in CENTCOM’S planning for invading Iran with troops, a zero-sum strategy that sums up the tragic, reckless folly of American military focus, ignoring the hard lessons of previous Middle East engagements, and best exemplified by the Afghanistan withdrawal.
This CENTCOM envisioned surge of forward-deployed pawns, is nothing short of military madness, with Congressmen Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz describing illusory victories as political operatives tapped by the U.S. petroleum industry profiting sturdily from the war.
CENTCOM commands can face pressure in the U.S. to achieve measurable metrics–such as Iranian “body counts” promoted to the media as compared to U.S. “casualties” hidden from the media in the same breath–which can overshadow the chaotic, unpredictable human cost on the ground for America to be involved in such a no-win Middle East military campaign.
Kubrick’s Paths of Glory highlights the absurdity of a cold, calculated, mechanical approach to slaughter. This resonates with the Trump-boasted U.S. precision-strike capabilities and military strength that CENTCOM oversees, which promises surgical warfare but can still lead to immense destruction to both life and property for Iranian citizens from all walks of life, masking the squalid, dirty nature of human conflict beneath technological superiority.
In Kubrick’s cinematic tour de force, Mireau’s orders involve crossing no-man’s-land against superior artillery and numbers (just like Iran), an impossible attack. A U.S. ground invasion will involve overcoming Iran’s formidable defensive terrain and entrenched forces, leading to high casualties, capture of U.S troops, increased low morale, and minimal strategic gain.
Scapegoating for failure
When in Paths of Glory the “Ant Hill” mission fails, Mireau orders his own artillery to fire on his troops, and later commands a court-martial of his own French soldiers for cowardice.
The scenario brought forward by CENTCOM could see military leaders among the Trump’s faithful within his administration, blame yellow-bellied staff and U.S. soldiers for the failure of an ill-conceived, doomed mission upon Iran to protect their own warmonger reputations.
That’s when finger-pointing will commence among political elites in the business of war.
But CENTCOM is an entirely different computating beast. Its command structures operating from distant Middle East bases may dehumanize soldiers, with unnatural concerns, treating the “boots on the ground” moniker applied to U.S. troops as abstract numbers on a hardline AI-driven map for U.S. dominance rather than individual service members at risk.
Sacrificing soldiers for public image
When in Paths of Glory after the suicidal assault fails, Mireau holds a court-martial to save his wounded reputation. While not yet a parallel to the Iran war still in the early stages, this echoes current concerns about how bureaucratic failures in complex operations are managed, ensuring the military, its military-industrial complex, and political reputations endorsing those separate entities take precedence over culpability.
Disposable commodities
Disconnect and dehumanization is a striking theme in Paths of Glory. The film contrasts the luxuries of the chateau command where officers dine on wine and cheese with the muddy, shell-shocked reality of the bloody WWI trenches, the least of their self-idolizing worries.
The argument that Kubrick’s quintessential cinematic treatise on systematic, moral failure remains relevant today’s reality when analyzing how top-tier U.S. military bureaucracy in CENTROM’S key position operates in the seat of war.
Pawns and military ends
“The loss of empathy is the greatest casualty.” –- Colonel Dax
Soldiers are an abstract concept in Paths of Glory, and none more so than Kirk Douglas as Colonel Dax embodying moral integrity. The French generals his character countered in Kubrick’s film see human resources as expendable pawns to serve their personal vanity, career advancement, and rigid, inhumane military ends by treating men as chess pieces.
Humanity vs. The Machine
Dark AI and autonomous systems in 21st. century warfare, such as the Pentagon’s “Mythos” model capable of playing havoc on U.S. banks, poses future risk of dehumanization as a state-of-the-art threat to humanity, evoking Paths of Glory’s dehumanizing theme.
Stanley Kubrick
Kubrick met his future wife, Christiane, on the set of Paths of Glory, where she was credited as Susanne Christian, and remained together happily for 40+ years until Stanley’s passing in 1999. She played the pretty, reticent German singer at the film’s close who sings the German folk song “The Faithful Hussar,” moving French soldiers brought by raw emotion to tears.
It was a poignant visual of humanity expressed by cinema and beloved by Steven Spielberg.
Shared humanity
To digress into a full-out war with Iran is to abandon Israel’s strategic logic for peace and prosperity, an unaccountable, irrational pattern of unfocused Middle East policy that will likely discontinue any Middle East vision for shared humanity between sovereign states.
