What followed was less a resignation than an erasure. The administration needed a tidy arc: threat, response, victory lap. Kurilla’s insistence that the enemy still had teeth threatened that script, turning his assessments into liabilities. The country heard of “success”; he watched the same launch sites reconstitute on satellite feeds, the familiar signatures of an adversary adapting rather than retreating.

When Admiral Brad Cooper stepped in, the message was continuity, but the subtext was compliance. Kurilla’s absence from his own ending became its loudest line—a reminder that the cost of candor in uniform is often exile in plain sight. Official histories will file the operation under “measured response,” a model of disciplined restraint. Yet in closed-door briefings and whispered war-college anecdotes, it will endure as an unfinished argument about how much danger a democracy can stomach before it chooses the comfort of a cleaner story.