The Papa Johns closest to The Pentagon is far busier than usual

I was a pizza delivery guy around then, and I remember delivering pizzas to the local base. Mostly barracks, sometimes the Officers' quarters. One time, we had an order that went to a more secured location -- Got buzzed through the fence, around the side, up to the door, and into the man-trap inside the building.

That was past a bunch of signs saying I wasn't supposed to be there. The drivers always joked about 'Top Secret, Pizza Delivery clearance'. We had maps of the base, all the building numbers and everything.

That was all pre 9-11, It's a closed base now.

The Pentagon is bounded on all sides by busy public highways! Oh, and giant parking lots for Pentagon employees.

Any interested party can simply drive past and count the number of cars in the parking lots. Not a lot of mystery there! I assume countless foreign countries and news organizations do exactly that.

The "Pizza Meter" is a fun... thing. It's a nice lesson on how data can "leak" even if nobody is actually actively disclosing information directly. But the idea of a foreign nation taking the "Pizza Meter" seriously (or, of the USA using it as a signal that might be taken seriously by our adversaries) is not a credible idea.

I'm sure they do. But I'm also sure it's not Papa Johns. That garlic sauce is worth a national security incident IMO.

Also, these signals also help defuse situations because they are effective signals among adversaries that the sides are getting serious.

There would be literally nothing easy about fighting Iran, unless your idea of fighting is just to glass the entire country. Because any kind of conventional warfare with Iran would make Iraq and Afganistan look like kindergarden in comparison. And that's not to say that Iran is some kind of superpower - it's absolutely not. Just that the terrain is extremely difficult, the army is actually decently equipped and trained, and it's a huge and very populous country.