Outside the Beltway

Iran War: No End in Sight

Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.

James Joyner · Friday, March 13, 2026 · 11 comments

WSJ (“Israeli Officials Think Iran’s Regime Isn’t Likely to Fall Soon“):

Israeli officials now assess that Iran’s ruling regime is unlikely to fall in the immediate future, as Tehran’s battered rulers remain in control and conditions on the ground aren’t yet ripe for a popular uprising, people familiar with the matter said.

Nearly two weeks into the war, Iran’s military and political leadership appears functional and responsive to events, while its domestic opponents have been cowed by a heavy security presence. Israeli officials assess that changing the equation would likely require many more weeks or months of fighting.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that he wasn’t sure if Iranians would be able to topple the Islamic republic although he said Israel was working to create the conditions that would allow for it.

“I can’t tell you with certainty that the Iranian people will bring down the regime,” Netanyahu said. “If it doesn’t fall, it will be much weaker.”

On Thursday, the Israeli military laid out more limited goals for its activities, focusing on degrading Iran’s military capability so the regime can’t pose as much of a threat to Israel and the region.

“Our job as a military is when we see a threat to minimize it and push it away for as long as possible,” Israeli military spokesman Nadav Shoshani told reporters Thursday. “And after that there are more steps at different levels that are beyond the IDF,” he said, referring to the Israeli military.

[…]

President Trump and Netanyahu began the conflict calling on Iranians to take control of their country. Since then, U.S. officials have increasingly focused on narrower goals of destroying the country’s military capability, nuclear program and ballistic-missile arsenal.

[…]

The regime has so far proven resilient and has continued striking back, exacting a growing toll on the U.S. and its allies and the global economy.

A pair of fuel tankers were hit Wednesday night off Iraq, following attacks on cargo ships and oil tankers that have all but shut down the crucial Strait of Hormuz waterway. Dubai residents reported a series of missile warnings and intercepts early Thursday, and Gulf countries such as Bahrain and Saudi Arabia continued to be targeted in attacks. Meanwhile, Iranian security services appear to have solid control of the streets.

[…]

Trump has said in interviews this week that the war in Iran could end soon, without providing a timeline. Israel hopes for additional time to fight, but officials are aware Trump faces domestic pressure and could end the war abruptly, one of the people familiar with the matter said.

The Atlantic‘s Nancy Youssef (“The Iran War Has Four Stages. We’re in the Second.“):

The death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on the first day of the Iran war generated hope that the regime change the Trump administration and Israel yearned for would come to pass, perhaps with a more moderate new leader stepping up.

That, after all, is what happened two months ago in Venezuela, where Delcy Rodríguez assumed power after her boss, Nicolás Maduro, was captured by U.S. forces. The nationwide protests in Iran late last year and early this one hinted at a country potentially on the cusp of seismic change. For a few hours after the bombing started, the maximalist outcome the administration sought seemed within reach, officials told me.

Instead, the U.S. and Israel moved through their military-strike plan over the following days without a palpable change in Iran’s position. The regime named the ayatollah’s son Mojtaba Khamenei—whose ideas are believed to be more hard-line than his father’s—as successor. And rather than create the circumstances for a popular uprising, which Trump had called for in his first speech of the war, the air campaign has left Iranians feeling stuck between a regime they do not want and a war whose objectives are ill-defined. The strikes that once promised Iranians liberation have instead led to black rain caused by oil from stricken infrastructure, damage to historical sites, and, according to the preliminary findings of a U.S. military investigation, the deaths of at least 175 children and teachers from a U.S. Tomahawk missile. Trump’s assertion that Iran would “probably not” keep its borders only added to fears among Iranians that the war will lead to a divided country.

[…]

[W]hat would postwar Iran look like? “The administration still hasn’t decided what they want to see happen,” one Defense Department official told me. In a closed-door briefing yesterday on Capitol Hill, Pentagon officials didn’t offer legislators any more clarity. “They can’t give answers other than acknowledge the immediate military objectives,” a congressional official told me. (Asked for comment, the Pentagon pointed to public statements from the secretary of defense and the president.)

[…]

In the second phase of the plan, the military depends less on long-range missiles and instead is sending more aircraft over Iran to strike targets, given that the U.S. and Israel are close to controlling Iranian airspace. This could be the longest phase of the U.S. attack plan.

But at the same time, hopes of a new direction for Iran—further dashed by recent U.S. intelligence assessments that the regime is not at imminent risk, according to Reuters—have been superseded by fears that either the regime survives or, possibly worse, the regime’s ability to govern collapses, splinters, or is so weak that it leaves behind a failed state. That uncertainty raises the possibility that the U.S. and Israel could seek divergent ends to the war.

A broken Iran consumed by internal fighting poses a minimal threat to Israel. Israel’s targets expanded last weekend to key Iranian economic assets, including energy facilities, signaling an interest in weakening Iran beyond just its military capacity.

“The Israelis are looking to ensure that they don’t have a threat from the Iranians, but their way of going about it means if they are successful, Iran is a failed state, sooner or later,” H. A. Hellyer, a Middle East security and geopolitics expert for the Royal United Services Institute and at the Center for American Progress, told me.

The senior ranks of the U.S. military are divided over the prospect of a weakened or failed state. Some commanders see a benefit: Only a functional state can pursue nuclear ambitions. Others fear that an unstable and unpredictable Iran could pose a serious risk to the U.S., both economically and for long-term security, U.S. defense officials told me. A failed state could become a haven for terrorist groups that target U.S allies and interests in the region. Or one of Iran’s minority groups, such as the Kurds, could seek to grab parts of the existing state and make similar calls for greater autonomy for Kurdish populations in Turkey and Iraq. Above all, a weakened state puts 92 million Iranians in jeopardy from internal instability or, possibly, from a new emboldened regime, should one arise. If Iranians choose to leave, they could trigger a disruptive mass migration, as happened after the start of Syria’s civil war 15 years ago, a calamity with which the Middle East and Europe are still reckoning.

Israel and the U.S. have different pain tolerance for achieving their aims in Iran. Israelis consider higher gas prices caused by obstructions or threats in the Strait of Hormuz “a small price to pay” to combat their chief nemesis, Danny Citrinowicz, a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Middle East programs, told me from Israel.

But President Trump may balk at the prospect of sustained high oil prices, with some predictions that oil could reach $200 a barrel (from slightly less than $73 at the start of the war) ahead of November’s midterm elections. Even now, with oil about $100 a barrel, the war has caused what the International Energy Agency says is the largest oil-supply disruption in history; Gulf producers are cutting output by at least 10 million barrels a day—roughly 10 percent of global demand. The U.S. has listed a panoply of rationales for the war—10 were offered in just the first six days—suggesting that victory could have many definitions. If the principal U.S. aim is to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities, that does not require Iran’s regime to collapse but just that it be so weakened that it can’t rebuild for years. That doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that the conditions would be right for the people to overthrow their government.

“Tacitical success does not guarantee a successful post-regime Iran,” Christopher Preble, the senior fellow and director of the Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy program at the Stimson Center, a think tank, told me. “A strategic victory means that you are in a stronger position than when you started the war.”

The aphorism in the epigraph is attributed to Dwight Eisenhower, but he was simply repeating a line that was already old when he quoted it some seven decades ago. It was followed by this:

There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of “emergency” is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning.

So, the first thing you do is to take all the plans off the top shelf and throw them out the window and start once more. But if you haven’t been planning you can’t start to work, intelligently at least.

That is the reason it is so important to plan, to keep yourselves steeped in the character of the problem that you may one day be called upon to solve–or to help to solve.

I have no doubt that CENTCOM planners had in fact been thinking about this problem for years, if not decades. They had almost certainly updated those plans in the wake of MIDNIGHT HAMMER and the so-called 12 Day War. It explains why our tactical successes have been as great as they have been.

But the planning—informed by the longstanding consensus of the intelligence community—had also shown that simply killing the bad guys would likely not by itself lead to regime change, much less the emergence of a regime more friendly to US interests. It why President Trump’s hand-picked Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Dan Caine, advised caution.

The war has thus far cost the lives of at least 11 American servicemen, with scores more wounded. We’ve lost at least four aircraft (three fighter jets and a refueler). We’re rapidly depleting our magazine depth of critical assets like air defense and Tomahawk missiles. At least a thousand Iranian noncombatants, including some 170 at a children’s school, have been killed. All of those were known risks that the President was advised of.

The above reports confirm what I’ve suspected for days: our goals (to the extent they exist) and Israel’s are not the same. A failed state in Iran would suit them just fine. It is decidedly not in American interests or those of its non-Israeli allies and partners in the region. But it explains why Israel is targeting critical infrastructure that will be necessary to get Iran back on its feat, regardless of what regime is in charge at war’s end.