In an Atlantic essay, “War and Consequences,” Elliot Cohen argues that the effects of our war of choice in Iran will long outlast the Trump administration. After a longish setup, he observes,
The war showed off American technical and tactical prowess, but numerous weaknesses as well. America’s shortage of advanced munitions was known, but is nonetheless stunning, with more than a quarter of its stocks of certain key weapons having been consumed on both offense and defense in a short war in a secondary theater. America’s strategic performance was nothing short of appalling—its alienation of allies to the point that they refused to provide even passive support to operations, its failure to protect Gulf States, its rough handling of an ally that had fought alongside it, its seeming lack of options to preclude or respond swiftly to Iranian operations in the strait were all signs of ineptitude and even incompetence. Barbaric bluster about ending Iranian civilization made matters worse.
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The geopolitical consequences of this war will be immense. No one can go back to believing that oil supplies passing through the Strait of Hormuz are reliably secure. The Arab Gulf States will have to choose between straightforward appeasement of Iran and submission to many of its wishes—the choice apparently made by Qatar and possibly Oman—and a more mixed posture of bribes and armament such as that of the United Arab Emirates. Other parties are engaging as well, most notably Ukraine, which may find some of its biggest customers for both defensive and offensive weaponry and command-and-control systems in the Gulf.
Most of that has seemed obvious for some time. But Cohen sees broader impacts:
For all militaries, the war confirms some of the great lessons of the Russia-Ukraine war: that it is much easier to deny access to or use of key terrain than to seize it; that there is an urgent need to shift to cheaper, mass-produced precision munitions for both offensive and defensive use; that numbers matter; that air supremacy—the kind of control the Allies exerted over Normandy beaches in 1944, for example—is a thing of the past, having been subverted by ballistic and cruise missiles as well as drones; that swift, smashing victories are usually chimeras of the political imagination; and, unfortunately, that indifference to the suffering of one’s own population and a readiness to inflict misery on an opponent’s civilians pay strategic dividends.
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Most of all, this war has demonstrated profound American weaknesses. The damage will not be undone when the Trump administration is gone, two and a half long years from now, because it is the American way of war itself that this conflict has called into question.
That way of war was a strategic and operational style relying on relatively small, extremely advanced forces that did not have mobilizational depth behind them—not people, not munitions, not platforms. It was predicated on having enough time to build up to confront an enemy, as was the case in both the Gulf and Iraq wars. It rested on secure bases near the enemy, which would suffer only attacks that could be easily parried. It assumed that the initiative would rest with the U.S., and that allies would play along, despite whatever doubts they might have. It underinvested in both active defenses (e.g. surface-to-air missiles) and passive defenses (e.g. hardened aircraft shelters). It reflected not only the errors of an unusually feckless administration, but the accumulation of poor decisions and inadequate or misdirected investments by the Pentagon and Congress, civilian and military leaders alike. It was caused only partly by the distractions of Afghanistan and Iraq, but resulted even more from decades of loose thinking and self-serving assumptions about the changing character of war.
What’s frustrating about all this is that, not only has most of this has been known for years, but we’ve done little about it despite our ostensible national security strategy going back to at least 2017—and arguably 2011—being built around a rising China is the single greatest threat. Granting that the political will is considerably less here than in a potential fight with a peer competitor, it’s concerning, indeed, that a fight against a relatively minor regional power put so much strain on our resources. While the recognition of the implications of mass-scale drone warfare is more recent, we’ve similarly done remarkably little about it.
