What the Iran War Has Taught Us
Lessons learned? Or lessons identified?
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.
[…]
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.
[…]
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.
I am not, ultimately, surprised that there has been a long-term reluctance to embrace and evaluate changing global conditions that predate Trump. Fighting the last war, and all that.
But it is nonetheless a massive indictment of governing by gut (Trump’s, in particular) and by purging experts that the clear lessons Ukraine was teaching right in front of our faces were ignored in the Iran calculation.
But, of course, Trump thinks this is the 19th cenutry and we are some imperial colossus that can trample its way across the globe.
The ways in which the man who claims to want to make America “great” and show the world how “hot” and “strong” we are keep doing the opposite. It is all quite nauseating.
The good news is that maybe China is reconsidering notions of militarily taking Taiwan.
Honestly, I think much of what Cohen writes is largely besides the point.
I’m not saying that cheap drone technology isn’t important, it’s just that we have known for close to three decades that both regime change and eliminating Iran’s nuclear program would not be possible without a full-scale ground invasion.
Absolutely nothing new there.
What has changed, though, is the amazing hubris of the sitting POTUS.
Going to war without any kind of back-up plan in case the Iranian leadership decided not to fold in a war that was quite literally existential to them. Can you believe it?
It’s not primarily drones or advances in area denial, it’s plain stupidity: a dealer in bullshit getting high on his own supply aided by an army of sycophants.
That’s it. Nothing more complicated than that.
Add to that, the US can’t quit the Middle East, each time a president attempts to pivot away from the ME to focus on other threats and even to conserve our power and focus on domestic issues, we allow ourselves to be sucked back in.
Our interests in the ME have been diminishing, but the commitment of our power hasn’t followed.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Agreed, these failures are widespread, not just the Trump administration and its allies.
The ticket out of the Middle East was (is!) a sustained withdrawal from oil and other fossil fuel, and Trump has pointed the US in the opposite direction – MORE dependence on oil and coal and less on solar and wind. Obviously the big money behind oil and coal, and the possibility of tapping into it for himself, dictates Trump’s position, and our whore-laden Congress goes along with it.
I have a quibble:
I think he has this wrong. I think air supremacy now, and this transformation has been rapid, consists of drones. It has not been subverted. It has been transformed.
The Soviet/Russian S300 system was the best SAM system the world knew. Nobody but the USAF even contemplated trying to breach it.
Ukraine has demolished it systematically with drones. I think it won’t be long until we have air defense drones or something similar to counter drones. This will rely on cheap, mass-produced components, since the real challenge is not shooting down a drone, per se, but doing it cheaply enough.
The US Military is on the back foot on this, and that isn’t really Trump’s fault (though I am happy to have people blame him). I don’t think anybody saw this transformation coming. But we need to embrace it and develop it just as fast as we can.
I presume that there are people in the military and in the government working on this, and telling Trump as little about it as possible, since I’m sure he wants more battleships and aircraft carriers and things that look awesome, not something that looks like the RC models that the nerds played with.
The U.S. security umbrella has lost an enormous amount of credibility by the failures to protect our own bases and assets in the Persian Gulf region, plus the failures to protect the Gulf Arab states. Now, the GCC are looking elsewhere for security help including not putting their eggs all in one basket.
I also think that the American and Russian failures to impose military will on others is a validation of the Post WWII international system. Focus on economic and trade development, emmesh societies into the interdependency of nations, raise the well-being of all people, and so forth. The pain of failure of the large, powerful nations (like US, Russia, China) has risen because more people around the world are, in the main, living better lives and culturally resist going backward. The feudal system is past; the age of empires, is past and there is no going back.
When Goliath loses to David, Goliath thinks: I need to grow bigger. The last war we won by being Goliath ended in 1945, and since then we’ve lost again and again and again to a string of Davids.
I don’t think we’re going to change much. I think it’s core character – we’re big and we’re rich, and having done what it took to become big and rich I don’t think we can turn away from it and find a new path. In fact, I don’t think there is a new path, the world has adjusted to our power and found ways to outplay us. All we really have, our big edge, is the power to annihilate. The American people don’t seem to be willing to go full Genghis and even if we were, there’s the ‘rich’ part of the equation. There’s no profit in annihilation.
Entropy. The center will not hold. The days of the superpower are over.
In relation to Hegsthet and El Taco, we learned that drunk and stupid is no way to go to war.
@Kathy:
We should’ve known that those two Deltas would lead us to failure. Hegseth was always going to be a screw-up, and proved it his first week on the job when trump told him to have the Army Corps of Engineers release water from their reservoirs in response to the SoCal wildfires. The Corps, despite knowing better, released at least two billions of gallons from two central CA dams with virtually no notice to locals. The predictable result was that the water flowed into a dry central CA lake bed, where it evaporated and soaked into the ground, and created a public hazard on the way because no one expected the river level to rise rapidly — local officials had to scramble to move equipment and notify people. But since the DoD does much more than management of water resources and navigable waterways, this guy can do enormous damage.
@Jay L. Gischer:
I would argue that drones do not create air supremacy. Drones make it difficult for even a superior air force to control the skies the way the US did, for example, in Iraq.
@Michael Reynolds:
I would say that distinction goes to Gulf War I.
Even Iraq II and Afghanistan showed us to be Goliaths. It was winning the post-war period in both cases that showed the weaknesses.
@Steven L. Taylor: I think you are making my point. If you control the drones, you control the airspace. You can deny larger aircraft that space, or enable them. But you have to ask, what task can a larger aircraft carry out that a drone can’t do and much more cheaply?
So far, nobody has figured out how to deny airspace to drones effectively, but they are making progress. This will come.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I would argue that no war is won til the aftermath is sorted. A victory is when you crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women.
Gulf 1 could barely be called a victory given that we had to turn right around and do Iraq, which was won, in the strategic sense by Iran and the Kurds, if anyone. What did we win? A couple of air bases? The US is just one of several factions with influence in Iraq. We tried to nail Jell-O to the wall and ended up with one nail and a bit of goo.
@Michael Reynolds:
Grenada!
It’s barely two years since Ukraine and Iran demonstrated the scope of the power of swarms of small UAVs. Closer to one, actually.
@Jay L. Gischer:
Someone posted here in the comments section a few weeks back about how the U.S. is working on advanced drone tech such as what he called a blade system that could be used to take down attacking drones. Stuff we did not provide to Putin or even Ukraine.
It sounds like this drone tech we have has not scaled up to the point where we could use it in the Iran War, just had timing in that we just don’t have enough of a stockpile built up to deploy these fancy drones to the Middle East.
That being said it is a bit embarrassing for America to not take lead in supplying drones to our allies who are turning to Ukraine who is locked in a fight with Russia.
I think China was a greater threat. No matter what Iran hawks keep saying, Iran wasn’t that big a threat, even after the JCPOA was torn up, until we picked the fight. It was an irritant and a dangerous nuisance, not a direct threat.
@Steven L. Taylor:
That sounds right. Drones have proliferated at lower altitudes, but I believe that aircraft operating at high speed and high altitude, including those deploying precision-guided munitions, are beyond the reach of the drones we’ve seen.
Lower and slower aircraft, such as several US Reaper drones and the Army Apache helicopter, have been shot down by what have been described as Iranian drones—although on the daily Warcast that he co-hosts, Malcolm Nance said they are loitering munitions that pursue a target once it’s been identified. This drone/munition costs tens of thousands, while a Reaper drone or Apache costs tens of millions (and of course the Apache has a crew).
The current state of aerial drone warfare really doesn’t sound much different than what was described in in a Popular Science piece on lasers vs drones ten years ago. In 2016, they said:
@Michael Reynolds:
By that definition there aren’t a heck of a lot of “victories” to be found in history. Btw, today is the 150th anniversary of the start of Sitting Bull’s non-victory of Little Big Horn.
@Jay L. Gischer:
The US military doesn’t do cheap. Someone commented a day or two ago about how agile the Ukrainians have been. I’m reminded of how much praise Mitt Romney got for managing the Salt lake City Olympics. The biggest part of the success was that it was explicitly a short term organization. There was little organization politics, no one building fiefdoms, nor seeking careers in the organization, little feuding over funding allocations, no undercutting rivals. Like the US military in WWII, the Big One, most participants wanted to get back to what they’d been doing. A few pilots, for instance, wanted to build careers in the Army Air Forces, but most went home. And then there was a huge fight over separating them out as the Air Force, which was mostly driven by fighting for appropriations. I expect most Ukrainians want this over so they can go back to what they were doing.
Building, say, a 13 billion dollar aircraft carrier creates funding, promotions, careers, cash flow, retirement jobs with contractors, happy lobbyists, and happy constituents in places with contractors. Building $100 drones, not so much.
The Ford cost another 5 billion in R&D, which they plan to spread over four ships. The initial R&D said don’t build another one similar to the Nimitz, make more, smaller carriers with turbine electric drive. The Navy funding bureaucracy said no, build them with nuclear power. (Of the 13 billion + 5 billion, I only had any control over about 50 million.)
@Steven L. Taylor: “Even Iraq II and Afghanistan showed us to be Goliaths. It was winning the post-war period in both cases that showed the weaknesses.”
Things like of ‘won the war but lost the peace’ or ‘post-war period’ for a period involving much fighting are misleading.
I liken it to you and your friend punching out a guy in a bar with a powerful, quick blows.
But then the fight *starts*.
@gVOR10: “I’m reminded of how much praise Mitt Romney got for managing the Salt lake City Olympics.”
Mitt also secure massive funding from the US government (not complaining).
He boasted about this at the time, then during his campaign boasted about doing it lean.
@Barry_D: Mitt Romney lied? Say it ain’t so.
Thanks to Trump, people forget what a lying sack of spit Romney was.