When it comes to military affairs, wars sometimes act as time portals. Waged in the present, they frequently reflect the powerful pull of the past. They may also provide glimpses of the future of conflict, but too often it is the past that dominates the present. The current war against Iran is no exception, for the long American love affair with strategic bombing – which the Israelis have eagerly imported from the US military, and which is now heavily complemented by missiles – remains on full display.
Whether the war reaches a dismal conclusion or even expands with ground operations in the next few days, its lessons are becoming clearer. It should be no surprise that bombing alone has failed to defang the Iranian military or upend the ruling regime. American strategic air campaigns have regularly failed to achieve their goals for over 75 years.
In the Korean War, Pyongyang and other cities were flattened, with hundreds of thousands of civilians killed; yet the conflict remained protracted on the ground, stalemated like the Western Front in World War I, ending in a bloody draw. Despite massive bombing for years, air power did just as little in Vietnam, proving unable to keep communist forces from taking over the whole country. Similarly, ‘shock and awe’ bombing in Iraq during the 2003 invasion of that sad land could not prevent the rise of a nettlesome insurgency that still flares up today in Anbar and other provinces. As to what US troops called ‘Big Daddy’ air power in Afghanistan, two decades of bombing from above failed against the Taliban who now rule in Kabul.
Given all this contrary experience with the applications of strategic air campaigns, from the 1950s to the 2020s, the pull of the past must be powerful indeed, strong enough to convince Pentagon leaders and President Trump that air attack alone could defeat Iran. Yet the spotty history of strategic air power is well known, so the decision to rely solely upon it in a conflict in one of the world’s most sensitive geostrategic locales is puzzling. Why would Trump choose to “roll the iron dice” of war, betting just on an air campaign?
Aside from speculation that he needed to mount a major diversion from the Epstein scandal, there are two other very plausible explanations for Trump’s choice to launch this “preventive” war when a policy of sustained diplomacy could clearly have continued to keep Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.
The first is that the habits of mind and institutional interests of US military leaders buttress views that are highly resistant to change, and most high-level officers are true believers in strategic air power. Those outside the military, as political historian and journalist Walter Millis noted in the wake of the Korean War, tend to be “overimpressed by the soldiers’ technical authority in their specialised field”. This leads to the persistence of what he went on to label “questionable platitudes sanctified by generations of military experts”. Trump may have fallen prey to this sort of reaffirmation of longstanding US military praxis.
A second explanation for the folly of believing in victory through air power over Iran is that Pentagon leaders and President Trump may have been persuaded by the exhortations of technologists who are now making the argument that AI is the new ingredient that can actually, finally, make air power work in the way that, a century ago, the American military iconoclast Billy Mitchell said that it could. Hugely powerful computational engines have done absolute wonders with regard to increasing the “throughput” – in terms of scale, scope, and tempo – of the air campaign against Iran. Yes, there are glitches, when old or inaccurate data are relied upon for targeting, as in the case of the deadly attack on a girls’ school at the outset of the war. But the Pentagonians consider this an outlier; instead, they focus on the rate of attacks, the percentage of named targets actually hit, and other measures of military throughput via a vastly speeded up ‘kill chain.’ What they fail to realise, though, is that strategic air power can always drop a lot of bombs, but even in the face of increasingly accurate bombs and missiles, a thinking enemy can disperse and disguise key assets and armaments in ways that allow continued resistance and the ability to mount counterblows.
The Iranians have proved this in the past month with responses, even after absorbing much pounding from US and Israeli forces, ranging from continuing small numbers of selective missile strikes to deployment of lots of drones and sea mines, and with dedicated light coastal forces at the ready. Taken together, these threaten to cause dire, global economic effects.
Even AI-assisted air power, by itself, will prove unable to deal with these resilient Iranian capabilities that, for their part, seem to be giving us a glimpse of that other portal that comes with wars – the one that looks to the future. In this case it may be pointing to something far less conventional that is looming up ahead. There are other hints of this development under way, as the tactical battlefields in Ukraine are now no-man’s-lands relentlessly scoured by drones, in use by both sides, able to hunt down small units, even individual soldiers. And in the Black Sea, so much wider than the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, the Ukrainian surface naval and aerial drone forces drove a large, conventional Russian fleet into hiding. Hopefully, someone in the Pentagon or the White House will point to these current examples from another war before stepping up any maritime, and perhaps amphibious, operations against the Iranians.
And it seems clear that Donald Trump, on some level, has grasped the fact that air power has not worked to achieve any of his aims. If he ends the war now, his declaration of victory will sound hollow. For the regime of the mullahs will remain intact. And the Iranians will be able to dig out their fissile material from under the rubble of their nuclear facilities – if they hadn’t dispersed it before the initial US-Israeli bombing in June of last year. The Iranian ability to reinstate a blockade, stopping the flow of a sizable portion of the world’s oil and natural gas supplies, will be well understood. Perhaps even by Americans.
Faced with this, what other options does Donald Trump have? He could opt to expand the bombing target lists to include even the desalinisation plants upon which Iranians are so dependent. But this would be an act of cruelty – and, in all likelihood, a chargeable war crime – against the very people he has said he hopes to liberate. Another option would be to acknowledge the failure of the strategic bombing campaign and embrace what the Pentagon is now preparing to undertake: amphibious and airborne operations with the Marines, paratroopers, and special operations forces. No doubt initial lodgements could be made by such operations; but the cost in casualties would be significant, and Iranian resistance would likely morph into guerrilla-style warfare until the Americans were convinced to leave.
In the meantime, were this much larger expansion of the scale of the war to occur, the global economic consequences of such escalation would likely prove to be catastrophic. Diplomatically, the Western alliance would be further, perhaps fatally, frayed; and Russo-Iranian ties would tighten in ways that would put an end to all efforts at peaceful statecraft with Tehran, a most dire consequence for the Arab states of the Gulf region.
As to the United States itself, the transformation of this intended short preventive war into a quagmire that brings economic pain and deepens social divisiveness would have crippling effects at home. Abroad, it would be another blow against the whole concept of there being an inspiring American role to play in the affairs of the world.
[Further reading: Trump’s dead-end war]
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