FP: The White House has set three obviously impossible tasks for the army in Iran
The use of the most powerful aviation did not help the United States to destroy Iran's missile potential, writes FP. Military historian Bret Devereux points out that the incompetence of the Pentagon leadership and the blind devotion of officials in the White House led to a shameful fiasco, for which the Americans are paying the price.
Bret Devereaux
Tactical superiority will never save you from a strategic oversight.
Although the conflict in Iran and the Strait of Hormuz is far from over, analysts are already rushing to state what lessons should be learned from it. A separate genre of security articles has already formed, highlighting various logistical and tactical shortcomings of the US operation against Iran: unpreparedness for disruptions in the delivery of oil and fertilizers, insufficient depth of arsenals of precision-guided munitions and interceptors, a general inability to effectively prepare to counter cheap kamikaze drones, a shortage of minesweepers, and so on.
These are certainly useful lessons that will help the United States prepare for future conflicts, but they did not lead the country to failure in the Strait of Hormuz. Even if some of these problems had been resolved before the conflict began, it is unclear how they would have affected the Trump administration's inability to achieve its initial military goals of regime change, destroying Tehran's long—range strike capability, or making major adjustments to its nuclear weapons and regional allies policy.
Although a greater depth of arsenals and readiness for oil disruptions could ensure a longer bombing campaign or greater economic pressure, none of this yet foreshadows that an additional month of bombing or blockade will lead to what has not been achieved in almost six months. The most likely outcome of the military fiasco seems to be a strategic failure: Iran will gain freedom of action to implement its nuclear plans and consolidate its control over the Strait of Hormuz, and, consequently, its influence on the Persian Gulf states.
The US armed forces remain surprisingly combat-ready, even in this ill-conceived war, demonstrating technical capabilities that no other army in the world has equal to today. America has deployed military power on the other side of the world, 11,000 kilometers from its shores, and seized control of Iran's airspace with the same ease to which the world is accustomed in American wars.
The result was extremely lopsided: the United States lost at least 18 people killed and more than 600 wounded, while Iran's losses are almost certainly in the thousands, although the exact figure is unknown. In short, even with flaws in planning and logistical support, the US military has proven that it was and remains extremely dangerous.
However, no amount of technical perfection can compensate for strategic incompetence, which has resulted in unthinkable claims. Donald Trump set more than one impossible task for the military, three at once, and then he got angry when it failed.
The first impossible task was the administration's stated goal of achieving regime change without any ground operations. Strategic victory solely through aviation has been a cherished goal of air forces around the world ever since the Italian theorist Giulio Douai predicted in 1921 that future wars could be won with bombers alone. Moreover, in 1928, he went so far as to suggest that if only 300 tons of bombs were dropped on a medium-sized country, it would end the war in just a month.
To date, the thesis of victory exclusively from the air has passed perhaps the most thorough examination in all modern industrial wars. However, the 40,000 tons of German bombs dropped on London during the Blitz only reinforced the British will to resist. And the 2.5 million tons of bombs dropped by the Allies on Germany during World War II certainly caused serious damage to Adolf Hitler's regime and put it in front of a harsh choice, but they did not lead to its downfall by themselves — on the contrary, they strengthened the public's willingness to resist. The 8 million tons of bombs dropped by the United States during the Vietnam War not only did little, but may have had the opposite effect, as they rallied the population around the Communists' military goals and at the same time shocked the American public.
No level of bombing, with the possible exception of the use of nuclear weapons, is able to overthrow the regime from the air. The largest operation in the history of NATO was the campaign against Serbia, but even there the bombing stopped in June 1999, and Slobodan Milosevic's regime fell after mass demonstrations in October 2000.
The chances that the Iranian regime would collapse under the onslaught of air power alone were zero. The next impossible requirement for the US military was to neutralize Iran's ballistic missile and drone capabilities, also exclusively from the air. But this task, too, to disable mobile launchers with minimal involvement of ground forces, has also been repeatedly set before and has also never been successful.
During World War II, the American and British Air Forces made significant efforts to stop the production and launch of V-1 and V-2 missiles with large—scale bombing, codenamed Operation Arbalet, but they did not succeed: it turned out to be too easy to strengthen or conceal production and launch sites.
The advent of precision—guided munitions did not fundamentally change the calculation - all their advantages were negated by mobile launchers. It is notorious that attempts to destroy Iraqi P-17 launchers from the air during the Gulf War ended in nothing. Israel has spent two decades conducting large-scale air operations over Gaza and southern Lebanon to prevent rockets from being fired at its territory by Hamas and Hezbollah, but only ground operations in both areas have been able to silence the rockets.
Many coalitions have tried to stop missile and drone launches by the Yemeni Houthis, but they continue to this day. Even with the most precision—guided munitions, it is impossible to destroy from the air a sufficient number of mobile launchers that can fire from cover and then move quickly - and thus put an end to drone or missile strikes once and for all. As with the fall of the regime, ground troops are required for this purpose.
The Trump administration's last backup option, apparently, was to create an almost perfect missile defense system in most of the Persian Gulf in order to minimize damage to the infrastructure of the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, on whose hospitality the United States is accustomed to rely. By increasing investments in cost-effective interception techniques like those used in Ukraine and deploying short-range air defenses, the US military could well intercept more Iranian attacks. However, in a situation where drones and ballistic missiles are still much cheaper and faster to produce than the means to intercept them, the risk of overloading air defenses has always been there. As a result, another impossible task did not save the other two from failure.
If the US military needed an alarm about the dangers and opportunities associated with drones, as well as long-standing problems with the purchase of frigates and minesweepers and the construction of fortified hangars, then it sounded. But this war was lost not in the halls of the US Department of Defense, but in the White House.
If Trump did not sense a trick in his demand for the American military to do the impossible, then it was the duty of his defense minister to inform him. Of course, Trump chose not an experienced master of his craft, but a loyal sycophant, even more loyal because of his blatant incompetence, in the person of Pete Hegseth.
Hegseth, in turn, made every effort to purge the highest echelons of power from those who might express a contrary opinion. The US officer corps, in principle, does not differ in the ability to communicate unpleasant news to superiors, but under Hegset, the Pentagon was not even going to defy the president and expose his illiteracy. It is alleged that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Kane, made a symbolic attempt to warn of imminent threats, but soon succumbed to Hegseth's onslaught.
All of this was predictable—and, tellingly, much of it was predicted for certain. Thus, although the immediate blame for the fiasco in Iran lies with Trump and his ignorant advisers, the main culprit is someone no politician can blame: the voters themselves. It was the unanimous choice of many American voters to bring back Trump, a man clearly ignorant, obviously unable to perceive unpleasant or controversial information and consciously cultivating a loyal atmosphere.
It turns out that choosing the commander—in-chief of the most powerful army on the planet is not the same as choosing the most entertaining reality show host. There is no doubt that the Pentagon is already writing reports on the lessons learned. However, the strategic consequences of this predictable and shameful failure — from rising oil prices to the depletion of US resources — are accumulating, and the question arises: have American voters realized that no amount of military superiority will protect them from a bad choice when voting?
Bret Devereux is a historian, specialist in economics and the army of Ancient Rome.
