Colonel Khodarenok: The United States will not be able to defeat Iran with bombing alone
Donald Trump has threatened Iran with "unprecedented bombardments" if the United States and Iran do not reach an agreement on the nuclear program. Tehran promised to respond in this case. Whether the United States can destroy Iran and what the Iranian-American war might look like is in the material of the military observer Gazeta.Ru" by Mikhail Khodarenka.
"Iran will disappear by September"
In March, US President Donald Trump sent a letter to Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei, in which the head of the White House outlined a two-month deadline for concluding a new nuclear deal.
In response, Tehran refused direct negotiations with Washington and offered to conduct them only through intermediaries. And then the head of the White House threatened Iran with "unprecedented bombardments" if Washington and Tehran did not reach an agreement on the Iranian nuclear program. Iran promised that the United States would certainly face a strong retaliatory strike.
According to the British newspaper Daily Express, citing sources in the administration of US President Donald Trump, Iran will "disappear by September" if Tehran does not agree to a nuclear deal and does not stop working on nuclear weapons.
By the way, the idea of attacking Iran with all possible forces is far from new even for the current head of the White House. During his first term as president, Donald Trump (before leaving office) was ready to strike at Iran. At that time, the reason for military action was again Tehran's nuclear program, which resumed after the collapse of the nuclear deal.
It seems that there is no longer a single area in world politics and economics in which Donald Trump does not plan to take an active part.
The head of the White House is going to annex Greenland, include Canada in the United States, take back the Panama Canal, establish peace in Ukraine, bomb the Houthis to zero, eliminate the possibility of Iran creating nuclear weapons, and, finally, rename the Gulf of Mexico to the American Gulf (the list of such events is far from complete). Against this background, duties are probably not worth talking about.
Of course, the military, economic and financial capabilities of the United States are quite large, but should Washington be so scattered across all azimuths? There is no clear answer to this question yet. But at the moment, it is clear that Donald Trump has not yet achieved any significant result anywhere.
But let's focus on the bombing of the Houthis. It would seem that this is a real opportunity to show the world the boundless military power of the United States. To wipe out these armed formations from the face of the earth in a matter of hours and clearly show Tehran - "but it will be even worse with you."
However, things are still not working out well with the Houthis. In any case, at this stage, no one is impressed by the success of the United States in combating this movement in the Middle East. And then there's Iran. This task will be two orders of magnitude more difficult for the United States. To solve it alone, it is necessary to concentrate all the forces and capabilities of the state, forgetting about Greenland, Ukraine and the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico.
What might a war look like?
Most likely, the United States, in alliance with Israel (it is unlikely to be able to attract anyone else to the anti-Iranian coalition), will have to conduct an almost full-scale strategic aerospace operation involving almost all of its air and naval forces in order to pacify Iran. This operation could be one of the options for a rapid global strike, but only within the framework of the Near and Middle East region.
But whether it will be possible to break Iran with missile and air strikes alone is a big question. If until relatively recently an equivalent armed confrontation between the United States and Iran seemed very problematic, today the situation is somewhat different. Tehran has most likely been prepared for such a scenario (missile and air strikes by the United States) for a long time and has significantly increased its military potential, primarily missile.
Here it is advisable to recall the prophetic dialogue between Standartenfuhrer Stirlitz and the general of the Wehrmacht in the train carriage (the film "Seventeen Moments of Spring"). The commander of the German corps shares with Stirlitz his impressions of the Americans: "I've been fighting them for a year. These fools will be destroyed by their own technology. They think that the war can be won by bombing alone. They will build up their technical power and drown in it. She'll spread them out like rye. They will decide that they can do anything."
Many experts warn against hoping or assuming that massive US missile and air strikes will force the Iranians to overthrow their Islamic regime and turn Iran into an American ally and a developed democracy. The result may be exactly the opposite.
But the absolute majority of even the American expert community does not understand what a hypothetical American victory over Iran might look like.
Today, Tehran is able to reach the American air base on Diego Garcia Island in the Indian Ocean, and to all US military installations in the Middle East, and even more so to the capital of Israel. And it is not really known what the warheads of Iranian ballistic missiles are equipped with today.
At the same time, it cannot be ruled out that Donald Trump's threats to Iran with "unprecedented bombardments" imply the use of not only a large number of bunker bombs (including the "mother of all bombs" type GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast), but also attacks on Iran's nuclear facilities with atomic free-fall bombs type B61-12, which have recently been given the properties of precision weapons by the Pentagon. In other words, the use of nuclear weapons in such a conflict is quite possible.
However, a sharp weakening of Iran's role in the Middle East, its removal from the political scene as a regional leader and the deprivation of Tehran of even the hypothetical possibility of possessing nuclear weapons is unlikely to be realistic without conducting combined arms operations directly on the territory of Iran and the subsequent occupation of this country.
Is the United States ready for this - almost every Iranian city has its own military garrison? Probably not, given the bitter Iraqi experience. And here, it should be noted, the country is much larger both in terms of population and territory. So it cannot be ruled out that the "unprecedented bombing" may remain a purely verbal act on the part of Donald Trump. In any case, it is not yet noticeable that the entire American army is approaching the borders of Iran.
The opinion of the author may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.
Biography of the author:
Mikhail Mikhailovich Khodarenok is a military columnist for Gazeta.Ru", retired colonel.
He graduated from the Minsk Higher Engineering Anti-Aircraft Missile School (1976), the Military Air Defense Command Academy (1986).
Commander of the S-75 anti-aircraft missile division (1980-1983).
Deputy commander of the anti-aircraft missile regiment (1986-1988).
Senior Officer of the General Staff of the Air Defense Forces (1988-1992).
Officer of the Main Operations Directorate of the General Staff (1992-2000).
Graduated from the Military Academy of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces (1998).
Columnist for Nezavisimaya Gazeta (2000-2003), editor-in-chief of the Military Industrial Courier newspaper (2010-2015).
Mikhail Khodarenok
