The debacle that Trump and Netanyahu have gotten their nations into
Cross-posted from Aurelien’s substack “Trying to understand the world”
Photo: Screen Grab
After last week’s excursion into culture and politics (and extra marks to those who spotted the title’s allusion to Joni Mitchell’s song about illusions) I’m afraid we’re back with strategy again this week. Now a couple of weeks ago, I published what I hoped would be my last essay on strategy for a while, taking Ukraine as a point of reference and describing the failure of politicians and pundits to even understand what they were seeing, let alone what it meant, or to grasp the very concept of attrition warfare. Little did I think, etc etc.
But the fact is that the flapping around the US/Israel attack on Iran—you can hardly call it a debate—has shown once again that even those who are supposed to understand these things don’t, and that decisions have been made in splendid isolation from current, or reasonably future, reality. So maybe it’s time, once more, to set out a few simple realities about strategy and what you need to implement it, as well as something about the curious, but quite foreseeable, type of asymmetric attrition warfare that it looks as if we are moving towards.
I’m not getting into issues such as numbers of missiles, technical characteristics of weapons systems and the like, which I leave to the better informed (though that hasn’t stopped the poorly informed from charging in with their own ideas.) And I’m going to steer clear of detailed comments on the politics of the region, because, although I am reasonably familiar with it I’m far from an expert, and I’ve never been to Iran. (Yes, I know, that hasn’t stopped others.) So I’m going to focus primarily on issues of principle and doctrine, illustrated by some historical examples, in an attempt to clarify what’s going on, what’s going wrong, and what the possible outcomes might be.
Any strategy handbook, any set of notes at a military Staff College, will tell you that to conduct a large-scale military operation you need basically three things:
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A clear idea of what you want to accomplish, expressed in such a form that, without ambiguity, you can say whether you have reached it or not. (Sometimes it’s called the “end-state.”) This is at the strategic level.
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A plan for a series of activities (military, but also diplomatic, political and economic) that, successfully pursued according to an overall programme, will get you to the end-state. This is the operational level, and historically the West, and especially the Anglo-Saxons, have not understood it very well.
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And finally, the necessary military, political, economic and other resources to enable you to actually carry out the operational level plan towards the end-state, without running out of resources or being stopped by developments you should have anticipated but didn’t.
I think it’s fairly clear that the current assault on Iran has no real idea of an end-state, nor does it seem to know how to get there. Whether it has the resources is, I suppose, a secondary consideration if the objective itself is not clear, but we’ll come back to that towards the end.
Things go wrong when one of more of these conditions is not met. I’m going to start by talking about the first, because it’s obviously fundamental, in some ways it’s the most difficult, and it’s generally the source of most of the other problems. If you don’t know where you want to go, after all, you’re most unlikely to get there. Yet this uncertainty is often disguised behind bluster about “winning the war,” “restoring stability,” or even “sending a message.” In reality, the test of a genuine strategic objective is that it is not necessary to ask “why are you doing this?” because that is evident from the way the objective is formulated. Now of course you can hope that the end-state will produce other desirable things in due course. Thus, the Allied military campaign against the Third Reich had the end-state of the destruction of the Wehrmacht and the Nazi regime, and the occupation of the country. That was the limit of the military task. Rebuilding the country, developing new political institutions and punishing the remaining Nazi leaders were all political tasks which military victory made possible, but which remained to be done by others. In addition, there is often a great deal of concurrent activity in related areas with its own dynamic, such as planning in 1945 for an occupation government. But the fundamental point remains: the military must be directed to make plans to achieve a political end-state whose purpose and nature are evident and can be objectively assessed.
Obviously, this doesn’t always happen. I’m going to choose a negative example which may surprise you, but which illustrates that we’re talking here about something which is inherent in any use of military forces for political objectives. As fighting broke out in Bosnia in 1992, and in an atmosphere of panic, uncertainty and propaganda, there were calls from all directions to “intervene” in order to “stop the violence.” Now “intervention” here was not a strategy or even a defined concept, but a slogan, and it meant nothing more than “do something.” It was impossible to define any realistic military task in Bosnia, even in theory, and various internal studies in European governments showed that, even to quieten down areas of conflict would require 100,000 troops deployed throughout the country, to be replaced by fresh forces after 4-6 months, in the service of some theoretical operational-level plan if and when it was ever defined. And such forces did not remotely exist in a Europe whose militaries were overwhelmingly still short-service conscripts. So none of the three criteria were met. But the media, many political lobbies and many actors at the UN were not prepared to leave it there, and so a UN force was eventually created.
To be called the UN Protection Force, or UNPROFOR, it had no obvious mission, but was given one of escorting humanitarian aid convoys, hence its name. There was no defined end-state, and no obvious purpose other than “doing something,” to make the international community feel better, so the first condition was not met. Never more than 20,000 strong, it was outmatched by the warring factions, and could not do anything proactively. It had no operational plan, but only an incessant rain of instructions and mandates from New York, which were generally impossible to fulfil, and frequently contradicted each other. Many of the clever ideas were contributed by states which were not providing troops. So the second criterion was not met. Finally, few of the national contingents were able to carry out their missions. Some had been sent purely to acquire experience or to earn money, and many were forbidden from engaging in combat. Depending on the task, perhaps a quarter or a third of the forces might be available for actual operations, at various levels of capability. So the third criterion was not met. In the circumstances it is amazing that UNPROFOR achieved as much as it did, leaving over 200 dead behind it in only three years.
The fact that a force was constituted and deployed without any real idea of what it was supposed to achieve is actually a lot more common than is often realised. History books are full of apparently stupid decisions to start wars or reinforce failure for reasons that appear insane in retrospect, as well as being generally divorced from the realities of the time. But this conceals a larger issue: such decisions are rarely taken for a single reason, and often result from the interaction of all sorts of different pressures and ambitions. They may also be based on partially or completely false understandings of the situation, or indeed just plain wish-fulfilment. Some are based on over-confidence, others on fear that waiting will make the position even worse. Let’s have a look at a few examples, and try to apply some of the insights to the current situation regarding Iran.
If I ever write another book on history, I’m going to call it The Alternative was Worse, to underline the point that most decisions about war and peace are sub-optimal, and often the consequences of a search for the least bad solution. One of the most discussed of such cases is the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941. When the first mass-market books on the War started to appear in the 1950s, popular historians writing them scratched their heads. What on earth were the Japanese thinking? How could they have gratuitously decided to attack a much bigger and more potentially powerful nation? We understand better now, of course: the Japanese economy was close to collapse under sanctions, and there were only a few days supply of oil left in the country. But we also understand how much of the decision was related to internal politics between the Army and the Navy, and the risk of a military coup if the Japanese government looked like acceding to demands to leave Manchuria. When war games showed that the planned attack would probably fail, but might succeed, then mounting this attack seemed to be the least bad of a series of bad options.
A similar logic seems to have dominated the thinking of the Prussian General Staff in 1918. If surrender was unthinkable, then the probable defeat of an attempt to break through Allied lines and seize the Channel Ports was better than the certain defeat which would follow if nothing were done. Likewise, popular historians were incredulous that Hitler had declared war on the United States at the end of 1941. But Hitler assessed (correctly) that the United States was pretty much in the War anyway, and such a declaration would enable the German U-Boats to operate directly against US shipping. Anyway, the war in Russia would soon be over and Britain would be forced to come to terms well before the US could have any impact on the War. The position would be no worse, in other words, and might actually be better. And there are many other examples: we know that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 was not undertaken with much confidence of success, for example, it was just that the other options were worse. And coming more up to date, the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982 was a desperate manoeuvre by a deeply unpopular military government. The idea that the British would be able and willing to respond clearly never occurred to them, but for the British the very survival of Mrs Thatcher’s government was in the balance, so there was no choice.
Closely related are cases where countries are dragged into conflicts, or become more deeply embroiled in them, without ever having a strategic objective, or even rationale, or even necessarily taking a decision as such. This is also much more common than is generally realised, and often results from the impact of external crises. A classic is the Russian mobilisation against Austria-Hungary in 1914. The Russians had no desire for a war with Vienna at that point, but felt obliged to support their ally Serbia with a strong political gesture. Which meant, of course, that the Prussians, for whom Austria-Hungary was more a liability than an asset as an ally, felt they had to support them against Russian threats. And we know how that all finished. Seeking a protector and manipulating that protector into feeling obliged to take your side in a crisis is a trick as old as politics. And after a while, the tail starts to wag the dog. A classic case is Vietnam, where the US found itself exploited by a government in Saigon demonstrating Ukrainian levels of corruption, but felt obliged to support it and make excuses for it nonetheless, and to expend lives and treasure trying to keep it in power. The fact that Very Serious People with pipes and horn-rimmed glasses subsequently produced clever intellectual justifications for the US having got its fingers in the Vietnamese wringer doesn’t make Washington’s conduct any more far-sighted or rational. Indeed, a major feature of the Cold War was Superpower support of thoroughly nasty individuals and regimes for whom they then had to make allowances and elaborate apologias, often for strictly short-term tactical reasons.
I strongly suspect, though I can’t prove, that something like this happened with the Saudi bombing of Yemen. The Saudi Air Force was once described to me as “a flying club for Princes.” It was not taken seriously as a military force, but was an illustration of the historic bargain by which the Saudis bought foreign military equipment to ensure both the presence of support personnel in their country, effectively as hostages, and also that the nations supplying equipment would feel bound to come to their assistance in crisis.The idea of the country flexing its muscles aggressively in this way must have alarmed the US, but they were so deeply committed already that they couldn’t back out. It’s quite likely, therefore, that the US helped the Saudis with mission planning and targeting because the consequences of not doing so would have been even worse.
Of course, nations may just be mistaken or confused about their strategic objectives. The French thought that if they lost the war in Algeria they would open the way to a Soviet invasion of Europe from the South. They and the British thought that the Suez operation was the only way of preventing Nasser from setting the whole of North Africa on fire. Likewise, in 2022, some pundits argued, quite seriously, that if the West did not send arms to Ukraine, then China would be “emboldened” to take Taiwan, or something. US intentions for the future of Iraq after the 2003 invasion were effectively an exercise in unrestrained normative fantasy. By contrast the international community’s longer-term objectives for Afghanistan were detailed and precise—the creation of a western-style paradise, from the documents I saw—but with no indication of how, or even why, this state of affairs should ever come about. They were, once more, an exercise in fantasy, rather like world-building in a work of fiction..
Paradoxically, the fact that many of these “rationales” are so incoherent, fantastic, incomplete and even internally contradictory actually makes launching military adventures easier. For example, not everybody in France was afraid of a Soviet invasion from an independent Algeria, but it was one of a series of overlapping and reinforcing ideas which enabled a disastrous policy to be pursued for so long: had there been one single rationale, the war would not have dragged on so long. It’s obvious that the current US/Israeli assault on Iran is a good case of this. It’s not so much that strategic objectives seem to change daily in Washington, as that there are a whole host of different motivations, some mutually contradictory, held by different people who go before the cameras on different occasions to say different things. All they have in common is a vague conviction that Iran should be attacked. And it’s a classic error of pundits to imagine that because many different actors in a national capital publicly support something, there is therefore a united policy, let alone an agreed plan. In many cases, vague but impressive-sounding strategic soundbites are all they can agree on, and they differ violently about everything else.
In the case of Iran, it’s fairly clear that the US Establishment never has forgiven, and never will forgive, the humiliation of the fall of the Shah and the occupation of the US Embassy. (Mr Trump’s own statements make it clear he shares this view.) On the other hand, it’s difficult for most people to say this out loud, so various constituencies in Washington and their foreign cheerleaders give different and often conflicting rationales, some of which they genuinely believe, at least up to a point. So far as I can see, there are “cooler heads” in the sense of those who think a military campaign isn’t the best way to destroy Iran, but few who actually advocate learning to live with it. Thus, sudden changes in announced “objectives,” simply mean that another way of punishing Iran has come into favour or fashion. Linked to this, of course, is a profound, willed, ignorance about the country itself and its internal politics. And what is interesting is that this ignorance is not new: it dates from generations ago. We know this because few subjects in modern history have been more intensively studied than the failure of the US to anticipate the fall of the Shah in 1978 and his replacement by an Islamic regime. It’s clear that this failure was total: few US diplomats spoke Farsi, and they mixed overwhelmingly with the westernised elite who supported the Shah, ignoring the opinion of the street. In some ways we are seeing a similar process now but in reverse, as critics of the regime, mostly secular liberals, are deferred to by the West. For that matter, the whole question abut the degree of “popular support” for the current regime seems to me wrongly formulated, and perhaps even meaningless, since it appears to take no account of the specificities of the situation in the country.
Thus, the decision to attack Iran has deep historic roots, at least in the case of the US (I don’t know enough about Israel to judge.) Mr Trump seems to be riding some kind of massive escalatory wave, partly of his own creation, partly the result of long and bitter resentment, and he cannot get off. There came an observable moment a couple of weeks ago when it was obvious that war was inevitable: not because it was sensible, not because there were no alternatives, not because it had a high prospect of success, and not because its consequences could be reliably anticipated, but because going back was by then impossible. Mr Trump caught himself in a trap partly of his own devising, and can’t get out. All he can do, as so many have before him, is to plunge ever onwards, hoping for a miracle.
The second criterion, you will recall, is some kind of a plan for a series of actions that together will lead to the goal you are after. Now for this you have to have a definable goal, as we have seen, but there also has to be some transmission mechanism by which these actions should, or at least could, lead to this outcome that you want. As I’ve suggested many times in the case of Ukraine, this often just amounts to assuming “stuff happens,” after which, by some magical process, the objective (in that case the fall of the current political system in Russia) is attained. In the case of Iraq, almost no thought seems to have been given to the “how” of the desired transition towards a liberal democratic western state: it was just assumed to be going to happen. In Afghanistan, by contrast, and because of the involvement of large numbers of donors and NGOs there were very detailed assumptions about future progress, divided into distinct Phases. The problem was, when you looked at the Phases, they had no necessary or causative connection with each other, and there was no reason to suppose that one Phase (“defeat the Taliban”) would lead to the next (“establish western-style institutions and the rule of law”) automatically, or even at all. The same was true of Bosnia. For thirty years now, after Phase 1—the end of the fighting—we have been stuck in Phase 2, the attempt to create a multi-ethnic western-style state, with multi-ethnic political parties. But since nobody much in Bosnia with power wants those outcomes (though the West listens to the few who do), we are stuck there and, on recent showing, we seem to be sliding backwards again.
This way of thinking—which is also found in post-crisis doctrine and plans for national reconstruction—does actually have a fairly specific origin, in what is known as Modernisation Theory. This began in the 1950s and 1960s with the belief that economic growth and modernisation would produce democratic, rational, secular political systems. I’ve discussed the Theory and its influence and limitations elsewhere. For our purposes here, what’s important is that it got a new shot in the arm from the end of the Cold War, the writings of Fukuyama, and the apparent move of the new Russia towards a western model, and became the dominant, if generally unarticulated, belief in western capitals about how all societies develop.
It’s worth pointing out that, a couple of generations ago, there seemed to be at least some evidence to support the belief. In the Middle East, for example, modernisation began during the brief period of western colonialism after 1919, with social changes, including in the position of women, a massive expansion of education, an opening to the outside world in the teaching of English and French, and the development of western-style political parties among other things. And indeed from the beginnings of independence in the region in the 1940s, we saw the arrival of at least superficially modern, secular states with some hopes for the growth of genuine democratic systems. There were, of course, reactionaries and traditionalists who might seek to prevent such developments, but they could be faced down, and anyway were on the wrong side of history.
This was the set of assumptions into which the 1978/79 Iran crisis reversed uninvited. Iran was seen at that point as a classic case of successful modernisation, propelled towards the certain teleological future by a stern but respected Head of State, opposed only by some obscurantists with long beards. The complete failure to anticipate not simply the degree of resistance to the Shah’s White Revolution, but the influence and organisation of the Shia religious establishment, remains like a buried childhood trauma in the collective unconscious of the western political class even today. Recall that, at that time, religion was barely a force in western politics. Even in countries like France and Italy where the Church had been politically active, it was now in full retreat before the forces of secularism. In other western countries, notably Britain, it had just degenerated into an institution of gutless humanism, scarcely ever mentioning religion as such. (I recall a Methodist preacher earlier in the decade who had evidently read Marcuse, trying to start a conversation on Repressive Tolerance.) Muslim communities of the time in the West were smaller and largely un-radicalised. Political Islam was the province of a few specialist scholars.
So it’s not surprising that the French, with the support of the US and perhaps others, thought it would be a neat idea to send the Ayatollah Khomeini back from his French exile to Tehran, to calm the situation after the departure of the Shah and to help prevent anti-western forces seizing control of the country. The West, of course, had no idea how to understand Khomeini and his role and influence in Iran. Available potential models included the Pope, Martin Luther King and even Gandhi. The idea that he could be a wily operator with a political agenda and a following of millions was beyond anything that the West could imagine, and even now, that decision and its consequences constitute a painful unhealed scar on the collective psyche of western decision-makers. By a wearily-familiar progression, we blame the Iranians for the consequences of our own decisions, and the repercussions that we should have foreseen, but didn’t, which is one reason why we hate them so much.
It’s not just Iran, either. Incoherent ideas derived from Modernisation Theory help to explain the disastrous failure in Iraq: left to themselves, and with the evil Saddam removed, the Iraqis would move rapidly along the path to a modern liberal democratic market economy, because that was the destiny of all societies. Religious forces were so yesterday, and thus could be discounted. Likewise, the arrival of the Islamic State first in Iraq and then in Syria was such a shock because the very idea of religion, not just as a political mobilising factor but as a complete and unchallengeable guide to life, had been unknown in the West since the seventeenth century. (Ironically, the theoreticians of the Islamic State thought that their model was extremely modern, normative and post-nationalist, though not exactly in the sense that Brussels would use these terms: but that’s a subject for another day.)
More widely, and to conclude the second point, you cannot evolve an operational plan unless you know how the pieces of the society you are confronting fit together, and the degree to which power resides in any one area. Even in the case of a strictly military campaign, and absent the Carthaginian option, someone has to actually take a decision to surrender. In World War 2, the British clung for a long time to the idea that bombing would make the German people so desperate that they would at least refuse to go to work, and ideally cooperate to bring the Nazi government down and force surrender. However, there was no transmission mechanism by which the German people could make their views known, even had they wanted to surrender ( to the Russians as well, of course.) But there was the Gestapo. The residual influence of Modernisation Theory even today is such that western leaders and the media assume that every country is full of People Like Us standing ready to take over the reins of government, and that by contrast if a country is run by People Not Like Us, then the vast majority of the population must be waiting for Us to overthrow the government for them. And yes, it’s actually as dumb as that.
The West has been very bad at understanding the strength and weakness of different regimes, sometimes because it demonises those individuals it has heard of. For years, the West tried to get rid of Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian leader, by putting money and effort behind his squabbling political opponents, and every time he won. When eventually the amputation of Kosovo resulted in him losing the 2000 election and being overthrown, the West congratulated itself and breathlessly awaited the pro-western moderate who would take his place. They got Vojislav Kostunica, who thought Milosevic was a wimp, as well as a very angry Serb population. We also fail to distinguish between personal regimes, like Assad’s Syria or Gaddafi’s Libya, where the removal of the leader throws everything into chaos, and institutional regimes like those of Egypt or Algeria which just carry on. When Robert Mugabe died, people thought that Zimbabwe would change radically: it didn’t, because he was only part of the ZANU-PF power structure. When the Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame dies, the country may well come apart, because he has murdered not only his enemies but most of his friends as well. So we can see the fundamental, and typical, US error in assuming that the Iranian regime was fragile, that removal of a small number of its leaders would bring the system down, and that People Like Us were ready to take over.
The third criterion, having the necessary resources, may seem obvious: look at all those shiny aircraft and ships. But think back to my earlier essay where I talked about attrition. The most important thing to understand with conflicts such as that in progress is that victory means different things to different countries. The question “will the US or Iran win,” is, strictly speaking, meaningless, because wars are not football matches. The only relevant criterion is whether a country achieves the victory criteria it has set for itself or not. It’s possible that both sides will “win” in this conflict, if US objectives are retrospectively dialled down to just hurting Iran. But the fact remains that the two sides are trying to do quite different things. The US is, I think, fundamentally trying to destroy Iran and finally expunge the shame of 1979, although it doesn’t want to say this publicly, and so resorts to articulating all sorts of conflicting interim objectives. The Iranians want to survive, certainly, but they also want to drive the US out of the Gulf, and dominate the region strategically. The US objective is obviously unachievable, without the (theoretical) use of nuclear weapons which would destroy the entire region: no amount of damage inflicted by aircraft and missiles can “destroy” a country, and anything less would be psychologically unsatisfying, and just lead to more violence later.
But there’s more to attrition than that, of course, as Clausewitz spent some time discussing. And the fact that the sides will have asymmetric objectives and victory conditions means that simple attrition-based comparisons can be misleading. The easiest way to look at attrition in cases like Iran is through the lens of the attrition of relative capability to achieve objectives. That is, US (and Israeli) objectives require certain capabilities to be preserved at a usable level, whereas Iranian objectives require the preservation of a substantially different set. Whoever destroys the most aircraft or, within reason, the most missiles, will not necessarily be the “winner.” Likewise, money is not always a factor. It may be true that it takes a million-dollar interceptor to destroy a drone costing a fraction of that price, but it’s also irrelevant, unless one side is resource-constrained to the point that it cannot afford to buy any more interceptors. And that is clearly not the case. We have become so obsessed with financial calculations that we forget that the real constraints on war-making are not financial, but very practical. Thus, the first reaction to shortages of raw materials is to say “prices will go up;” Well, yes, but the real issue is there won’t be as much raw materials, and some customers, including the military, will have to go without. Drones are not just cheaper, they are massively easier and quicker to construct than interceptors, and require much less in the way of rare and expensive components and materials, some of which are increasingly difficult to source. Yet on the other hand, for very practical reasons the US cannot simply switch to constructing and using drones, even if it could overnight develop a doctrine for them.
So in effect, to “win” (or more precisely to avoid losing) the Iranians need to preserve enough missiles and the capacity to launch them to drive the US out of the Gulf, and to retain at least a limited system for command and control, as well as an acceptable level of political control of the country. The US on the other hand has to retain a capability including: stopping the vast majority of drones, both now and those to be manufactured, maintaining large forces in the region for at least a period of months, protecting those forces against attack, ensuring that casualties are kept to an absolute minimum, replacing personnel at the end of their tours with equally-skilled surrogates, replenishing ships with everything from fuel and ammunition to toilet paper, repairing ship systems that go wrong, having a safe and effective system for handling casualties and even ordinary illnesses, keeping complex and expensive aircraft flying in difficult conditions, resting and rotating pilots and ground-crew, keeping adequate supplies of complex and expensive spares and ordnance, keeping radars and ISR equipment functional, and of course ensuring that political support for the War remains as high as possible. Et cetera. (None of this means the US will “win” of course, just that it must meet at least these minimum criteria to avoid losing. And various types and combinations of attrition could ruin any chances of success entirely)
But behind these minimum requirements that must be protected against attrition are a whole host of other requirements that the US has little control over. A large percentage of necessary raw materials and key ingredients such as silicon chips are sourced from countries that view the US with disfavour. In reality, even the provision of basic necessities such as food, consumables and spare parts cannot be guaranteed, not least because of the chaos that the War itself has created. Beyond a certain point, complex equipment cannot be repaired in the field, or anywhere near it. Where and how could the US transport a non-flying aircraft for deep repairs that would not risk its attack and destruction? And how many could it manage and how long would it take?
It’s been said correctly that US forces, like those of most western powers, are optimised for small, short wars where air superiority can be assumed. But as I pointed out before, virtually all wars are attritional in some sense, and it turns out that even “short” wars (days, weeks, who knows?) are subject to attrition of different sorts very quickly. This is less attrition of the political and financial base, than the very tangible hard limits brought to you by all these clever people who outsourced and globalised everything, forgetting that one of the basic things you need in any military (or any complex system for that matter) is redundancy. Remember that? It seems likely that the West has already attrited away its capability to conduct serious operations for more than a week tor two, and the overall position is getting worse, not better, as capabilities destroyed in Iran will not be replaceable quickly, and perhaps not at all.
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