Tactical Success, Strategic Failure? Washington Walks the Path to Defeat in Iran (opens in new tab)

The US will either have a long and painful and ultimately unfruitful ground war, or will have to accept some of Iran's terms for a ceasefire which will leave Iran in a stronger geopolitical situation than before the war.

A third option is for the US to throw Israel under the bus and either cut military funding to them, or force them to contain themselves by treaty, join the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and so on, under that threat.

Since Israel have been goading for this war, spoiling any diplomacy (by killing the Iranian diplomats), and seem to have no intention of ceasing fire until Iran is completely fractured, I think they are the ones who need to be stopped.

Iran would perhaps re-agree to the terms and inspections they were previously under if Israel were also forced to submit. America would then re-establish it's authority in the region to some extent.

> And, unfortunately, if there is any strategic sense left in the Iranian regime, it now understands that having a nuclear weapon is no longer an optional hedge for its evil system’s survival and power. It is a strategic necessity. Iran has effectively established itself as gatekeeper of the Strait of Hormuz — a fundamentally different status quo than existed before the conflict, giving Tehran a durable form of economic leverage it did not previously possess.

I'd feel remiss not to point out that we had all of the objectives in Iraq completed within 3 weeks - it was the nation building cleanup that became the quagmire.

After 6 weeks in Iran we are worse off than we started and the long term implications are so much worse.

By all accounts the JCPOA was a success and working effectively when Trump cancelling it in 2018. We're here because he felt the need to solve the problem of his own making.

When I first went to Afghanistan in 2008, I was probably the most hated soldier by coalition troops in the whole country.

All I was tasked to do was sit in rooms and tents with a moleskin and my little Japanese ball pen workhorse, writing down stuff while coalition commanders were talking about plans, hyping each other up and bragging about who had more tactical success than their counterparts.

Nobody knew who I was or what I did in their strategic meetings. I just sat there, no eye contact, no yeah or mehs, no comments, no interruptions. Whenever they were done with the meeting, I got up, thanked them for their time, wished them a good day and went outside to sit down somewhere else, thinking some more, and then I went to work.

Back in the day, the coalition had a problem with having too many hammers but not a lot of scalpels. For a hammer, after a while, everything starts looking like a nail, and with air superiority, the hammering went fast and hit hard. So it was a quick way to make a name for themselves and collect medals and a pay raise.

Most of the time, those tactical decisions resulted in short and long-term strategic failure.

For example, it was easy to kill a Taliban commander with an airstrike, but the result was that the twenty or so commanders he had overseen and kept in check went on a spree of violence against locals and coalition troops alike in pursuit of the succession of their predecessor.

So someone very smart in the upper echelons of the coalition decided to implement the tenth man rule.

It basically said if nine men look at the same information and arrive at the exact same conclusion, it is the duty of the tenth man to disagree. No matter how improbable it may seem, the tenth man has to start digging with the assumption that the other nine are wrong.

8/10 times, I did find those short or long-term strategic errors in the planned tactical operations, and whenever I did, everyone who was with me in the room that day had to prove why I am wrong and their approach is right. 9/10 times they couldn’t.

You can imagine those people all have giant egos and do not like it if someone outsmarts them, so they got rid of me by the end of 2009.

Officially, I was pulled to sit in more boring rooms with boring people.

Inofficially, I was told by a General that commanders were about to revolt because I was undermining their morale and they would often question themselves and their planning, instead of acting quickly and decisively, which would slow down their "efficiency" and the efficiency of the campaign.

When you look at the timeline this article showcases and think about that the inner circle of the President got replaced by yes men and a Secretary that wants a more deadly and less "woke" force that simply does what the Commander-in-Chief tells them without thinking for themselves, I wonder if the current situation the US has maneuvered itself into is because of the complete absence of soldiers that do what I did 18 years ago.

Outsourcing the strategic thinking process to a technology that is wrong 35% of the time by design is maybe the biggest strategic long-term failure the US military ever did. I see why this is necessary because replacing competent minds with loyalists above else makes this a viable approach.

Dumbing down the US Military and every position that has access to the President that could intervene stupidity looks less and less like an unintended consequence of the Secretary’s "rebuilding" of the military and more like an intended goal.

In my humble opinion, this doesn’t serve the American people nor the good men and women that serve their country and whose life is relying on people taking the time and effort to dig in with the assumption that everyone in the room, including a President, is wrong.

I’m retired, so all I can do now is point my fingers at idiots and tell you guys, look at this idiot and what he is doing.

But I no longer have access to rooms where big decisions are made and rely on your ability to make good decisions who you give the power to annihilate whole continents and whom not just like the rest of the normal people out there.

We live in interesting times.

Iran just needed to survive. There is no expectation for it to win against the nuclear super powers. It's a wonder it survived even for this long.

Is it tactical success though?

Conflating K:D ratio with strategic success typical fallacy, but if Iran game plan is to take hits while hitting back then so far US inability to neutralize/suppress Iranian fires also tactical failure. US can glass 10000s targets but if adversary built to take punches and remain operational (and still down planes), then US tactically failing if goal is knockout/haymaker.

So far US+co generated like 20% of sorties vs Iran than Iraq. We can charitably assume 100% the effectiveness since 100% precision munitions (vs many more hardened targets). But Iran also 5x larger than Iraq. So far it took deploying like 50% of active fleet, and drawing down 25%+ of high end munitions, who knows how much high end interceptors... losing regional basing. Iran still being able to punch back and attrite US air at frankly unsustainable rates = the reality is on paper US may not even have the high-end munition stockpile to tactically defeat Iran in detail without being utterly strategically depleted vs peer adversaries 50x larger (PRC).

Hence TACO threatened to end civilization, because there aren't enough munitions to destroy Iranian MIC, but there's enough to destroy power plants / go counter-value. Or settling for reverse blockade since discretionary magazine depth can sustain outside of standoff range where Iran can't hit back, but basically cedes region to Iranian missile complex.

Iran tactically "won" by allowing US to commit tactical and strategical seppuku by wasting so much fires for ineffective neutralization/suppression that another few weeks and it would be obvious US mathematically couldn't sustain let alone win the air game. TLDR Iran broken 3 of US fingers taking punches to the face, they're not going to come out looking pretty, but break a few more fingers, and US going to to look retarded/crippled for still punching.

It's probably not wise to say so on HN, but one possible strategic goal of this war was to distract from the Epstein files.

It seems to me that Trump's second term foreign policy is obsessed with dismantling the "shadow" oil market -- ending the system where China captures upside when sanctioned countries like Russia, Iran, and Venezuela sell oil, in yuan to boot -- without losing face or deterrence. They have arguably been successful at that objective in Iran and Venezuela, and I forget what's going on with Russia, but you can see the administration working on that front too. (I say this as a Biden stan and someone who thinks the Iran war is bad chess and bad morals.)

The other place I'd push back on this article is its belief that America doesn't want to trim the grass in Iran every few years. We are pretty committed to Iran not having nukes and the American people seem to have liked this war and the earlier strike pretty well.

first time anyone has called loosing there big advantage a tactical success, Iran was bringing down top of the line stealth planes, no doubt with some help, but that new and very very highly sought capability, is bieng dialed in. China has publicly stated that the will be honoring there defence agreament with Iran for the sale of high end missles, anti aircraft and ship killers, within the next month, made previous to the current situation. And the "help is on the way" anouncement is continuing to have consequences, especialy after the tactical success of bombing schools full of little girls, hospitals, universities, bridges, and water supplies. Big guys, with big bombs, big help, big success.