Iran Is Finished

They Just Can't Admit It

So don’t hold your breath waiting . . . .

As we move into the third week of the war, so much is happening on so many different levels that even the most intelligent and thoughtful commentators are having difficulties. So I’m going to begin this by pointing out some basics, and then try to clear up some misunderstandings. Unfortunately, that means jumping around. Sorry.

I’ve brought the first two of these up before, but they need to be repeated. The first is that the chief goal of the Israeli-American Coalition was and still is to eliminate Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal which was the source of their power, and their stated aim of going nuclear. The two are related, since without ballistic missiles, practically speaking, Tehran doesn’t have the ability to launch nuclear strikes.

I apologize for bringing this next part up, because it’s basically Planning 101. Your goals determine your objectives, since objectives can be quantified, are how you measure your success in meeting your goals. Achieving one goal can therefore involve a set of objectives, but those objectives are simply measurements of how close we are to achieving our goal.

Now as regards the goal of eliminating Tehran’s threat, there are a good half a dozen objectives involved—and probably more. Unfortunately, leaving aside the fundamental problem of making sure that achieving a measurable objective will actually move you towards your goal, in any given set of objectives, one set usually consists of objectives that can be accomplished simultaneously, one set consists of objectives that are sequential, and a third set is contingent,

I know, boring and halfway to being incomprehensible. So I’ll give examples.

So the initial air strikes had three objectives, the elimination of Iran’s air defense systems, decapitation of its leadership, and suppression of its ability to retaliate using drones and missiles.

So the remaining objectives consisted of objectives that depended on success in the first three, while another set consisted of objectives that were contingent not just on success in the first three, but on how Iran reacted.

Achieving the first two gave the coalition mastery of the air. Mastery as opposed to supremacy, although both allow your air strikes to operate freely over Iranian air space. The difference is relative.

But mastery allows you to divert more resources to elimination Iran’s offensive capabilities And the close you get to supremacy the more effective your elimination of your enemy’s offensive capabilities will be, since it means your fixed wing aircraft (including drones) can loiter over possible offensive threat nodes and destroy them one by one, It also enables you to bring in resources that can’t operate safely unless you have mastery, e.g., they’re slower, aren’t stealth.

So when the Coalition says that Iran has only about ten percent of his ballistic missile capabilities left, and less than 20 percent of its drone capabilities, that they’ve destroyed about 60 naval ships, including all four of their drone “carriers,” and sixteen mine layers. that they’re eliminated dozens of individuals directing Iran’s military command control structure, have destroyed the Iranian military installation on Kharg Island, and so forth, those are the objectives required to eliminate Iran’s ability to threaten both us and Iran’s neighbors.

The other complication is that the other coalition members have other objectives peculiar to them, although those all relate to the goal of eliminating Iran’s military threat.

So although given that Iran is a highly repressive totalitarian state, regime change, if it happens, is basically a possible byproduct, not a goal.

Success in those objectives eliminates the threat. Since the Iran regime is simply a much large version of its proxies, success there by definition creates the conditions for change. By that’s a possible byproduct. Hopefully a beneficial one, but to be blunt about it, it’s pretty far down the list. I bring this up, because I’m seeing a good deal of worry about the eventual outcome. That’s grossly premature.

But I understand the confusion, which I would argue goes back to Woodrow Wilson and his stated goal of “making the world safe for democracy,” which over the decades resulted in some extremely muddled thinking. It’s muddled because, among other reasons, if you can’t measure your progress towards achieving your goal by accomplishing objectives, the whole idea is unworkable.

And even in Saint Woodrow’s time, there was no agreed definition of “democracy.” Assuming one is even possible, and that’s ignoring the question of whether it’s the best form of government. Please note: I’m not saying it isn’t or that it can’t be, I’m simply pointing out that it’s not a goal that can be measured by a set of objectives.

But I definitely understand the confusion a good many people have, because for over a century leaders have been doing pretty much what Wilson did—regardless of their ideology or their motives.

And at the same time, the whole notion of planning, as I described it above, is equally suspect in the eyes of a good many people. I doubt there’s any rational system that humans can’t totally wreck, any noble idea that intellectuals can’t ruin, and certainly no action that contemporary journalists can’t distort beyond recognition.

A personal aside: I was not only in charge of university planning, but I wrote extensively about it. As the German poet Heinrich Heine observed, Experience is a great teacher, but the lessons are hard. That was definitely my experience, which I summaries in the last sentence of the paragraph above,

The Grand Delusion

Despite the failure of the regime’s military, the surviving leadership is behaving as though they they still have plenty of military assets, are still making wild threats.

I’m not surprised. In fact, we’ve seen this before. In the First Gulf War, the Hussein regime was insisting that it was winning right up until the bitter end. The main difference between then and now is that as of this writing, we’re not sure who’s actually in charge, or if anyone is. Mostly we have suppositions: Khamenei’s second son has succeeded him, assuming he’s actually alive, but supposedly the religious leaders (the “mullahs”) were/are opposed, so there’s possibly a split between the theocrats and the armed wing. Maybe, maybe not.

It definitely looks like what’s left of the mullah-ocracy has relocated to the city of Mashad, in the far northwest, and I don’t believe Khamenei’s supposed successor has made any appearances or statements. Moreover it doesn’t look like the men making such statements necessarily have any power. Maybe, maybe not.

And since the Coalition has no interest in taking over Iran by a ground invasion, my guess is that the public denials, delusions and wild threats emanating from the various spokesmen will continue—although the identities may very well change. Practically speaking, I believe there are four reasons.

The first is that this is basically the first time that a nation’s war making capabilities have been largely destroyed from the air. The failure to grasp this isn’t just restricted the whatever is left of Iran’s leadership. It’s difficult to grasp elsewhere. The airpower theorists of the 1920s argued that would happen. But the technology didn’t yet exist. It took roughly a century for it to be possible. And the weapons currently being used against Iran have really never been deployed on this scale.

In my last post I pointed out that the deployment of B52 heavy bombers was widely assumed to mean level flight bombing plastering the area with gravity bombs. But in reality the bombers were relying on stealth missiles capable of precision strikes that appeared to come out of nowhere. A good example of weapons that simply didn’t exist in earlier air campaigns.

And frankly, I think that a good many people making claims about the war assume that the word “stealth” is just another adjective, don’t really grasp that it means it’s almost completely invisible to radar.

Moreover, in previous wars, despite the claims made by the allied bomber barons, claims that were subsequently repeated over and over again by scribes and enthusiasts, Allied air attacks, although they destroyed whole cities, killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, didn’t accomplish the desired objective of destroying the military capabilities of Germany and Japan.

So anyone arguing on the basis of the history of aerial attacks from the 1930s right on through the start of this century would logically assume that the only way to “win” was by territorial conquest, i.e., a ground war.

Moreover, given the overwhelming emphasis on how a future war on a grand scale would involve nuclear weapons, the development of precision weapons using conventional explosives was largely ignored.

The second reason is that Tehran had purchased about five billion dollars of what they believed was the latest Chinese munitions: everything from anti-ship missiles to air defense systems. So they reasonably believed these weapons would work. So did everyone else.

But none of these things actually worked, Iran launched at least fifty of its supposedly devastating Chinese anti-ship missiles and didn’t hit a single American ship. Their Chinese built (and reverse engineered) air defense systems didn’t work either. We know none of this stuff worked as advertised, because if it had, we would have lost a good many ships and lots of aircraft.

The third factor is the regime’s wild claims about how well they were doing. You really have to watch this stuff because it’s totally fabricated. But I would argue that the leaders of totalitarian states tend to believe their own propaganda, just as oftentimes the heads of major corporations in the west do. After 1918, the British Prime Minister from 1916 on, Lloyd George, openly said the British military had lied to the government about how well they were doing.

If you’re interested in this topic, I wrote about it extensively in my books on the two European wars, and I explained how to a remarkable extent, the British and French high commands really believed what they were saying. So my guess is that we’re seeing the same situation here. As the man said on seeing his first giraffe, it can’t be true so it mustn’t be true.

My fourth point deserves a more elaborate explanation; first owing to its complexity, and second, the disastrous consequences of not grasping it.

Slow Metronomes

The phrase is borrowed from a sentence I lifted from the French combat veteran (of both world wars) Marc Bloch, who in writing about the French Army, observed that “at headquarters the metronomes were always too slow.” Bloch was, along with Lucien Febvre, one of the founders of the Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, and thus the founder of the annales school of history, which emphasized a methodology of research that in my view as a scholar has has produced some of the most significant historical studies done in the last century.

The following quotation from Francoise Barrett-Ducroq explains why:

Anyone who examines a whole social group patiently and systematically—not in the absence of theoretical conceptions, but without trying to protect such theories from the real facts and evidence—discovers an astonishing and contradictory histo­ry, a history made up of contrasts: of impudence and morality, cynicism and tender­ness, cruelty and generosity; a history, in short, amazingly like real life.

The quote is from one of the few annales studies available in English: Love in the Time of Victoria (London, 1991), originally published L’amour sous Victoria (Paris, 1989). The only other good example available in English that I know of is Francois Billacois on dueling.

Unfortunately the extremely important works on military history, notably Jean Norton Cru’s Temoin, has never been translated.

But back to metronomes.

Bloch’s comment is simply an easily understandable version of what in the 1970 was defined by the American air force officer John Boyd as the OODA loop. The acronym is for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. And Bloch got right to the point of the loop. If you can cycle through the loop more quickly than your opponent, you’ll most probably defeat them, regardless of their power.

In order to ensure a fast execution of the loop, militaries need to train the men conducting the actual operations to make decisions on their own. Armies with highly centralized command structures can’t react that quickly: by the time upper level commanders have, received the observations, moved from orientation to decisions, it’s too late. And that’s assuming the commander in question is actually receiving the observations and is willing to make decisions.

Bloch’s experiences fighting the Germans made him aware of the importance of quick reactions, and eventually other armies in the West followed suit, using Boyd’s loop. I should add that it’s an important explanation of Israel’s repeated defeats of their opponents, and why the Ukrainian War is still going on.

Moreover, since armies reflect their nation, countries with command driven economies, like the Soviets (and the Russians) and the Chinese simply can’t make decisions fast enough.

At this point, the American military is pretty good at executing this loop, which accounts for why the bizarre relationship between what the Iranian leaders are claiming and the reality of their situation.

What I mean by that is that most probably on day X they’re assuming they still have a fleet, can close the straights, but by the time they actually decide to do that—Y days later—they no longer have a fleet. And Y is a very small number—like four or five. And even assuming there’s a recognition that they no longer have a navy or an air force and so on, they’re thinking that they can still control the straight because of Kharg Island, Only to discover those don’t exist either.

They’re still planning a vast increase in missile strikes, but their missile inventory has largely been destroyed. Largely because the Coalition has severely degraded the Observation and Orientation part of the loop, which is obviously critical.

I should add here, for the sake of military history buffs, that great generals (Marlborough, Napoleon, Wellington, Grant) had a major advantage in this regard, as they could see the battle developing in front of them and react quickly to it. That’s by no means taking away from their genius at war: very few people have that ability, but it meant they could direct battles themselves.

So I imagine that the denial and the fantasies will continue, and be treated respectfully by the chattering monkeys of the west. All the planning in the world, coupled with success in reacting according to the OODA loop doesn’t alter human nature, and denial is incurable.

Now given the war is only entering its third week, it’s ridiculous to be talking about a general uprising or a government collapse, but still, I want to explain something about Iran that isn’t well understood.

The Myth of the “Iranian People”

Iran basically began as the Persian empire, and empires are composed of all sorts of different “peoples.” There are all sorts of confusions and misunderstandings there, probably traceable back to the stupidities of the nineteenth century, in which what Stevenson called the “more cultivated among the ignorant” babbled on about the such mythical entities as the “Slavic peoples,” and others assured us that war was now impossible because the “workers” of one country would never fight their fellows in another country

But leaving that aside, here’s the point.

In making it, I’m not going to cite any data, because after decades of the mullahs I’m dubious about any facts emerging from Iran. But we do know that the country is not like, say Japan, which is racially and culturally homogeneous. In addition to the Persians, it has large numbers of people of Turkish, Azeri, Kurdish, and Baloch extraction. That’s part one.

Then there’s the second part. That Iran has areas, or regions, where, although the inhabitants there have commonalities, linguistically and religiously, they’re fed up with the ruling theocrats. For example, take the southwestern province of Khuzestan. Its four million odd inhabitants are mostly Arabs, members of the Sunni sect of Islam.

But recently their tribal leaders issued a call for Iran to become a free federated republic, castigated the current regime. If that’s the sentiment there, you can imagine how all the millions of people who constitute the other groups feel.

The Turks and the Azeris also have countries (Turkey and Azerbaijan). The others don’t, but they’d very much like to have one (the Kurds and the Balochs).

In other words, instead of the mythical “uprising of the people” invented by the French left, we could see everything from relatively peaceful secessions to a collapse to a series of armed incursions to heaven only knows.

The problem with totalitarian states that rule through repression, is that when their inabilities get to a certain point, they implode.

Unfortunately, although it’s easy to point out the fallacies behind invented constructs like “people,” that doesn’t mean we can predict anything much. It’s like the response of a Hemingway character when he was asked how he went bankrupt: “Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.”