Although the conflict in Iran and the Strait of Hormuz is far from over, analysts are already rushing to declare what lessons should be learned from it. An emerging genre of security policy articles highlights the various logistical and tactical shortcomings of the U.S. operation against Iran: a lack of preparation for disruptions in oil and fertilizer shipping, insufficientmagazinedepth in precision munitions and interceptors, a general failure to prepareeffectively to counter cheap one-way attack drones, insufficient minesweepers, and so on.
These are useful lessons that may help the United States prepare for future conflicts, but they are not the fundamental cause of the country’s failure in the Strait of Hormuz. Even if some or all of these concerns had been addressed long before the conflict, it is hard to see how they might alter the Trump administration’s failure to achieve its initial war aims of regime change, the destruction of Iran’s long-range strike capability, or major alterations in Iranian policy toward nuclear weapons and regional proxies.
Although the conflict in Iran and the Strait of Hormuz is far from over, analysts are already rushing to declare what lessons should be learned from it. An emerging genre of security policy articles highlights the various logistical and tactical shortcomings of the U.S. operation against Iran: a lack of preparation for disruptions in oil and fertilizer shipping, insufficientmagazinedepth in precision munitions and interceptors, a general failure to prepareeffectively to counter cheap one-way attack drones, insufficient minesweepers, and so on.
These are useful lessons that may help the United States prepare for future conflicts, but they are not the fundamental cause of the country’s failure in the Strait of Hormuz. Even if some or all of these concerns had been addressed long before the conflict, it is hard to see how they might alter the Trump administration’s failure to achieve its initial war aims of regime change, the destruction of Iran’s long-range strike capability, or major alterations in Iranian policy toward nuclear weapons and regional proxies.
While greater magazine depth and preparedness for oil shortages might have enabled a longer bombing campaign or a greater degree of economic pressure, that is no reason to suppose that seven months of bombing or blockade might achieve what nearly six months thus far have not. Strategic failure, leaving Iran with a freer hand to pursue nuclear ambitions, a far greater degree of control over the Strait of Hormuz, and consequently a greater degree of influence over the Gulf states now seems the most likely outcome of this military debacle.
The U.S. military remains remarkably capable, demonstrating even in this poorly conceived war technical capabilities that no other military can currently match, projecting military force more than 7,000 miles from American shores, and seizing control of Iran’s skies with the apparent casual ease the world has become accustomed to in America’s wars.
The resulting damage has been remarkably lopsided, with the United States suffering at least 18 dead and more than 600 wounded against Iranian losses that almost certainly number well into the thousands, though a precise total is not known. In short, even with failures of planning and logistics, the U.S. military has shown that it remains remarkably dangerous.
No amount of technical excellence, however, can make up for the strategic incompetence of demanding that the military accomplish the impossible. U.S. President Donald Trump has demanded of the military not one impossible task, but three, and then reacted with shocked anger when it has failed.
The first of these impossible tasks was the administration’s stated aim of achieving regime change without any ground operations. Achieving a strategic victory entirely through airpower has been the coveted aim of independent air forces around the world ever since Italian theorist Giulio Douhet predicted in 1921 that future wars could be won with bombers alone, even going so far as to suggest in 1928 that just 300 tons of bombs dropped on a mid-sized country could end a war in a month.
The thesis that wars can be won entirely from the air is now one of the most thoroughly tested in all of modern industrial war, and 40,000 tons of German bombs dropped on London during the Blitz merely hardened the British will to resist. The 2.5 million tons of bombs the allies dropped on Germany during World War II in return inflicted serious damage and imposed stark choices on Adolf Hitler’s regime, but they likewise did not force it to collapse and indeed seem to have reinforced public commitment to the war. The 8 million tons of bombs that the United States dropped during the Vietnam War likewise accomplished little and may even have been broadly counterproductive, serving to secure the civilian populace’s support for communist war aims while alienating the American public.
It may be impossible at any level of bombing short of nuclear use to collapse a regime from the air. The closest that any operation has ever come was the NATO campaign against Serbia under Slobodan Milosevic, but even there the bombs stopped dropping in June 1999, while Milosevic’s regime fell to mass demonstrations in October 2000.
The chances of the Iranian regime collapsing entirely through the application of airpower were slim to none, so the next impossible thing demanded of the U.S. military was to neutralize Iran’s ballistic missile and drone capacity, also entirely from the air. But this mission—disabling mobile launch capability with minimal ground forces—has also been tried repeatedly before and has also never succeeded.
In WWII, both American and British air forces made substantial efforts to shut down V-1 flying bomb and V-2 rocket production and launches through an extensive bombing campaign, codenamed Operation Crossbow, but they could not stop the launches. It was simply too easy to harden or conceal production and launch sites.
The advent of precision munitions has not changed this calculus, being offset by the emergence of mobile launch systems. Infamously, efforts to take out Iraqi Scud launchers from the air during the Gulf War were unable to produce even a single confirmed destruction. Israel likewise has spent two decades running extensive air operations over Gaza and southern Lebanon to prevent Hamas and Hezbollah rockets from being fired at Israeli territory, but only ground operations in both areas were able to silence the rockets.
Multiple coalitions of countries have attempted to silence Houthi missiles and drones fired from Yemen, yet the launches continue even now. Even with precision munitions, it does not seem possible, from the air alone, to destroy enough mobile launch systems, which can fire from concealment and then swiftly move into new locations, to end a drone or rocket campaign. As with regime collapse, stopping the rockets appears to require ground troops.
The Trump administration’s final fallback appears to be simply running nearly perfect missile defense over much of the Persian Gulf region to prevent Iran from damaging the infrastructure of the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, upon whose hospitality the U.S. military effort relies. Greater investment into cost-effective interception methods, such as those in use in Ukraine, and the deployment of more short-range air defense might well have enabled the U.S. military to intercept a greater percentage of Iranian attacks. Yet in an environment where drones and ballistic missiles remain much cheaper and quicker to produce than the means to intercept them, it was always likely that Iran would eventually saturate defense capacity in the region. One more impossible task could not rescue the failure of two others.
If the U.S. military required a wake-up call to the dangers and opportunities posed by drones, as well long-standing procurement problems for things like frigates, minesweepers, and hardened aircraft facilities, that call has been delivered. But this was not a war lost in the halls of the U.S. Defense Department; it was lost in the halls of the White House.
If Trump was unable to see the peril in demanding the U.S. military accomplish the impossible, it was the duty of his defense secretary to make him aware. Of course, Trump did not select an experienced and capable defense secretary, but a loyal toady, made only the more loyal by his manifest incompetence, in the form of Pete Hegseth.
Hegseth, in turn, has gone to great lengthsto purge the senior ranks of anyone likely to offer a contrary opinion. The U.S. officer corps has never exceled at delivering unwelcome news to political decision-makers, but Hegseth’s approach meant the Pentagon was never going to push back against presidential ineptitude. Reporting suggests that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan Caine, made a token effort to signal the difficulty before being drowned out by Hegseth’s boosterism.
All of this was predictable and indeed much of it waspredicted. Thus, while the immediate blame for the debacle in Iran attaches to Trump and his incompetent advisors, the ultimate blame must lie where no politician will admit it: with the voters. It was the choice of a plurality of American voters to return Trump, a man manifestly incompetent, manifestly incapable of absorbing unwelcome or contrary information, manifestly interested in surrounding himself with loyal yes-men, to the White House.
It turns out that electing the leader of the most powerful military on the planet is not the same as selecting the most entertaining host of a reality show. Reports about lessons learned are doubtless already being penned within the Pentagon. Yet as the strategic fallout, from elevated oil prices to depleted U.S. resources, of this predictable and disgraceful failure continue to mount, the question is whether the American voters have realized that no amount of military excellence is sufficient to insulate them from their own poor choices at the ballot box.