When it comes to military affairs, wars sometimes act as time portals. Realized in the present, they often reflect the powerful pull of the past. They can also provide glimpses of the future of the conflict, but all too often it is the past that dominates the present. The current war against Iran is no exception, because America’s long love affair with strategic bombing — which the Israelis eagerly imported from the US military and is now heavily supplemented by missiles — remains open.
If the war comes to a grim conclusion or even expands with ground operations in the coming days, its lessons are becoming clearer. It should come as no surprise that bombing alone has failed to damage the Iranian military or topple the ruling regime. US strategic air campaigns have regularly failed to achieve their goals for more than 75 years.
In the Korean War, Pyongyang and other cities were leveled, with hundreds of thousands of civilians killed; however the conflict remained protracted on the ground, deadlocked like the Western Front in World War I, ending in a bloody draw. Despite years of massive bombing, air power did little in Vietnam, proving unable to keep communist forces from overrunning the country. Similarly, the ‘shock and awe’ bombings of Iraq during the 2003 invasion of that sad land could not prevent the rise of a nettle insurgency that still rages today in Anbar and other provinces. As for what US troops have dubbed “Big Daddy” air power in Afghanistan, two decades of aerial bombing have failed against the Taliban who now rule in Kabul.
Given all this contrasting experience with applications of strategic air campaigns, from the 1950s to the 2020s, the pull of the past must be powerful indeed, strong enough to convince Pentagon leaders and President Trump that airstrikes alone can defeat Iran. However, the tarnished history of strategic airpower is well known, so the decision to rely solely on it in a conflict in one of the world’s most geostrategically sensitive areas is puzzling. Why would Trump choose to “throw the iron dice” of war, betting only on an air campaign?
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Aside from speculation that he had to make a major detour from the Epstein scandal, there are two other very plausible explanations for Trump’s choice to launch this “preventive” war, when a policy of steady diplomacy could clearly have continued to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.
The first is that the habits of mind and institutional interests of US military leaders support views that are highly resistant to change, and most senior officers are true believers in strategic air power. Those outside the military, as political historian and journalist Walter Millis noted in the wake of the Korean War, tend to be “very impressed by the technical authority of soldiers in their specialized field.” This leads to the persistence of what he went on to label “controversial views sanctified by generations of military experts.” Trump may have fallen prey to this kind of reaffirmation of longstanding US military practice.
A second explanation for the folly of believing in victory through air power over Iran is that Pentagon leaders and President Trump may have been swayed by the urgings of technologists who are now arguing that AI is the new ingredient that can actually, finally, make air power work in the way that, a century ago, American military iconoclast Billy Mitchell said it could. Extremely powerful computer engines have done absolute wonders in terms of increasing the “carriage” – in terms of scale, scope and pace – of the air campaign against Iran. Yes, there are flaws, when relying on old or inaccurate targeting data, as in the case of the deadly attack on a girls’ school early in the war. But the Pentagonians consider this a strange thing; instead, they focus on the rate of strikes, the percentage of said targets actually hit, and other measures of military power through a highly accelerated ‘kill chain’. What they fail to realize, however, is that strategic airpower can always drop a lot of bombs, but even in the face of increasingly accurate bombs and missiles, a thinking enemy can disperse and disguise key assets and armaments in ways that allow for persistent resistance and the ability to mount counterattacks.
The Iranians have proven this in the past month by responding, even after absorbing many blows from US and Israeli forces, ranging from continuing a small number of selective missile strikes to deploying many drones and sea mines, and with dedicated light coastal forces on standby. Taken together, these threaten to cause dire global economic effects.
Even AI-assisted airpower, on its own, will prove unable to match these resilient Iranian capabilities that, in turn, seem to be giving us a glimpse of the next portal that comes with wars – the one that looks into the future. In this case, it may be pointing to something much less conventional that is ahead. There are further hints of this development in progress, as the tactical battlefields in Ukraine are now a no-man’s land constantly cleared by drones, in use by both sides, capable of shooting down small units and even individual soldiers. And in the Black Sea, much wider than the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, the naval and air forces of surface Ukraine hid a large Russian conventional fleet. Hopefully, someone in the Pentagon or the White House will point to these actual examples from another war before expediting any naval and possibly amphibious operations against the Iranians.
And it seems clear that Donald Trump has, on some level, grasped the fact that air power has not worked to achieve any of his goals. If he ends the war now, his proclamation of victory will ring hollow. Because the regime of the mullahs will remain intact. And the Iranians will be able to dig their fissile material out from under the rubble of their nuclear facilities – if they hadn’t dispersed it before the initial US-Israeli bombing in June of last year. Iran’s ability to reimpose a blockade, stopping the flow of a significant portion of the world’s oil and natural gas supplies, will be well understood. Maybe even from the Americans.
Faced with this, what other options does Donald Trump have? He may choose to expand the list of bombing targets to include the desalination plants on which the Iranians are so dependent. But that would be an act of cruelty – and, in all likelihood, an indictable war crime – against the very people he has said he hopes to liberate. Another option would be to accept the failure of the strategic bombing campaign and embrace what the Pentagon is now preparing to undertake: amphibious and airborne operations with Marines, paratroopers and special operations forces. No doubt initial deposits can be made from such operations; but the casualty cost would be considerable, and Iranian resistance would likely devolve into a guerilla-style war until the Americans were persuaded to leave.
In the meantime, should this much larger expansion of the scale of the war occur, the global economic consequences of such an escalation would likely be catastrophic. Diplomatically, the Western alliance would break down further, perhaps fatally; and Russian-Iranian ties would strengthen in ways that would end all attempts at peaceful statecraft with Tehran, a very serious consequence for the Arab states of the Gulf region.
As for the United States itself, the transformation of this brief, targeted preventive war into a quagmire that brings economic pain and deepens social division would have crippling effects on the country. Abroad, it would be another blow against the whole concept of an inspiring American role to play in world affairs.
(Further reading: Trump’s Roadless War)
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