By Noah Rothman
Wednesday, March 11, 2026
For decades, the United States and its allies have been
gaming out what a full-scale war against the Islamic Republic of Iran would
look like. As recently as 2020, in the immediate aftermath of the airstrike
that neutralized Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qasem Soleimani, mainstream and center-left media outlets summarized the forecasts of
American war planners. Their conclusions were sobering.
In a war that the Iranian regime sees as existential,
Tehran could be expected to pull out all the stops. “Iran’s vast network of
proxies” would be activated. American and European civilians would be targets,
as would vulnerable U.S. military positions in Iraq and Syria. “Sleeper cells”
would carry out attacks against soft targets in Europe and Latin America.
Hezbollah would roar to life in Lebanon, raining missiles down on Israel.
Terrorists would target American diplomatic posts as far afield as West Africa
and Southeast Asia. Crippling cyberattacks against Western-oriented
governmental and commercial interests would cause major financial disruptions.
Bombs, mines, missiles, drones, and fast boats would complicate U.S. operations
in the Strait of Hormuz, putting all maritime traffic to a halt for the
indefinite future.
The war would escalate quickly, probably necessitating
the introduction of a massive ground force to topple the regime. Overmatched in
conventional engagements with U.S. forces, the Iranian military and the IRGC
would dissolve into a deadly insurgency. By the end of combat operations, up to
1 million on all sides of the conflict, including civilians, would die. Iran’s
cities would be in ruins, compelling the West to commit untold resources to
Iran’s spotty recovery. “Those who survived the conflict will mainly live in a
state of economic devastation for years and some, perhaps, will pick up arms
and form insurgent groups to fight the invading US force,” Vox reported.
A civil war would follow the regime’s collapse, precipitating a massive refugee
crisis and creating pockets of instability inside Iran in which transnational
Islamist terrorist groups would thrive.
A cursory survey of the opinion landscape on this, the
eleventh day of that very conflict, suggests that lay observers of this war
have already concluded that something like the worst-case scenario is unfolding
before our eyes. It’s not.
To date, U.S. forces alone have conducted strikes on at
least 5,500 Iranian targets, according to Admiral
Brad Cooper, in accordance with the American military’s objective in this
war: eliminating Iran’s capacity to “project power” across its borders.
America’s operational tempo is accelerating while Iran’s is in retreat. The
Iranian ballistic-missile launch rate is down
92 percent from the first day of hostilities. U.S. forces have entombed
much of Iran’s stockpiles in their underground “missile cities.” U.S. drones
monitor from the skies the cities that it hasn’t hit, striking them only when they observe Iranian activity. In addition, over
60 percent of Iran’s missile launchers have been disabled.
The Iranian navy is off the chessboard. According to
Cooper, 60 vessels have been struck, sunk, or rendered useless to the enemy,
including all four of Iran’s Soleimani-class warships. At least 16
Iranian mine-laying vessels have been destroyed. Ten of Iran’s 18 air bases
have been hit and rendered inoperable. The U.S. maintains, if not air
supremacy, superiority in the skies over Iran. The Iranian air force is a
non-entity, as are its air defenses. As was the case in Venezuela, Russian and
Chinese technology has proven unequal to U.S. capabilities, allowing the U.S.
to transition away from the use of exquisite stand-off munitions (long-range
missiles launched from a safe distance) toward cheaper, more abundant, precision-guided gravity munitions.
Iran’s leadership caste is dead or scattered. Its command
and control is disrupted, as evinced by episodes in which the IRGC struck
civilian targets in the Gulf states that Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian promised would no longer be
targeted. The succession of Mojtaba Khamenei to serve as supreme leader after
his father’s death exposed cracks in the leadership, some of whom reportedly
believed that the title should not be hereditary. And the captive Iranian
people remain the Islamic Republic’s most fearsome enemy. The regime’s message
to the people is, explicitly, that anyone who takes to the streets in support
of the U.S.-Israeli military campaign will
be killed.
In any conflict, the enemy gets a vote. And in this
campaign, Iran’s strategy has been to spread the pain of this war around to its
Gulf neighbors, lashing out wildly at civilian, diplomatic, and military
targets alike. The war games anticipated this, too, assuming that the region
would absorb enough damage to ensure its neutrality. Instead, the region united against Iran. Additionally, the expected effort to
close off the Strait of Hormuz and put unendurable pressure on global energy
consumers has succeeded in engineering a spike in the price of oil.
But in 2019, energy-sector analysts assessed that even a
days-long disruption of traffic in the Strait combined with disruptions to the
production capacity of other Gulf producers “could potentially send oil to
$300.” While we’re hardly “weeks” into these expected disruptions, the prices
of Brent crude oil (light, sweet crude highly desirable for refining) have not
yet approached their all-time high: $147 per barrel in July 2008. Much has
changed in the intervening years, including the fact that “the shale revolution
has turned the U.S. into a net exporter of petroleum and major exporter of
liquefied natural gas,” the Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip observed. “That means the hit to consumers is
offset by a boost to producers.”
Of course, this war has been accompanied by unanticipated
challenges. There is tension between the U.S. and Israel over its targeting
priorities, including oil infrastructure such as fuel depots. Those are
legitimate targets (the IRGC exploits Iran’s energy sector), but those strikes
are contributing to price instability in the oil market. While Iran’s ballistic
missile capabilities have been severely degraded, it continues to deploy
low-cost drones against targets in the Gulf region. The United Arab Emirates
has absorbed most of this fire, although UAE officials contend that they
maintain a 90 percent interception rate.
And then, there are the factors beyond the control of
U.S. and Israeli tacticians. Moscow is reportedly providing Iran with targeting information that
partially counteracts the loss of Iran’s radar systems. That information is helping Iran to target U.S. radar and interceptor systems
throughout the region. U.S. officials now acknowledge (on
background) that the pathological mistrust of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky
in the Pentagon led Defense officials to reject the procurement of Kyiv’s tried
and tested anti-drone munitions.
Disruptions to the oil market are putting significant
pressure on Washington, and Iran’s oil exports have continued to flow despite U.S.-Israeli efforts to throttle
this crucial IRGC revenue stream. Iran is targeting regional desalination plants in an attempt to create a
humanitarian catastrophe. The United States and Israel are taking casualties,
each of which is deeply regrettable and saps Western resolve to continue this
fight to its finish. And the Iranian regime has not collapsed. Not yet, at
least.
Contrary to some embarrassing rhetorical contortions in
Washington, this is a real war, and real wars rarely go according to plan. This
conflict is no exception. But the pessimistic assessments of the war encouraged
by over-caffeinated observers on social media are unwarranted. Some perspective
is in order, and that perspective would lead any honest spectator to conclude
that the facts on the ground do not warrant the catastrophism that prevails
among the groundlings on social media and within the press corps.
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