Why the US is facing strategic defeat

Drone, Missiles, THAAD

Irrespective of the ever-shifting war aims peddled out by Administration officials, there is a clear and obvious sense in which strategic victory and defeat are defined here. If the United States cannot, either through direct denial or military coercion, suppress Iran’s attacks on its own assets and those of its allies and protectorates, that would constitute a strategic defeat for the United States. If the US declares mission accomplished whilst the Iranians are still firing their weapons at the oil monarchies, US military bases, Israel, and, above all, if Hormuz is still closed, that would constitute an unambiguous strategic defeat for the United States.

By the same token, if Iran can continue its attacks and keep Hormuz closed despite whatever the US throws at it, until such a time as the US offers a ceasefire, it would’ve succeeded in reestablishing deterrence. That would constitute a strategic victory for Iran. This is not a definitional question; it is a question of the perception of adversaries, third parties, and disinterested analysts. The Western media spin won’t count; it would just be too blatantly obvious.

As I showed you on Twitter, the mechanics of the drone war are quite daunting. The crucial variables here are the rate at which the US can degrade Iranian drone production sites (d_{fac}) and the rate at which the Iranians can rebuild and repair the same (r_{fac}). The governing factor is the ratio, r_{fac} / (d_{fac} + r_{fac}). This ratio controls the dynamics of the rate at which Iran can sustain counter-value attacks across the gulf and the length of time it can keep Hormuz closed.

Even under conservative but realistic assumptions favorable to the US, it is really hard to see how the US can degrade Iranian strike capabilities fast enough.

Even in the highly implausible extreme scenario where Iran cannot reconstitute any production sites and the US degrades them at the rate of 90% per month, Iran can still sustain a high rate of fire for four months.

What is the solution to this problem? If Iranian capabilities cannot be degraded for at least four months, the costs to the world economy and the United States would be intolerable. We will see a global inflation shock, global monetary tightening, a food crisis as the fertilizer shock cuts the next crop in half, and almost certainly a global recession. It will destroy the Trump presidency; it will destroy the GOP for a generation; and it would finally end the entrapment of the United States by its junior geopolitical ally.

Is there a military solution? What can the US do? John Warden’s decapitation idea was supposed to work. It did not. There is absolutely no sign of any political instability in Iran. “Zero” as a senior European official told the Washington Post.

Then what? The Kurdish stratagem? At best they can create a breakaway statelet. That is not going to move the needle on this question. Iran can and will continue its relentless attacks across the gulf whether or not the Afghan model of US air power combined with ground force proxies succeeds in creating a sort of Erbil in northwestern Iran. So that’s not gonna get you any closer to solving this problem.

What is left? Ground forces? Does the US have the appetite? And even if the US did have the appetite, can the US even hope to prevail in a prolonged counterinsurgency war? In order to achieve the same force-to-space or the same force-to-population ratio as Iraq, the US will have to deploy 600,000-1,000,000 troops. This is at the very limits of American armed strength. It will consume the entire US military strength. That may have been an option back in the unipolar world. It would be a recipe for disaster, not just in Iran, but in Asia.

What else? The Kharg island idea is a totally harebrained scheme. You can’t do that without suppressing Iranian fire. Not only is it fully exposed to Iranian missiles and drones, it is within striking range of Iranian mobile artillery. If you land a division of the marines, they will have to be evacuated within hours after suffering dozens if not hundreds of casualties. The entire scheme assumes that the US has suppressed Iranian fire, when suppressing Iranian fire is the very problem that needs to be solved by the US military.

But it gets worse still. I wrote about the implications of our mature precision strike regime that Krepinevich predicted in the early 1990s. This is “an international military order where standoff precision-strike capabilities have diffused far beyond the technologically-advanced great powers,” I wrote. But even I underestimated the Iranians.

The Iranians are not just deploying hypersonic missiles that the US has been unable to develop. They don’t just have the largest missile arsenal in the Middle East. Recent military developments have revealed surprising Iranian reconnaissance-strike capabilities.

The Iranians have managed to hit every single American military base in the region. But that is not the half of it. THAAD is one of the most powerful ballistic missile defense system in the world. If anything should be invulnerable to attack, it is this system. The Iranians have managed to hit and likely disabled every single THAAD battery in the region; all five of them.

Any serious military analyst can tell you this is a big fucking deal. Not only does it mean that Iran is basically a military peer in terms of reconnaissance-strike in its near-abroad. It has operational implications. I raised this issue on Twitter.

All US air bases in the gulf have come under sustained attack. Are they able to fly sorties from them, even if at a degraded operational tempo. Or have they been abandoned and the sorties are being launched from faraway bases with aerial refueling? We keep getting Pentagon updates about the number of targets hit. But what is the sortie rate in this air war? Has it degraded?

Grok was able to answer in the affirmative. The United States has had to pull back its forces from the region. The sortie rate that the US can generate has been severely degraded by Iranian attacks on US air bases in the region. Grok estimates that the supremely important rate at which the US can degrade Iranian drone and missile capabilities I mentioned above, have to be marked down by 35-50%.

This means that the curve is not bending down but going up! The all-important interdiction campaign to degrade Iranian capabilities has suffered a massive setback. That is why the US is rushing a third aircraft carrier to the region: because the US can barely use nearby air bases, it has to rely on naval aviation to fill in the gap.

But any serious military analyst can tell you that there are severe limits on what can be accomplished by the dozens of sorties that can be sustained with a carrier group relative to the hundreds that can be sustained by land-based aviation. So, this is quite unambiguous military catastrophe for the United States.

The Trump administration is now in a real pickle of its own making. There is no military solution in sight. With the destruction of the THAAD shields and with the interceptor inventories running out, Iran’s counter-value strategy will be able to impose escalating — not decaying — costs on the US and its allies and all countries on earth. Because of the stunning success of Iranian counterforce strikes — they’ve basically made US bases in the region practically unusable — the US cannot generate enough sorties, even if the drone war math was promising, which I have shown you is not.

The United States is therefore staring at an unambiguous strategic defeat here. Hurling bombs at the enemy has never worked in the entire century of air power. There is no reason to think that it will coerce the Iranians into submission. They have the strategic advantage here and they’re gonna press it.

It is also possible that the Russians and behind them the Chinese will resupply and rearm the Iranians. If that happens, as seems likely, this will turn into a ‘reverse Ukraine’.

The Trump administration needs to understand that there are no military solutions here. Talk to the Omanis. Find a diplomatic solution before this brings the whole house down on your heads.