Trump will never be able to declare victory in Iran

The first six months of the war with Iran have been a sombre lesson for the United States and for its commander-in-chief. President Trump’s Operation Epic Fury has failed to bring down the regime in Tehran because the White House and military planners underestimated their enemy. After months of bombing destruction, a naval blockade and unprecedented economic sanctions, the mullahs and generals in Iran have adapted their warfare response to undermine and eventually thwart America’s vast superiority in firepower. “Iran’s strongest strategy was not to win a conventional military contest against the United States or Israel. It was to make the war harder to contain,” Neda Bolourchi, a national security analyst, concluded in an assessment of the conflict for the prestigious Modern War Institute at West Point in New York state. “Persian Gulf capitals, shipping insurers, energy markets, fertiliser markets, data centres, US allies and domestic political audiences all became part of the battlefield,” she wrote. The US military planners knew there was a risk Iran would try to close the Strait of Hormuz as one of its main leverages against the armada of warships and missiles assembled by Central Command in the region. However, the aim of Operation Epic Fury was to cause such damage to Iran’s military infrastructure that one of two consequences would follow: the collapse of the regime or a peace deal weighted heavily in favour of Trump’s demands for an end to the nuclear programme, a huge reduction in Iran’s ballistic missile inventory, and a pledge by Tehran to stop funding its proxy militia, including Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Houthis in Yemen. “As in Vietnam, we simply did not understand our enemy in Iran. The assumption that the leadership that succeeded Ayatollah Ali Khomeini would fold like an old tent proved fundamentally wrong,” a former senior Pentagon official said. “Strategy matters. We apparently had no Plan B if the initial air campaign failed to produce the desired results,” the former official said. “There are numerous options we could have put in place before going to war, such as a blockade [imposed more than a month after Operation Epic Fury began], support for resistance groups, or ground-force operations.,” he said. “We are also at the wrong end of the cost equation. We are defending ourselves with weapons costing an order-of-magnitude or more than those they intercept [a Patriot interceptor missile costs $3.9 million as opposed to an Iranian Shahed-136 drone at between $20,000 and $50,000} . Nor can we produce them at scale. And our national deficit just hit $40 trillion. We are pricing ourselves out of the market,” he said. The ground-troops option was never realistically on the cards because of America’s aversion to battlefield casualties. The decision to go for air and naval power, rather than boots on the ground, was to avoid American fatalities, although 18 US personnel have been killed in Iranian retaliatory strikes. Central Command still sent 2,200 marines and later more than 2,000 paratroopers from 82nd Airborne Division to the Gulf, in addition to the 50,000 troops already in the region.. All of them have been kicking their heels ever since. Trump’s threats to invade Kharg Island, which manages up to 90 per cent of Iran’s crude oil exports, never materialised into action by the marines or paratroopers, whose numbers were insufficient for even a short-term ground operation. The biggest lesson for the US is one that should have been learned a long time ago: that air power alone, even on the scale the American military can provide, rarely leads to a long-lasting and satisfactory political outcome. If the confrontation with Iran escalates into a new round of US military strikes, that basic lesson will still be valid which means Trump will never be able to declare victory. ends