Iran War: Ends and Means

The U.S.-Israeli war against Iran is only a few days old. U.S. and Israeli forces have replayed the “shock and awe” of the previous 12-day war that destroyed much of Iran’s nuclear weapons’ facilities. In that brief conflict, President Trump made it clear that the purpose of the air and missile strikes was limited to destroying or at least disrupting Iran’s ability to acquire a nuclear weapon. In that conflict, the ends and means were matched. The current war, however, appears to have the larger purpose of regime change—an end that is more difficult to accomplish, especially if our means are limited to air and missile attacks. We have killed Iran’s Supreme Leader and up to 40 of the regime’s key political and military leaders in our initial strikes, but the regime lives on and is striking out against U.S. military facilities, Israel, and even some Arab governments in the region that play host to American bases. President Trump, while encouraging Iranians to overthrow the current regime, has also indicated that regime change is not necessary to bring the war to an end.

Since the dawn of the air age, military theorists have argued that air power in the form of strategic bombing can defeat an enemy without the need for ground combat. In 1921, the Italian airman Giulio Douhet in Command of the Air wrote that air power alone is “capable of crushing the material and moral resistance of the enemy.” Air power can accomplish this mission, he explained, “solely with its own means, to the complete exclusion of both army and navy.” “Future war,” he predicted, “will be total in character and scope” and aerial offensives will target industrial and commercial establishments, governments, and population centers. By “inflicting the greatest damage in the shortest possible time,” Douhet continued, air power will bring about the “complete breakdown of the [enemy’s] social structure.”

Douhet had American disciples such as Gen. Billy Mitchell and Major Alexander De Seversky (a Russian airman who became a U.S. citizen in 1927), and a British admirer in Air Marshal Hugh Trenchard. De Seversky in the early years of the Second World War wrote an influential book titled Victory Through Air Power in which he characterized air power as “the paramount and decisive factor in warmaking.” “Air power,” he wrote, “is the American weapon,” and he believed its proper application could bring both Germany and Japan to their knees.

World War II proved the immense value of air power, but its enthusiasts were wrong to claim that air power alone could achieve victory and produce regime change. German industries and cities were pulverized by the Anglo-American strategic bombing campaign, but it also took Soviet and Anglo-American ground offensives and winning the Battle of the Atlantic to seal Germany’s doom. Likewise, the strategic bombing of Japan caused immense damage to Japan’s war making ability and its population centers, but it was the combined American sea, air, and ground forces across the central and southwest Pacific, coupled with British ground troops in Burma, and Chinese ground forces that kept Japan tied down on the mainland, culminating in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Soviet ground forces in Manchuria, that finally brought Japan to its knees. Regime change came in both countries, but only after Allied troops occupied those countries. As Codevilla and Seabury noted, “control of the air, unlike control of the ground, guarantees nothing and means next to nothing unless it is part of a plan to achieve something on the ground.”

During the First Gulf War in 1991, the Bush 41 administration deliberately refrained from seeking to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime, recognizing the difficulties of nation-building and the need for a stable Iraq to balance Iran in the Middle East. The Bush 43 administration, however, toppled Hussein’s regime in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan, but was terribly unsuccessful in its effort to nation-build in both countries, resulting in the “endless wars” that candidate and later President Donald Trump rightly criticized. In Bush 43’s wars, like World War II, it took a combined air, sea and land campaign to topple the Iraqi and Afghan regimes. And unlike in World War II, regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan only led to more fighting.

Writing in Unherd, the renowned strategist Edward Luttwak believes that Trump’s plan for Iran is to replicate what he achieved in Venezuela. Luttwak writes that Trump’s successful raid in Venezuela transformed that country from a dictatorship under Maduro to “a reasonably obedient American protectorate” by using only a small force of “boots on the ground.” If there are any “boots on the ground” in Iran, Luttwak writes, they are probably covert Israeli operatives, not Americans. Trump, he argues, is free of any “nation-building fantasies” and doesn’t want the increased casualty count that would result if U.S. ground troops were inserted into Iran. Instead, Luttwak counsels, the U.S. should focus its air and missile power on removing Iran’s capability to launch ballistic missiles and armed drones that Iran has used to retaliate against U.S. military facilities and allied nations in the region, and using naval power to keep open the Straits of Hormuz. Finally, Luttwak says, the U.S. needs to “recruit and empower a less-than-horrific regime figure” to “steer the government in the right direction” without U.S. troops on the ground and without an occupation force. He suggests the current Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian would fit the bill. Perhaps.

In their book War: Ends and Means, Codevilla and Seabury rejected the notion of a “perfect peace” or a “perfect” world order. “Perfect peace, the perfect tranquility that comes from perfect order,” they write, “exists only in the City of God.” On earth, we must settle for imperfect order and temporary solutions to international problems.

 Francis P. Sempa writes on geopolitics.