Plans, Platforms And Projectiles.

The longer-term meaning of the Iran war.

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Now that the Weekend War That Wasn’t is in its fourth week, it’s becoming clear that just about everything to do with its progress, as well as its origins and its potential consequences, is covered in hopeless confusion. Confusion about exactly how the conflict started and why, confusion about what kind of conflict it is, confusion about what its originators were trying to achieve, confusion about what those who claimed to be, or have been identified as, the originators thought they were trying to achieve, confusion about what has actually happened, confusion about the meaning of what has apparently happened, insofar as it is known, confusion over what “victory” means for various actors, confusion over whether some of the parties even have a concept of victory, let alone if it’s a feasible one and how it can be evaluated, confusion about how the fighting can be stopped, if it can be, and confusion about all of the manifold interacting political, economic and military consequences. Not bad for something that was supposed to be finished before the markets opened on the Monday.

Some of this confusion is inevitable in any major politico-military crisis, and I’ll explain why in a minute, and what the consequences of that might be. More of the confusion is the result of pundits competing with each other to protect their business models by trying to convince you that they alone know What This is All About, and that the explanation for all of the above confusion just happens to be based on one of their pet obsessions. I’ll start by trying to dissipate some of this confusion, and look at what this implies for an “end” to the conflict. I then want to talk about the difference between Aspirations, Consensus and Plans, and how that helps us understand what appears to be happening and may follow. I finally want to talk about some of the more likely practical results of the conflict, which is important in the sense that I don’t think we have been in a more dangerous moment since 1914, and the consequences of this conflict could be equally far-reaching. But we have to be realistic: in spite of all the furious controversy, no single “cause” will be found for the War, no concept of victory will ever be universally shared, and it may not even be clear when the conflict “stops.”

As I say, some of the confusion about aims, objectives and process is to be expected: it’s a feature of complex crises like this one. However, there is one area, surprisingly, where there really isn’t any inherent confusion at all with the principle. There is a surreal debate in some quarters about whether the US and Israeli attacks could be “justified,” especially if they “prevented” something, and about whether this or that state is “at war,” or whether such and such is an “act of war,” among other things. The actual situation is simple enough in principle, although unfortunately it’s not the principle that is the problem. But let’s start by recalling what the principle actually is. Under Article II (4) of the UN Charter, it is agreed that “all Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.” Military measures to “restore international peace and security” are reserved to the Security Council alone, with the obvious common sense exception that a state retains “the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs … until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.” And that’s it.

The result is that War, with its associated discourse of “declarations of war,” “casus belli,” “acts of war,” “belligerents” etc. has been superseded and no longer exists. Instead of “war” we now have something called an “armed conflict,” which is not a legal state but pragmatic one, determined by the level of violence in a particular area. Thus, there is an armed conflict in the East of the DRC but not in the West. Thus also, it’s an anachronism to ask whether two countries are “at war” with each other. The problem is that “armed conflict” is a term dreamed up by International Humanitarian Lawyers to mark out a field to which the Law of Armed Conflict could be applied, but they forgot actually to define what it was, and it wasn’t until the ad hoc Tribunals of the 1990s that that question even had to be addressed. So there’s an armed conflict in parts of Ukraine where Russian and Ukrainian forces are in contact. But what about elsewhere? Is there an armed conflict in the Moscow region because drones have fallen there? So was the US sinking of an Iranian destroyer legitimate? Was the Iranian bombardment of oil facilities in the Gulf States legitimate? I have no idea and, whilst there are plenty of opinions, nobody else has either. (And note, for the umpteenth time, that morality and the law are two different modes of argument.)

But not much else is clear. Some of the confusion is because of censorship, fakery, mistakes, misunderstandings and faulty analysis, and this has been a trend in all recent conflicts. But quite a lot of it is inherent in the way that political systems work and in the interactions between them, so let’s look at that next. I’ve covered some of this ground before, but it’s clear that not everybody is quite on the same page, so I’ll put it in the simplest and most generic terms first.

We’ll begin with the commonplace observation that all major political decisions contain elements of consensus and compromise. This is most trivially true in countries with coalition governments, with weak governments depending on others for their support, or with governments that are divided within themselves for personality or political reasons. But it’s actually universally true, because even the strongest and cleverest leader can’t do everything. Even Stalin was forced to delegate things, and Hitler was notorious for not reading written documents. (The Fuhrer Directives were generally negotiated between interested parties in the light of Hitler’s known opinions, and then presented to him for approval or modification.) But in more normal situations, all important government decisions result from negotiation and bargaining. Sometimes this is overt, sometimes it goes on behind the scenes: much depends on the political culture. Sometimes a Ministry, a Department or a group or individual may decide not to make a fight of something because it’s not worth it. On other occasions, very important issues may be fought out in public or semi-public.

The main reason for this is that most major political decisions have acceptable arguments on both sides, as well as different aspects that mean different things to different people. It’s quite natural, therefore, that actors will take different positions. The Foreign Ministry may want to participate in a peacekeeping operation for political reasons, the Defence Ministry may be worried about open-ended and potentially dangerous commitments, the Finance Ministry just wants to stop people spending money. There is no “right” answer: it depends on which factors you think are most important. But it does mean that a policy that emerges on a major, and especially on a controversial, issue will be strongly supported by some, supported with reservations by others, very grudgingly supported by a third group, and a matter of indifference to still others. Likewise, in order to ensure that the policy is accepted, the detail of the policy, and especially the way it is presented, may have to give a little bit of ground to opponents or sceptics. If the policy is successful, however, its original opponents will “remember” that they were always more supportive than they might have appeared at the time, and of course if it fails, the reverse is true. The same applies to unintended consequences, and events which were unexpected at the time. (I can’t count, for example, the number of people in 1990/91 who had “always thought” that the Cold War was about to come to an end, though they had said nothing earlier.) And when an unwelcome conclusion or development seems inevitable, people will comfort themselves by finding virtues in the situation that they hadn’t appreciated before.

All this is familiar enough to anyone who has worked in a political environment for any length of time. Yet for several reasons, some people still find it hard to grasp. One major problem is the intellectual grip that Realist-style thinking has in many western countries. (I say “style” because people often tell me that this or that proclaimed Realist is in practice more subtle in their thinking.) But basically, states and governments are seen as having unitary interests, and competing with each other for power and prestige. Within governments, political groupings and institutions battle rationally against each other to secure resources and advance their agendas. There is no room, in other words, for a lot of the factors that have actually entered into decision-making historically and still do today. This kind of mechanistic, materialist approach, often in its crudest form, is sometimes defended as a useful simplification, but in reality it obscures much more than it informs. It’s true of course that battles for budgets and influence take place inside governments all the time (although the US system should not be seen as typical) and that there are disputes between even the closest of allies. It’s also true that nations will typically pursue what they see as their best interests, but these interests are by no means always inimical to the interests of others. Politics is not a zero-sum struggle for power, at any level, and policies are often adopted because they suit the broader interests of groups or nations for different, and even incompatible, reasons.

So in the case of Iran, a lot of unnecessary confusion has been caused by tiresome arguments for example about whether it is Israel which is controlling the US, or the US which is controlling Israel, and about the “real” reason for the attack on Iran. (The two are evidently linked.) The reality is, and it is hardly news, that the relationship between the US and Israel is highly complex, and that the US has historically sought to make use of Israel and Israel has historically tried to manipulate the US. What the case really does is to provide an example of how complex the relationships between large and small powers often are, and how large powers do not necessarily dominate small ones. Likewise, asking what the war is “about,” is pointless: it’s not “about” any one thing. It’s a war with many different origins, where some of the main figures felt forced into the decision, others embraced it joyfully, others with reservations, still others went along with it for career or political reasons, and probably no major actor in Washington had exactly the same mix of motives. And of course as I suggested a couple of weeks ago, crises like this acquire a momentum of their own beyond a certain point, and it is easier to go forward, no matter how dangerous, than it is to go back.

This interpretation clearly has major implications for a resolution of the crisis, because it means that it will be very difficult—indeed it may actually be impossible—to arrive at a consensus in Washington that the fight is over, the US has lost and must act accordingly. Different groups will behave in different ways. For example, if the fighting continues much longer, senior military figures will start to worry about the wear-and-tear and destruction of expensive weapons systems with long and uncertain replacement schedules, and what this will do to the capability of the military for the future. (I return to that point later.) Meanwhile, someone who thought that the destruction of Iran would bring about the Second Coming of Jesus won’t have these concerns. (I imagine there are similar divides in Israel and quite possibly in Iran, but I don’t have enough knowledge of these countries to do more than speculate.)

A corollary of this leads to the second point. Because there are so many interests involved, because individuals come and go, because institutions become more or less influential, circumstances change, other factors limit your choices at any given point and allies and opponents themselves go through political evolutions, it’s difficult for countries to have “strategies” in any but the most trivial sense, and the more complex and divided the political system, the more difficult it is. That is to say, the political class of some countries (or parts of it anyway) often have long-term aspirations, and when they are in power or otherwise have influence, they will try to nudge things in the direction they want. So in the 1960s there was a strong current of elite opinion in Britain in favour of joining the (then) Common Market. The fact that Britain did join in 1973, though, was not the result of a particular strategy but of circumstances: the unexpected victory of the strongly pro-Europe Conservatives in 1970, and the disappearance of De Gaulle from the political scene. Likewise, other parts of the British political class aspired almost immediately to leave again, and campaigned relentlessly for decades to do so, but it was only because of David Cameron’s stupid decision to hold a referendum on the subject in 2016 that they accidentally got their wish. This is, in fact, how most major domestic and international political changes happen: if power is not always found “lying in the street” in Lenin’s phrase, then power, or the ability to decisively influence events, tends to be the result of an opportunistic approach and a good sense of timing.

There were certainly those in the US and Israel who, for various combinations of reasons, pressed for decades for this conflict, and to the extent that they ever had power or influence, they may have made it more likely. But the real issue is power and access to power at a certain moment, and it’s an elementary error made by pundits (and even some serious historians) to suppose that speeches or articles or even government documents over long periods of time can somehow be crushed together to make an ascriptive strategy that those concerned were not conscious of having. Indeed, there’s even a technical name for it in psychology, apophenia, or the tendency to make patterns out of unconnected things, originating in the fear of a random and disorderly universe. Apparently, it is unusually common in those involved in various aspects of politics. The reality is that the volume of potential “evidence” now available is so enormous that you can find any set of connections that you want to. It resembles Borges’s Library of Babel, in the sense that every conceivable thesis, refutation of that thesis and refutation of the refutation is available somewhere, and can be traced back through the decades in various documents. All this is important, because the lack of a strategy for Iran—as opposed to a generalised aspiration to do harm when the opportunity presented itself—meant that the US was not really prepared for this war, and that the effects on US power and on its economy and its political and military system, will accordingly be a lot more severe than they might otherwise have been.

Now of course nations and government don’t act randomly. Even for something as rushed and hurried as the US assault on Iran, some planning certainly would have taken place. Indeed, competent governments do what is called “contingency planning” all the time, and it’s highly likely that some American government at some point asked for a contingency plan for a war with Iran to be prepared. (The existence of contingency plans, of course, is another incitement to apophenia.) But the US operation, at least, has an improvised and jury-rigged quality to it that suggests a lack of anything beyond technical military planning without a political context. (It’s hard to judge for Israel.) Iran, with a stable, ideologically-based political system which has endured over decades, does seem to have a coherent long-term politico-military plan, and to be implementing it, which is why it has the initiative, and will likely retain it. Moreover, because any strategy requires a strategic objective (“end-state” in the jargon of the trade), and the US has none, or if you like has a number of competing, ill-defined ones, then it is by definition impossible for the US to succeed except by accident. “Destroy Iran” is not an end-state.) More importantly, perhaps, the lack of an agreed end-state in Washington means that judgements about success and failure are meaningless, because there is no agreed objective to relate them to. In turn, this will lead in due course to complete uncertainty, and violent disagreement about how to “end” the war, because with different ends in mind, different lobbies will be arguing that the war should be continued, paused or for that matter stopped, because their criteria have been met, or alternatively can now never be.

Plans are not a strategy, of course, although in my experience some nations and institutions seem to think that enough detailed plans can somehow be made to add up to one. But it is possible to do longer-term planning under one of two conditions, recalling that in politics five years is a long time and ten years is an eternity, as governments change, personalities wax and wane and different sorts of pressure are brought to bear. The first is where there is a single figure or group with very clear ideas about what they want in a specific area. A good example is the revision of France’s security strategy under De Gaulle. He had a clear vision of what he wanted: France as a member of NATO but with an independent capability for decisions and action and an independent nuclear force, and a partner of the US but not a subordinate. It helped that he had a great deal of support in political and military circles for going this way. This involved getting out of Algeria—inevitable anyway—to enable the French military to be modernised, pursuing the nuclear programme that had been secretly started under the Fourth Republic to operational status, building a national command system outside NATO and promoting investment in an independent defence industry. It also required a political component, including attempts at NATO reform and discussions with the US, before a progressive withdrawal from the Integrated Military Structure. By contrast, with the decline of the Gaullists over the last generation, and the triumph of the Globalists and neoliberals, French security policy has become short-term and completely incoherent.

The second is a broad elite consensus and the willingness to think in decades, but in very general terms. The classic example is the re-industrialisation of Japan after World War 2, and its move towards an export-oriented economy, a path subsequently copied by others. There was no grand, detailed Strategic Plan, but rather a long-term consensus on starting small, and moving steadily into more and more ambitious levels of technology. We could add the rebuilding of Russia under Putin and moves by the Chinese to dominate certain sectors and capabilities of the world economic system. But even in the Chinese case, I doubt that there was a highly-detailed blueprint: in any event if everyone knows which general direction to go in, you don’t need one.

This all makes the situation of the United States very uncomfortable. Its political culture is extremely short-termist and largely focused on a domestic audience. It has little idea about long-term strategies (as I have pointed out several times, a document is not a strategy) and its decision-making system is personalised, fragmented and labyrinthine. It may not be an exaggeration to say we have arrived at the point where its administration is no longer cable of taking critical decisions. The corollary is that, as the conflict continues, the system will progressively just stop working and will eventually come to a halt. Nothing will happen and nothing can be decided. Mr Trump may well announce some decision or some new policy, but the means to implement it will probably not exist, and any of a number of players will be able to sabotage it. For this reason, as for others I’ll touch on, it seems highly unlikely that there will be a “deal,” with Iran, let alone a detailed agreement. If you can’t even decide what you want, it’s hard to persuade someone to give it to you.

So a United States which was not prepared for this war and had no agreed objectives for it, finds itself with its fingers caught in the wringer. What could it do? Well, for the first time perhaps in its modern history, Washington cannot just “declare victory” or silently acknowledge defeat, and go home. The VietCong could not pursue the Americans back to Washington, the Taliban were happy for the US to leave Afghanistan. But the regime in Tehran has a vote here, and they also have a policy. (Recall that the Persian Empire stretched from India to Libya at one point.) As a minimum objective, Tehran will want to evict all foreign forces from the Gulf, and become the undisputed regional superpower. In the past, Israel was the main threat to these ambitions, but it’s not clear how far that that country will be in any shape to resist them in a few months time. If that is indeed one of Iran’s ambitions, then there are two reasons why the US, and the West in general, is not going to be able to frustrate it. The first is to do with the developments of new technologies.

By now you’re probably tired of reading about how Drones have Changed Everything, and I wouldn’t blame you, especially since much of the coverage on the subject has been hopelessly sensationalist. But in fact we are at a certain stage (perhaps half-way?) in another revolution in military technology and tactics which will have all sorts of consequences we can’t yet foresee. Recall that up to one hundred and fifty years ago, trained manpower was the metric for assessing military power on land, as it had always been. Although technology became a dominating factor in World War 1, the actual level of that technology was quite low. Even as late as the start of World War 2, tanks and aircraft were still rudimentary, and not that expensive or complex to manufacture and maintain. In most cases their expected combat life was short anyway. It was only in the Cold War that the Weapons Platform—an expensive, sophisticated independent piece of equipment requiring skilled operation and maintenance—came to be the norm, and even then it was more common in the West than elsewhere. Thus, western nations came to rely on small numbers of platforms which were increasingly powerful and versatile, but which also epically more expensive, and required increasingly sophisticated training, support and maintenance just to function.

That period is now coming to an end, but not necessarily in obvious ways. For example, it’s often argued that drones benefit the defence more than the offence, by reference to Ukraine, where it is probably true. But the last few weeks have shown that drones are also powerful offensive weapons. Consider: you want to destroy a command and control facility or a military camp. Until recently, there were only two ways. If there was no resistance, you could fly a frighteningly expensive aircraft over the target, with a pilot it takes a minimum of two years to train, drop a bomb, and go home to a sophisticated airbase probably hundreds of kilometres from the target and capable of at least first-line maintenance, where a single flying hour would require perhaps 5-10 man-hours of work by highly-trained technicians . If resistance was expected, the same aircraft, perhaps after attempts had been made to suppress enemy air defences, would launch a missile from a safe distance, hoping that the targeting information was accurate and up-to-date, before going to the same airbase.

With such a model (and effectively the same is true of missiles launched from ships), there is a great deal of investment in the success of the individual attack. An aeroplane may drop one or two bombs or fire one or two missiles before going home. With drones and (relatively) low-cost missiles, you can afford to use much larger numbers. If some get lost, shot down or miss their target, the loss is proportionately much smaller. As guidance systems continue to improve, (and it seems that Iran has been able to do precision targeting in at least some cases), it is going to become massively easier and cheaper to bring a given destructive capability against a target. At the end of the day, after all, a fabulously expensive strike aircraft is just a complicated and resource-hungry way of getting a small amount of destructive power on the target. The comparison of drones and interceptors or missiles is often made in cost terms, but, as I’ve argued, this is only relevant if you are cash-constrained. The more important comparison is of the resources involved to produce the same effect. A missile launched from an aircraft requires the development and production of the missile as well as the aircraft, and its maintenance and support costs and the training of the pilot and the ground crew. When you can achieve the same result with, say twenty drones, as with a squadron’s worth of expensive aircraft, their pilots and support personnel and some expensive missiles, the economics of warfare start to change. And you expect to “lose” the drones anyway.

What is currently going on in the Gulf is therefore a conflict between two different types of warfare, that we might call Platform Warfare and Projectile Warfare. At the moment, the latter appears to have advantages in terms of area denial and precision attacks in well-defended areas.

But obviously such weapons and such a style of warfare have their limitations: they cannot take and hold ground, for example, and they cannot project power beyond a certain point. They also require a doctrine and command and control systems if they are to be used above the tactical level. Nor are they necessarily the Poor Man’s weapon: they can be used by advanced military powers (Russia is the obvious example) and in any case they also require a degree of training and technical expertise. However, Projectile Warfare does have a number of practical advantages, especially for nations whose orientation is essentially defensive and those who cannot or do not wish to acquire expensive platforms. Indeed, if its use becomes generalised, nations may increasingly hesitate before they acquire too many expensive platforms anyway.

It does seem the Iranians have made broadly the right choice, then, in their war with the US and Israel. The question is whether the same military posture will help them with what is assumed, from their statements, to be their larger purpose of dominating the Gulf. I don’t think its realistic to try to anticipate internal political developments in Iran—it’s well above my pay grade anyway—but we can still talk a little bit about capabilities and how they might be used. The first point to make is that “domination” in this sense does not need to be assertive and flag-waving, along the US model. That model—primarily for domestic US consumption—turns out in practice to be the facade we always thought it was, and the war has revealed US “domination” of the region to be largely theatrical. Beyond the rhetoric of “Empire,” useful to US politicians and equally useful to critics of the country, lay the reality of a declining economic and industrial power trying to make up with violent rhetoric for an increasing lack of solid military capability: a point to which I return.

In practice, it’s likely that “domination” will amount essentially to deterring states in the region from doing things that Tehran doesn’t want, without the need for public threats and bluster. That would include hosting US bases, or developing too close a relationship with western countries. In turn, the West would realise that attempting to challenge Iran militarily would be pointless, and would therefore keep away. This is analogous to Iran’s policy in Lebanon (where of course there were also other regional players) which was based on its ability, through Hezbollah, to stop the Lebanese political system dead at any point. A few token assassinations and the odd drone strike would probably convey the right message to any hesitating Gulf state leadership. And of course the Straits can be closed at will, at any time. It isn’t even necessary to say any of this out loud, because, in that region as elsewhere, much is not said and still less is written down, but lots of things are just known. For that reason, a de facto recognition of Iran’s status would probably be enough, particularly since writing it down would involve a level of political humiliation which neither the Gulf States nor the US political systems could easily tolerate. I don’t know whether Iran will do this, and what they do precisely will depend on things that haven’t happened yet, but such a policy would be technically feasible. It would depend to some extent on continued intelligence support from China and Russia, but both countries are likely to think this is a reasonable investment, as well as a way of retaining influence in Tehran.

The second point has to do with the design of western equipment. The last decade of the Cold War saw the West field a new generation of much more complex, sophisticated and costly conventional weapons, which it was hoped would give them qualitative superiority over the Warsaw Pact. They were designed for a short defensive war in Europe, before the point where tactical nuclear weapons had to be used. Tanks such as the American M 1, the British Challenger 2 and the French Leclerc were an order of magnitude more capable than their predecessors, and derivatives, developments and even some of the original hulls are still in service today, although they have proved completely unsuited to the very different type of combat in Ukraine. The problem is that, other than fiddling with the basic designs, there are really no new ideas for the next generation, and all that can be said is that a successor system will take decades to design and produce, and cost unbelievable amounts of money.

The same is broadly true in other areas as well. Although the media focus has been on new weapon systems such as the F-35 (which first flew twenty years ago, remember), much of the US arsenal is elderly and some is obsolescent. Again, this is because attempts to replace existing systems with advanced technology such as the ill-fated Zumwalt-class destroyer, came to grief, and replacements are still on the distant horizon, and will be fabulously expensive when they do arrive. In addition, western destroyers and frigates were intended primarily to counter aircraft and submarine threats, which reflects the circumstances of their design and construction. Defence against drone swarms and hypersonic missiles is another issue entirely. Such ships now carry no real protective armour, and a hit from a sub-munition in a sensitive area could do a lot of damage.

Not only is some US equipment elderly, and in some cases obsolescent, but even the newer equipment is being used at high intensity, consuming stocks of spares and wearing out the platforms. (The expected fatigue life of an aircraft, for obvious reasons, is based on peacetime usage.) For example, the majority of US tanker aircraft are KC-135s, a design dating from the early 1950s. The fleet is slowly being modernised, but the existing older aircraft will have to continue flying for some while. The strain of constant refuelling missions on old airframes could mean that many will become unusable quite quickly.

Such programmes will also have to compete for funds with the need to modernise the increasingly-obsolescent land and sea components of the US strategic nuclear system. But even infinite amounts of money can only buy what there is to buy, and what can be produced. Industrial capacity in the US has sharply declined in recent years, and in shipbuilding; for example, only 1-2 hulls can be produced every year. But the problem (which is not confined to the US) is in many ways even more basic. Although there are programmes, designs and studies, it’s not obvious how much of the present generation of post-Cold War equipment is actually going to be replaced, or indeed whether it can be replaced in any reasonable timescale at any reasonable cost.

In other words, the platform-centric West may be about to hit a hard limit of capability. Even in principle, it isn’t possible to build platforms that can counter the sheer numbers, simplicity of manufacture and relatively low cost of projectile-based defences, or to resist such projectile technologies being used aggressively. In the short term this is going to benefit Iran, both in defeating the US and Israel and in its regional ambitions. In the longer term, it is going to have a massive effect on the strategic balance in the world and, as usual, nobody is thinking seriously about it.