Asymmetric warfare

Thousands are dead after more than five weeks of Donald Trump's war on Iran. Most of those are Iranians, including heavy civilian casualties due to attacks on infrastructure and at least one school. But the death toll includes members of the US military, and civilians and military personnel in Israel, Lebanon and surrounding Gulf states.

Efforts to negotiate a cease-fire over the weekend predictably failed. In the aftermath of that failure, Trump has announced that he'll block the Strait of Hormuz to prevent oil shipments through it, despite the fact that opening the Strait is a key US demand for cessation of hostilities.

I won't try to make sense of the conflict or its current status.

Instead, I want to reflect on the shocking failure of US military strategy and planning in prosecuting this war.

Back in February of 2022, Vladimir Putin intensified his attacks on Ukraine, deploying massive conventional firepower and troops in hopes of capturing territory from that sovereign nation, and reassembling some fragments of the former USSR. At the time, Putin himself expected that the campaign would be swift and decisive, but it didn't work out that way.

Putin wasn't alone in that belief. Prominent members of the right-wing chattering classes cheered the composition of the Russian army. Matt Walsh, for example, posted a comparison of Russian and US military recruiting advertisements, bemoaning the fact that the Russian soldiers were all muscle-bound straight men while the US let smart girls into our army.

Four years later, the outcome of the Russia/Ukraine war is far from certain. The Russians, however, have learned at their enormous cost what a smart and agile foe can do with a strategy of battlefield mobility and technology. Drones and communications surveillance turn out to be much easier to produce and deploy than human troops and conventional tanks and bombers.

Here's the thing that bothers me about our conduct of this war.

I know that the Pentagon is staffed by smart, driven and experienced officers who spend their days watching other conflicts and thinking hard about what they mean for the conduct of modern warfare. I've met 'em. I am rock-solid positive that staff there understood what Ukraine has done to Russia, how they did it, and what that meant for wars conducted with jet fighters and bombs.

And yet we carried precisely Putin's strategy into Trump's battle with Iran, all the way down to massing Marines and other forces in the theater to conduct ground-based campaigns.

I draw no parallel between the nations of Iran and Ukraine, here. Iran is a reactionary, theocratic petrostate with a population terrorized by its brutal leadership. By contrast, Ukraine fights for its life, but also for the kind of liberal democracy that the US once espoused. I respect Zelenskyy and the Ukranian people enormously.

Just like the Ukranians have done to the Russians, though, Iran has used drones, speed and mobility to fight back against the US and our allies. It has closed the shipping channel that carries one-fifth of the world's oil and destroyed petroleum refineries in neighboring Gulf states. It has exacted a heavy cost on the battlefield, but also on the economies of developed nations around the world.

No matter what Donald Trump claims on social media, he has not won his war. The Strait remains closed. The shooting continues.

Trump's elevation of Pete Hegseth to Secretary of Defense is, certainly, why the US ignored the voices of the smart staffers at the Pentagon. Since he took the job, Hegseth has made clear his desire to use that Russian recruiting video for the US military. He talks about lethality, about no constraints on battlefield violence, about the primacy of muscle in developing our soldiers. He has fired generals for their skin color and gender. He has fired lawyers because he doesn't want to hear from them about the law.

And, look: Physical fitness is important, but it's not strictly more important than intelligence, technical expertise, morality and ethics. I don't think we should ever have entered this war, but if we were going to do so, we should have been smart and principled about it.

I make no predictions on the course of events in the Gulf over the coming months.

I do, however, predict this: China is watching our conduct of this war carefully. It has already learned important lessons. We've depleted our available materiel; that makes Chinese adventure in the Strait of Taiwan perhaps less risky in the near term than it was. Battlefield conduct using unmanned platforms will be less costly, in money and in domestic popular opinion. And if China can interdict the flow of computer chips from TSMC, it will be much, much worse for the global economy than the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

I bet you Xi listens to his smart generals.