[Excerpt from essay by Robert A. Pape, Professor of Political Science and Director of the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats.]
Iran’s strikes cannot be dismissed as acts of scattered retaliation, the flailing lashing out of a dying regime. Rather, they represent a strategy of horizontal escalation, a bid to transform the stakes of a conflict by widening its scope and extending its duration.
Such a strategy allows a weaker combatant to alter the calculus of a more powerful foe. And it has worked in the past, to the detriment of the United States. In Vietnam and Serbia, U.S. adversaries responded to overwhelming displays of American airpower with horizontal escalation, eventually leading to American defeat, in the former case, and, in the latter, frustrating U.S. war aims and spurring the worst episode of ethnic cleansing in Europe since World War II.
Decapitation strikes, in particular, create powerful incentives for horizontal escalation: when a regime survives the loss of its leader, it must demonstrate resilience quickly by widening the conflict. Although the United States has hugely battered Iran, it must reckon with the implications of Iran’s response. Otherwise, it will find itself losing control of the war it started.
squailtaint on
One thing I am trying to understand is why Iran hasn’t done the worst yet? Are they? The worst: dumping all mines into the straight, and/or attacks within Israel.
Is Israel just that well protected that they couldn’t smuggle a few rocket launchers in to aim at sites like water treatment plants or nuclear facilities? I’ve never really understood this. Same logic for Ukraine/Russia, anyone who understands how substations work, or how little guarded most utility sites are, would understand how you would only need a handful of people to coordinate mass chaos. Yet we haven’t seen this. Is it coming? Early days?
And the mines, reports were they had thousands of mines to unleash into the straight. What is there trigger for doing so and why hasn’t it been pulled yet?
I don’t want to come off as wishing the worst, it’s just all the articles and analysis over the years implied it would go down this way, and now that it is happening, every analysis seems to have been wrong?
boldmove_cotton on
> Iran’s strikes cannot be dismissed as acts of scattered retaliation, the flailing lashing out of a dying regime.
Sure it can. It is easy to be a skeptic, opining that all the IRGC needs to do to win is survive while fighting asymmetrically. The author compares Iran to Vietnam, but the differences cannot be more stark.
Saddam’s calculus for the first gulf war was to entrench the Americans in a Vietnam-like quagmire. Instead, Desert Storm was arguably the most successful and lopsided military operation ever conducted, with the coalition achieving its military objectives of pushing the Iraqis out of Kuwait and obliterating Saddam’s military capabilities with comparatively low costs.
The US doesn’t need to put boots on the ground and then spend years fighting insurgency. All they need to do to ‘win’ is to continue to degrade Iran’s abilities to build and fire missiles and drones faster than the IRGC can reconstitute, because threatening its neighbors and the strait of Hormuz is Irans only leverage. If the US can remove that threat, which it appears broadly capable of doing, they can continue flying sorties to degrade regime indefinitely with little risk.
The skeptics are all focused on the end game as if that scenario isn’t possible or good enough, as if regime change in the short term is the only path to victory. I would argue that neutering the regimes ability to threaten the region and forcing them into hiding is a clear win, even if complete regime change remains a long term hope.
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[Excerpt from essay by Robert A. Pape, Professor of Political Science and Director of the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats.]
Iran’s strikes cannot be dismissed as acts of scattered retaliation, the flailing lashing out of a dying regime. Rather, they represent a strategy of horizontal escalation, a bid to transform the stakes of a conflict by widening its scope and extending its duration.
Such a strategy allows a weaker combatant to alter the calculus of a more powerful foe. And it has worked in the past, to the detriment of the United States. In Vietnam and Serbia, U.S. adversaries responded to overwhelming displays of American airpower with horizontal escalation, eventually leading to American defeat, in the former case, and, in the latter, frustrating U.S. war aims and spurring the worst episode of ethnic cleansing in Europe since World War II.
Decapitation strikes, in particular, create powerful incentives for horizontal escalation: when a regime survives the loss of its leader, it must demonstrate resilience quickly by widening the conflict. Although the United States has hugely battered Iran, it must reckon with the implications of Iran’s response. Otherwise, it will find itself losing control of the war it started.
One thing I am trying to understand is why Iran hasn’t done the worst yet? Are they? The worst: dumping all mines into the straight, and/or attacks within Israel.
Is Israel just that well protected that they couldn’t smuggle a few rocket launchers in to aim at sites like water treatment plants or nuclear facilities? I’ve never really understood this. Same logic for Ukraine/Russia, anyone who understands how substations work, or how little guarded most utility sites are, would understand how you would only need a handful of people to coordinate mass chaos. Yet we haven’t seen this. Is it coming? Early days?
And the mines, reports were they had thousands of mines to unleash into the straight. What is there trigger for doing so and why hasn’t it been pulled yet?
I don’t want to come off as wishing the worst, it’s just all the articles and analysis over the years implied it would go down this way, and now that it is happening, every analysis seems to have been wrong?
> Iran’s strikes cannot be dismissed as acts of scattered retaliation, the flailing lashing out of a dying regime.
Sure it can. It is easy to be a skeptic, opining that all the IRGC needs to do to win is survive while fighting asymmetrically. The author compares Iran to Vietnam, but the differences cannot be more stark.
Saddam’s calculus for the first gulf war was to entrench the Americans in a Vietnam-like quagmire. Instead, Desert Storm was arguably the most successful and lopsided military operation ever conducted, with the coalition achieving its military objectives of pushing the Iraqis out of Kuwait and obliterating Saddam’s military capabilities with comparatively low costs.
The US doesn’t need to put boots on the ground and then spend years fighting insurgency. All they need to do to ‘win’ is to continue to degrade Iran’s abilities to build and fire missiles and drones faster than the IRGC can reconstitute, because threatening its neighbors and the strait of Hormuz is Irans only leverage. If the US can remove that threat, which it appears broadly capable of doing, they can continue flying sorties to degrade regime indefinitely with little risk.
The skeptics are all focused on the end game as if that scenario isn’t possible or good enough, as if regime change in the short term is the only path to victory. I would argue that neutering the regimes ability to threaten the region and forcing them into hiding is a clear win, even if complete regime change remains a long term hope.