A Strategic Assessment of the Iran-Israeli War
I recently locked my X account, so I’ll be returning to Substack to make short pieces based on the analysis I’ve been doing there. Apologies for my low output on this platform, as personal obligations have limited my deep focus time. I’ve resolved to carve out time to resolve this.
Just as we’ve seen with the Russo-Ukrainian War, popular analysis of the state of the conflict between Israel and Iran has rapidly degraded into claims that one side or the other is “winning,” or “losing.” Rarely is this ever done, so let's zoom out and ask what it means to "be winning" or "be losing" in a conflict. The first step is to ask ourselves what the strategic goals of the parties involved are. Again, this is rarely done. Trying to use missile strikes, destroyed TELs, interceptions, or civilians killed as a proxy for "how well" a combatant is doing is fraught with issues, because it takes a series of increasingly speculative leaps to connect those metrics to the core question of whether that combatant is getting closer or further away from achieving its strategic goals, and we'll always be working with incomplete information.
Israel is claiming that its strategic goal is to eliminate Iranian nuclear capability. Everyone seems to accept that they haven't done this. They bombed some nuclear enrichment sites and assassinated a few scientists, but this will not stop the Iranians from developing a bomb if they so choose. No one seems to discuss Iran's strategic goal, or really care. It's very hard to talk in terms of winning or losing without determining this. Is it to develop nuclear weapons? No. The fatwa remains in place and they could easily have done it 100x over by now if they haven't already. They were signaling their openness to make a deal on this issue until Israel engaged in an unprovoked attack on them. Israel's only hope of achieving this goal at this point is to drag the US into the conflict.
Iran's strategic goal, at least in the short term, is to re-establish deterrence. If they can survive the US/Israeli onslaught and cause enough military, economic, or political attrition in Israel to force it to end its offensive against them, they will achieve their goal. Their main path to achieving this is depleting Israeli interceptor stocks, which I believe they can accomplish in a matter of one to two weeks. Israel does not have the same advantages Ukraine has, because the country is much smaller, and the Iranians have been building up their missile stockpiles for decades in preparation for this exact moment. Their stockpiles of BMs are likely nowhere close to exhaustion, and they haven't seriously dipped into their supply of drones yet. If they can deplete Israeli air defenses, they can begin deploying overwhelming swarms of attack drones that will quickly create an unsustainable situation for the Israelis.
But back to the Israelis, I don't believe that this conflict has anything to do with Iranian nuclear research, which is being used as a fig leaf to cover the actual strategic Israeli goal, which is destabilizing Iran by forcing it to fight a protracted air war with the United States. They'd like to solve the Iranian problem permanently, and with opposition to Israel rising, and American military power waning, there's no time like the present. The window is closing on this opportunity, and all the while their position is being eroded by regular drone, missile, and rocket attacks on Israel by Ansar Allah, Iranian backed forces in Iraq, Hezbollah, and Hamas. Although they've successfully put a subset of the forces arrayed against them on their collective back foot, they've failed to eliminate any of them as a threat.
All the signals we're receiving are that US involvement is becoming increasingly likely. This means that Israel is indeed "doing well," but not in the sense of military victories. Their air defenses are by all appearances slowly being degraded, and many of their claims about the number of TELs or Iranian AD systems they've destroyed seem dubious. We're working with imperfect information, so it isn't easy to draw conclusions here.
The issue with the Israeli strategic goal is that it's a serious gamble. They've clearly determined that they can weather whatever storm arises from future escalations, including the destruction of the region's oil infrastructure, but US intervention could be more limited than they need it to be, or the Iranian response to that intervention could be so devastating, that it causes a political crisis in Israel. Time will tell.
Welcome back - a brief but well balanced article.
The Israeli goal was indeed to create regime destruction and not change (you need troops on the ground for Regime Change). The problem is that they probably had a three day window to devastate the Iranian Regime so much that Iranians lost faith in it and society (with its ethnic schisms it was hoped) would break apart. The problem is that the population seem to have rallied around the Regime (no matter how unpopular it is - part of what I call the 'Stalin Paradox') and the Regime managed to organize and fight back. The longer the time goes on it is most likely to increasingly advantage the Iranians against the Israelis in an attritional war that Israel is not geared for.
Having failed, Natanyahu desperately needs to get the US involved to save Israel from its own strategic failure and himself from a fall in his Government and ending up in a jail cell for corruption. When it looked as if there was spectacular success in the early days, Trump was all in, until evidence showed it had not worked. Now Trump, often implosive and indecisive, is having to step back - especially as Iran is demonstrating surprising power against Israel. Possibly the last person to talk to him will win the argument.
Should Trump decide to attack Iran, it will not stay at bombing but the need to ultimately commit ground troops to save US assets in the region. If this is the case, then the longer the war would go on, the more temptation the Russians and Chinese have of fighting their own proxy war against the West. For Russia, to divert Western material support from Ukraine to elsewhere as the US calls on its Western allies to assist it. And for China, to further weaken the US and delay any build up of US forces in the Pacific against it.
"Israel is claiming that its strategic goal is to eliminate Iranian nuclear capability. Everyone seems to accept that they haven't done this."
Everyone knows that "Iranian nuclear capability" is but a pretext. Israel's real goal is to get the United State to turn Iran into a failed state, like the United States turned Iraq, Libya and Syria into failed states, in each case, at Israel's behest.
This goal is preceding apace.