All the imbalances and manipulations in the conflict between the US and Iran

In the conflict with Iran, the United States has entered a phase of accounting manipulation. The four casualties following the ceasefire declaration have been removed from the casualty count for Operation Epic Fury, as the Administration maintains that this operation concluded with the truce and that the current phase is a subsequent one initiated in response to Iran’s violation. The aim is to secure a further sixty days of operations without allowing Congress to intervene on the substance of the war. Meanwhile, according to CNN, the casualty figure has risen to 618 (18 killed and 600 wounded) compared with around five hundred last week. This is a considerable number for a conflict that has not yet seen any direct contact between opposing troops.

Meanwhile, the Americans have suspended their attacks on Iran to allow more room for negotiations, whilst Tehran – despite having declared that it will cease fire as long as the United States does so – does not appear interested in new negotiations. This is implicit confirmation that the exclusive use of air power is unlikely to guarantee a resolution to conflicts. As Dan Caine stated before the Senate, “air power has structural limitations”, despite Pete Hegseth having described Operation Epic Fury as the most effective air campaign in history. Put simply, destructive power does not guarantee success in asymmetric conflicts when the weaker party manages to shift the focus of the confrontation and draw motivation from the attacks. The gap between tactical efficiency and operational results characterises the American campaign in Iran. This is because the United States fought two air wars simultaneously. The first was a war of destruction, fought at high altitude where technological superiority determines the outcome. The second was a war of attrition, fought at low altitude, where what matters to the Iranians is withstanding the pressure long enough to make the conflict unsustainable for the attacker. Tactically, the first has produced considerable results; strategically, the second has been largely ineffective and has determined the overall outcome of the conflict to date.

Tehran’s response therefore focused on the low-altitude airspace above and around the Strait, where low-cost drones and cruise missiles were deployed, imposing costs disproportionate to their unit value. This forced the Americans to evacuate the operations coordination centre at Al Udeid. Aircraft and tanker aircraft were gradually redeployed to the Arabian Sea and Jordan, beyond the effective range of Iran’s most dangerous systems, but also too far away to maintain a sustained presence over the Strait. As Kelly Grieco, a researcher at the Stimson Centre, observed, “Iran did not achieve air superiority, but it prevented the Americans from exercising it in the area that mattered”. This asymmetry should be seen as the consequence of a decade-long policy of procurement decisions geared towards long-range bombing and the dismantling of advanced air defences, at the expense of drones with long endurance, mobile air defences and mass-produced interceptors at sustainable costs.

Robert Pape, who in 1996 wrote the seminal work on the effectiveness of air power, recently analysed the situation in this month’s issue of Foreign Affairs. The 1991 Gulf War had convinced the world that the United States could strike any adversary with precision and speed. The revolution in low-cost drones has made the logic of ‘remote’ warfare increasingly difficult to sustain. This confirms the fact that regimes rarely collapse from the outside. Far more often, they collapse from within, when motivation wanes and the elites begin to think that resistance costs more than surrender. Bombing campaigns, with their inevitable impact on the civilian population, tend to strengthen internal resistance and may have the opposite effect to that intended. The war in Iran suggests that air superiority is changing in function. Its capacity to destroy conventional military targets remains intact, whilst the translation of that capacity into political outcomes depends on conditions that air power alone cannot control. The distinction between these two capacities is set to influence Western military planning far beyond the Persian Gulf.

If the bombing campaign proves insufficient, the ground option remains; however, this currently appears unfeasible, as already described in these pages. An invasion of Iran – a country three times the size of Iraq, with almost double the population and a mountainous terrain that favours defence – requires resources, time and political tolerance for casualties that no US administration is in a position to guarantee under the current circumstances. The option of neutralising underground nuclear sites by land appears even more difficult: according to those who have examined the dossier, this would be the most complicated special mission in American military history. What is certain is that no build-up of ground forces is currently taking place in the region. The result is a strategy in limbo: aerial destruction fails to bring the regime to its knees, a ground operation is not feasible, and the naval blockade is a contest of economic endurance that Washington is not certain of winning. US intelligence assessments reported in the press have concluded that it is unlikely Iran will alter its negotiating position as a result of intensified attacks. For the regime in Tehran, this is a war for survival, and against those fighting to survive, bombing breeds unity, not surrender.

Experience shows that political pressure on decision-makers increases when an air campaign fails to produce the expected results, and the simplest way to respond is to intensify the campaign and expand the range of targets. If the regime’s core remains intact, however, further bombing does not alter that calculation. Trump has repeatedly threatened to strike even harder without actually doing so, knowing that any escalation targeting Iran’s energy infrastructure would provoke a similar response against infrastructure in the Gulf: the threat has thus become a substitute for action, repeated with a frequency inversely proportional to the availability of credible alternatives. That leaves diplomacy, which at present seems, in all likelihood, the most promising option. Negotiating the 2015 international agreement on Iran’s nuclear programme required two years of specialist work by highly experienced diplomats. The current negotiations are being handled by figures without specific expertise, and the State Department has been stripped of the necessary professional expertise. Tehran has built its strategy not on military superiority, but on the gap between the time of war and that of politics. The sky above Tehran belongs to the Americans. The Strait beneath that sky does not. And this, in the end, is the only calculation that matters.