The Real Reason Trump Hasn’t Been Able to Win the War With Iran
Slate · L · trust 47/100
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One major, little-recognized reason for President Donald Trump’s failure to push the Iranians into surrender—even after hitting more than 13,000 targets with bombs dropped from planes or with missiles fired from long range—is this plain fact: No nation has ever won a war with air power alone. To the extent bombs and missiles have played a role in victory, they have been in coordination with forces on the ground, an escalation of involvement that Trump wisely wants to avoid.
In other words, even if Trump hadn’t overestimated the Iranian regime’s fragility, even if he’d devised a clear strategy of what he wanted the war to accomplish, he would almost certainly not have won this war. He might have done so, if he or Israel’s leaders had prepared and trained a cadre of rebels, perhaps from within Iran’s army, to rise up against the regime’s leaders as the bombs fell. But they didn’t do this, unless you count Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s harebrained scheme—thoughtlessly approved by Trump—to groom former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad , one of Iran’s most brutal and unpopular leaders, to storm the palace after Israeli bombs assassinated the entire top layer of Tehran’s government.
In any case, the plot would have almost certainly failed, even it had been carried out, because Ahmadinejad had no followers inside his own country and because the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps would have quickly grabbed control of the social, political, and economic levers that it has long dominated—as it indeed did, without pause, in the hours after the bombing began. For a while, there was talk of recruiting Kurdish militias in Iraq to storm across the border and seize power in Tehran—until, perhaps, someone realized they would have no support from Iran’s largely Shiite population either.
The U.S. Air Force was created as an independent branch of the armed forces in 1947, inspired and instantly strengthened by the belief that air power can win modern wars without the messy skirmishes of ground troops. The belief, which air theorists had propagated since the onset of combat planes in World War I, seemed confirmed by the results of World War II. However, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey , a panel of experts, released a report the same year, concluding that, in fact, the Allied bombing of German cities—and the German bombing of British cities—had little impact on the war. The board singled out the persistent bombing of German oil and communications facilities as a factor that impeded the resupply of the Nazi tank army. In other words, to the extent bombing had an effect on the war, it was by assisting the ground war—not by shaping the course of the war from the sky on its own.
The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the war in the Pacific to a sudden end, but this suggests only that the shock and awe of nuclear weapons—the obliteration of a whole city by a single explosion—might alter the general rule about air power. Even here, though, historians have noted that the Soviet Union’s near-simultaneous invasion of Manchuria —which dispelled Japan’s illusion that Moscow might stay neutral in the war—also had an impact on the emperor’s calculations. (And even then, the emperor disrupted the normal chain of command by intervening in a decision that would normally have been made by the army, whose top officers were prepared to keep fighting.)
The most authoritative, skeptical account of the subject is the 1996 book Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War by University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape. A scrupulous analysis of 33 strategic air campaigns from World War II through the decades since, it tests whether those campaigns validate any of the four war aims that bombs and missiles are said to accomplish: (1) punishment (inflicting enough pain to cause the government to surrender or the people to revolt); (2) relentless damage (compelling the government to surrender in order to avoid further costs); (3) decapitation (killing key leadership, resulting in the regime’s toppling); or (4) denial (weakening enemy troops to the point where our own troops can push forward without suffering unacceptable casualties).
Pape finds some cases that support the fourth (denial), but that’s the one objective that assumes troops on the ground, which, again, Trump is very unlikely to deploy in Iran. Pape finds no evidence—from the wars in Korea to Vietnam to the first Gulf War or any others—to support the theory that air power can accomplish any of those aims on its own. In general, he concludes, “No strategic bombing campaign has ever yielded decisive results, nor were any significant opportunities missed. … The lesson of airpower history is that strategic bombing is a very marginal coercive tool.”
The ironically titled Bombing to Win was published 30 years ago, but the wars since—in Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, and now Iran—do nothing to contradict its conclusions. It seemed at the time that NATO’s 1999 airstrikes on Serbia might be an exception: The reigning dictator Slobodan Milošević stepped down from power after relentless bombing but no ground forces. However, while researching my 2016 book Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War , I discovered that several U.S. intelligence agencies—including the Special Technological Operations Division of J-39, a highly secretive unit of the Pentagon’s Joint Staff (which may or may not still exist)—conducted an ingenious series of cyber offensives, information-warfare operations, and targeted intimidation of Serbia’s industrial elite, who backed away from Milošević under pressure, as a result of which his puppet regime collapsed. These weren’t combat…
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