It’s been just long enough to gain a little perspective on June’s “Twelve Day War” with Iran, and to attempt a preliminary assessment of what it all accomplished, and where it leaves us. The results, as almost invariably when it comes to the use of military force, are a little mixed, but if you’re a big fan of the Trump-Netanyahu axis, things worked out surprisingly well, considering the downside risks that were so gleefully run. Longer term, though, the prospects seem less bright. A few tentative thoughts and conclusions:
Trump is the luckiest son of a bitch to ever live. My view is that Donald’s decision to jump into Israel’s sudden air war was impetuous, ill-considered, and so fraught with risk that the way it all worked out was little short of a geopolitical miracle. Having been struck by the USAF, Iranian leadership went over their options, many of which could have set off an apocalyptic chain reaction, and chose the most measured response that national pride permitted – and not for the first time:
Rather than launch everything they had at every American military installation within range, and forgoing options such as attacking the US navy and/or commercial shipping, blowing up Saudi oil facilities, or – multiple horrors – attempting to close the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranians fired a mere 14 ballistic missiles at the Al Udeid air base in Qatar, after, according to Trump, giving a few hours notice of the time and place they intended to strike. Normally, Al Udeid, America’s largest facility in the Middle East, would have been a juicy target packed with billions-worth of high-end military aircraft, but the base had been evacuated, its aircraft and personnel dispersed to other locales, leaving only the Patriot air defence elements behind to guard the fixed assets that couldn’t be hustled out of the way. It was a non-event; Iranian leadership, evidently, decided that it was too risky to try to make the Americans pay for their part in the devastation raining down around their ears, which was of course the smart and sensible thing to do, but not necessarily what you’d expect under the circumstances, especially from a Supreme Leader sweating on the business end of personal death threats posted by a crowing Donald on his ludicrous social media fever swamp.
Anyone with any sort of grasp of the situation is still sweating through nightmares about all the ways this could have gone sideways. But hey, it’s Donald, and Fat Donny always skates.
Iran is much diminished as a regional power and chaos agent. No doubt about it, they’re back on their heels. I can cheat here by simply copying in what I wrote in a prior post on topic:
We’ll be getting to the tough questions in a second, but first, wow. Not long ago Iran was everywhere ascendant and seen as the most dangerous force in the region. Now they’re hanging on by their fingernails, their allies eliminated, their armed forces devastated, and their leadership hunted like rats.
As will be discussed, this puts Iran down, but as things stand, by no means out. There should probably, now, be an interlude of greater stability and relative quiet, but how long it lasts is another question.
It remains unclear whether Bibi and Donald were working in a coordinated fashion to execute a joint war plan, but on balance I guess we have to think so. I hesitate to credit Donald with the ability to hatch any sort of scheme involving coordinated military action, but maybe Netanyahu and his team did all the heavy lifting. Clearly, as the pre-strike evacuations of various American facilities in the region made obvious, the Israelis had, at a minimum, given Trump a courteous heads-up a few days prior to launching their air campaign, but I was initially inclined to believe Lil’ Marco Rubio when he claimed, at the outset, that the United States otherwise had nothing to do with it. Diplomatic negotiations to halt Iran’s nuclear program were ongoing, albeit getting nowhere, plus our own intelligence estimates had the Iranians deliberately stopping short of enriching uranium to weapons-grade, and in that context it made no sense, within the usual framework of international relations, to launch such a pre-emptive strike. In the immediate reverberation of the first wave of attacks, as confusion seemed to reign among the key players of the US foreign policy apparatus, with Trump and Rubio repeatedly changing their stories, it really did look as if Bibi simply decided on his own to pull the pin on an operation he’d been contemplating for years, one for which the Israelis had laid the groundwork months prior with a set of devastating strikes on the Iranian air defence system.
I was wondering in the moment whether an Israeli decision to force the issue had been taken immediately after Trump relaxed the pressure on the Mullahs, by withdrawing the threatening detachment of B-2 bombers from Diego Garcia while negotiations continued. This was a move which made no difference militarily (as was demonstrated, the B-2s were perfectly capable of striking anywhere in the world from their home base in Missouri), but seemed at the time to telegraph Donald’s well-known aversion to following through on his blustery threats to use force. Thinking further on it, though, would Israel really take such a precipitous step unilaterally? I still don’t think any of this would have happened if it had been up to Donald alone, absent Netanyahu’s undoubtedly incessant lobbying for the implementation of policy by other means; but in retrospect it seems impossible that even an irredeemable SOB as arrogant as Bibi would launch such a comprehensive set of strikes, obliterating the ongoing diplomacy, without Donald’s approval, and it’s interesting, in evaluating this, that Israel’s attack began right after a 60-day deadline for a settlement issued by Trump – one of those who-knows-if-he-really-means-it ultimata that Donald himself seemed to have forgotten – had expired. So perhaps, indeed, the attack had been planned and coordinated all along.
Whether Donald intended all the while for US forces to join the fray is another matter. Detailed plans had long been in place, of course, for a US strike if it ever became necessary, but many of the relevant assets weren’t in-theatre when Israel began pummelling Iranian targets, and key elements of the attack, like the dozens of aerial refuellers required, were hastily rushed into place after the IAF strikes had already all but achieved everything they could. I suspect that Donald saw what success the Israelis were having, using American aircraft to mop the floor with what was left of Iran’s military, and decided, after waffling a bit, to run to the front of the parade, declare himself Grand Marshall, and dust off his own air force’s well-rehearsed plans to hit Iranian nuclear facilities (in specific connection with which the Massive Ordinance Penetrator bombs had been developed and stockpiled). No doubt Bibi was urging him all the while to join the party, but it really doesn’t seem as if Trump knew until the last minute what he was going to do. Indeed, he said as much to reporters.
It’s hard to know which is worse; either Bibi manipulated the United States into joining a risky war the Americans didn’t want to start, deliberately and unilaterally derailing US diplomatic efforts with quite contemptuous impatience, or Donald was scheming all along to let the Israelis do the heavy lifting before deciding, or perhaps having intended all along, to send in the USAF’s heavy hitters to finish the job, in which case the negotiations were exactly what they now look to have been to all of America’s potential adversaries: a devious ruse. Trump may well have intentionally demonstrated to the whole world, yet again, that there’s really no point to dealing diplomatically with his administration.
As usual with Donald, pick your poison, this time with the added bonus that maybe you can have both at once.
Stealth remains a military game changer. It’s hard to evaluate any additional edge the undoubted ultra-stealthiness of American B-2 bombers may have provided, since, by the time of their strike, Israeli aircraft had already pummelled Iranian air defences into virtual oblivion, besides which the bombers apparently went in supported by tactical aircraft equipped to jam and kinetically suppress any defences that remained, which fighters, according to the Pentagon, even found a few things to shoot at. Better safe than sorry. Under the circumstances, huge and decidedly unstealthy radar reflecting monsters like the USAF’s B-52s might have been just as able to penetrate Iranian air space, in which case the main utility of the B-2s was actually their unique capacity to carry the Massive Ordinance Penetrator bombs, though the Americans, quite sensibly, would never use anything but their sharpest knives on such a mission.
There’s no doubt, however, that the stealthy F-35s operated by the Israelis again proved the effectiveness of American stealth technology even in the teeth of sophisticated “near peer” air defence systems supplied by the Russians. It’s believed that the IAF has modified their F-35s for extended range (perhaps using stealthy conformal fuel tanks) allowing them to run missions all the way to Iran and back without refuelling, though they may also have been able to land on the way back, perhaps at Saudi or Jordanian bases, to refuel; but however they got there and back, it was the F-35s that kicked down the door and opened up Iran’s air space not just to Israeli air superiority, but outright air supremacy. Iranian sources made several specious claims, backed by ludicrous imagery generated by AI and computer video games, to have shot down several of the fighters, but reliable sources indicate that none of the IAF machines was so much as damaged, and it’s thought that they may never have even been glimpsed on radar. The ease with which the F-35s have repeatedly penetrated hostile air space with impunity, including on missions to destroy the very weapons designed to bring them down, must be giving both the Russians and the Chinese pause. Whatever one thinks of the bigger picture, the Israeli ability to take over the airspace of a hostile power, and then flood the zone with literally hundreds of tactical aircraft, including non-stealthy F-15s and F-16s taking advantage of the holes blown through the defences by the F-35s, was, by every applicable military criterion, utterly magnificent. For good or ill, the Iranians now know that there’s no conventional weapon they can buy that can stop the Israelis and their accursed US-supplied stealth fighters from coming and going as they please, a frightening realization that could cut both ways.
One of the ridiculous Iranian propaganda shots purporting to depict a downed F-35. Apart from being inaccurate in several details, including wing shape, the supposed F-35 is about 20 times the size of the actual aircraft.
Anti-missile defences work – to a point. Trying once again to use their rocket forces as an asymmetric offset to overwhelming Israeli air power, the Iranians rained literally hundreds of their many marks of intermediate range ballistic missile on Israeli targets, urban and military, and achieved only minimal results from a strategic perspective. The psychological effect may turn out to have been another matter, since the Iranians launched enough weaponry to partially, if intermittently, overwhelm even the dense thicket of ultra-sophisticated missile defence forces assembled domestically and augmented by the Americans.
In the popular consciousness Israel is defended against missile strikes by its famous “Iron Dome” system, but Iron Dome uses radars and interceptors designed to hit the slower, lower-flying sorts of rockets that used to be fired regularly at Israeli targets by Hamas and Hezbollah. The much more potent Iranian missiles, screaming in from outside the atmosphere at speeds approaching 12-14 times the speed of sound, must be met by a much different order of defensive interceptor. On hand were Israeli weapons dubbed Arrow and David’s Sling, as well as American ground based THAAD** missiles, and Standard Missile-3 interceptors fired by American ships off shore. These are all extremely complex and expensive weapons, the latest variants, incredibly, being capable of reaching up into space and making exo-atmospheric interceptions (the best kind) – I don’t have figures for the Israeli systems, but to give you an idea, a single THAAD round costs something like 12 million dollars, and an SM-3 is just as expensive – and as a result this type of defensive anti-ballistic missile is difficult to manufacture and stockpile in sufficient quantities, which stockpiles, once depleted, can’t possibly be replenished in a hurry. Much is made of the brute fact that the defensive weapons, faced with the requirement to score direct hits in “bullet-shooting-at-a-bullet” engagements, are per force far more expensive than the weapons they defend against, which, from a purely economic perspective, misses the point – the cost of the interceptors has to be measured not against the price of the attacking missiles, but the price of letting those missiles strike their targets – but it’s highly relevant that the cost and complexity of the defensive interceptors means that it’s very difficult to have enough of them ready to use when there are literally hundreds of hostile hypersonic radar tracks incoming.
Besides, any defence, however sophisticated and layered, can be saturated and overwhelmed, and while the Iranians accomplished almost nothing militarily with their strikes, and killed only a small fraction of the Israelis they would have liked to have murdered, it’s estimated that from 10-15% of the attacking missiles made it through. Now, in tactical terms, a defensive success rate of, say, 87% against a threat like a huge barrage of intermediate range ballistic missiles is absolutely brilliant, and probably represents the maximum effectiveness possible with existing technology. This, however, is cold comfort to those on the ground, crouching under the 13% that are still striking nearby. Moreover, there’s reason to believe that it was turning into a near-run thing whether the Iranians would run out of IRBMs before the defenders ran out of interceptors, and that the cease-fire may have come just in time. In any case, the outcome serves to prove that there’s no magic, foolproof solution to the problem posed by ballistic missiles, and while a defensive success rate approaching 90% renders the threat they pose more political than military, it’s not a political threat to be taken lightly.
Note that even at Al Udeid, a point target loaded for bear and, apparently, primed for the exact time of a small attack, the defending Patriot batteries let through a leaker; one of the 14 missiles evaded the defences and hit something valuable, a ground-based communications array.
We can expect the analysis of these engagements to spur frantic effort to develop not just better, even more expensive interceptor missiles, but directed energy weapons, using lasers and perhaps microwaves. The Israelis are already well at work on a laser system dubbed Iron Beam.
The MOP may or may not be effective. Only 14 Massive Ordinance Penetrators were dropped on 2 targets, 12 of them on the deeply-buried facility at Fordow, six apiece drilling two holes with successive impacts. According to tests conducted repeatedly in the U.S., this should have been enough to penetrate all the way through to the target, several hundred feet underground and encased in God knows how many feet of super-hardened, steel-reinforced concrete, but for now, at least, it’s impossible to tell. Even if they didn’t penetrate all the way through, their massive explosions would have generated significant concussive and seismic effects, perhaps severe enough to damage or destroy the sensitive equipment, especially the hundreds of delicate centrifuges vital to the uranium enrichment process, that operated at the subterranean site. The truth is that we just don’t know, and neither does the Pentagon. Gathering accurate intelligence may take months, if it can be gathered at all, though we’ll be able to see from space whether the Iranians start digging out the facility and using it again, which would indicate that the attacks were at best partially effective. If the bombs caused major damage, or complete devastation, the Iranians may have to start in again somewhere else, this time going still deeper and layering on even more concrete, knowing, as they do so, that the next generation of weapons to replace the MOP is already in development. This time it may be the Iranians who have to grapple with the problem that the defensive measures are far more difficult and expensive to deploy than the weapons designed to overwhelm them, and the effort might seem futile, in which case the MOPs will have done their job.
Don’t bet the mortgage.
Iran’s nuclear program was set back – not destroyed. It’s assessed that the Iranians had stored several hundred pounds of processed uranium at the Fordow facility, which, enriched to a high but still sub-weapons-grade level of about 60%, existed in a gaseous form stored in canisters. For all their martial prowess, the Israelis didn’t have the hardware necessary to take this material out, and it’s now being reported that the Iranians were therefore quite content to keep it all stored at Fordow, where it seemed safe despite the always latent threat of an American strike, right up until Donald shot his mouth off to the press and announced he’d decide on the spur of the moment, within the next two weeks, whether he wanted the USAF to join the battle. Until hearing that pronouncement, they appear to have been betting that Trump wouldn’t have the cajones to commit his own forces to combat, but as soon as Donald disabused them of that misapprehension they began moving the uranium to parts unknown, only a couple of days in advance of the strike.
Pentagon planners were, of course, aghast that Orange Idi was making public announcements about attacks that work best only when they come as bolts out of the blue, and it was, indeed, as a response to Donald being so dumbfoundingly forthright about the coming strike that the planners felt they needed to reestablish some semblance of surprise by sending two waves of bombers around the globe in two different directions, one of them a feint. In the result, whatever the damage to Fordow, most or all of the enriched uranium has survived, and can still be processed into weapons-grade material somewhere else. How long this would take the Iranians is a matter of fierce debate, since they’re probably going to have to build a new facility to do it, depending on how badly Fordow was damaged. It could take years, maybe, or maybe only months, if Fordow can be rehabilitated, which might depend upon whether another airstrike is launched to slow them back down. Setting back the Iranian nuclear program in such fashion is no small achievement, but falls far short of bombing it completely and permanently out of existence, an impossible task. Therefore:
The job remains incomplete, and unless Iran now feels it must change its behaviour, this isn’t over. I found an interesting article published, somewhat surprisingly, out of Latvia, that sums it up nicely, from which I now quote, liberally and lazily:
Israel achieved operational surprise and carried out a “decapitation strike“ within days of starting the operation. Iran’s top military leadership was reportedly eliminated, including armed forces chief of staff Mohammad Bagheri and IRGC commander Hossein Salami. Iran reportedly lost 11 nuclear scientists and 30 generals in just 12 days. By comparison, Russia has lost slightly more than ten generals during its ongoing war in Ukraine, which is now well into its fourth year…Israel is preparing to execute new strikes on Iran in the event Tehran attempts to revive its nuclear program, and according to Ron Dermer, a top advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Jerusalem is counting on U.S. support. Three weeks after the U.S.-Israeli coalition’s military operation, the results are mixed: tactically, the brief campaign was overwhelmingly effective, but it fell short of meeting several key strategic goals. Israeli airstrikes swiftly disabled much of Iran’s air defenses, disrupted command-and-control networks, and hit hundreds of military, nuclear, and defense infrastructure targets across the country. U.S. follow‑on attacks using high‑penetration bunker‑buster bombs struck major sites connected to Iran’s nuclear program, but by every indication they did not attempt to reach deeply buried sections of the Isfahan Nuclear Research Center. In the end, critical Iranian resources and equipment remain intact, enabling a potential rapid resumption of nuclear weapons development. Israel now faces a choice: launch a new, ground‑penetrating military operation deep into Iranian territory, or pursue a new diplomatic agreement on Tehran’s nuclear program.
https://theins.ru/en/politics/283091
That sounds about right. For all its tactical brilliance, the war waged by Israel and America has failed to meet a number of key geopolitical objectives. There has been no regime change; the Mullahs remain firmly in control, and while upper echelon military and political figures have been killed, like they say, nobody is irreplaceable. The Iranian nuclear program is damaged, but can be reconstituted. The Iranians can take the uranium they’ve already enriched, and, if need be, build a new facility, deeper and even better protected than Fordow, to keep right on working towards a stockpile of weapons-grade material. If that’s the decision, follow-on attacks will be necessary, and we may find ourselves playing geopolitical whac-a-mole, just as we once did with Saddam Hussein, until Bush the Younger decided he was going to fix things once and for all. The Israelis are already talking as if they want to skip to the “fixed once and for all” phase straight away, which, frankly, is terrifying to contemplate.
Now, if you were running Iran, what would you do? Give in? Try to negotiate some more? Or would you reason that since there’s no conventional weapon you can buy or build either to defend against the US-Israeli axis, or hit back hard enough to deter attack, the best bet is to go nuclear, and promise that the next time the IAF waltzes into Iranian airspace in its damnable F-35s, the 13% of the missiles that manage to penetrate Israeli defences in the retaliatory onslaught will each be delivering several hundred kilotons of thermonuclear warheads?
The minute we assess that this is the route they mean to take, the pressure to take drastic military action immediately, before they can get there, will be overwhelming.
The best way out of this mess would of course be the diplomacy that now seems all but impossible. I’ve long asked in this space why anybody would bother negotiating with the Americans, given all that Trump has done to tear up treaties and undo agreements reached under prior US regimes, even his own, and that goes double now that the Twelve Day War was initiated right in the middle of a diplomatic effort that now looks to have been a sham. If I’m the Supreme Leader, I’m screaming at my underlings to get me a bomb, ASAP, so that I can sit in Tehran beaming and thumbing my nose at the world in the same way Kim does from his perch in Pyongyang, and not end up murdered in a ditch like Qaddaffi, or swinging at the end of a rope like Saddam, or just killed in my bed by a MOP, as Donald has already threatened in one of his crazy-pantsed postings on his wretched social media platform.
I’ll say this again too: when Donald came to power in 2016, we already had a treaty with Iran, one with stringent terms to which the Iranians were adhering to the letter. The current problem was already solved, maybe not permanently, but to about the greatest extent that anything in this messy world of geopolitics motivated by religious and ethnic hatreds going back millennia ever gets solved. That was never enough for the Boltons and Netanyahus of this world, since it only kept Iran from joining the nuclear club, and didn’t address the maximalist goal of dealing with all the other geopolitical problems posed by the Iranian regime. Anyway, since it was Obama’s achievement, Burnt Umber Voldemort just had to tear that treaty to shreds, and ever since Bibi and the sorts of hard-line thinkers who agree with him have been agitating to get the job done their way. They want regime change, imposed by military force. The way things are going, I’m betting they’re going to get their chance, probably not so long from today, and then we’ll have another in a lengthening series of opportunities to comprehend the limits, and the unpleasant knock-on effects, of attempting to solve complex problems by pounding them with sledge hammers.
We’ve been dodging bullets in the Middle East. Violent as it’s become, we’ve still been dodging bullets. Maybe our luck will hold.
As so often before, I ask you: do you feel lucky?
**Theatre High Altitude Air Defence
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the needlefish 