We Still Haven’t Answered the Basic Questions of the Iran War
OCCASIONALLY, WHEN THINGS START to look a little too neat, a little too measurable, a little too certain, I like to return to an old friend for guidance. Carl von Clausewitz, the nineteenth-century Prussian officer, might be a questionable choice for insight into a twenty-first-century fight. But he wrote one of the most enduring works on military theory in the history of the world, and there’s a reason military professionals around the globe turn to him for understanding—especially about our own limits. “We have all the cards,” the president declared last weekend, and “If they want to talk, all they have to do is call!!!”
When the administration talks about Iran, things are portrayed as deceptively simple. That’s likely because people in the administration are counting missiles, launchers, ships, and command nodes. They’re estimating how much of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps remains intact. While those may appear to be useful metrics, they create a dangerous illusion—that war can be understood through numbers alone. Clausewitz would caution us to start somewhere else entirely: with the “center of gravity,” the source of an adversary’s strength.
For Iran, that center of gravity is not its arsenal. It is its institutions—most notably the IRGC and the clerical establishment under the supreme leader (though how much the current supreme leader is actually in charge of either of those organizations is doubtful at the moment). These are not just instruments of power; they are the regime’s foundation. They enforce internal control, propagate the regime’s ideology, and direct military and economic activity. Unlike democratic systems like ours, where public opinion and economic activity shape national power, Iran’s structure allows it to concentrate authority and absorb shocks in ways that are surprisingly resilient when compared directly with our system.
Our center of gravity might be our military, even though it’s by far the strongest in the world: With defense priorities spanning the entire globe, the American military is stretched pretty thin in most places at most times, and being forced into devoting major resources—for example, three aircraft carrier task forces—to one conflict at the same time deprives other theaters. But for Iran, that might not be our weakest point—after all, it does them little good if the U.S. Seventh Fleet in the Western Pacific is weakened. Instead, Iran seems to think our center of gravity is our politics and our economics. The Iranian people have little to no say over their government’s policy, but the Iranian leaders know that Americans are very sensitive to gas prices, economic slumps, and the fluctuations of the stock market—as are our leaders.
UNDERSTANDING THE CONCEPT of the center of gravity is only the first step. To think about how to affect it, there’s another old theorist, Antoine-Henri Jomini, who wrote about what he called “decisive points” in war—the places, actions, or capabilities that allow a force to gain leverage over an enemy. One element of the “great principle underlying all the operations of war,” Jomini wrote, was to “throw by strategic movements the mass of an army, successively, upon the decisive points of a theater of war, and also upon the communications of the enemy as much as possible without compromising one’s own.” If Clausewitz tells us what matters most, Jomini helps us think about where and how to apply pressure to attack it.
In a conventional war, decisive points are relatively easy to determine: key terrain, major formations, command nodes, the enemy’s capital city. Strike, destroy, or take those, and the enemy begins to unravel. But in a conflict with an enemy like Iran, decisive points are far more diffuse. Some are physical, like missile infrastructure or the Strait of Hormuz. Others are institutional and are tied to the IRGC and clerical control. Still others are economic and psychological: the regime’s perception of its own survivability, its ability to impose costs on global markets, and its confidence that it can outlast its adversaries.
All this makes the fight more complex. We can strike visible targets and still struggle to influence the underlying source of strength. Just as different weapons, formations, and tactics are necessary for driving an opposing army from the field of battle, or capturing a city, or destroying a command post, the forms of power necessary to degrade Iran’s military capability might not be those necessary to attack its decisive points.
After the 1991 Gulf War, the Iraqi regular military was shattered. The elite Republican Guard, which many considered one of the decisive points of Saddam Hussein’s regime was destroyed, and many inside and outside of government expected Saddam to fall. But he didn’t. The decisive points were not what we thought they were.
In 2003, Iraqi formations collapsed quickly, yet the war did not end—it transformed. Saddam had learned his lesson, so what followed was not a continuation of conventional combat but the emergence of a far more elusive enemy in the irregular Fedayeen Saddam. What followed that was first a complex insurgency, then a religious civil war, and later a terrorist-supported insurrection. The lessons in each of those conflicts was sobering and our estimates of the enemy situation were always incomplete. What existed on the ground consistently confounded what we believed.
Absent strong political guidance, the military’s natural inclination is to think in strictly military terms, and to identify decisive points in narrowly military ways. During Operation Iraqi Freedom, units were continuously tasked with finding and destroying arms caches. Success was measured in the number of supply points found and eliminated. But every time we destroyed one, we found dozens more we didn’t know about—buried underground, hidden in mosques, stored in buildings across cities and in berms in the countryside. The dead-ender Fedayeen Saddam, and then the foreign fighters who followed them, and then the various religious militias and terrorist groups in Iraq who came after that, became adept at saturating the country with weapons—small arms, improvised explosives, car bombs, suicide vests, rocket-propelled grenades, anything they could find to injure or kill. Iran has also learned that lesson, so that today that nation is similarly saturated with rockets, drones, and missiles, and the means to launch them.
That experience should temper any confidence the United States places in current intelligence assessments, and many believe our military’s assessments of how much it has actually destroyed may be too high. The intelligence community’s assessments of how much remains may also be too high. All of these numbers should be treated with skepticism. Clausewitz warned that intelligence in war is often contradictory, incomplete, and frequently wrong. Even when you’re physically on the ground, you have incomplete information—and all the more so when you’re hundreds or thousands of miles away, or 30,000 feet overhead in a fast-moving aircraft. The enemy hides, deceives, disperses, and adapts. That is the nature of war.
TWO OTHER CLAUSEWITZIAN terms come into play. The “fog of war” is both the absence of evidence and the continuous presence of misleading information. “Friction” is the accumulation of small failures—miscommunication, delays, human error—that make even simple tasks difficult. Together, they create an environment where certainty is fleeting, and any overconfidence by leaders filled with hubris is dangerous.
Iran operates comfortably in that environment. Even as it absorbs damage to its conventional capabilities, it retains the ability to disperse assets, conceal capacity, and shift to asymmetric methods. Mines, drones, missiles, proxy networks, and economic leverage points like the Strait of Hormuz allow Iran to extend the fight into areas where ambiguity becomes a weapon.
We should, at the same time, be aware that part of Iran’s strategy is to portray to the American government, the American people, and the whole world a picture of unity, patience, and grit that may be far from the truth. They, like every adversary, have an incentive to hide their weaknesses, and the closed nature of their regime makes those weaknesses less obvious than our open society makes ours. Clausewitz’s warnings about misleading intelligence apply as much to overconfident assessments of our strengths as to overly pessimistic estimations of the enemy.
A few real questions remain. Are we truly affecting Iran’s center of gravity? Have we identified decisive points that matter, or just those that are visible and that we can strike? What are we missing as we work through the fog of war? And how is Iran using uncertainty and friction as a tool against us?
Clausewitz would remind us that war is not a math problem. Jomini would ask whether we are applying pressure in the right places. Right now, the honest answer to both questions is the same.
We’re still figuring it out.
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