While US has made Operational Progress yet challenges remain
Tehran’s strategy is built not on defeating its enemies but on simply surviving a prolonged war of attrition. The notion that such a vast and geographically complex country could be invaded and its regime toppled through external military intervention is, in practical terms, a pipe dream.
- The war in Iran is currently in a phase in which the military trajectory is relatively positive: the United States is steadily destroying Iran’s ability to use its most essential tool in the war
— drone and missile attacks — which in turn underpin the entire Iranian strategy. Iran has still done some damage to US forces, and it is still firing drones and missiles, though the overall attack rate is slowly decreasing. These attacks still pale in comparison to the major attacks Iran sought to conduct in an existential war and have caused neither operationally significant damage nor widespread casualties.
- The US-Israeli combined force will need time to achieve its military objectives and prevent Iran from inflicting further political and economic pain upon the United States and its allies in the region, but the campaign remains incomplete, and it is too soon to forecast its outcome. Declaring it an operational failure is unquestionably premature.
- Iran has developed and sought to implement a multi-pronged theory of how it will defeat the United States and Israel in a major, existential conflict. This theory is that inflicting enough political and economic pain upon the United States, Israel, and America’s Gulf allies will make the combined force cease its operations.
- The Iranians have developed five lines of effort to compel the United States and Israel to end the war:
--drone and ballistic missile attacks to inflict US and Israeli casualties and economic damage in the Gulf;
-- drone, missile, and naval attacks including mines to disrupt shipping in the Persian Gulf;
-- proxy attacks from Hezbollah and other Iranian-backed groups; global terrorism;
-- and cyber attacks on critical infrastructure.
- The US-Israeli combined campaign has focused on stopping drone, ballistic missile, and traditional naval attacks most urgently because these assets are the most essential Iranian tools that Tehran needs to execute its strategy.
-Both aerial and naval drones remain a threat to shipping and oil infrastructure in the Gulf, and the threat of Iranian mining of the Strait remains real, if complex.
- The combined force will likely knock the drone and missile threat down to levels that would permit renewed maritime transit through the Strait if the current campaign succeeds in its aims, but oil and shipping prices depend in part on the risk-tolerance of third parties, so even an immediate end to the Iranian threat may not cause prices to drop quickly.
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