The Iranian Question

Tensions are high in the Middle East with the U.S. and Israel expected to launch a new war against Iran, with the Iranians promising to "not hold back" and retaliate using the full extent of their arsenal of missiles. If the 12 Day War had small spillovers in Qatar and Bahrain, this new war has the potential to spillover into other Middle Eastern countries with unpredictable consequences for everyone involved but one thing that is certain is that there will be huge loss of life, combatants and innocents alike.

Despite strong rhetoric from both Israel and the U.S, the Trump Admin has been uncharacteristically hesitant to begin the war, delaying it for over a month seemingly afraid of what the Iranians might do in response.

The Trump Admin has good reasons to be afraid. The 12 Day War showed that Israel on its own cannot defeat Iran but even worse, the combined air defense of Israel, CENTCOM and Jordan could not stop salvos of 40-50 Iranian missiles which ended up causing billions in damages to Tel Aviv, Haifa, the Dimona Nuclear Research Facility, the Mossad HQ, Weizmann Institute and other sensitive sites across Israel.

Iran has been working day and night to rebuild its missile stocks and beef up its air defense and electronic warfare capacity. The worst part for the anti-Iran coalition is that the 12 Day War saw the elimination of sleeper terrorist cells inside Iran by local security forces. These terrorist cells arguably caused more damage to the Iranian state and military than the air strikes themselves.

Aware of this fact, this past January, the U.S. and Israel took advantage of a food riot and tried turning it into a general uprising, when the violence flared up mostly in the ethnically Kurdish areas of Iran but campaigns on social media left the impression that the riots were bigger and more widespread than in reality.

American and Israeli military leadership was aware of this fact, despite presenting to the wider public that the Islamic Republic of Iran was "unpopular" and "losing control of the country", and chose not to attack then, partly because there weren't enough assets in place and partly because they foolishly expected mass defections from the army and police because an out of touch "royal" who hasn't set foot in the country since 1979, told them to throw out Ali Khamenei.

Now that this plan failed and the window of opportunity to attack Iran while its security forces were distracted with rebellions is gone, the only option left is to bomb Iran with far more force than during the 12 Day War but that will end in failure just like the previous time if not followed by a military invasion with troops on the ground and this is where the problems begin.

Lessons from the USSR, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq

During WW2 the USSR suffered ~10 million military casualties (as calculated by the Russian MoD, counting only the POWs that died in captivity) for a war which lasted 3 years and 10 months. The Soviet Afghan War lasted for close to 10 years and saw the deaths of over 16k Soviet troops. This was enough to collapse the morale of the Soviet citizenry and obliterate public trust in the leadership of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union which, coupled with other factors, led to the collapse of the USSR.

Although the two wars are hardly comparable as in WW2, the USSR fought to preserve its existence, in Afghanistan, the USSR fought to keep in power the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) which few Soviet citizens were interested in doing and even fewer in giving their life for it. 

This led to a vicious cycle where the Soviet military leadership was limited by the Politburo who sought to remain popular, unable to fully commit and defeat the Mujaheddin but at the same time unable to abandon its ally, the PDPA, so it was stuck for a decade fighting a war that wasn't politically feasible to actually win by military means.

The U.S. has a similar aversion for casualties. It was first seen during the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu. The Somali National Alliance (SNA) of Mohammed Aidid shot down two U.S. helicopters and blocked the rescue convoy managing to kill 18 U.S. soldiers in the process while losing 200 fighters. This was a high enough death toll for Bill Clinton that he ordered the U.S. military to leave Somalia giving Aidid the outcome he desired.

The last real war the U.S. military fought was the 2003 Invasion of Iraq and it heavily mirrored the USSR's struggle in Afghanistan. The invasion was a success, with tens of thousands of Iraqi military deaths for a few hundred American soldiers, but that was enough to make most Americans hate the war. The subsequent insurgency which continued to bleed the U.S. military, became politically unfeasible to defeat despite the U.S. military having the means to do so. Similar story in Afghanistan.

These wars taught U.S. military leadership that it is the wisest to avoid massive troop deployments and fight wars from afar, like in Libya where the U.S. helped local insurgents by bombing Gaddafi's regime and letting them take care of the rest. This had many downsides as the vacuum of power allowed jihadists to, briefly, take over parts of the country and the U.S. allies ended up with a rump state centered around Tripoli while hostile forces ended up conquering most of Libya.

Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya were all victories that ultimately turned into disasters because of the fear of casualties. None of these countries ended up becoming U.S. allies and are, arguably, even more hostile to America and its allies than prior to being invaded.

The waning empire

So if the U.S. is afraid of taking any casualties due to the political reaction at home, how can it expect to fight Iran and win?

Supporters of the Trump Admin would be quick to point at Venezuela as an example of "stunning success" for Trump's foreign policy but the reality is far different than the "victory" presented by the White House. (more details available in this Substack)

The preliminary bombing was claimed to have destroyed the Venezuelan Air Force and Navy but videos taken later showed only several AA batteries burning. Although Maduro was said to be unpopular, none in Venezuela's cities were celebrating his capture, only Venezuelans in foreign countries were ecstatic. Maduro's capture did not change the regime in Venezuela as the main opposition figure, Corina Machado, wasn't air lifted to Caracas to assume power. Maduro's handpicked vice-president, Delcy Rodriguez, simply took over from where he left off and Machado was quickly cast aside. Rodriguez's ascension cannot be considered "regime change" as every other member of Maduro's administration remains in place even if Rodriguez is a bit more cooperative with Washington D.C.

While Venezuela was something which the White House could spin into a success the same can't be said about Greenland. In short the U.S. was humiliated by Denmark over Greenland. Despite threats of economic sanctions and military invasion, the "tiny country" called the bluff and Trump was the one that backed down agreeing to "reemphasize pre-existing commitments in the 1951 US–Denmark treaty" [SkyNews].

Regarding Iran, the US ambassador to NATO, Matthew Whitaker, said that the White House is trying to avoid a repeat of Libya and put someone in charge to fill up the vacuum of power. But how will the U.S. do that without a ground invasion? The U.S. has already tried defeating an opponent using the Libyan scenario with a purely aerial campaign: Operation Prosperity Guardian.

The bombing campaign against the Houthis lasted for two years and hasn't yielded any results. The Houthi blockade of the Red Sea is still in place and this was the main goal of the Operation. On May 6th 2025 US president, Donald Trump, in a style similar to the operation to capture Maduro, announced the "capitulation" Houthis who had told him that they won't attack U.S. ships which they did indeed stop but the Red Sea as a route for maritime commerce is still off limits. The port of Eilat remains closed off to this day as every Israeli ship will be targeted.

Now that we've established that an exclusively aerial campaign won't topple the Islamic Republic of Iran, can the U.S. repeat Operation Iraqi Freedom and prepare an invasion of Iran?

Military sealift is America’s Achilles’ heel

In short, no. An operation like 2003 Invasion of Iraq is something which the U.S. will never be able to replicate.

Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va wrote in an op-ed from 2020 talking about American capacity to transport troops and cargo for a hypothetical war in the Indo-Pacific:

In preparation for the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. military moved over 2 million tons of cargo and equipment. This massive effort began in late 2001 and did not culminate until combat operations began in March of 2003. The long build up masked the inadequacy of the U.S. military sealift capacity with an estimated 85 percent of all sustainment material transported by civilian vessels. A multi-year logistic build up across uncontested seas is a luxury the U.S. simply won’t enjoy in the event of conflict in the Indo-Pacific.

The same op-ed mentions that the U.S. has only 61 logistics ships, all aged and in various states of disrepair. A 2019 exercise by TRANSCOM testing the readiness of the fleet and 40% of the ships were "ready" even though the test did not include the loading and unloading of cargo. The average age of the Ready Reserve Force was 45 years in 2020, long past their retirement age.

This is a far cry from WW2, when the Military Sealift Command (MSC) 365 ships just in the Pacific theater. When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 the MSC had 214 logistics ships 167 of which were used to prepare the invasion and support American troops. This was less than half of the number of logistics ships the U.S. used in Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm in 1990-1991, with the U.S. using 367 ships to move troops and cargo across the oceans.

While the need for more ships to transport cargo to the Middle East after Operation Desert Shield declined as much of what the U.S. moved there in preparation for it stayed in that theater of operations, this was not the case after 2011 when the U.S. officially withdrew from Iraq and with it left most of the equipment, leaving behind only the bare minimum to support the couple hundreds of troops left in Iraq and nearby countries.

Since 2020 nothing has improved for the U.S. military's sea logistics, which would be needed for an invasion of Iran.

A 2023 article from the Atlantic revealed that only 91 Jones Act compliant ships able to supply U.S. overseas territories and regions like Alaska, Puerto Rico and Hawaii, ships that could be used in a war with Iran. (During the writing of this article, Iranian gunboats harassed an American tanker supplying the Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group)

CEO of the maritime news website gCaptain, John Konrad V, expressed on X/Twitter in July 2025 his disappointment at the Trump Admin's failure to restart shipbuilding, start inquiries into maritime disasters like the Gaza Pier and the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore.

In addition to the lack of a sealift capacity to support a ground invasion, there's the Iranian missile program. The large arsenal of short and medium range missiles, anti-ship missiles and ballistic missiles would pose a great danger to any enemy navy attempting a landing on Iranian shores and cause many casualties which the US is deathly afraid of incurring.

The coming war

Despite the riots failing to take down the Islamic Republic, the U.S. has continued to move additional assets to the Middle East or bases like Diego Garcia.

The MIM-104 Patriot and THAAD batteries deployed in 2025 for the 12 Day War never left CENTCOM and their numbers have only increased since. Just in the past couple of days, observers reported "At least six new C-17A flights originated from Kadena AB in Japan, suggesting the movement of THAAD and MIM-104 Patriot systems from the USINDOPACOM to the CENTCOM"

The U.S. is still preparing for war and the war against Iran is so important for the Trump Admin it is willing to jeopardize the Indo-Pacific theater and waste the interceptor stocks on Israel, leaving none for U.S. troops in East Asia, Taiwan and Ukraine where other U.S. interests are at play.

The U.S. with help from Israel and possibly the Royal Air Force will attack Iran once Israel is protected to the best of America's abilities in terms of air defense and then the bombing will begin!

While the U.S and Israel will attempt to destroy the Islamic Republic from a single blow which is unlikely to work so a protracted war will follow which will likely end up being a repeat of Operation Prosperity Guardian. Dozens of airstrikes on military sites, infrastructure, energy, assassination attempts on key figures perhaps even the Ayatollah etc. and then fend off the Iranian counter missile salvos until Iran runs out of missiles or Israel and the U.S. run out of interceptors and the latter is more likely to happen first.

Israel may have other surprises planned for Iran like the underground drone factories exposed in during and after the 12 Day War but without defection from the Iranian military, police and other security structures, the regime will hold and the state of uneasy peace will resume.

Lastly, there's the unthinkable option of Israel using nuclear weapons to wipe out Iran's nuclear program, underground missile silos and the Iranian regime. It is unlikely that Israel would succeed in such an endeavour as Iran's nuclear program and silos are dug deep beneath mountains and wiping out Iran's cities would require a lot of nukes.

Iran is standing in the way of Israel dominating the Middle East. American Jews have realised a while ago that the U.S. is becoming weaker and that they are under a time limit to take out Iran while the U.S. still has a capable military. Israel has taken steps to become more independent from the U.S. but Iran is too big and powerful of an opponent for them to subdue alone.

This war is unavoidable and will repeat itself until Iran falls or Israel and the U.S. are militarily crippled and unable to attack Iran again.