I Don’t Know How the War Is Going
· The Atlantic
Cheering for epistemic humility gets you no television interviews, no requests for op-eds, and no invitations to conferences. All that it will earn you is a fair bit of social-media critique for being a wimp, a sellout, or a garden-variety fool. But in the early phase of a war, above all, it should be the prudent observer’s battle cry.
The Iran war is no exception. In the absence of hard data, the kind that become available years or decades after a war, the temptation is to reach for analogies or proverbial wisdom, or any of the other heuristic shortcuts that the psychologist Daniel Kahneman thoroughly described in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow.
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This is as true for those who oppose the war as for the people launching it. The most simpleminded of these expressions is “This is Iraq all over again!”—an interpretation that the Trump administration has clumsily reinforced by comparing the initial bombing campaign to the opening moments of the Gulf War and the Iraq War. In this case, the Iraq analogy is shorthand for saying, “Yes, the opening phase is going swimmingly, but before you know it, the United States will be caught in the middle of a protracted land campaign against multiple insurgents that will inflict thousands of casualties and leave Iran even worse off than it was before.”
If there is one thing of which we can be fairly confident, however, it is that the Trump administration has no desire to repeat what it views as the mistakes of its predecessors; it seems determined to make its own mistakes. Raids, particularly to secure nuclear sites or destroy missile launchers, are conceivable. But no plausible scenarios in which we send an expeditionary force to Iran could make sense, and no plausible need would compel it. This war could indeed turn into a disaster, but if it does, the result will be a different kind of disaster than the Iraq War (not all of which was a disaster, either).
[Read: Trump has lost the plot in Iran]
A different kind of cognitive shortcut is the contention that the war is a failure based on the fact that the Iranians have indeed launched missiles at U.S. bases in the region, at Israel, and at various neighbors, and that people have been killed. All casualties are awful. But losses on the scale that the United States and Israel and other countries have so far suffered are not evidence of defeat, but an inevitable consequence of war. And Iran’s broadening of the war with reckless attacks is likely to turn out to be a major strategic misjudgment on Tehran’s part.
To judge the war’s success requires asking a more complicated set of questions: Have the Iranians’ missile-launch rates gone up or down? Do those changes reflect coherent command and control, or merely the implementation of plans laid down in the past? Have the Americans and the Israelis blown up empty buildings or those with the right people inside them? Have they wiped out just a single level of Iranian leadership or several? Are some in the Iranian regime reaching out to the allies?
A third epistemic shortcut consists of invoking the lessons of history, usually in terms of unqualified pronouncements about what air power can and cannot do. Air power cannot overthrow a government, some say, which is on one level true—a fighter jet cannot take the keys to the presidential palace, after all—and on another level, obviously false. American air campaigns in the former Yugoslavia and in Libya brought down regimes without the involvement of American ground forces.
This assertion is even more dubious for rooting its claims about present capabilities of rapidly evolving technologies in the past. The idea that fast airplanes could routinely and accurately knock out individual tanks, for instance, was as absurd during World War II as it is self-evident today. Modern air power has become more and more precise, and further empowered by weapons that are tailored for various effects. Some aim to achieve deep penetration, others to saturate a large area with submunitions, and still others to precisely target, say, a corner of a building.
The effectiveness of air power is, like any form of military power, a matter of quantity as well as quality. The United States and Israel are deploying hundreds of strike aircraft every day, plus drones, and all are animated by astonishingly detailed intelligence. None of this guarantees success, to be sure—mistakes will undoubtedly occur, and almost certainly have—but these facts make this war different, and so it needs to be judged on its own terms.
The claims that “It’s Donald Trump’s war” and (its cousin) “It’s Bibi’s war” tell us nothing. The loathing and disregard that many reasonable people have for both men can impair our ability to determine whether they are succeeding. Henry Kissinger was reputed to have asked, in a moment of perplexity, “Why are the wrong people doing the right thing?” In this case, the demonstrable incompetence of the Trump administration in presenting a consistent case for the war does not necessarily spill over into the U.S. military’s apparently effective way of waging it. Bungling and competence can exist side by side to a frightening degree.
[Read: Would Trump risk an oil crisis?]
So how should we think about the war, beyond a becoming modesty about what we actually know? The beginning of wisdom is to recognize that all wars are individual—that, as the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz put it, “Every war is rich in unique episodes. Each is an uncharted sea, full of reefs.” Wars resemble one another more than they resemble anything else, but each one has to be understood on its own terms.
The British military historian Sir Hew Strachan once observed that it was pointless for politicians to ask him or his colleagues for answers to contemporary problems. “What history and historians can provide are, perhaps, some useful questions.” The same applies here. The best historical questions are often “How is this different from that?” and “Where did this come from?” History is more about understanding change than finding eternal verities.
Wars are filled with contingent events. Accidents, personal quirks, shifting luck—these all play a role in battle and in the outcomes of war. Above all, outcomes are never predetermined. To take but one example: A great deal of the Trumpian theory of victory rests on the individuals who will succeed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to power, and whether they will survive the promotion.
Finally, insistence on widening the aperture of our questions about a war helps us understand it: Will this war strengthen or diminish Russian or Chinese influence? How does the war seem to be affecting the attitude of Iran’s neighboring Arab states? Is it enhancing or detracting from the reputation of American (and Israeli) military power? Is an Islamic Republic stripped of most of its military assets likely to be a threat in the same way as in the past?
These questions are all far more important than conclusions derived from the latest salvo of missiles. We cannot now answer them definitively, but they will be far more important in the long run than the more immediately satisfying insistence that we know what is going on. Because the truth is, we do not.