National Review: What's gone right in the Iran War

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ƒor decades, the United States and its allies have been gaming out what a full-scale war against the Islamic Republic of Iran would look like. As recently as 2020, in the immediate aftermath of the airstrike that neutralized Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qasem Soleimani, mainstream and center-left media outlets summarized the forecasts of American war planners. Their conclusions were sobering.

In a war that the Iranian regime sees as existential, Tehran could be expected to pull out all the stops. “Iran’s vast network of proxies” would be activated. American and European civilians would be targets, as would vulnerable U.S. military positions in Iraq and Syria. “Sleeper cells” would carry out attacks against soft targets in Europe and Latin America. Hezbollah would roar to life in Lebanon, raining missiles down on Israel. Terrorists would target American diplomatic posts as far afield as West Africa and Southeast Asia. Crippling cyberattacks against Western-oriented governmental and commercial interests would cause major financial disruptions. Bombs, mines, missiles, drones, and fast boats would complicate U.S. operations in the Strait of Hormuz, putting all maritime traffic to a halt for the indefinite future.
The war would escalate quickly, probably necessitating the introduction of a massive ground force to topple the regime. Overmatched in conventional engagements with U.S. forces, the Iranian military and the IRGC would dissolve into a deadly insurgency. By the end of combat operations, up to 1 million on all sides of the conflict, including civilians, would die....

To date, U.S. forces alone have conducted strikes on at least 5,500 Iranian targets, according to Admiral Brad Cooper, in accordance with the American military’s objective in this war: eliminating Iran’s capacity to “project power” across its borders. America’s operational tempo is accelerating while Iran’s is in retreat. The Iranian ballistic-missile launch rate is down 92 percent from the first day of hostilities. U.S. forces have entombed much of Iran’s stockpiles in their underground “missile cities.” U.S. drones monitor from the skies the cities that it hasn’t hit, striking them only when they observe Iranian activity. In addition, over 60 percent of Iran’s missile launchers have been disabled.

The Iranian navy is off the chessboard. According to Cooper, 60 vessels have been struck, sunk, or rendered useless to the enemy, including all four of Iran’s Soleimani-class warships. At least 16 Iranian mine-laying vessels have been destroyed. Ten of Iran’s 18 air bases have been hit and rendered inoperable. The U.S. maintains, if not air supremacy, superiority in the skies over Iran. The Iranian air force is a non-entity, as are its air defenses. As was the case in Venezuela, Russian and Chinese technology has proven unequal to U.S. capabilities, allowing the U.S. to transition away from the use of exquisite stand-off munitions (long-range missiles launched from a safe distance) toward cheaper, more abundant, precision-guided gravity munitions.

Iran’s leadership caste is dead or scattered. Its command and control is disrupted, as evinced by episodes in which the IRGC struck civilian targets in the Gulf states that Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian promised would no longer be targeted. The succession of Mojtaba Khamenei to serve as supreme leader after his father’s death exposed cracks in the leadership, some of whom reportedly believed that the title should not be hereditary. And the captive Iranian people remain the Islamic Republic’s most fearsome enemy. The regime’s message to the people is, explicitly, that anyone who takes to the streets in support of the U.S.-Israeli military campaign will be killed.

In any conflict, the enemy gets a vote. And in this campaign, Iran’s strategy has been to spread the pain of this war around to its Gulf neighbors, lashing out wildly at civilian, diplomatic, and military targets alike. The war games anticipated this, too, assuming that the region would absorb enough damage to ensure its neutrality. Instead, the region united against Iran. Additionally, the expected effort to close off the Strait of Hormuz and put unendurable pressure on global energy consumers has succeeded in engineering a spike in the price of oil....

But in 2019, energy-sector analysts assessed that even a days-long disruption of traffic in the Strait combined with disruptions to the production capacity of other Gulf producers “could potentially send oil to $300.” While we’re hardly “weeks” into these expected disruptions, the prices of Brent crude oil (light, sweet crude highly desirable for refining) have not yet approached their all-time high: $147 per barrel in July 2008....

Contrary to some embarrassing rhetorical contortions in Washington, this is a real war, and real wars rarely go according to plan. This conflict is no exception. But the pessimistic assessments of the war encouraged by over-caffeinated observers on social media are unwarranted. Some perspective is in order, and that perspective would lead any honest spectator to conclude that the facts on the ground do not warrant the catastrophism that prevails among the groundlings on social media and within the press corps.

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