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I struggle to see what other kind of war could have been envisioned. Admittedly I'm not military myself, but I certainly hang out with a goodly number of current and former military personnel in various online and IRL spaces from several different branches -- they uniformly say that this is more or less a textbook example of the "American way of war." With focus on as-precise-as-technologically-possible aerial and missile strikes on political and military targets, down to the targeting of specific individuals, supported where possible by Special Forces/CIA paramilitary "dirty tricks" I don't see how this is functionally different from, e.g., the way we went into Afghanistan. The bombardment of Tehran, Isfahan, and IRGC infrastructure looks a lot like 2003 "Shock and Awe" in Iraq.
What, do you think Paul Wolfowitz was jonesing for the 82nd Airborne and 1st Infantry Division to be rolling from Turkey towards Tabriz?
The kind of war that I imagine guys like Kagan want is an extended low to medium intensity conflict like Afghanistan or Iraq circa 2010 that gives them a chance to posture and justify their salaries while funneling money to their friends and sponsors in the contracting world.
This war, at least so far, is not that.
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Yes, actually.
The big difference is the lack of buildup. There was no effort to sell the war to the public or to the international community. Trump relied on the element of surprise, the Sucker Punch Doctrine.
The result is low support. Even the Republican numbers are hovering in the 80s, where they were in Lizardman Constant territory at this point in the Iraq war. The USA had the Coalition of the Willing, with Britain Australia Poland etc deploying troops in Iraq. In Iran we have...Israel? I mean kinda but Israeli forces don't appear to be under direct command of a US general, where in Iraq all coalition forces were under a US commander (Spartan style).
Now obviously the bright side was the element of surprise, and for whatever reason we can't expect the Israelis to operate under a US command structure...but there are big differences in how the story will be seen.
There was no way Donald Trump could do so. The "public" (meaning the mainstream media) and the "international community" (meaning Euro liberals) could not be convinced by Donald Trump. So he quite rationally did not waste any effort on this unachievable goal. He does seem to have brought the Gulf states into the fold (with the help of a feckless IRGC, granted).
Well, Trump didn't even bother trying to convince a domestic audience. Compact has a good overview of the collapse in basic propaganda efforts: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-GEcO360z1g&t=1484s
As I was saying to @hanikrummihundursvin up thread, to me this issue illustrates just how "siloed" the liberal media bubble has become from more conservative and internationalist ones.
Liberals feel like this came out of nowhere and as a result their first impulse blame the perfidious Jew. Meanwhile everyone else has been speculating about if/when the US would do something about Iran's repeated threats to global shipping, and the answer to those questions turned out to be "Yes" and "March 2026".
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The neocon dream was a quick, decisive war to topple the IRI and replace it with a pro-American democracy. The specifics of how that was going to happen were probably pretty hazy and involved both underestimating Iran and overestimating the US, but I really doubt they envisioned an intense-yet-noncommittal air war with no meaningful ground element. As I will never shut up about: this war looks like a failed attempt at gunboat diplomacy with seemingly no plan if Iran didn't immediately cave.
Not really. The point of "Shock and Awe"-style tactics is to disrupt enemy command and control so your ground forces can overwhelm theirs with limited organized resistance. There was no ground component to Operation Epic Fury.
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