Wow.
So yesterday began with the court order regarding Trump and his deploying the National Guard to LA (descent of the dark fascist night), continued with a US senator (Padilla) doing an information op in order to further that fascist night narrative, and ended with Israel rolling the iron dice in Iran.
It’s going to be a long summer.
So a couple of things.
First, I had a long call this morning with a friend (who isn’t a taxi driver) who operationalizes Israel’s “Never Again” philosophy as “don’t cede the initiative.” If Israel thought that Iran was on the verge of a nuclear breakout, it would know that particular action would irrevocably change the balance of power in the Middle East and would act before it was forced to do so.
My friend pointed to two historical analogies. The first is the Six-Day War when Israel faced a dire strategic situation and took matters into its own hands. The second is the history of carrier warfare in the Pacific during WW II. That theater was about first-mover advantage, strike first and strike hard with everything you have.
Second, take anything you read or hear over the next few days with a grain of salt as it is probably wrong, especially when it comes from analysts. It’s not just about the first cut of history and all of that, but also because too many people who are talking heads are also players. It’s spin all the way down, an information war with you as one of the targets
We can probably deduce some facts from simply what Israel and Iran are either saying or not saying. Iran probably didn’t shoot down many (or perhaps any) Israeli planes. Israel decapitated the top level of Iran’s military command. The further deduction is that it appears Israel could do whatever it wanted yesterday over Iranian sovereign territory and there wasn’t anything Iran could do to stop it. Beyond that we’ll see.
Third, there’s a story that Mossad had established a drone base outside of Tehran that it used to stage attacks against various regime targets. This would be one of the greatest coups in modern warfare, not just from a military perspective but also psychologically. Your most dangerous enemy can establish bases 1,000 miles from home in your backyard and kill your top leaders? If you are in the Iranian leadership (and still alive) who can you trust?
This is the second major drone strike launched from deep within an enemy’s territory in the last few weeks. The basic tactic shouldn’t be surprising. A few years ago we had walked through an informal, map table exercise of using soft-shelled flatbed trucks to launch a drone strike from a big-box store parking lot from within the Beltway. Plenty of drivers lay up for their rest period in those parking lots. Seven minutes to downtown DC.
The fact that there is plenty of Chinese-owned land around military bases, especially farmland where large freight shipments or storage facilities would not be out of place, should be very concerning.
Fourth, to the question of center of gravity. A lot of analysts point to how well-fortified Iran’s nuclear sites are, which combined with the large distances involved provides Iran with a strategic depth that Israel could not overcome. I think that while Israel is attacking the nuclear sites, it is also attacking the real center of gravity of the Iranian regime which is its perceived unity.
A lot of ink has been spilled over the previous decades about how dissatisfied the Iranian people are with the regime, how it is a popular uprising waiting to happen… and yet here we are still waiting for that to happen. Oppressive regimes usually don’t fall until they either lose their nerve or their unity. The facts that Israel has been able to establish military bases deep within Iranian territory, that for years it has been able to conduct assassinations of top Iranian (and Hamas) leaders and scientists, force Khamenei and others to deal with the fact that members of the larger regime have been playing footsie with the Israelis for years and that Iran cannot stop it.
Fifth, the question any staffer needs to ask while planning such an operation is what comes next? You can destroy a lot of equipment, kill a lot of people and disrupt their chain of command, but without a plan to exploit those short-term advantages into something much larger, all you are doing is burning assets or throwing rocks at a hornet’s nest.
Last year when Israel hit Iran it seriously degraded the latter’s air defense system. It was an impressive feat of military operations, but the advantage it provided would only be temporary. Given enough time Iran would rebuild and Israel would not be able to pull off the same attack plan twice. The hole in Iran’s air defense system was a wasting asset that meant little in and of itself, and last night Israel decided to use it as part of a larger strategic plan.
Finally, rhetoric has consequences. The Israeli-Iranian war didn’t start last night, but rather began decades ago once Iran took operational steps towards Israel’s destruction by arming groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas. It certainly escalated when Iran decided to start a nuclear weapons program.
As Richard Fernandez observed, you need to be careful what you say. If you keep saying “death to the Jews” or “death to America,” all the while building up the capability to do just that, you cannot claim later to say “just kidding.”
Some times you need to take people at their word.
The problem with killing generals is that there are always more where they came from. There’s always the possibility that the new ones will be better than the old and with this bunch’s record, it’s not that likely they’ll be worse.
The centrifuge halls are deeper underground that even we could probably reach. The Iranians have been building elaborate underground installations for millennia. It’s questionable whether anything of great value was in any of the buildings that were destroyed.
As you point out, the real vulnerability is the regime as a whole. Better to remind every Iranian what a complete failure and waste the last 45+ years have been. Every time they light a candle instead of turning on a light that’s been out with no prospect of ever being in operation. Walking to work, if you still have a job, because refineries don’t run without power and the country’s too poor to import fuel and what there is goes just to the privileged few. Those that were working in oil production aren’t because there’s no longer any way to get it out of the country and nothing to do with it in country, see refineries above.
All of those are soft targets with no air defense, and above ground. Then it will be months if not weeks before every general and a lot of colonels and all the Mullahs and their families and hanger’s on are hanging from the lamp posts.
There is a concept in Japanese fencing (kendo) called seme, roughly translated as pressure. It means putting your opponent under pressure, physical or psychological, where they make a predictable move. Once the opponent is committed to that move, you take advantage of the opening created and strike. Seems like that’s what happened to the Iranian military leadership.
suleimani gave way to ghani, who I believe was killed back in 2024, and now Salami, it maybe like the Six Day War, which was a remarkable stroke of good fortune, it is said, the loss of faith in Jordan and Egypt not to mention Syria, helped inspire the rise of the Salafi in those countries including the embryo of Hamas, under Sheikh Yassin,
then again it may be more like the 2014 and 2021 engagements which were nowhere as conclusive,
First-mover advantage is valuable. So is luck. In 1967 the Israelis were lucky because the state-of-the-art Jordanian radar happened to be down for maintenance when the Israeli planes took off to bomb the Arab airfields. In 2025 the Israelis are lucky that the current US govt is strongly on their side. Israel may also be lucky in that after Oct 7 and everything that’s followed most Israelis are probably no longer willing to bet their lives on the restraint or incapacity of the Iranian mullahs. In both 1967 and 2025 the Israelis waited as long as they could before attacking. In 1967 they struck at the right time and decisively. Let’s hope that’s also the case in 2025.
Israel may have a couple of hidden advantages.
One is that Iran’s population is “diverse”, as we say in the West, with significant non-Persian minorities. Does anyone know how committed those other populations are to the current Iranian government?
Second is that most of the countries within missile range of Iran — and that includes the Arab Gulf states, Turkey, the Euros, even Russia — would probably breathe a sigh of relief if the possibility of Iranian nukes were taken off the table. Of course most of those countries won’t openly assist Israel — just the opposite, in fact — but who knows what they will do out of the limelight.
Prepare to be surprised!
Carrier warfare in 1942-43 was based on the concept of giving without receiving, a type of warfare that in another age with another type of ship was likened to egg shells armed with sledge hammers
It was about recon, who could locate each other first, who had the best intel to feed the strike package. Then in Midway luck played its role again in the actual American strike.
There’s a corollary to first-mover advantage – the bar room analogy which states that it is the second person to throw a punch who gets blamed for starting the fight.
The problem facing Israel is mot just Iran’s strategic but the age-old dilemma that without occupying a piece of territory with infantry your control is limited. Think Serbia during the 1999 Kosovo War which NATO attacked over a two month period with thousands of air strikes. The Serbs eventually gave up but that was a small country in NATO’s back yard and they still held out for months
The contrast between 2021 and 2023 in Gaza is illustrative. In 2021 Israel was able to inflict strategic damage on both Hamas facilities and its leadership, a tactical victory which resulted in…. 10/7. That led to Israel deciding to occupy the territory and bring a decisive result
Contrast that again with its various campaigns in Lebanon, not just Hezbollah but also the PLO which brought Israel to Beirut in 1982. Israel has been reluctant to occupy southern Lebanon, instead reliant on proxies such as the SLA and even UN forces because it could never deal decisively with the key factor which was Hezbollah’s leadership in Beirut.
As Gavin pointed out, Iran has several fundamental disadvantages including the ethnic composition of its population and the fact that alot of Arabs don’t want a Shi’ite version of a new Persian Empire. The question becomes how does Israel, preferably exploiting those strategic factors, can destroy the nuclear facilities without occupation.
Perhaps it cannot and this – much like past decades – becomes a managed conflict, sporadically flaring into actives which involve Israel “mowing the lawn.”
I was watching in harms way the preminger adaptation of the james bassett war drama with john wayne and kirk douglas which climaxes in the solomons (unlabeled as such)
Douglas is an intel officer surveying the japanese fleet moving toward the american landing force