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Tactical Success, Strategic Failure? Washington Walks the Path to Defeat in Iran

aaron695 6mo ago
[dead]
enlightenedfool 6mo ago
Iran just needed to survive. There is no expectation for it to win against the nuclear super powers. It's a wonder it survived even for this long.
- CamperBob2 6mo ago
  No wonder at all. They took 500,000 casualties in the Iraq war, including from chemical weapons, and survived to fight the next one.
  - seanmcdirmid 6mo ago
    90 million people, and fairly well educated and industrious at that. Iran is not some tribesmen at low development in Afghanistan, they would actually be a solidly developing country on par with China if they weren’t heavily sanctioned and held back by the clerics and revolutionary guard.
- H8crilA 6mo ago
  It got much more than that - they blockaded off the entire Persian Gulf. They are a few shots away from removing the East-West Pipeline. Their proxy in Yemen had already demonstrated that they can block off the Bab al-Mandab Strait - even a replacement US aircraft carrier is going around Africa right now just because the threat exists. This is a proper clusterfuck if you understand the logic of global freedom of navigation, as enforced by the (clearly declining) superpower. No wonder the leader of Kuomintang went to Beijing to talk things out with Xi Jinping.
  - seanmcdirmid 6mo ago
    The leader of the KMT going to Beijing shouldn’t be read in too much. They haven’t been in power for a long time and their whole support for “one china” is why they remain politically unpopular in Taiwan.
  - orwin 6mo ago
    Houthis are not an Iranian proxy, they have autonomous strategic decisions. They are/were funded by Iran to be a pain for the Saudi. The Saoudi published articles about it. People there know more about the local situation than western pundits.
    - lostlogin 6mo ago
      This is different, but does it relate to the aircraft carrier taking the long route?
- legitster 6mo ago
  There is almost no example where tactical bombing ever achieved a strategic victory - without real boots on the ground. (Even the atomic bombs in Japan may not have worked if Russia had not also invaded the same week.) Remote bombings historically only strengthen resolve. Bombing Iran into surrendering was never a realistic outcome.
  - Ekaros 6mo ago
    Controlling whole country after that is even bigger question. Someone living there and being bombed could make them think that you are ready for lot of pain for lot of years to come. You only need enough drones every year or every other year.
- antod 6mo ago
  The revolutionary guard probably view it as a win for them. No more clerics or civil bureaucracy to argue with now they are fully in charge. They don't need their navy or airforce to assert even more control over the civilian population. Bombing them further will probably be about as successful as it was with the North Vietnamese (another chain of tactical successes while failing strategically). There was regime change, just not in the direction anyone else wanted.
  - orwin 6mo ago
    It's worse than that, they used to be a police branch, they now basically replaced the army as well. In a way, that makes the Iranian regime way less resilient in the long term though.
    - CamperBob2 6mo ago
      To use a WWII metaphor, it's as if we killed Hitler in 1934 and instead of the Night of the Long Knives, the Sturmabteilung are now running the whole country. Except it may be even worse than that. While you might expect some infighting among SA factions, the Revolutionary Guard is a distributed force that's ideologically united by both a common religion and a common cause.
wpollock 6mo ago
It's probably not wise to say so on HN, but one possible strategic goal of this war was to distract from the Epstein files.
- s5300 6mo ago
  [dead]
- watwut 6mo ago
  Now they need Epstein files to distract from the war.
  - jameskilton 6mo ago
    Why do you think Melania started talking about Epstein again when she did?
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
legitster 6mo ago
> And, unfortunately, if there is any strategic sense left in the Iranian regime, it now understands that having a nuclear weapon is no longer an optional hedge for its evil system’s survival and power. It is a strategic necessity. Iran has effectively established itself as gatekeeper of the Strait of Hormuz — a fundamentally different status quo than existed before the conflict, giving Tehran a durable form of economic leverage it did not previously possess. I'd feel remiss not to point out that we had all of the objectives in Iraq completed within 3 weeks - it was the nation building cleanup that became the quagmire. After 6 weeks in Iran we are worse off than we started and the long term implications are so much worse. By all accounts the JCPOA was a success and working effectively when Trump cancelling it in 2018. We're here because he felt the need to solve the problem of his own making.
jacknews 6mo ago
The US will either have a long and painful and ultimately unfruitful ground war, or will have to accept some of Iran's terms for a ceasefire which will leave Iran in a stronger geopolitical situation than before the war. A third option is for the US to throw Israel under the bus and either cut military funding to them, or force them to contain themselves by treaty, join the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and so on, under that threat. Since Israel have been goading for this war, spoiling any diplomacy (by killing the Iranian diplomats), and seem to have no intention of ceasing fire until Iran is completely fractured, I think they are the ones who need to be stopped. Iran would perhaps re-agree to the terms and inspections they were previously under if Israel were also forced to submit. America would then re-establish it's authority in the region to some extent.
shawndrost 6mo ago
It seems to me that Trump's second term foreign policy is obsessed with dismantling the "shadow" oil market -- ending the system where China captures upside when sanctioned countries like Russia, Iran, and Venezuela sell oil, in yuan to boot -- without losing face or deterrence. They have arguably been successful at that objective in Iran and Venezuela, and I forget what's going on with Russia, but you can see the administration working on that front too. (I say this as a Biden stan and someone who thinks the Iran war is bad chess and bad morals.) The other place I'd push back on this article is its belief that America doesn't want to trim the grass in Iran every few years. We are pretty committed to Iran not having nukes and the American people seem to have liked this war and the earlier strike pretty well.
- ifwinterco 6mo ago
  Trump is more unpopular now than Nixon was... after Watergate
  - palmotea 6mo ago
    > Trump is more unpopular now than Nixon was... after Watergate And surprisingly, the Democrats are even less popular than he is.
- petesergeant 6mo ago
  > the American people seem to have liked this war https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2026-04/Ipsos%20Iran%20Poll%20Topline%204.13.2026.pdf https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/... and that's without the oil supply shocks having kicked in properly yet
- seanmcdirmid 6mo ago
  I don’t think most Americans lied the previous strikes so much as they were neutral to them. Weapons of mass destruction arguments themselves fall off as meh to most people these days, especially those who remember Bush 2’s run. “Oh north Korea might have nukes? Ok…Iran also you say, so what?” We not committed at all to an expensive war every few years with Iran. Rather, we should do what China is doing and unwind our dependence on middle eastern oil (or a low world price for while pumped domestically) and just move on to new and better transportation tech.
metalman 6mo ago
first time anyone has called loosing there big advantage a tactical success, Iran was bringing down top of the line stealth planes, no doubt with some help, but that new and very very highly sought capability, is bieng dialed in. China has publicly stated that the will be honoring there defence agreament with Iran for the sale of high end missles, anti aircraft and ship killers, within the next month, made previous to the current situation. And the "help is on the way" anouncement is continuing to have consequences, especialy after the tactical success of bombing schools full of little girls, hospitals, universities, bridges, and water supplies. Big guys, with big bombs, big help, big success.
maxglute 6mo ago
Is it tactical success though? Conflating K:D ratio with strategic success typical fallacy, but if Iran game plan is to take hits while hitting back then so far US inability to neutralize/suppress Iranian fires also tactical failure. US can glass 10000s targets but if adversary built to take punches and remain operational (and still down planes), then US tactically failing if goal is knockout/haymaker. So far US+co generated like 20% of sorties vs Iran than Iraq. We can charitably assume 100% the effectiveness since 100% precision munitions (vs many more hardened targets). But Iran also 5x larger than Iraq. So far it took deploying like 50% of active fleet, and drawing down 25%+ of high end munitions, who knows how much high end interceptors... losing regional basing. Iran still being able to punch back and attrite US air at frankly unsustainable rates = the reality is on paper US may not even have the high-end munition stockpile to tactically defeat Iran in detail without being utterly strategically depleted vs peer adversaries 50x larger (PRC). Hence TACO threatened to end civilization, because there aren't enough munitions to destroy Iranian MIC, but there's enough to destroy power plants / go counter-value. Or settling for reverse blockade since discretionary magazine depth can sustain outside of standoff range where Iran can't hit back, but basically cedes region to Iranian missile complex. Iran tactically "won" by allowing US to commit tactical and strategical seppuku by wasting so much fires for ineffective neutralization/suppression that another few weeks and it would be obvious US mathematically couldn't sustain let alone win the air game. TLDR Iran broken 3 of US fingers taking punches to the face, they're not going to come out looking pretty, but break a few more fingers, and US going to to look retarded/crippled for still punching.
Jamesbeam 6mo ago
When I first went to Afghanistan in 2008, I was probably the most hated soldier by coalition troops in the whole country. All I was tasked to do was sit in rooms and tents with a moleskin and my little Japanese ball pen workhorse, writing down stuff while coalition commanders were talking about plans, hyping each other up and bragging about who had more tactical success than their counterparts. Nobody knew who I was or what I did in their strategic meetings. I just sat there, no eye contact, no yeah or mehs, no comments, no interruptions. Whenever they were done with the meeting, I got up, thanked them for their time, wished them a good day and went outside to sit down somewhere else, thinking some more, and then I went to work. Back in the day, the coalition had a problem with having too many hammers but not a lot of scalpels. For a hammer, after a while, everything starts looking like a nail, and with air superiority, the hammering went fast and hit hard. So it was a quick way to make a name for themselves and collect medals and a pay raise. Most of the time, those tactical decisions resulted in short and long-term strategic failure. For example, it was easy to kill a Taliban commander with an airstrike, but the result was that the twenty or so commanders he had overseen and kept in check went on a spree of violence against locals and coalition troops alike in pursuit of the succession of their predecessor. So someone very smart in the upper echelons of the coalition decided to implement the tenth man rule. It basically said if nine men look at the same information and arrive at the exact same conclusion, it is the duty of the tenth man to disagree. No matter how improbable it may seem, the tenth man has to start digging with the assumption that the other nine are wrong. 8/10 times, I did find those short or long-term strategic errors in the planned tactical operations, and whenever I did, everyone who was with me in the room that day had to prove why I am wrong and their approach is right. 9/10 times they couldn’t. You can imagine those people all have giant egos and do not like it if someone outsmarts them, so they got rid of me by the end of 2009. Officially, I was pulled to sit in more boring rooms with boring people. Inofficially, I was told by a General that commanders were about to revolt because I was undermining their morale and they would often question themselves and their planning, instead of acting quickly and decisively, which would slow down their "efficiency" and the efficiency of the campaign. When you look at the timeline this article showcases and think about that the inner circle of the President got replaced by yes men and a Secretary that wants a more deadly and less "woke" force that simply does what the Commander-in-Chief tells them without thinking for themselves, I wonder if the current situation the US has maneuvered itself into is because of the complete absence of soldiers that do what I did 18 years ago. Outsourcing the strategic thinking process to a technology that is wrong 35% of the time by design is maybe the biggest strategic long-term failure the US military ever did. I see why this is necessary because replacing competent minds with loyalists above else makes this a viable approach. Dumbing down the US Military and every position that has access to the President that could intervene stupidity looks less and less like an unintended consequence of the Secretary’s "rebuilding" of the military and more like an intended goal. In my humble opinion, this doesn’t serve the American people nor the good men and women that serve their country and whose life is relying on people taking the time and effort to dig in with the assumption that everyone in the room, including a President, is wrong. I’m retired, so all I can do now is point my fingers at idiots and tell you guys, look at this idiot and what he is doing. But I no longer have access to rooms where big decisions are made and rely on your ability to make good decisions who you give the power to annihilate whole continents and whom not just like the rest of the normal people out there. We live in interesting times.

[dead]

Iran just needed to survive. There is no expectation for it to win against the nuclear super powers. It's a wonder it survived even for this long.

CamperBob2 6mo ago
No wonder at all. They took 500,000 casualties in the Iraq war, including from chemical weapons, and survived to fight the next one.
- seanmcdirmid 6mo ago
  90 million people, and fairly well educated and industrious at that. Iran is not some tribesmen at low development in Afghanistan, they would actually be a solidly developing country on par with China if they weren’t heavily sanctioned and held back by the clerics and revolutionary guard.
H8crilA 6mo ago
It got much more than that - they blockaded off the entire Persian Gulf. They are a few shots away from removing the East-West Pipeline. Their proxy in Yemen had already demonstrated that they can block off the Bab al-Mandab Strait - even a replacement US aircraft carrier is going around Africa right now just because the threat exists. This is a proper clusterfuck if you understand the logic of global freedom of navigation, as enforced by the (clearly declining) superpower. No wonder the leader of Kuomintang went to Beijing to talk things out with Xi Jinping.
- seanmcdirmid 6mo ago
  The leader of the KMT going to Beijing shouldn’t be read in too much. They haven’t been in power for a long time and their whole support for “one china” is why they remain politically unpopular in Taiwan.
- orwin 6mo ago
  Houthis are not an Iranian proxy, they have autonomous strategic decisions. They are/were funded by Iran to be a pain for the Saudi. The Saoudi published articles about it. People there know more about the local situation than western pundits.
  - lostlogin 6mo ago
    This is different, but does it relate to the aircraft carrier taking the long route?
legitster 6mo ago
There is almost no example where tactical bombing ever achieved a strategic victory - without real boots on the ground. (Even the atomic bombs in Japan may not have worked if Russia had not also invaded the same week.) Remote bombings historically only strengthen resolve. Bombing Iran into surrendering was never a realistic outcome.
- Ekaros 6mo ago
  Controlling whole country after that is even bigger question. Someone living there and being bombed could make them think that you are ready for lot of pain for lot of years to come. You only need enough drones every year or every other year.
antod 6mo ago
The revolutionary guard probably view it as a win for them. No more clerics or civil bureaucracy to argue with now they are fully in charge. They don't need their navy or airforce to assert even more control over the civilian population. Bombing them further will probably be about as successful as it was with the North Vietnamese (another chain of tactical successes while failing strategically). There was regime change, just not in the direction anyone else wanted.
- orwin 6mo ago
  It's worse than that, they used to be a police branch, they now basically replaced the army as well. In a way, that makes the Iranian regime way less resilient in the long term though.
  - CamperBob2 6mo ago
    To use a WWII metaphor, it's as if we killed Hitler in 1934 and instead of the Night of the Long Knives, the Sturmabteilung are now running the whole country. Except it may be even worse than that. While you might expect some infighting among SA factions, the Revolutionary Guard is a distributed force that's ideologically united by both a common religion and a common cause.

wpollock 6mo ago

It's probably not wise to say so on HN, but one possible strategic goal of this war was to distract from the Epstein files.

s5300 6mo ago
[dead]
watwut 6mo ago
Now they need Epstein files to distract from the war.
- jameskilton 6mo ago
  Why do you think Melania started talking about Epstein again when she did?
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]

legitster 6mo ago

> And, unfortunately, if there is any strategic sense left in the Iranian regime, it now understands that having a nuclear weapon is no longer an optional hedge for its evil system’s survival and power. It is a strategic necessity. Iran has effectively established itself as gatekeeper of the Strait of Hormuz — a fundamentally different status quo than existed before the conflict, giving Tehran a durable form of economic leverage it did not previously possess. I'd feel remiss not to point out that we had all of the objectives in Iraq completed within 3 weeks - it was the nation building cleanup that became the quagmire. After 6 weeks in Iran we are worse off than we started and the long term implications are so much worse. By all accounts the JCPOA was a success and working effectively when Trump cancelling it in 2018. We're here because he felt the need to solve the problem of his own making.

jacknews 6mo ago

The US will either have a long and painful and ultimately unfruitful ground war, or will have to accept some of Iran's terms for a ceasefire which will leave Iran in a stronger geopolitical situation than before the war. A third option is for the US to throw Israel under the bus and either cut military funding to them, or force them to contain themselves by treaty, join the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and so on, under that threat. Since Israel have been goading for this war, spoiling any diplomacy (by killing the Iranian diplomats), and seem to have no intention of ceasing fire until Iran is completely fractured, I think they are the ones who need to be stopped. Iran would perhaps re-agree to the terms and inspections they were previously under if Israel were also forced to submit. America would then re-establish it's authority in the region to some extent.

shawndrost 6mo ago

It seems to me that Trump's second term foreign policy is obsessed with dismantling the "shadow" oil market -- ending the system where China captures upside when sanctioned countries like Russia, Iran, and Venezuela sell oil, in yuan to boot -- without losing face or deterrence. They have arguably been successful at that objective in Iran and Venezuela, and I forget what's going on with Russia, but you can see the administration working on that front too. (I say this as a Biden stan and someone who thinks the Iran war is bad chess and bad morals.) The other place I'd push back on this article is its belief that America doesn't want to trim the grass in Iran every few years. We are pretty committed to Iran not having nukes and the American people seem to have liked this war and the earlier strike pretty well.

ifwinterco 6mo ago
Trump is more unpopular now than Nixon was... after Watergate
- palmotea 6mo ago
  > Trump is more unpopular now than Nixon was... after Watergate And surprisingly, the Democrats are even less popular than he is.
petesergeant 6mo ago
> the American people seem to have liked this war https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2026-04/Ipsos%20Iran%20Poll%20Topline%204.13.2026.pdf https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/... and that's without the oil supply shocks having kicked in properly yet
seanmcdirmid 6mo ago
I don’t think most Americans lied the previous strikes so much as they were neutral to them. Weapons of mass destruction arguments themselves fall off as meh to most people these days, especially those who remember Bush 2’s run. “Oh north Korea might have nukes? Ok…Iran also you say, so what?” We not committed at all to an expensive war every few years with Iran. Rather, we should do what China is doing and unwind our dependence on middle eastern oil (or a low world price for while pumped domestically) and just move on to new and better transportation tech.

metalman 6mo ago

first time anyone has called loosing there big advantage a tactical success, Iran was bringing down top of the line stealth planes, no doubt with some help, but that new and very very highly sought capability, is bieng dialed in. China has publicly stated that the will be honoring there defence agreament with Iran for the sale of high end missles, anti aircraft and ship killers, within the next month, made previous to the current situation. And the "help is on the way" anouncement is continuing to have consequences, especialy after the tactical success of bombing schools full of little girls, hospitals, universities, bridges, and water supplies. Big guys, with big bombs, big help, big success.

maxglute 6mo ago

Is it tactical success though? Conflating K:D ratio with strategic success typical fallacy, but if Iran game plan is to take hits while hitting back then so far US inability to neutralize/suppress Iranian fires also tactical failure. US can glass 10000s targets but if adversary built to take punches and remain operational (and still down planes), then US tactically failing if goal is knockout/haymaker. So far US+co generated like 20% of sorties vs Iran than Iraq. We can charitably assume 100% the effectiveness since 100% precision munitions (vs many more hardened targets). But Iran also 5x larger than Iraq. So far it took deploying like 50% of active fleet, and drawing down 25%+ of high end munitions, who knows how much high end interceptors... losing regional basing. Iran still being able to punch back and attrite US air at frankly unsustainable rates = the reality is on paper US may not even have the high-end munition stockpile to tactically defeat Iran in detail without being utterly strategically depleted vs peer adversaries 50x larger (PRC). Hence TACO threatened to end civilization, because there aren't enough munitions to destroy Iranian MIC, but there's enough to destroy power plants / go counter-value. Or settling for reverse blockade since discretionary magazine depth can sustain outside of standoff range where Iran can't hit back, but basically cedes region to Iranian missile complex. Iran tactically "won" by allowing US to commit tactical and strategical seppuku by wasting so much fires for ineffective neutralization/suppression that another few weeks and it would be obvious US mathematically couldn't sustain let alone win the air game. TLDR Iran broken 3 of US fingers taking punches to the face, they're not going to come out looking pretty, but break a few more fingers, and US going to to look retarded/crippled for still punching.

Jamesbeam 6mo ago

When I first went to Afghanistan in 2008, I was probably the most hated soldier by coalition troops in the whole country. All I was tasked to do was sit in rooms and tents with a moleskin and my little Japanese ball pen workhorse, writing down stuff while coalition commanders were talking about plans, hyping each other up and bragging about who had more tactical success than their counterparts. Nobody knew who I was or what I did in their strategic meetings. I just sat there, no eye contact, no yeah or mehs, no comments, no interruptions. Whenever they were done with the meeting, I got up, thanked them for their time, wished them a good day and went outside to sit down somewhere else, thinking some more, and then I went to work. Back in the day, the coalition had a problem with having too many hammers but not a lot of scalpels. For a hammer, after a while, everything starts looking like a nail, and with air superiority, the hammering went fast and hit hard. So it was a quick way to make a name for themselves and collect medals and a pay raise. Most of the time, those tactical decisions resulted in short and long-term strategic failure. For example, it was easy to kill a Taliban commander with an airstrike, but the result was that the twenty or so commanders he had overseen and kept in check went on a spree of violence against locals and coalition troops alike in pursuit of the succession of their predecessor. So someone very smart in the upper echelons of the coalition decided to implement the tenth man rule. It basically said if nine men look at the same information and arrive at the exact same conclusion, it is the duty of the tenth man to disagree. No matter how improbable it may seem, the tenth man has to start digging with the assumption that the other nine are wrong. 8/10 times, I did find those short or long-term strategic errors in the planned tactical operations, and whenever I did, everyone who was with me in the room that day had to prove why I am wrong and their approach is right. 9/10 times they couldn’t. You can imagine those people all have giant egos and do not like it if someone outsmarts them, so they got rid of me by the end of 2009. Officially, I was pulled to sit in more boring rooms with boring people. Inofficially, I was told by a General that commanders were about to revolt because I was undermining their morale and they would often question themselves and their planning, instead of acting quickly and decisively, which would slow down their "efficiency" and the efficiency of the campaign. When you look at the timeline this article showcases and think about that the inner circle of the President got replaced by yes men and a Secretary that wants a more deadly and less "woke" force that simply does what the Commander-in-Chief tells them without thinking for themselves, I wonder if the current situation the US has maneuvered itself into is because of the complete absence of soldiers that do what I did 18 years ago. Outsourcing the strategic thinking process to a technology that is wrong 35% of the time by design is maybe the biggest strategic long-term failure the US military ever did. I see why this is necessary because replacing competent minds with loyalists above else makes this a viable approach. Dumbing down the US Military and every position that has access to the President that could intervene stupidity looks less and less like an unintended consequence of the Secretary’s "rebuilding" of the military and more like an intended goal. In my humble opinion, this doesn’t serve the American people nor the good men and women that serve their country and whose life is relying on people taking the time and effort to dig in with the assumption that everyone in the room, including a President, is wrong. I’m retired, so all I can do now is point my fingers at idiots and tell you guys, look at this idiot and what he is doing. But I no longer have access to rooms where big decisions are made and rely on your ability to make good decisions who you give the power to annihilate whole continents and whom not just like the rest of the normal people out there. We live in interesting times.