“I do think there’s a lot of evidence to believe that we’re accomplishing the military objectives [of the Iran War], which is destroying the Iranian Navy, the Iranian Air Force, their air defenses, the missile production capabilities, drone production capabilities. That’s going well. But how that translates into strategic success has been, I think, the weakness in this entire operation and continues to be today. And I think that if we were to take a step back to February [when the Iran War started], and think about where we are today, I don’t know that this would be in our theory of success. It would probably be a branch plan that would not be going so well. And I’m worried about that.”
That was retired-Air Force Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote, former Deputy Chief of Staff for Strategy, Integration, and Requirements, now a professor of policy analysis at the RAND School of Public Policy and a non-resident adviser to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Aerospace Security Project.
He was speaking on July 23, at a CSIS event, The Air Campaign Returns: From Epic Fury to Midnight Hammer, along with retired-Air Force Gen. James Slife, former Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force, former Commander of Air Force Special Operations Command, and also a non-resident adviser to CSIS’ Aerospace Security Project.
The two former senior Air Force officers not only gave their frank views of the Iran War, but also discussed the future of warfare and its impact on the Air Force and other U.S. military forces. I will start with their views on Iran and the war and then move on to other subjects they dealt with.
Since the Strait of Hormuz is central right now, let’s begin with their views on the Strait which I found inciteful.
Ret.-Gen. Slife began by pointing out, “Military planners have struggled with the Strait of Hormuz challenge for years and years. I mean I don’t think it’s any surprise to anybody that’s paying attention to how this has played out, because geography favors Iran in the Strait.”
Slife continued, “I mean they [Iranians] have three sides of the Strait of Hormuz, right? It’s a very narrow waterway. It’s very shallow. The ability to maneuver inside the Strait is very limited. It’s crowded. I mean there aren’t a lot of great options.”
Then, as a former Air Force commander he offered the following views: “I mean, frankly, if there was a great option for how air power could unblock the Strait of Hormuz, it would probably be unblocked at this point. There are things that I think the air component is doing in conjunction with the naval component to target the means that Iran uses to exercise control over the Strait. But it is a very difficult problem. Geography just doesn’t favor us in this regard.”
Ret.-Lt. Gen. Hinote added, “I think we’re dealing with the problem of small numbers,” and then explained, “The [U.S.] joint force can be exceptionally good at preventing the majority of attacks on shipping [in the Strait]. That could even get into the 90% plus range. You could even call it 98%. But it’s that last 2% that the joint force just has the most difficulty stopping [Iran from hitting a transiting ship] because you just can’t stop everything when there are these mountainous rugged shores that Iran controls and they can use that as [protective] cover to attack shipping.”
Hinote went on, “So the problem is not necessarily that we’re not militarily successful. I call 98% pretty militarily successful, but it’s that last 2% that the [ship] insurance companies cannot accept. And so that’s, I believe, the true dilemma that is facing the world economy today — that as long as Iran has the will to try and negate shipping through the Strait, it’s going to have some level of capability to do so. And that just creates a conundrum that we just haven’t solved and [are] unlikely to solve.”
The two former Air Force generals also raised the issue of Israeli and U.S. forces having different missions for their military involved in attacking Iran.
Ret.-Gen. Slife put it this way: “I wonder to what extent the difference in [U.S. and Israeli] targeting reflects different national aims between Israel and the United States. I don’t have any way of knowing that, but I do think it’s noteworthy that we are actually, we have pursued very different target sets which may tell us something about what our respective national aims are.”
Ret.-Lt. Gen. Hinote picked up that idea saying, “To me, the Israeli theory of success is pretty straightforward. They [the Israelis] believe the Iranian regime will always be hostile to them and they believe that they have to go back and back and back to re-strike things and to re-strike the regime targets. And you might think of that as a strategy that we’ve heard called mowing the grass…meaning that the grass is going to grow back and we’re going to go back and they are resigned to some way of mowing the grass again for years.”
That means, according to Hinote, “The more [Iranian] regime leaders we [meaning the Israelis] can kill, the better, because that means it takes more time for the new regime leaders to be dangerous to us.”
As for the U.S., according to Hinote, “We’re at a stage now where we’re fighting a coercion campaign…Hey, we want the Strait [of Hormuz] open. Hey, we want you to give up your nuclear aspirations.”
But now, as he adds, “There’s nobody left in Iran who really can make that decision and enforce it up and down what is left of the government and military apparatus. So we’re in a state now where what you might have thought of as the strategic aims and the military means, not only were they not necessarily totally aligned, they may have in certain circumstances worked against each other — and that’s a really difficult place to be.”
That is because, as Hinote points out, “We [the Israelis and U.S.] did one of the most successful, maybe the most successful decapitation operation [of Iranian leadership] in history. And so given that, I think you expect that there’s going to be a high degree of paralysis and inaction at the
highest levels of the Iranian government. So you’re almost thinking like, okay, well, what at that point, how do you take advantage of that strategic paralysis?”
However, there was no “strategic paralysis” in the Tehran regime, nor was there an internal uprising, as President Trump called for that night last February when he announced the first Iran attacks were underway. “When we are finished,” Trump said to the Iranian people, “take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will probably be your only chance for generations.” Trump also called on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the armed forces and police to “lay down your weapons and have complete immunity” otherwise “face certain death.”
As Hinote put it last week, “We’re in a state now where what you might have thought of as the strategic aims and the military means not only were not necessarily totally aligned, they may
have in certain circumstances worked against each other — and that’s a really difficult place to be. And I think one of the reasons why it feels intractable right now is because you have that disparity.”
In fact, Hinote added, “The United States would like to be done with the Middle East, so that we could finally execute some sort of pivot to Asia. And we’d like to get out of all of these very expensive bases in the Middle East. And so we have a theory that is we want to put the [Iranian] regime into some sort of state where we don’t have to go back anytime soon — and we get to a steady state that is better than what was in existence on February 28th [when the U.S. and Israel first attacked Iran].”
Slife also mentioned an effect on U.S military readiness from the Iran War that need further attention when he said, “You know that all our readiness is built around how we generate and deploy forces, particularly for the Air Force and the Navy. We’ve seen heavy deployments beyond what the [military] services feel like they can routinely support from a readiness perspective and so those things always have a delayed effect.”
Slife added, “I think just the pace of operations over the last year has probably exceeded the Air Force and the Navy’s ability to maintain levels of readiness going forward. So, I think we were going to have to pay close attention to that over the next three-to-five years, because there is always a delayed impact to these kinds of heavy operations.”
Hinote spoke about “the mission to rescue the [U.S.] back-seater of the F-15E [that was shot down over Iran]. We’ve only heard a little bit about that. My sense is that it was a huge operation that required tremendous integration across multiple types of forces in a very difficult time frame.”
He pointed out the difference from the troubled April 1980 Iran rescue attempt that was, he said, “so bad that it led to reforms for the next decade in the United States military. We may see that [the April 5, F-15E back-seater] rescue operation, in contrast, stands as being one of the best we’ve ever seen.”
Hinote then explained why saving the back-seater was so important.
“What if that weapon-system officer would have been captured and paraded in Iran on TV with the entire world seeing it real time,” Hinote said, “You could see that any political objectives that we were trying to achieve would be all the more difficult to achieve with one single pilot being paraded around in Iran…So, not only was the true political nature of the whole operation in jeopardy, but you [the U.S.] were willing to send what I think is going to end up being scores of airplanes into harm’s way, multiple units, helicopters and such to go rescue this one pilot so that the political objectives could be preserved.”
While public concentration currently is on what’s not yet worked to end the Iran War, that rescue operation was one element that did succeed.
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