The Iran war's early lessons

Ten lessons of the Iran war (so far)

The U.S. military is always busy studying the last war so it can be sure it’s ready to fight that last war the next time. Okay, that’s a little cynical. But just a little. Combat always throws off sparks of innovation that can lead to new or improved strategies, tactics, and weapons. But those changes tend to happen at the margin. War is fundamentally a grim business — nasty, brutish, and usually too long. Big League changes tend to creep, not sweep, the battlefield. That’s why the U.S. military, in its Professional Military Education courses, is always on the hunt for quicker, better, and/or cheaper ways (you can only pick two) to prevail. There are reams of “lessons learned” studies and “after action” reports designed to distill the most recent war’s wisdom.

Speaking of schooling, the Pentagon’s military education program now finds itself amid its own tug-of-warrior-ethos-education. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently machine-gunned military fellowships at places like Harvard and Princeton universities (he’s a graduate of both) for being out of whack with “American Values” (PDF). Not everyone thinks this is smart. Of course, it’s unlikely the U.S. war effort in Iran, or in any future conflict, will suffer from a lack of Ivy League diplomas in its ranks. Nonetheless, given the SECDEF’s emphasis on education, it’s never too soon to check out early returns from Iran and hazard some incipient intelligence:

1. Hype new weapons

There’s nothing like a war to put new military hardware to the test. Early top scorers in the U.S. military’s arsenal include the Low-cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System (LUCAS) kamikaze drone and the long-range Precision Strike Missile (PrSM). The most expensive weapon system in world history — the F-35 fighter — got its first combat kill against a crewed aircraft (even if it was an Israeli F-35 downing an Iranian trainer).

Speaking of cost, it’s worth noting that the LUCAS drone boasts “Low-Cost” as part of its official name. That’s because each drone costs only about $35,000, a bargain in Pentagon terms. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it’s a copy of Iran’s Shahed-136. “This was an original Iranian drone design,” Admiral Brad Cooper, who is overseeing the war as chief of U.S. Central Command, said. “We captured it, pulled the guts out, sent it back to America, put a little Made-In-America on it, brought it back here, and we’re shooting it at the Iranians.” (“Boomerang” would be a good nickname for it.)

2. But don't ignore the old ones

Sure, shiny new weapons get all the ink when war breaks out. But we can’t overlook the tried-and-true arms the U.S. is using against Iran. For the first time since World War II, a U.S. submarine torpedoed an enemy vessel to the bottom of the sea. And lumbering Eisenhower-era B-52 bombers attacked Iranian targets.

3. Defend your troops in harm's way

The first six U.S. combat deaths came in the war’s opening hours when an Iranian drone exploded through the ceiling of a command post in Kuwait. While concrete barricades protected those inside from ground-based attacks, the command post’s roof was vulnerable to an overhead strike. Unlike high-flying missiles that can be shot down by the U.S. missile defenses now protecting U.S. troops in the region, slow-and-low-flying drones can sneak under such shields. Although the type of drone involved in the strike isn’t known, a Shahed-136 is suspected.

4. Buy more cheap weapons

The opening days of the U.S.-Iran war have made clear that the U.S. still relies too much on so-called “exquisite weapons.” Because they are so expensive, few are bought and stockpiles are quickly depleted. Even for countries like the U.S. and Israel, war becomes unaffordable when you are forced to shoot down cheap drones with $4 million missiles. The nation’s biggest defense contractors saluted when President Trump ordered them to increase munitions production March 6. The Pentagon insists it has sufficient ammo of all kinds to wage its war on Iran as long as necessary. Even so, it has reached out to Ukraine seeking help to defend against Iran’s drones — and is ordering 30,000 more of its own.

5. While you may be running out of explosives, don't run out of explanations

War works best when there’s a simple, achievable goal. Things bog down when such clarity is diffused by multiple, and shifting, aims. Operation Epic Fury has muddled into Operation Epic Confusion as the Trump administration has launched a barrage of rationalizations for the war.

The conflict began with Trump telling the Iranian people that their future is “yours to take,” a call for regime change that Hegseth denied two days later. Along the way, other reasons for the war have included the imminent but unspecified threats Iran poses; the need to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons and missile programs; its support for terrorism; freedom for the Iranian people; a pre-emptive, knock-out blow because Israel was going to attack, anyway; Iran’s effort to assassinate Trump; and (of course), Tehran’s efforts to interfere in the 2020 and 2024 U.S. presidential elections.

By March 6, a week after the first shots were fired, Trump unilaterally declared total war on Iran. “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” he said. “Surrender,” of course, means the loser capitulates. But what if Iran refuses to throw in the towel? In that case, Trump will decide when the war should end, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. “Then Iran will essentially be in a place of unconditional surrender,” she declared. “Whether they say it themselves or not.”

Nifty piece of work, that. If they can redefine “surrender,” they can redefine “victory.”

6. For Pete's sake, calm down

The soldier you want in the foxhole ain’t the same person you want at the Pentagon podium. Unfortunately, Hegseth, a former infantryman who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, is late of Fox News, and still thinks he’s in the Fox Hole. At times like this, the nation craves a steady and sober mouth on the tiller (The Bunker can’t believe he’s saying this: like Dick Cheney).

But Hegseth has been a Multiple Launch Rocket System spewing incendiary rhetoric around the world since the war began. “They are toast … death and destruction from the sky all day long,” the Pentagon pugilist said March 4. “We are punching them while they’re down,” Hegseth added, pledging that U.S.-Israeli “violence of action” will prevail.

Hegseth is sounding less like Lieutenant Colonel Bill (“I love the smell of napalm in the morning”) Kilgore in “Apocalypse Now” than reprising the role of the late and great Robert Duvall in the remake: “Apocalypse Right Now, Dammit.” Hegseth’s words don’t sway public opinion in Iran — they’ve got enough real trouble there right now — but they do unnerve the Americans whom Hegseth is supposedly serving.

7. Dangers of decapitation

Air strikes are the 21st century’s version of assassination. If there’s no Brutus handy to knife Caesar from the inside, bombs from the outside will have to do the job (“Et tu, B-2?” so to speak). That’s how the Israeli air force, with targeting help from the CIA, killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, on February 28.

But this so-called decapitation strategy has its downsides. As David Ignatius noted in the Washington Post, it’s like a “fire and forget” missile. It’s designed to knock off a leader in the hopes that someone better — at least in the decapitator’s estimation — will fill the job. Unfortunately, the U.S. and Israel have recently killed a lot of potential successors to Khamenei. Beyond that, U.S. intelligence doesn’t think that even an extended U.S. military campaign would help put the Iranian opposition into power. Turns out that when it comes to “fire and forget,” it’s a lot easier to pull the trigger than to remember what comes next.

8. Train, or at least screen, your allies better

In the opening hours of the war, a single Kuwaiti F-18 fighter shot down three — three! — U.S. F-15E fighters. Each was apparently downed by a short-range missile that would have required the Kuwaiti pilot to eyeball his targets before firing his missiles. Thankfully, all six crew members safely bailed out. The only F-15s we make today are F-15EXs, which cost about $150 million a copy.

“We know that this was not from hostile enemy fire,” former F-16 pilot and Air Force General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said. Interesting word choices there. The common phrase is “hostile fire,” or “enemy fire.” There’s growing suspicion that the shootdowns were due to hostile allied fire, which hardly qualifies as truly friendly fire. “To make the same mistake three times over seems highly improbable, especially at close range,” Thomas Newdick at The War Zone wrote March 6. Stay tuned.

9. Nukes remain the best defense

Just ask North Korea.

10. No need to worry about public backing of the war, so long as they believe it's not going terribly wrong

(So far.)

Here's what has caught the bunker's eye recently

→See you in court!

AI pioneer Anthropic has sued the Trump administration for declaring the company a risk to the Defense Department’s supply chain, Matt O’Brien of the Associated Press reported March 9.

→Bandaging bolts out of the blue

Lawmakers encouraged the U.S. military to address the new kinds of wounds that drones are increasingly inflicting on the battlefield, Brandi Vincent reported in DefenseScoop March 6.

→And speaking of boomerangs...

The Trump-created U.S. Space Force’s push to boost procurement of complicated orbiting systems is being hamstrung by a lack of skilled government managers following workforce reductions by the Trump administration, Sandra Erwin reported March 3 at Space News.

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