A Teachable Foment

“This was a discovery war. Both sides treated it as a live rehearsal, learning the things you can only learn by fighting: what the missiles and drones can really do, where the air defenses hold and where they leak, how the next one might be fought. More conflicts are coming, soon enough, and everyone fought this one with that in mind. The problem is the asymmetry in what was learned. We learned tactics, which depreciate. The other side learned something strategic, which compounds. They learned that the West is not built for discomfort. One oil shock and a single election cycle’s worth of patience, and the most powerful military coalition on earth stood down a regime it had on the ropes. And consider who the opponent was. Iran was close to the weakest adversary we could have faced: isolated, under sanctions for decades, its air defenses degraded, no nuclear weapon yet in hand, no major power fighting at its side, and a regime its own people had risen against months earlier. The conditions will never be this favorable again. If this is what our resolve looks like against Iran, the question every capital is now asking is the obvious one. What does it look like against China, with a peer military, an integrated economy we cannot simply sanction, and the patience of a state that thinks in decades?” Dror Berman with a very interesting look at what we, and the world, just learned. A Discovery War, Not a Peace Deal.

+ “It reflected not only the errors of an unusually feckless administration, but the accumulation of poor decisions and inadequate or misdirected investments by the Pentagon and Congress, civilian and military leaders alike. It was caused only partly by the distractions of Afghanistan and Iraq, but resulted even more from decades of loose thinking and self-serving assumptions about the changing character of war.” Eliot A. Cohen in The Atlantic (Gift Article): War and Consequences.