I am by no means an expert on warfare. What little I know comes from books on the general principles of war and from playing a few war games. It is the latter which are giving me a sense of déjà vu.
The war games I play are computerized versions of traditional board games where you move pieces around on a hex grid overlaid on a map. Unity of Command is a good example. These games are relatively simple while still illustrating some of the basic principles of warfare.
When I start a new battle scenario, I begin by reading the background material, noting the victory conditions, exploring the map, and studying the stats of my pieces. Then I think a bit about how to accomplish my goals, come up with a plan, and start moving pieces. Typically, everything goes according to plan for a turn or two, until the computer opponent does something I didn’t expect. Maybe a couple of strong enemy units break through my defensive forces and start trying to interdict my supply lines.
Now my advancing units have to stop, and I have to move some of the trailing units backwards to pin and destroy the enemy units blocking my supplies. Meanwhile, new enemy units have moved into blocking positions, and I’ll have to bring my scattered forces forward again to mass against them and break through. None of that is good. I’ll never capture my target enemy cities in time to meet the victory conditions.
In broad terms, the problem is that I’ve lost the initiative. I should be driving events and forcing the enemy to try to keep up. Instead, I’m stuck desperately trying to respond to enemy actions. Losing the initiative makes it a lot harder to win a war.
That’s why I find reports about the War in Iran so disturbing: They remind me of my game-playing experience. Iran’s blockade of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz seems to have caught the U.S. military unprepared. Suddenly we’re trying to rally our allies to join the fight, a step which should have taken place much earlier. Suddenly there’s talk of moving thousands of ground troops into the area, rather than having them prepositioned from the start. The U.S. military seems to be reacting to events rather than driving them.
When this happens in a wargame, I usually give up and start over. Now I’ll know that certain enemy units are better positioned or more powerful than I anticipated, so I’ll move more forces in front of them to keep them from doing another spoiling attack. That gets me further along…until I run into the next enemy surprise. And so on.
The first few times I did that, I felt a little incompetent. After all, if I had done a better job evaluating the starting conditions, I wouldn’t have been caught out. A real commander would have spent a lot more time studying the enemy and imagining the various actions the enemy could take and how to respond to them. Eventually I realized that playing the game was my way of doing that. I could plan for the battle by playing it over and over until I got it right.
Unfortunately, the War in Iran is not a wargame. There’s no starting over. All mistakes are built to last.
Obviously, my wargaming experience doesn’t make me a better military thinker than actual military officers. They are much better trained and have much more experience. In every possible way, they are better war planners than I will ever be. Which is why it’s so concerning that they are making the kinds of mistakes I would have made.
The explanation, I suspect, is that the U.S. military is weak at the top. Trump, like all civilian leaders, knows little of warfare, and Hegseth has been getting rid of top leadership in his weird quest to make the military less “woke.” Fortunately, the U.S. military is so much more powerful than Iranian forces that these mistakes have not led to outright military defeat.
At least not this time.
Mark,
Something that you’re not going to know because you’re not in the loop; all of these scenarios have been discussed ad nauseum and it’s evident (at least to me) that the Trump administration and the military have been at least 3-4 major steps ahead of Iran on everything. Be reasonably confident that the administration, military, and negotiators are working hand-in-hand to reach the end goals of an absolutely non-nuclear Iran with as little destruction & loss of life as possible. Iran is facing down a enormous war, economic, and political machine that’s going to get what it wants in the end, absolutely non-nuclear Iran, so if Iran simply capitulates on that and hands over all its nuclear materials it’ll be over in short order. The problem is that Iran leadership and military want to save face culturally and they don’t give a damn how many people are killed and how much is destroyed. It’s all about propaganda to them and that kind of mindset will very likely get them killed in the long run.
As for the shutting down of the straight; be assured that this is just an mild annoyance in the great scheme of things, this too will pass. All the Administration has to do is to try and do a reasonable job of managing public perception without revealing their cards to Iran. Remember, the vast majority of the media absolutely hates Trump and everything he does, Trump knows this and he’s going to figuratively stick his thumb in their eye whenever he can. It doesn’t matter what Trump does, the vast majority of the media is going to attack him for it and hope he fails. By the way, the Strait of Hormuz is an international strait and international law guarantees transit passage for peaceful ships.
You should seriously consider that the things you’re viewing as mistakes might actually be planned tactical maneuvers in an effort to reach the end goals. War is chaos and plans must shift, but what cannot shift is the end goal. How you get to the end goal can shift all over the place.
Truly understand and respect the facts surrounding what you wrote, “They are much better trained and have much more experience. In every possible way, they are better war planners than I will ever be.” So sit back, relax, pay attention, watch it unfold instead of attempting to be an armchair quarterback with 20/20 vision.