The military of the Islamic Republic of Iran, we were told at the start of the Iran War, had essentially been obliterated by the United States and Israeli air campaigns.
Yet, that assessment was quickly changed by US intelligence officials.
Iran’s Drones That Russia Is Using. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
Iran F-14 Tomcat Fighter. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
Rather than mostly having been knocked out by sustained American and Israeli airstrikes, US intelligence experts assessed that maybe only 50 percent of Iran’s missile and drone launch capabilities were destroyed.
Grotesque Intelligence Failures
It turns out that the US and Israeli intelligence services vastly underestimated the Islamic Republic.
Among other things, the US and Israel miscalculated that a few days of heavy bombardment of Iran would result in a popular uprising against the regime.
On top of that, US intelligence misunderstood how deep, hardened, and complex Iran’s underground missile cities were.
And how ineffective the combined arsenals of the US and Israeli militaries were for collapsing those missile cities buried deep beneath mountains of nearly impenetrable granite.
That’s why Iran has managed to sustain itself despite the intense military pressure that both Washington and Tel Aviv subjected the country to.
It’s also why the Islamic Republic is nowhere near collapse, despite whatever President Trump and his advisers tell the public.
So long as those underground missile cities remain even 50 percent undamaged, Iran’s ability to continue prosecuting the war against the US, the Gulf Arab states, and Israel will continue in perpetuity–long after the Americans and Israelis have expended their own arsenals of critical weapons.
Iran really concentrated on building a honeycomb network of advanced underground military facilities when the Islamic Republic witnessed how rapidly the US military machine moved on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003.
Realizing that there was no way the Islamic Republic could resist that kind of air assault, the regime spent decades and vast sums of money to ensure that it had a durable defense in the depths of Iran’s vast mountain chains.
Misunderstanding the Adversary
Because of that investment, and the Iranian “Mosaic” defense strategy, the Islamic Republic has survived–and thrived–under the combined weight of US and Israeli airstrikes.
Within those vast underground complexes, the Islamic Republic has stored, managed, and rapidly produced literal swarms of increasingly complex long-range ballistic missiles, anti-ship ballistic missiles, potentially hypersonic weapons, and legions of drones that today have utterly stymied the US and Israeli war machines (and shut down global shipping traffic).
Multiple experts who support the US and Israeli war against Iran insist that the United States has effectively degraded the air defenses inside Iran and knocked out enough of the country’s defense industrial base that US and Israeli forces can now risk moving closer to Iranian airspace or even potentially land troops somewhere in southern Iran, do not understand what they’re talking about.
Whatever the US and Israeli airstrikes have destroyed in terms of Iran’s air defenses and especially of Iran’s missile and drone launchers are just the systems that US and Israeli targeting intelligence analysts can see.
Underestimating Iran
There are no eyes inside those vast underground complexes where the Iranians have moved so much of their defense industrial base.
Thanks to these capabilities, the Iranians can launch a seemingly limitless array of drones, missiles, and hypersonic weapons from well-concealed positions–and Iran can restore these capabilities at will, thanks to their industrial base being underground.
What’s more, the production, maintenance, partial manufacturing, and protected launch capacity that the underground facilities grant Iran’s military means that the Islamic Republic can maintain its fighting capabilities far longer than what most Western defense experts assess.
Plus, a rundown of the US arsenals required even potentially to destroy those deeply buried bases indicates that, even if the US had sufficient numbers of major penetrating munitions, notably weapons like the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOP (the US does not), the Iranian facilities are so massive, deep, and hardened that there’d be no guarantee that the Islamic Republic could not reconstitute its fighting capacity.
Losing to a Protracted Insurgency (Again)
In the Iran War, the West has to relearn what it means to fight an insurgency.
Iran has decentralized its defensive capabilities and its leadership structure while keeping the maintenance and (at least partial) construction of those weapons underground.
Neither the US nor Israel has sufficient numbers of weapons capable of even having a chance at collapsing this vast underground network of Iranian military facilities.
So, the Iranians have calculated that they can outpace the capacity of the US and Israeli militaries to wage a protracted struggle against the hardened Iranian war machine.
The Americans and Israelis have grievously miscalculated the defensive capabilities of Iran.
Therefore, all their plans to end the Iranian military threat are incorrect.
They will continue to lack a war-winning strategy because they have so badly underestimated the ability–and commitment–to defeat the US military in the long run.
About the Author: Brandon J. Weichert
Brandon J. Weichert is the Senior National Security Editor. He also manages The Weichert Brief on Substack. Weichert also hosts “National Security Talk” on Rumble. He is the author of four bestselling national security books, the most recent of which is A Disaster of Our Own Making: How the West Lost Ukraine (Encounter Books). Follow him via Twitter/X @WeTheBrandon.
