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Source: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/trump-third-way-iran
Can the U.S. Siege of Iran Succeed?
(Tablet) Michael Doran - President Trump is applying enough force to change the calculus of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps without tipping into a war of conquest. Bombing has proved insufficient, so he is tightening an economic siege in its place. Iran's missiles and drones are dispersed, mobile, buried underground. As long as enough survive, Tehran can impose severe costs of its own, not just on American forces but on the energy and desalination infrastructure on which the Gulf states depend. Tehran spent two decades preparing for precisely this war. The IRGC's "mosaic" defense disperses command, launchers, and production across so many redundant nodes that no single strike changes much. The arsenal sits in tunnel complexes and hardened silos. A revolution in the character of warfare is underway. The stalemate in the Strait of Hormuz is the product of cheap precision weapons. A Shahed drone is assembled from commercially available components in a workshop small enough to hide. The U.S. can destroy production sites, temporarily, but it cannot bomb away an arms industry that fits in warehouses and can be replicated beyond Iran's borders in Russia, Belarus, and Tajikistan. Tehran can replenish its offensive arsenal faster and more cheaply than the U.S. and its allies can replenish the high-end defenses required to stop it. The result is that while the U.S. enjoys overwhelming superiority by every conventional measure, Tehran retains the ability to break things faster and more cheaply than Washington can guarantee that they will keep working. If Trump were prepared to destroy enough of Iran's economy and absorb Iranian retaliation across the Gulf, American power could eventually destroy Iran's capacity to resist. But that is very different from saying that Iran can be compelled quickly and cheaply. The recent histories of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza have demonstrated how much suffering Middle Eastern political and military organizations can impose on the populations under their control without abandoning their fundamental objectives. The writer is Director of the Middle East Center at the Hudson Institute.