A question for some of the military spergs here. What realistic strategic and tactical options were available to the Iranian military, faced with their overwhelming quantitative and qualitative inferiority, and the unpopularity of the regime? If any of you had been commander-in-chief of Iran, and had not been killed by either the US or Israel, and you couldn't surrender or defect, and your task was to do the best you could to "win" the war, however you define it, what would you have done?
Unfun Answer:
Have arranged ahead of time with the US and Israel that I wouldn't be killed so officers in my conspiracy can seize control of the country at the right time and declare a ceasefire and transitional government. The Islamic Revolution loses, but I win.
Short Answer:
Build a time machine.
Long Answer:
Iran was not prepared to fight the sort of war it would have needed to fight in order to "win." It's easiest to explain this by making a comparison to another country's defense structure, one that's quite close to them.
Pakistan's greatest threat and rival is India, and they are horrifically outmatched should a real war spark. This is not a controversial opinion. India has much larger amounts of everything needed to win the great Jeet-Jam, as costly as it would be to commit to that. So Pakistan has two tools in its escalation ladder that have their own ways of being particularly painful. The first is obviously nukes. You invade me, I nuke you, you lose no matter how hard you nuke me back. Not hard to understand. The other part is Pakistan's rather competent and advanced air force, out of all proportion to the rest of its military. You might recall from the recent dust up that Pakistan's planes did decently well. This is a vital part of its defense; if you have no means to contest enemy air presence, you are no longer fighting a modern war. You are automatically surrendering the initiative, ease of logistics, flexibility of mobility, just an unfathomable amount of disadvantage that means your only option is insurgency, which essentially means a government in exile at best and thus for all practical purposes for a nation without invested patrons, surrender, at least in the short term.
Back to Iran. Iran's primary threats are Israel and the United States, one more constant than the other, but the way they've gone about things, their preference was to not get the US involved in a significant commitment if they could fob off whenever possible. First off, Iran did not have nukes, unlike Pakistan, so that's off the table. They'd have really liked one, but too bad. Israel and the US have similar primary threats now that nukes are off the table; extremely advanced and capable air forces.
To make a long story short, Iran did not prepare sufficiently, or perhaps at all, to counter this primary threat. They chose to invest near completely in ballistic/cruise missiles and drones, and this was well suited to the conflicts with Israel which were basically long distance pissing matches where they try and arc rocks over Iraq and Jordan and see what sort of architectural renovations they can make on each other, while testing western capabilities at handling swarm attacks.
There is a colossal problem in this tactic. Swarm attacks meant to overwhelm enemy air defenses are nothing new. They're as basic as World War 2, a prevalent element in Soviet naval tactics which involved firing four, six, eight missiles at ships who could only fire a certain amount of interceptors over a certain amount of time. This is an old problem, and the solution is also old. It's called "bomb the fucking bajeezus out of the other guy before they can launch or detect you."
Russia can execute successful swarm attacks against Ukrainian missile defenses because their launches come from behind a layered network of surface to air and air to air defenses. Hamas could try and overwhelm Iron Dome in surprise bombardments with masses of cheap and imprecise ordinance targeting a wide area for the purposes of what amounts to competitive pissing rather than anything with strategic purpose.
Iran's air defenses were not up to snuff. They neglected their defensive measures to try and maximize on competitive pissing while thinking nobody might run up and kick them in the balls.
This isn't completely unreasonable for them, they're under heavy sanctions, their economy is in tatters, aircraft able to perform competent air defense against Israeli/US fighters are expensive and require many flight hours and constant maintenance: much of their air force getting blown up probably couldn't fly if they wanted to put them up in the first place. Missiles and drones on the other hand are cheap by comparison, you don't need to train a large number pilots for hundreds of flight hours to keep them sharp and capable, they're very easy to store and far easier to maintain, they don't need airfields to operate, and they look very scary when fired in swarms against cities and bases.
But you can't win against an air force with nothing but missiles and drones.
The final comparison to make is Desert Storm. Or rather the bombing campaign before it. Looking at it should seem extremely familiar. However, Iraq had, for its time, a sophisticated air defense network of ground launchers and fighter aircraft both, and though they got ground into paste in short order, surface to air fire still bit out a fair chunk of damage.
Compare to Iran now. Whose air defense has already been completely evaporated; rather, it barely existed in the first place, as the Twelve Day War proved when the jews were just taking joyrides into Iran to bomb shit like they were attacking uncontacted tribes in the Amazon.
You could say that a tactic could be baiting in a ground invasion. Again though, that does not work if you do not have any way to interdict air support. It works in fuckups like the Battle of Mogadishu when you don't have a real expeditionary landing force and are outnumbered a hundred to one. It also doesn't work if your enemy just chooses not to fight you on your terms and doesn't come to you for your big bad kantai kessen in the middle of the irrelevant buttfuck mountains, which if anybody in the US administration has any brains whatsoever, they know not to make such a basic mistake.
ASTROJEWS
