One and Done Fails (Once Again) With Airpower

Will Trump Return To Bombing Iran?

Hello All,

Well, if history does not repeat itself exactly—it usually rhymes. And so it has been with Trump’s rather extraordinary decision to launch one night of US bombing of Iran, declare victory, and then stop the air campaign. At the time there was a debate over the extent of damage that had been done to Iran’s program. The President, with his usual tendency towards understatement, said at the time that Iran’s nuclear capabilities had been “obliterated” and used the entire force of the US government to get across that narrative.

However the likelihood of that was always extremely low. As I wrote in my analysis right after the US strikes, broad claims of success were to be treated with enormous skepticism. Normally, air power needs time, effort and planning to be successful—and it was not clear that the US bombing of Iran had any of these. This was written on June 28.

The (US bombing of the Iranian) nuclear program is easily the most debated—and we wont know the answer for a while (regardless of lots of people pretending to know). The Israelis had obviously degraded Iranian nuclear facilities and science, but they did not destroy it. Its a question of how much they had degraded it.

The most important thing to take from this opening stage of the campaign is that for air power to work takes time. You need to be able to exert air power over a country for long enough to adjust your targeting sets, to stop recovery, etc. Its one of the things that early air power propagandists either did not understand or did not want to admit. Air power is transformative, but it bloody well needs time, thorough planning, and a extremely large logistics capacity to achieve its goals.

This was not rocket science btw—its how air power works.

Now we are starting to get more measured battle damage assessments (BDAs) and the results are exactly as expected.