Iran War: Ends and Means

The U.S.-Israeli war against Iran is only a few days old. U.S. and Israeli forces have replayed the “shock and awe” of the previous 12-day war that destroyed much of Iran’s nuclear weapons’ facilities. In that brief conflict, President Trump made it clear that the purpose of the air and missile strikes was limited to destroying or at least disrupting Iran’s ability to acquire a nuclear weapon. In that conflict, the ends and means were matched. The current war, however, appears to have the larger purpose of regime change—an end that is more difficult to accomplish, especially if our means are limited to air and missile attacks. We have killed Iran’s Supreme Leader and up to 40 of the regime’s key political and military leaders in our initial strikes, but the regime lives on and is striking out against U.S. military facilities, Israel, and even some Arab governments in the region that play host to American bases. President Trump, while encouraging Iranians to overthrow the current regime, has also indicated that regime change is not necessary to bring the war to an end.

In their magnificent book War: Ends and Means, Angelo Codevilla and Paul Seabury began by noting that “history’s clearest teaching about war is its utter unpredictability.” War’s unpredictability, they continued, stems from “complex, interactive factors.” Carl von Clausewitz, the great Prussian theorist of war who Codevilla and Seabury often referenced and quoted in the book, called this “friction,” and war’s winners, according to Codevilla and Seabury, are those “who combine flexible minds with inflexible will—and who have luck on their side.” The great Florentine political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli, who the authors also frequently referenced and quoted, believed that great leaders who possessed virtu could control or at least deal with fortuna—the chance and unpredictability of wars and crises. There is no rule for success in war, Codevilla and Seabury wrote, “only the pressing need to size up a constantly changing situation, while making the most imaginative use of the forces at one’s command.”

Since the dawn of the air age, military theorists have argued that air power in the form of strategic bombing can defeat an enemy without the need for ground combat. In 1921, the Italian airman Giulio Douhet in Command of the Air wrote that air power alone is “capable of crushing the material and moral resistance of the enemy.” Air power can accomplish this mission, he explained, “solely with its own means, to the complete exclusion of both army and navy.” “Future war,” he predicted, “will be total in character and scope” and aerial offensives will target industrial and commercial establishments, governments, and population centers. By “inflicting the greatest damage in the shortest possible time,” Douhet continued, air power will bring about the “complete breakdown of the [enemy’s] social structure.”