President Trump has held fast to one belief over the course of the nearly five-month war with Iran: If the U.S. military hit Iran hard enough, eventually the country’s leaders would bend to his demands.
“We’re going to knock out all their power plants,” Mr. Trump told Fox News this week. “We’re going to knock out all their bridges unless they get to the table and negotiate.”
“Do you believe the Iranians are serious about making a deal?” he was asked.
“I think they have no choice,” Mr. Trump replied.
Only a few years earlier, the long, frustrating wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had largely discredited this vision of military power.
In their early months, both wars were fueled by a novel military strategy that rose to prominence after the 1991 Persian Gulf war. It posited that by simultaneously attacking with precision weapons on multiple fronts, the U.S. military could paralyze its enemy and achieve a swift, low-casualty victory.
As the Iraq and Afghanistan wars dragged on, the military’s faith in this new approach began to wane. By 2007, a new theory of warfare — summed up in the Army’s counterinsurgency doctrine — took hold.
The strategy preached that too much firepower, poorly applied, would only produce more enemies.
“Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is,” the new doctrine counseled.
“Sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction,” it paradoxically advised.
Today, that same decades-long debate over the best use of America’s massive firepower advantage is playing out at the Pentagon, inside the White House and in the skies over Iran.
The initial 38-day military campaign that started on Feb. 28 hit Iran hard. It opened with a stunning series of Israeli strikes that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the nation’s supreme leader for almost 37 years, and his top military commanders in a Tehran compound.
In the weeks that followed, the Pentagon says it hit around 13,000 targets, eviscerated the country’s Navy and Air Force, vastly degraded Iran’s missile and drone arsenals, and killed some 40 high-level military and intelligence leaders.
The attacks weakened the Iranian military, but they did not eliminate Iran’s ability to threaten its neighbors with missile or drone attacks. And they did not end Tehran’s ability to effectively close the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic international waterway.
A cease-fire, which began on April 8, was supposed to produce a deal that would end the war, reopen the strait and ensure that Iran never acquired a nuclear weapon.
Instead it collapsed this month, reigniting hostilities.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said that the U.S. military used the break in attacks to identify Iranian vulnerabilities. “Our ability to see, our ability to get into networks has only been vastly improved over time,” he told reporters last month after a briefing on the war at U.S. Central Command.
The campaign, when it restarted, would be more efficient and lethal than the earlier efforts, he promised.
But, so far, that does not seem to be true. Since the cease-fire first took effect, Iran has been able to restore or reconstitute much of its ability to project power, two senior U.S. officials said. That includes Iran’s ballistic missiles and missile launch sites, armed droned launch sites and other underground facilities.
Many of the more than 300 sites that American warplanes have hit this month are targets the military struck during the initial assault that began in February, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.
The new round of strikes so far has been mostly limited to military targets, like command centers, missile sites and coastal surveillance facilities, that threaten commercial vessels in the strait.
U.S. forces also appeared to have hit sites that have military and civilian purposes, including a railway bridge in northeastern Iran more than 700 miles from the strait. The Iranians relied on the bridge to ferry bombs and other military supplies to units launching attacks on the strait, a defense official said.
Despite the strikes, Iran has continued to fire at commercial shipping.
Mr. Trump has suggested that there may not be many Iranian military targets left along the strait. “We’re finding it hard to find where they have anything,” he told Fox News.
And so, he vowed that the U.S. military would expand the campaign and start striking civilian targets, like bridges and electrical infrastructure, that the Iranian military needed to fight back.
A big question inside the Pentagon is whether such strikes constitute war crimes. Another concern is whether they will work: Will they cause Iran’s leaders to capitulate or simply harden their resistance as the death toll rises?
One theory holds that the Trump administration has struggled to achieve its goals because the U.S. and Israeli militaries used too much force in the opening days of the air war, decimating Iran’s leadership and leaving the Trump administration without a coherent negotiating partner.
“Decapitation campaigns work, but not always in the way you want,” said S. Clinton Hinote, a retired Air Force lieutenant general who served as a senior air strategist in the Middle East in the 2000s. They produce confusion and paralysis, but do not destroy the enemy’s ability to fight back.
Such is the case so far in Iran. “The enemy might have been brain-dead, but the body kept functioning as it had been trained to do for the last decade,” General Hinote said. Iranian troops fired back at U.S. bases in the Middle East, struck America’s Gulf Arab allies and effectively closed the strait.
Now the Trump administration is in a spot where it is sitting across the negotiating table from a discombobulated, embittered and dug-in enemy that is either not willing or not capable of making lasting concessions.
Mr. Trump alluded to this possibility in his interview this week.
“I knew the first group for a little while, and they were evil, and they’re no longer with us,” he said. “I knew the second group also a little bit better, and they were evil, and they’re no longer with us.”
He described the latest group of Iranian leaders as having “some very bad ones in there.”
“I think they’re the ones that are stopping a deal,” Mr. Trump said.
David Deptula, a retired lieutenant general who is widely credited as the creator of the firepower-focused strategy that took hold in the early 1990s, said that a more intense air campaign aimed at Iran’s power generation and electrical distribution network could cripple the Iranian military’s ability to resist.
Those targets, he said, could be attacked in a calibrated and “reversible” manner that would not violate the laws of war.
“The air power lesson Trump must understand is that military action must be tied to clearly defined political objectives and sustained until the desired effects are achieved,” General Deptula said. “Sporadic retaliation followed by pauses, shifting demands or premature declarations of victory gives Iran opportunities to absorb the blows, adapt and wait Washington out.”
General Hinote was skeptical that more American bombs would produce new Iranian concessions. The U.S. campaign has achieved most, if not all, of its military objectives. The same was true in 2001 when U.S. forces shattered the Taliban and in 2003 when they destroyed the Iraqi military and Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship.
But U.S. presidents have consistently failed to translate those military successes into anything resembling a lasting victory.
“That’s been a constant disappointment throughout my career,” General Hinote said.
