What Epic Fury Stimulated: Part Two
Since late last year, I’ve been enjoying David Stahel’s outstanding series of books on the German operations against Soviet Russia in 1941. I hope to review his body of work in the future.
Back in May I quoted Stahel and it bears repeating: “It is important to remember that battlefield victories are not ends in themselves. Their worth is calculated from the strategic possibilities, military or political, that these stimulate.”
Although the quote is universally applicable, Stahel was writing about Barbarossa, one of the most extraordinary military campaigns ever. The Germans captured millions Soviet troops, destroyed multiple armies while advancing hundreds of miles into the Soviet Union.
They were winning everywhere. Yet, Stahel argues that somewhere in the middle of all that success Germany was already losing the war strategically. The victories stimulated things Germany could not control. Soviet mobilization. Longer supply lines. Constant German losses. Breakdowns in tanks and logistical trucks. A larger war on terrain and at distances increasingly favorable to the Soviet Union.
I am not saying the US has strategically lost the Iran war. That seems unlikely. But we don’t have a strategic victory yet either. “Total and complete victory. 100%.” is how Trump characterized our position back on April 7. That’s has not, in fact, materialized. It is a fine example of the type of hubris the German high command held in 1941.
Israel and the US did kick Iran’s ass. Israel conducted the spectacular decapitation of the Iranian regime but the US has ended up owning the war somehow.
This was all supposed to be about a breakdown in talks with Iran over nuclear weapons. But that is too easily forgotten given how things have played out since. Trump never really had a plan beyond Epic Fury itself. The IRGC filled the subsequent vacuum and choked the Strait of Hormuz. So here we are.
Anyway, Stahel’s quote keeps coming back to me. And it is time to look again at what exactly this operation has actually stimulated.
First, the impressive stuff. Epic Fury was an extraordinary American military achievement. That gets lost in the current mess.
Precision-guided warfare has been developing for more than half a century. Laser-guided bombs appeared during the Vietnam War and demonstrated that individual targets which had resisted repeated conventional bombing could finally be destroyed with remarkable accuracy. Desert Storm brought precision warfare into everyone's living room. Those strange green videos of bombs seemingly flying through windows were part of what made the 1991 war look futuristic at the time.
The technology became increasingly sophisticated during the Iraq War and the long campaigns that followed. GPS guidance, sensors, surveillance all improved. Drones arrived. Satellites became more detailed allowing for real-time response. Different platforms could increasingly communicate and share targeting information. That produced the precision.
Epic Fury was the next step, or perhaps a leap. By early April the US said it had conducted more than 10,000 sorties and struck more than 13,000 targets in Iran. More than 2,000 were command and control targets. More than 1,500 were air defense targets. Hundreds more involved ballistic missiles, drones, and naval forces.
That is an astonishing amount of remarkably precise destruction. Epic Fury probably is the most precise large-scale sustained bombing campaign in military history. Almost no collateral damage. You hit the target dead center or you time the strike to coordinate with multiple strikes simultaneously. What’s more, the bombs and missiles explode clean. There isn’t much shrapnel outside the blast range.
Compare this with World War Two. Precision bombing was a pipedream. A factory might be the target but hundreds of unguided bombs were required to have a reasonable chance of hitting it. Weather, navigation errors, smoke, flak, fighter attacks and the simple, near complete inaccuracy of bombs dropped from high altitude meant that the surrounding city frequently became part of the target whether planners intended it or not.
Sometimes the city was actually the target. The US firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945 killed roughly 100,000 people in a single night. That was more than the total number killed at Nagasaki later that same year. Conventional bombing killed scores of civilians during that war. It was unavoidable if you were going to hit a factory situated near a city.
Epic Fury operated according to an almost opposite technical principle. It hit exactly buildings inside of cities and limited the damage to less than a city block. Whatever we aimed at whether military or political or nuclear research, we hit that and only that 99% of the time. BOOM! became boom...far more effective.
There were a few horrible exceptions. Right at the beginning a mistaken strike on the girls' school at Minab killed scores of children. Hundreds of other civilians were killed, a few here and there. I’m not trying to be causal. Those tragedies belong in the record. But so does the wider achievement. 13,000 targets hit, comparatively few civilian deaths. All Iran’s cities are still standing. Precision is my point. War is hell.
Never has so much military damage been inflicted with so little accompanying destruction of civilian space. We have witnessed something without precedent in history. And yet, with all that success, here we are six months later without a strategic result other than the Strait of Hormuz is basically shut down, the Red Sea under threat, and the price of oil rising.
So, the value of battlefield victories “is calculated from the strategic possibilities, military or political, that these stimulate.” When I wrote Part One in May, Iran had already demonstrated that its battered military could make the Strait dangerous enough to disrupt global shipping. That has now become the defining strategic fact of the war.
Before the war roughly well over 100 ships moved through The Strait of Hormuz every day. About 20% of the world’s oil supply, among other things. Now less than a dozen pass on a given day and oil tankers are being struck by Iranian missiles whenever the IRGC chooses. Iran says the Strait is closed. Trump says it is open and has even suggested recently that the US now “controls” it and “we might keep it.” Yeah right, Mr. 100%.
You can’t make shit like this up.
Still, the IRGC has regional constraints. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, Turkey and Pakistan all have interests different from Tehran's. Gulf states are already developing new security relationships and alternative shipping arrangements. Saudi Arabia is increasingly moving oil outside Hormuz. Every workaround reduces the value of Iran's leverage a little. If the Strait become irrelevant, the IRGC loses.
Which brings us to all the unimpressive stuff. The war started with an oil shock. Oil remains expensive, with Brent pushing above $93 as I write this. And this isn’t even the biggest problem.
Oil must be refined to be used. Much Middle Eastern refining capacity now sits idle. European diesel prices are reportedly more than 70% above prewar levels and US gasoline about 60% higher than in February.
The longer all this continues the more this becomes more than just about oil itself. Let’s take jet fuel. Europe was dependent on the Middle East for much of its imported jet fuel when this started. Airlines warned months ago that shortages could eventually force schedule reductions. The feared collapse was avoided because traders did what markets usually do. They improvised.
Jet fuel began traveling enormous distances from places such as the US to destinations that previously relied on nearby Middle Eastern refiners. The global aviation system has a limit as to how long this can go on. I don’t know what it is, but it isn’t indefinite and prices will rise until a crisis actually arrives. At that point there will be fewer jets going anywhere.
Diesel affects trucking and agriculture. Jet fuel affects aviation and air freight. Gasoline affects almost everyone. Energy works its way into nearly everything else eventually. Food costs will rise to accommodate increased transportation stress.
Meanwhile, Iranian inflation reached 66% in July. Food prices were up 128%. Iran’s economy continues to deteriorate. Businesses connected to Gulf trade have been decimated. Ordinary Iranians are cutting meat and other food from household budgets. The IRGC is worried about mass unrest like the country experienced in January. It is strengthening the Basij and other internal security organizations for any necessary crackdown.
So far the internal reaction of Iran’s population has been to rally around Iran as a “nation” that should not be attacked. That is not necessarily directed toward the Guard but it works in their favor for now. That huge spike in the price of food and the loss of jobs? Not so much.
The IRGC may have achieved their immediate objectives by surviving. Epic Fury made them more powerful inside Iran. They demonstrated effective coercive control over the Strait. They forced the US to deal with a battered Iranian system on terms Washington clearly did not anticipate. How could we have anticipated it? Trump has no plan.
But the IRGC does not have a blank check. The longer Hormuz remains dysfunctional, the more pressure spreads through the global economy. The more Saudi Arabia and Oman and the rest of region have reason to intervene. It is not in Iran’s interest to be isolated from its Gulf neighbors.
Trump has his own version of this problem. He has claimed the United States “controls” Hormuz. He even suggested we are going to keep it. Guess what? The Strait is still not anywhere near normal functioning capacity. There are no prospects for improvement.
Which brings me back to Barbarossa. Unprecedented military success without the anticipated strategic result. We are a helluva long way from “total and complete victory” as Trump proclaimed almost six months ago.
In all that time, Hormuz closed. Oil rose. Refineries went offline. Jet fuel became in short supply in certain parts of the world. Saudi Arabia and China started working around the Strait. The Houthis threatened the Red Sea alternative. Iran's economy deteriorated. The IRGC strengthened internally. The US began blockading the country it had supposedly defeated. Trump threatening to bomb Oman (our ally) for failing to deal satisfactorily with the IRGC.
None of that diminishes what the American military accomplished. But it does qualify what the accomplishment stimulated.
We did damage their ability to refine uranium. That’s probably our greatest strategic achievement to date. Otherwise, it’s one gigantic mess. And everyone seems to have forgotten about the nuclear talks that supposedly started this war.
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