The high-priest of realpolitik, Henry Kissinger, nuanced asymmetric forces by insisting that, “The guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.” The unsentimental and shrewd Kissinger recognised the limits of US power and therefore believed in a cold admixture of pressure tactics and negotiations where credibility of “Peace with Honour” mattered more than outright militaristic victory.
The old fox sensed early that the asymmetric war with the North Vietnamese was conventionally unwinnable and so negotiated an exit (Paris Peace Accords) that still retained a modicum of credibility and “muscularity.” The Soviets didn’t read Kissinger in Afghanistan and paid dearly. Presumably having read Kissinger, even the Americans forgot the invaluable lessons of asymmetric conflict i.e., that networks beat hierarchies hands down. Even the technologically most advanced and powerful American military war-machine had to abandon Afghanistan after 20 years of the longest and the most expensive war.
Simply put, a decentralised insurgency (even with a ragtag militia of mujahedins) with a legitimacy gap with the local populace is simply insurmountable for an invading foreign power. Donald Trump is no student of history nor a believer in the strategic theory of balance-of-power. Trump believes that wars are indeed winnable with overwhelming force and that US military power is decisive and underutilized towards that purpose. Trump’s childlike glee in describing American weaponry includes language like “the most powerful weapons on the earth;” “nobody would dare challenge us;” “so advanced, it’s unbelievable;” “we have weapons nobody even knows about”; “so powerful on the seas nobody can challenge us;” “the most powerful weapons ever built” etc., is puerile or innocent at best.
Such hyperbole notwithstanding, both the military superpowers, the US and Russia, are embarrassingly stuck in seemingly endless quagmires in Iran and Ukraine respectively. They were supposed to end much earlier, with their imagined capitulations. In both Iran and Ukraine, the superpowers underestimated the asymmetric adaptation and the efficacy of the same. Overconfidence owing to superiority in conventional weaponry, assumed dominance with shock-and-awe tactics, misreading of local cohesion, and the metastasizing into a literal “national defense war” were to be the ultimate undoing of Washington DC and Moscow.
As in Vietnam and Afghanistan earlier, Ukraine has regressed into a no-win war of attrition, with Iran poised to go exactly the same way should the US put boots on the ground. The US war on Iran has seen the cutting-edge of American weaponry – B-2 stealth bombers, F-35 Lightning and F-22 Raptor fighter planes, Precision missiles (Tomahawk, ATACMS, PrSM, GBU bunker-busters), drones (MQ-9 Reaper, MQ-1 Predator etc.,), Naval strike platforms (USS Gerald R. Ford, USS Abraham Lincoln etc.,), Defense Systems (Patriot batteries, THAAD etc.,) and satellite tracking ~ that ought to expose the Iranians.
Yet, the Air Force and Navy-less Iranian defense systems remain impregnable and in “control” of the vital Strait of Hormuz. With effectively decrepit military hardware that has aging (or bombed out) weaponry platforms, when compared to the combined might of the US and Israel, Iran still holds out. It does so because Iran has invested significantly in an unconventional, lopsided, and asymmetric manner, in one of the largest missile and drone manufacturing infrastructures coupled with a guerrilla mentality (warned of by Kissinger decades earlier) that relies zealously on proxies, militias, sheer willpower and crude “harassment” capabilities that can penetrate American defences.
Iran avoids trying to “outfight” the stronger and more organised American enemy head-on, and instead uses quick dispersion, rapid mobility, crude surprise, endurance, and psychological pressure that makes simplistic portents of “victory” seem too costly, too slow, and therefore unacceptable for the decidedly stronger American military. The Iranians are almost teasing America with the consequences of a ground invasion, as they intend to turn it into a long, costly asymmetric war reminiscent of a Vietnam or a Afghanistan.
Iran’s successful counter to the mighty US aircraft carriers is its famed “mosquito fleet” of small, agile and very fast attack speed boats that bypass traditional naval defenses. From “swarming” to hit-and-run tactics, Iran’s crude capability on the seas is either overwhelming the US radars or evading them with their low-cost but high-nuisance capabilities. Hiding along the coastline, they are hard to detect or neutralize. Similarly, the Iranians have mastered a high-precision campaign using mobile launchers and “missile cities” that use saturation tactics to penetrate defenses. However, the best “cost imbalance” counter of the Iranians is their use of locally-developed (low-tech and ironically slow) drones towards ensuring draining/saturation tactics. Their low-altitude profiles, third-world electronic decoys and “precise mass” usage turns the tables on the economics of warfare.
An Iranian drone costing about $30,000 destroyed a billion-dollar AN/TPY-2 radar system, ensuring an unsustainable 30,000-to-1 return on investment. Even Iran’s locally developed (Almas, Toophan etc.,) hand-fired or tripod-mounted anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs) for ground defense deliver a tactical cost-asymmetry. Because these contraptions are highly mobile and difficult to detect until they fire, they have emerged as Tehran’s “last line of defense” even after its conventional air defense infrastructure got destroyed. The “smart-mining” of the Strait of Hormuz by the Iranians has created an irretrievable and expensive concern for the Americans, who seek to secure the contested strait.
Tehran is basically in a well dug-out denialistic mode as opposed to the expansionist/ invasion-minded instinct of the Americans. History is consistently instructive and loaded against Trump’s postured assumption of a “victory”. Additionally, Iran has a defensive mosaic layering with its conventional military (albeit with a degraded infrastructure and wherewithal), the Artesh, positioned as the first line of defense that is placed to absorb the initial enemy strikes and then allow the intermeshed but hardwired Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Basij militia to suck the American Army into a decentralised insurgency and attrition campaign that could bleed the invader’s spirits.
Invariably, the major global conflicts (US-Iran, Russia-Ukraine, US-Afghanistan, USSR-Afghanistan, China-Vietnam, US-Vietnam) in the last few decades entailing superpowers with nuclear weapons and overwhelming conventional-technical superiority have all come a cropper in the face of sheer grit, guerrilla tactics, and shoot-and-scoot weaponry, low-tech militaristic contraption, and above all, asymmetric tactics. This beseeches modern militaries to rethink and recalibrate their emphasis on nuclear or extreme sophisticated weaponry platforms that have frankly struggled to deliver against starkly inferior platforms, forces, and unconventional tactics.
(The writer is Lt Gen PVSM, AVSM (Retd), and former Lt Governor of Andaman & Nicobar Islands and Puducherry)