July Updates: Ukraine Winning, Iran Losing

Well, when I said I would be up and running by the end of July, I sort of forgot that it’s already 22 July. Whoops! But my right hand is improving, so I can sort of type, and I’ll try to keep everyone abreast of things.

But I’ve had to work on this in bits and pieces, and as a result it not only jumps around a good bit, but it sort of swoops from point to point, and undoubtedly leaves out a lot of explanations.

The Ukrainian War first. If you’ve been following my posts on this conflict, I’ve been observing for some time that Kiev was clearly winning the strategic drone campaign, degrading Russia’s refinery capacities and its abilities to support its army’s vital support systems.

In the last month, I’m seeing more and more people beginning to grasp that. Particularly given the major strikes on Russian shipping in the Sea of Azov, the Kerch straight, and the eastern waters of the Black Sea. At this point Kiev has hit close to a hundred Russian ships, mostly Moscow’s “Shadow Fleet,” that was enabling them to avoid sanctions on the sale of their oil.

Given my condition at the moment, hard to resist saying I told you so. But I’ll only observe that the conventional wisdom crowd is slowly adjusting to the twin realities of the importance of properly identified strategic strikes as a way to win wars, as well as the impact of drones and precision missile strikes.

At least in the Ukrainian situation. The best I can figure out is that when it comes to the Iranian commentariat, we seem to be back in the 1950s as far as ideas about warfare go, in a state of immaculate ignorance about Kiev’s successes, and still chewing on the by now well chewed bone of Leftist notions about Vietnam.

The paradox first: Iran is not a state, it’s a region ruled by a collection of criminal groups, the same as has been the case—and to a degree still is—in Gaza (Hamas), Lebanon (Hezbollah), and Yemen (Houthi). Again, I’ve been pointing this out since the Hamas attack on Israel in October of 2023, explaining that criminal gangs simply can’t win in a conflict with an actual state.

States have both a military and a defense industry to supp0rt it, and typically, their military power is tripartite (naval-air-ground) relies on an actual officer class who worry about national security, what weaponry is required, and the training of personnel. I bring this up because in the last century a great many intellectuals assumed that they knew better—and made things considerably worse for their country with their bumper sticker thinking. Skeptical? The military disasters of Leon Trotsky are an excellent example of my point.

Gangs don’t create anything: they simply steal it, and the gang members are basically a mob of criminals. The atrocities committed by Hamas in October 2023 are sadly typical—and the basic reason their surprise attack failed.

Hiding behind the claim of a religious mantle is totally bogus. The world is full of cults that have claimed/are still claiming a direct connection with some version of God, using that as the justification for criminality. The Indian sect known as the Thugee is an excellent example. Although they’re no longer with us, although they did inadvertently contribute a new word to our language: thugs.

And the term is definitely appropriate.

Now for Tehran the complication is that although the various factions all seem to share a common religious adherence to the minority Shia version of radical Islam preached and dictated by their late leader, his death has created a situation that appears to be roughly analogous to the situation in Moscow after Stalin’s death in 1954, which resulted in decades of inter and intra cadre fighting, and ended in the collapse of the Soviet state.

Interestingly, the usual gang of useful idiots in the West kept right on insisting the USSR was durable and powerful right up until the end—so keep that comparison in mind, because I’m seeing the same mindset with Tehran.

In making this comparison, I’m well aware that it took nearly half a century, but first, the leaders of the USSR presided over an actual state, and second, no foreign power was systematically degrading their military and decapitating their leaders.

The idea that the Shit and Communism share a commonality may be startling, so I’ll explain.

Although Marx had a good many ideas about economics, he seems to have thought of himself as primarily a philosopher, and in that regard the Handbook of Marxism-Leninism prepared under Stalin’s direction is quite accurate, with its opening emphasis on Marx’s philosophy of Dialectical Materialism. And Marx’s philosophical views derived heavily from Hegel’s.

Now although Marx believed that his philosophy explained how the world worked, at bottom he was no different from a good many other philosophers who were equally set in their views. Not just Hegel, but even earlier thinkers. The problem is that all such systems, no matter how well articulated and persuasive, are at bottom non-sense propositions. That is, they depend on propositions and notions that by definition can’t be established as explanations of observable phenomena.

Marx seems to have had some awareness of that, as he repeatedly insisted he wasn’t a Marxist. But Lenin and Stalin turned the philosophy into a religion, that is, a system of non-sense propositions to which total adherence was demanded, and deviance was punished. At bottom there isn’t much difference between Stalin’s determination to create a state based on unworkable economic fantasies and the Ayatollah Khamenei’s. Sure, there were differences, but they were trivial.

But here’s the most important similarity: when each absolutist ruler was no more, the result was a struggle for power, the difference being that in Moscow the struggle went on for decades of relative peace, while in Tehran the didodachi are struggling while the country is faced with powerful and implacable enemies. The time line is in this sense misleading.

The catastrophic ineptitude of the ex-Soviet state wasn’t revealed until February of 2022, while in Tehran’s case the catastrophe has been telescoped. But we can see the same behavior: wild threats which the state can’t deliver on, coupled with disastrous military decisions that in both cases have galvanized their neighbors. The last thing Moscow needed is for its western neighbors to get serious about defending themselves. The last thing Tehran needs is the emergence of an anti-Iranian Arab coalition. But that’s exactly what has happened in both cases. And the Arab states are a good deal more serious about the situation than the formerly great powers of Europe.

So here we are, with Tehran squandering its dwindling military capabilities by firing drones and missiles at Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and who knows where else, while en revanche the Coalition, having buried their nuclear capabilities under hundreds of tons of rubble and destroyed most of their conventional weaponry, has for the last two weeks been systematically eliminating their entire military support system and the infrastructure it requires.

Moreover, Tehran’s various factions seem oblivious to the fact that it’s not the 1970s as far as the world’s petroleum supplies go. The United States is now the leading exporter of oil and gas, and, coupled with the ramping up of Venezuelan production, can thumb its nose at the traditional OPEC cartel.

At the same time, the gulf oil producers have the financial resources to develop alternative delivery systems—which they’re doing. In case you missed this development, currently, the Saudis, the UAE, and the Iraqis aim to expand and in some cases create, pipelines that will enable them to export oil without having to rely on the Persian gulf.

So Tehran’s belief that it can control the world’s oil supply is wrong on half a dozen different levels.

At the same time, Tehran is thus far unable to grasp the difference between making threats that it can’t deliver on and understanding that powerful states don’t make threats: they may deliver ultimatums, or they may just act

The latest round is an excellent example, with Tehran having to rely on the Houthi to blockade Saudi Arabia’s oil shipments, coupled with the threat that if “we can’t sell our oil, no one else will be able to either.”

But Washington’s counter isn’t a threat: it’s a statement of what the response will be: you hit a tanker, we’ll destroy a power supply and/or a vital part of your infrastructure.

What’s important here is what’s largely being missed. In a word: escalation.

When I remarked that a lot of the Iran commentariat’s view of strategy is hopelessly out of date, what I meant was that on the one hand they are under the impression that escalation involves adding more and more resources in a costly and futile attempt to overpower the enemy, and on the other that this process ultimately leads to ground warfare, and what in their view is a quagmire.

That view mostly rests on an erroneous view of the Indo-Chinese War, about which a few pertinent facts. First, and most important: the Vietnamese leadership ditched their Soviet economic model and converted the country to a market based economy. That process began about fourteen years after their supposed victory.

Second, in 1997 Hanoi admitted that the war had cost them over five million dead. Third, their supposed 1968 victory in the Tet Offensive was actually a significant military defeat. Basing strategic claims on smoke and mirrors is not a very solid foundation. Nor is believing your fantasies are real.

Now, moving on to escalation, back in the 1960s the Hudson Institute posited an entirely different, and a much more realistic concept of escalation, arguing there were actually sixteen separate steps. At least. So what we’re seeing with Iran, is a measured application of this process. It’s measured, because it consists of a steady and precise use of force.

And in the intervening half a century plus, the dramatic changes in warfare have resulted in a much different pattern of escalation. It doesn’t involve an increase in resources; rather it involves escalating the precision strikes to new sets of targets. So the Coalition is moving from the destruction of Tehran’s actual weapons of war (hardly any of those remain) to the systems that support the remaining weapons. Pretty much the same systematic strikes that Ukraine has been using against Russia.

The difference is that Kiev had to rely on drones, owing to their near complete absence of air and naval power. But Israel, the United States, the UAE, and the Saudis have the luxury of overwhelming superiority in both. That enables them to engage in an extremely sophisticated targeting system that relies on an analysis of where the developing/remaining points of vulnerability are.

Moreover the whole process is taking place in near absolute secrecy. So it’s very hard to figure out not just what targets are actually being hit, but which air force is hitting them. We’re in the position of a fisherman trying to figure out how many fish are actually in the water based on an occasional fin near the surface.

Take the missile attack on the nuclear facility Iran is trying to build. We know it was struck—and judging by Tehran’s reaction, successfully. What we don’t know is who did it. My offhand guess would be the UAE, as I’m pretty sure they’ve been using their surprisingly large and well equipped air force to hit Iranian targets for some time

The rumor is that the United States recently used one of its stealth bombers in one of its recent strikes, and some of its B52 bombers in others. Given just how many missiles one of those can launch, that’s really an example of force substitution, not escalation. That is, one B1, B2, or B52 can target as many sites as several squadrons of fighter bombers.

And as of 23 July, someone hit an extremely high value Iranian target, just based on the visual evidence of the repeated secondary explosions.

Washington’s recent statement that for each tanker Iranian proxies hit, a bridge and or power plant would be destroyed is an excellent example of my point. It’s not an escalation in the resources used, it’s an escalation in what’s targeted.

My guess is that the only example of a traditional escalation would come if the Saudis decided to used their air force to deal with the Houthi. But again: it’s not like they haven’t intervened in Yemen before. In fact, as I recall, they relied on an effective air campaign from 2015 to 2022.

One last point. One of the more bizarre assumptions I noticed when Russia invaded Ukraine was the almost unconscious assumption that Ukraine was a country about the size and military-industrial capacity of Bolivia. And it really seemed to me that despite the reality revealed in the first six months or so of the war, outside observers seemed unable to shake that assumption.

How this applies to Tehran is simple: not only is it a very large country (over twice the size of Texas), so there are a lot of places to park weaponry, but since the government spent decades acquiring weapons, it accumulated enormous stockpiles. True, by and large they were the wrong kinds of weapons, but they still have a high nuisance value.

But the number of missiles and drones being launched is a fraction of what they managed a year earlier, is definitely down to being a nuisance. By contrast, Iran offers lots of targets whose destruction will gradually bring reality into play. Or rather it will bring out the fatal weakness of the individual gang members, as they have to weigh their individual survival versus their beliefs.

What happens is not death, it’s a combination of passive aggressiveness and melting which creates an internal collapse as epitomized by the Brazilian proverb:

It’s every man for himself and God against us all.