Yaniv Tal

Week 8 of our curator program, and contributions keep getting stronger and stronger. Points are being allocated for the first time, and curators are showing what's possible with structured data. Plus, one of our amazing curators covered how AI is helping historians read carbonized scrolls that sat untouched for 275 years. Watch the full call here 👇

A little note about war planning.⬇️ Over the years I've come to the conclusion that the scenario that often ends up playing out in war - and the one that actually has to be mitigated if planning is to be successful - is one that's beyond the worst-case scenario envisioned prior to the operation. This is because the people thinking up those worst-case scenarios are staff officers who suffer from institutional pressure to stick within conventional wisdom and keep the boss happy by telling him that, yes, this operation is actually possible and not a terrible idea. Meanwhile the enemy can be expected to ruthlessly take advantage of every possible opening because he is smart, tough, and motivated - and the first and foremost gap that the enemy slides through is the one between conventional expectations and battlefield realities. Let's apply this to Iran. The worst-case scenario envisioned by the yes-men in the Pentagon was probably that the campaign might take several weeks because the US and Israel could be expected to quickly breach the Iranian anti-access/area-denial (A2AD) "system of systems" and effective conventional bombing would break Iran's will to resist in a manner similar to Serbia in 1999. This was the "long" war plan which was floated prewar and reflected in the statements of US and Israeli officials in the first hours of the war - that this operation would take, at most, a few weeks. The Iranian population was also assumed to despise the regime, and would quickly rise up against it if given the opportunity. Furthermore the Iranian leadership was apparently assumed to be basically corrupt and mercenary (see claims that the Ayatollah controlled a vast personal fortune), and would not risk their valuable oil industry by either closing the Strait of Hormuz or inviting counterattack from striking Gulf Arab oil sites. This scenario was probably put up as a "Most Dangerous Course of Action" on the briefing slides - the "Most Likely" course of action was probably regime collapse after Khamenei was killed. This all briefs very well to someone like Hegseth, who wants to be told how we can do something rather than all the reasons why we shouldn't. The actual battlefield scenario we're facing right now - on D+12 and with absolutely no end in sight - is far worse than what was, in retrospect, an absurdly optimistic prewar assessment. Iran's A2AD network is still very intact, the Iranian population rallied around the flag, and Khamenei turned out to have been a respected, moderate octogenarian who was restraining the regime hardliners who were happy to set the Middle East on fire just to get at the US and Israel - not the other way around. Thus we see talk of ground troops - and a militarily implausible, open-ended invasion of Iran. We leapt into the abyss thinking it was a kiddie pool. This is something of an aside, but it's also occurred to me that this absurd analytical failure - an almost total misread of the political and military situation in Iran on the part of the US military and intelligence services - can best be explained by something I've also noticed and commented upon with respect to Ukraine. We're outsourcing not just our intelligence data but also our analysis to third parties. As shown in the Texeira Leaks, SACEUR was getting briefed raw, unquestioned Ukrainian cope propaganda as the TS level because we'd apparently outsourced our intelligence collection and assessments to the GUR and brOSINT and had no institutional capability to even sanity check the story that we were being told, or political will to suggest that this was even necessary. Going into Iran CENTCOM was likely sold a bill of goods by Mossad in the exact same way, with the exact same constraints of analytical competence and politics preventing critical assessment of whatever rosy picture the Israelis were painting of a short, victorious war.