Daistallia 2104
20-09-2007, 17:58
A war between the US (plus at least some allies) and Iran has been looming ever larger.
I've been saying for ages that it won't occur, simply because the US is unable to carry it out in a realistic manner.
However, events over the last 6-12 months are starting to make me doubt that. I am coming to believe that the Bush administration will take advantage of it's lame duck position to carry out what it views as an imprtant strategic attack on Iran's nuclear program.
What do you think will happen?
Some considerations:
And what did the exercise show about Iran? In the week after the war game I interviewed the partici- pants about the views they had expressed "in role" and about their personal recommendations for the next President's approach. From these conversations, and from the participants' other writings and statements about Iran, the following themes emerged.
About Iran's intentions there is no disagreement. Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, and unless its policy is changed by the incentives it is offered or the warnings it receives, it will succeed.
About America's military options there is almost as clear a view. In circumstances of all-out war the United States could mount an invasion of Iran if it had to. If sufficiently provoked—by evidence that Iran was involved in a terrorist incident, for example, or that it was fomenting violence in Iraq—the United States could probably be effective with a punitive bomb-and-missile attack on Revolutionary Guard units.
But for the purposes most likely to interest the next American President—that is, as a tool to slow or stop Iran's progress toward nuclear weaponry—the available military options are likely to fail in the long term. A full-scale "regime change" operation has both obvious and hidden risks. The obvious ones are that the United States lacks enough manpower and equipment to take on Iran while still tied down in Iraq, and that domestic and international objections would be enormous. The most important hidden problem, exposed in the war-game discussions, was that a full assault would require such drawn-out preparations that the Iranian government would know months in advance what was coming. Its leaders would have every incentive to strike pre-emptively in their own defense. Unlike Saddam Hussein's Iraq, a threatened Iran would have many ways to harm America and its interests. Apart from cross-border disruptions in Iraq, it might form an outright alliance with al-Qaeda to support major new attacks within the United States. It could work with other oil producers to punish America economically. It could, as Hammes warned, apply the logic of "asymmetric," or "fourth-generation," warfare, in which a superficially weak adversary avoids a direct challenge to U.S. military power and instead strikes the most vulnerable points in American civilian society, as al-Qaeda did on 9/11. If it thought that the U.S. goal was to install a wholly new regime rather than to change the current regime's behavior, it would have no incentive for restraint.
What about a pre-emptive strike of our own, like the Osirak raid? The problem is that Iran's nuclear program is now much more advanced than Iraq's was at the time of the raid. Already the U.S. government has no way of knowing exactly how many sites Iran has, or how many it would be able to destroy, or how much time it would buy in doing so. Worse, it would have no way of predicting the long-term strategic impact of such a strike. A strike might delay by three years Iran's attainment of its goal—but at the cost of further embittering the regime and its people. Iran's intentions when it did get the bomb would be all the more hostile.
Here the United States faces what the military refers to as a "branches and sequels" decision—that is, an assessment of best and second-best outcomes. It would prefer that Iran never obtain nuclear weapons. But if Iran does, America would like Iran to see itself more or less as India does—as a regional power whose nuclear status symbolizes its strength relative to regional rivals, but whose very attainment of this position makes it more committed to defending the status quo. The United States would prefer, of course, that Iran not reach a new level of power with a vendetta against America. One of our panelists thought that a strike would help the United States, simply by buying time. The rest disagreed. Iran would rebuild after a strike, and from that point on it would be much more reluctant to be talked or bargained out of pursuing its goals—and it would have far more reason, once armed, to use nuclear weapons to America's detriment.
Most of our panelists felt that the case against a U.S. strike was all the more powerful against an Israeli strike. With its much smaller air force and much more limited freedom to use airspace, Israel would probably do even less "helpful" damage to Iranian sites. The hostile reaction—against both Israel and the United States—would be potentially more lethal to both Israel and its strongest backer.
A realistic awareness of these constraints will put the next President in an awkward position. In the end, according to our panelists, he should understand that he cannot prudently order an attack on Iran. But his chances of negotiating his way out of the situation will be greater if the Iranians don't know that. He will have to brandish the threat of a possible attack while offering the incentive of economic and diplomatic favors should Iran abandon its plans. "If you say there is no acceptable military option, then you end any possibility that there will be a non-nuclear Iran," David Kay said after the war game. "If the Iranians believe they will not suffer any harm, they will go right ahead." Hammes agreed: "The threat is always an important part of the negotiating process. But you want to fool the enemy, not fool yourself. You can't delude yourself into thinking you can do something you can't." Is it therefore irresponsible to say in public, as our participants did and we do here, that the United States has no military solution to the Iran problem? Hammes said no. Iran could not be sure that an American President, seeing what he considered to be clear provocation, would not strike. "You can never assume that just because a government knows something is unviable, it won't go ahead and do it. The Iraqis knew it was not viable to invade Iran, but they still did it. History shows that countries make very serious mistakes."
So this is how the war game turned out: with a finding that the next American President must, through bluff and patience, change the actions of a government whose motives he does not understand well, and over which his influence is limited. "After all this effort, I am left with two simple sentences for policymakers," Sam Gardiner said of his exercise. "You have no military solution for the issues of Iran. And you have to make diplomacy work."
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200412/fallows/6
The next war would begin with an intense air and naval campaign. Let's say you're planning the conflict as part of the staff of the Joint Chiefs. Your list of targets isn't that long -- only a few dozen nuclear sites -- but you can't risk retaliation from Tehran. So you allow 21 days for the bombardment, to be safe; you'd aim to strike every command-and-control facility, radar site, missile site, storage site, airfield, ship and base in Iran. To prevent world oil prices from soaring, you'd have to try to protect every oil and gas rig, and the big ports and load points. You'd need to use B-2s and lots of missiles up front, plus many small amphibious task forces to take out particularly tough targets along the coast, with manned and unmanned air reconnaissance. And don't forget the Special Forces, to penetrate deep inside Iran, call in airstrikes and drag the evidence of Tehran's nuclear ambitions out into the open for a world that's understandably skeptical of U.S. assertions that yet another Gulf rogue is on the brink of getting the bomb.
But if it's clear how a war with Iran would start, it's far less clear how it would end. How might Iran strike back? Would it unleash Hezbollah cells across Europe and the Middle East, or perhaps even inside the United States? Would Tehran goad Iraq's Shiites to rise up against their U.S. occupiers? And what would we do with Iran after the bombs stopped falling? We certainly could not occupy the nation with the limited ground forces we have left. So what would it be: Iran as a chastened, more tractable government? As a chaotic failed state? Or as a hardened and embittered foe?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/14/AR2007091401973.html
Target Iran - Air Strike Uncertainties
One major uncertainty concerning the probability of disarming preventive strike against Iran's nuclear infrastructure is the question of American and Israeli assessments of their confidence in their assessments of the completeness of their understanding of Iran's nuclear infrastructure. It will be recalled that when the US contemplated striking China's nuclear infrastructure in mid-1964, prior to China's first nuclear test, their were doubts about the completeness of US intelligence. In fact, the US was surprised when China detonated a uranium bomb, since the US had overestimated the progress of China's plutonium program, and seriously underestimated the progress of China's uranium enrichment program.
Iran's partners -- North Korea and Pakistan -- present contrasting studies in clandestine facilities. It appears that US intelligence has incomplete intelligence concerning some aspects of North Korea's plutonium program [mainly relating to whether there are undetected reprocessing facilities], and almost complete ignorance of the whereabouts of the DPRK's uranium program. The missing facilities are presumably at hidden underground locations. It is generally believed that Pakistan's major nuclear material production facilities are above ground and reasonably well characterized.
Iran appears to have a complete copy of Pakistan's fissile material production complex -- uranium conversion, uranium enrichment, heavy water production, and a heavy water plutonium production reactor. Elements of these facilities have been hardened against attack, notably the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, which has been buried under a thick layer of earth. All of these facilities are heavily defended by anti-aircraft missiles and guns.
One cannot exclude the possibility, however, that some or all of the visible nuclear weapons complex is simply a decoy, designed to draw attention. It is possible that Iran, like North Korea and unlike Pakistan, has buried nuclear weapons production capabilities that have escaped detection, and would continue in operation even if the visible facilities were destroyed. There are persistent rumors of such hidden facilities, but little in the way of circumstantial evidence to give credence to these rumors.
Amrom Katz, a shrewd arms control analyst at Rand Corporation many years ago, said, "We have never found anything that the Soviets have successfully hidden" [ Verification and SALT: The Challenge of Strategic Deception, W.C. Potter, Ed. (Westview, Boulder, CO, 1980), p 212). The issue for attack planners is how many undetected facilities have been successfully hidden in Iran.
Assessing the probability of the existence of a parallel clandestine program must take into account probable Iranian strategies for successful completion of their weapons acquisition effort. There has been essentially no detectable discussion of this question in the open literature, which is something of a puzzle in itself. That is to say, is everything unfolding as they had foreseen, or have things gone badly off track?
* Iran may have [naively] assumed that the massive underground facilities at Natanz would escape detection, as would the other above ground facilities, and that there would be no need to declare their various other facilities to the international community. Under this scenario, now that these facilities have been detected, the rather thin cover stories for their various facilities would be proven inadequate, and one might hope that sweet reason might convince Iran to reconsider its commitment to nuclear weapons.
* Iran may have understood very clearly from the outset that its above ground facilities would be detected not too long after construction began. Indeed, the uranium conversion facility at Esfahan is at a site that was selected for such a capacity at the outset of the Shah's nuclear program in the 1970s, a fact that must have rendered this piece of real estate a suspect site long before actual construction began. The construction activity at Natanz and Arak would be visible even in 10-meter resolution wide-area imagery, so there could have been no realistic hope that these facilities would escape notice by the obscurity of their location. Although it is possible that the Iranians completely miscalculated the detective powers of the US and Israel, this does not seem plausible. Thus one must assume that Iran foresaw the crisis that would arise when their plans became clear, and planned accordingly.
1. Iran may have assumed that the US and Israel would lack the political resolve to strike at even a highly visible program, and that some combination of diplomatic pressure from Europe and the fear of Iranian retaliation would stay the hands of the Americans and Israelis. Iran may have assumed that other countries would be prepared to live with a "nearly nuclear" Iran, with a fissile material production complex under international supervision, though one which could be quickly converted to weapons production if the need arose. As of late 2004 Iran's leaders appeared to believe the gap between the US and Europe created a "security margin" for Tehran that would prevent any serious action against the Islamic Republic, whether in the form of Security Council sanctions or direct military action.
2. Iran may have believed from the outset that some combination of the United States and Israel would almost certainly develop and implement a high confidence disarming strike. In this case, there would have been compelling reasons to "dig tunnels deep", and bury their program from prying eyes. Under these circumstances, however, it is difficult to understand why Iran would have gone to the trouble of building the above ground facilities, knowing that they would create a host of problems.
3. Iran may have been unable to resolve this matter, and may have elected to build parallel above ground and underground programs. In the best case, this would augment their ultimate capabilities, and in the worst case it would provide them with a nuclear weapons capability even in the face of attempts at disarming military strikes. The above ground program would provide convincing evidence of Iran's ability to undertake the industrial scale production needed to develop a credible stockpile of dozens of weapons. Even if the overt infrastructure were destroyed, the fact of the existence of the residual underground facilities at an undisclosed location, could be credibly communicated to the outside world.
A September 2004 analysis by the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center concluded that, "As for eliminating Iran's nuclear capabilities militarily, the U.S. and Israel lack sufficient targeting intelligence to do this. In fact, Iran has long had considerable success in concealing its nuclear activities from U.S. intelligence analysts and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors (the latter recently warned against assuming the agency could find all of Iran's illicit uranium enrichment activities). As it is, Iran could have already hidden all it needs to reconstitute a bomb program assuming its known declared nuclear plants are hit."
But the preponderance of evidence and reasoning leads to the assumption that there is no underground nuclear infrastructure, and that the above ground infrastructure constitutes Iran's nuclear weapons program.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iran-strikes-doubt.htm
I've been saying for ages that it won't occur, simply because the US is unable to carry it out in a realistic manner.
However, events over the last 6-12 months are starting to make me doubt that. I am coming to believe that the Bush administration will take advantage of it's lame duck position to carry out what it views as an imprtant strategic attack on Iran's nuclear program.
What do you think will happen?
Some considerations:
And what did the exercise show about Iran? In the week after the war game I interviewed the partici- pants about the views they had expressed "in role" and about their personal recommendations for the next President's approach. From these conversations, and from the participants' other writings and statements about Iran, the following themes emerged.
About Iran's intentions there is no disagreement. Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, and unless its policy is changed by the incentives it is offered or the warnings it receives, it will succeed.
About America's military options there is almost as clear a view. In circumstances of all-out war the United States could mount an invasion of Iran if it had to. If sufficiently provoked—by evidence that Iran was involved in a terrorist incident, for example, or that it was fomenting violence in Iraq—the United States could probably be effective with a punitive bomb-and-missile attack on Revolutionary Guard units.
But for the purposes most likely to interest the next American President—that is, as a tool to slow or stop Iran's progress toward nuclear weaponry—the available military options are likely to fail in the long term. A full-scale "regime change" operation has both obvious and hidden risks. The obvious ones are that the United States lacks enough manpower and equipment to take on Iran while still tied down in Iraq, and that domestic and international objections would be enormous. The most important hidden problem, exposed in the war-game discussions, was that a full assault would require such drawn-out preparations that the Iranian government would know months in advance what was coming. Its leaders would have every incentive to strike pre-emptively in their own defense. Unlike Saddam Hussein's Iraq, a threatened Iran would have many ways to harm America and its interests. Apart from cross-border disruptions in Iraq, it might form an outright alliance with al-Qaeda to support major new attacks within the United States. It could work with other oil producers to punish America economically. It could, as Hammes warned, apply the logic of "asymmetric," or "fourth-generation," warfare, in which a superficially weak adversary avoids a direct challenge to U.S. military power and instead strikes the most vulnerable points in American civilian society, as al-Qaeda did on 9/11. If it thought that the U.S. goal was to install a wholly new regime rather than to change the current regime's behavior, it would have no incentive for restraint.
What about a pre-emptive strike of our own, like the Osirak raid? The problem is that Iran's nuclear program is now much more advanced than Iraq's was at the time of the raid. Already the U.S. government has no way of knowing exactly how many sites Iran has, or how many it would be able to destroy, or how much time it would buy in doing so. Worse, it would have no way of predicting the long-term strategic impact of such a strike. A strike might delay by three years Iran's attainment of its goal—but at the cost of further embittering the regime and its people. Iran's intentions when it did get the bomb would be all the more hostile.
Here the United States faces what the military refers to as a "branches and sequels" decision—that is, an assessment of best and second-best outcomes. It would prefer that Iran never obtain nuclear weapons. But if Iran does, America would like Iran to see itself more or less as India does—as a regional power whose nuclear status symbolizes its strength relative to regional rivals, but whose very attainment of this position makes it more committed to defending the status quo. The United States would prefer, of course, that Iran not reach a new level of power with a vendetta against America. One of our panelists thought that a strike would help the United States, simply by buying time. The rest disagreed. Iran would rebuild after a strike, and from that point on it would be much more reluctant to be talked or bargained out of pursuing its goals—and it would have far more reason, once armed, to use nuclear weapons to America's detriment.
Most of our panelists felt that the case against a U.S. strike was all the more powerful against an Israeli strike. With its much smaller air force and much more limited freedom to use airspace, Israel would probably do even less "helpful" damage to Iranian sites. The hostile reaction—against both Israel and the United States—would be potentially more lethal to both Israel and its strongest backer.
A realistic awareness of these constraints will put the next President in an awkward position. In the end, according to our panelists, he should understand that he cannot prudently order an attack on Iran. But his chances of negotiating his way out of the situation will be greater if the Iranians don't know that. He will have to brandish the threat of a possible attack while offering the incentive of economic and diplomatic favors should Iran abandon its plans. "If you say there is no acceptable military option, then you end any possibility that there will be a non-nuclear Iran," David Kay said after the war game. "If the Iranians believe they will not suffer any harm, they will go right ahead." Hammes agreed: "The threat is always an important part of the negotiating process. But you want to fool the enemy, not fool yourself. You can't delude yourself into thinking you can do something you can't." Is it therefore irresponsible to say in public, as our participants did and we do here, that the United States has no military solution to the Iran problem? Hammes said no. Iran could not be sure that an American President, seeing what he considered to be clear provocation, would not strike. "You can never assume that just because a government knows something is unviable, it won't go ahead and do it. The Iraqis knew it was not viable to invade Iran, but they still did it. History shows that countries make very serious mistakes."
So this is how the war game turned out: with a finding that the next American President must, through bluff and patience, change the actions of a government whose motives he does not understand well, and over which his influence is limited. "After all this effort, I am left with two simple sentences for policymakers," Sam Gardiner said of his exercise. "You have no military solution for the issues of Iran. And you have to make diplomacy work."
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200412/fallows/6
The next war would begin with an intense air and naval campaign. Let's say you're planning the conflict as part of the staff of the Joint Chiefs. Your list of targets isn't that long -- only a few dozen nuclear sites -- but you can't risk retaliation from Tehran. So you allow 21 days for the bombardment, to be safe; you'd aim to strike every command-and-control facility, radar site, missile site, storage site, airfield, ship and base in Iran. To prevent world oil prices from soaring, you'd have to try to protect every oil and gas rig, and the big ports and load points. You'd need to use B-2s and lots of missiles up front, plus many small amphibious task forces to take out particularly tough targets along the coast, with manned and unmanned air reconnaissance. And don't forget the Special Forces, to penetrate deep inside Iran, call in airstrikes and drag the evidence of Tehran's nuclear ambitions out into the open for a world that's understandably skeptical of U.S. assertions that yet another Gulf rogue is on the brink of getting the bomb.
But if it's clear how a war with Iran would start, it's far less clear how it would end. How might Iran strike back? Would it unleash Hezbollah cells across Europe and the Middle East, or perhaps even inside the United States? Would Tehran goad Iraq's Shiites to rise up against their U.S. occupiers? And what would we do with Iran after the bombs stopped falling? We certainly could not occupy the nation with the limited ground forces we have left. So what would it be: Iran as a chastened, more tractable government? As a chaotic failed state? Or as a hardened and embittered foe?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/14/AR2007091401973.html
Target Iran - Air Strike Uncertainties
One major uncertainty concerning the probability of disarming preventive strike against Iran's nuclear infrastructure is the question of American and Israeli assessments of their confidence in their assessments of the completeness of their understanding of Iran's nuclear infrastructure. It will be recalled that when the US contemplated striking China's nuclear infrastructure in mid-1964, prior to China's first nuclear test, their were doubts about the completeness of US intelligence. In fact, the US was surprised when China detonated a uranium bomb, since the US had overestimated the progress of China's plutonium program, and seriously underestimated the progress of China's uranium enrichment program.
Iran's partners -- North Korea and Pakistan -- present contrasting studies in clandestine facilities. It appears that US intelligence has incomplete intelligence concerning some aspects of North Korea's plutonium program [mainly relating to whether there are undetected reprocessing facilities], and almost complete ignorance of the whereabouts of the DPRK's uranium program. The missing facilities are presumably at hidden underground locations. It is generally believed that Pakistan's major nuclear material production facilities are above ground and reasonably well characterized.
Iran appears to have a complete copy of Pakistan's fissile material production complex -- uranium conversion, uranium enrichment, heavy water production, and a heavy water plutonium production reactor. Elements of these facilities have been hardened against attack, notably the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, which has been buried under a thick layer of earth. All of these facilities are heavily defended by anti-aircraft missiles and guns.
One cannot exclude the possibility, however, that some or all of the visible nuclear weapons complex is simply a decoy, designed to draw attention. It is possible that Iran, like North Korea and unlike Pakistan, has buried nuclear weapons production capabilities that have escaped detection, and would continue in operation even if the visible facilities were destroyed. There are persistent rumors of such hidden facilities, but little in the way of circumstantial evidence to give credence to these rumors.
Amrom Katz, a shrewd arms control analyst at Rand Corporation many years ago, said, "We have never found anything that the Soviets have successfully hidden" [ Verification and SALT: The Challenge of Strategic Deception, W.C. Potter, Ed. (Westview, Boulder, CO, 1980), p 212). The issue for attack planners is how many undetected facilities have been successfully hidden in Iran.
Assessing the probability of the existence of a parallel clandestine program must take into account probable Iranian strategies for successful completion of their weapons acquisition effort. There has been essentially no detectable discussion of this question in the open literature, which is something of a puzzle in itself. That is to say, is everything unfolding as they had foreseen, or have things gone badly off track?
* Iran may have [naively] assumed that the massive underground facilities at Natanz would escape detection, as would the other above ground facilities, and that there would be no need to declare their various other facilities to the international community. Under this scenario, now that these facilities have been detected, the rather thin cover stories for their various facilities would be proven inadequate, and one might hope that sweet reason might convince Iran to reconsider its commitment to nuclear weapons.
* Iran may have understood very clearly from the outset that its above ground facilities would be detected not too long after construction began. Indeed, the uranium conversion facility at Esfahan is at a site that was selected for such a capacity at the outset of the Shah's nuclear program in the 1970s, a fact that must have rendered this piece of real estate a suspect site long before actual construction began. The construction activity at Natanz and Arak would be visible even in 10-meter resolution wide-area imagery, so there could have been no realistic hope that these facilities would escape notice by the obscurity of their location. Although it is possible that the Iranians completely miscalculated the detective powers of the US and Israel, this does not seem plausible. Thus one must assume that Iran foresaw the crisis that would arise when their plans became clear, and planned accordingly.
1. Iran may have assumed that the US and Israel would lack the political resolve to strike at even a highly visible program, and that some combination of diplomatic pressure from Europe and the fear of Iranian retaliation would stay the hands of the Americans and Israelis. Iran may have assumed that other countries would be prepared to live with a "nearly nuclear" Iran, with a fissile material production complex under international supervision, though one which could be quickly converted to weapons production if the need arose. As of late 2004 Iran's leaders appeared to believe the gap between the US and Europe created a "security margin" for Tehran that would prevent any serious action against the Islamic Republic, whether in the form of Security Council sanctions or direct military action.
2. Iran may have believed from the outset that some combination of the United States and Israel would almost certainly develop and implement a high confidence disarming strike. In this case, there would have been compelling reasons to "dig tunnels deep", and bury their program from prying eyes. Under these circumstances, however, it is difficult to understand why Iran would have gone to the trouble of building the above ground facilities, knowing that they would create a host of problems.
3. Iran may have been unable to resolve this matter, and may have elected to build parallel above ground and underground programs. In the best case, this would augment their ultimate capabilities, and in the worst case it would provide them with a nuclear weapons capability even in the face of attempts at disarming military strikes. The above ground program would provide convincing evidence of Iran's ability to undertake the industrial scale production needed to develop a credible stockpile of dozens of weapons. Even if the overt infrastructure were destroyed, the fact of the existence of the residual underground facilities at an undisclosed location, could be credibly communicated to the outside world.
A September 2004 analysis by the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center concluded that, "As for eliminating Iran's nuclear capabilities militarily, the U.S. and Israel lack sufficient targeting intelligence to do this. In fact, Iran has long had considerable success in concealing its nuclear activities from U.S. intelligence analysts and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors (the latter recently warned against assuming the agency could find all of Iran's illicit uranium enrichment activities). As it is, Iran could have already hidden all it needs to reconstitute a bomb program assuming its known declared nuclear plants are hit."
But the preponderance of evidence and reasoning leads to the assumption that there is no underground nuclear infrastructure, and that the above ground infrastructure constitutes Iran's nuclear weapons program.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iran-strikes-doubt.htm