Tabatabai said that the only historical U. Bush and Barack Obama. Marine barracks in Beirut in And the Stuxnet attack was difficult to attribute definitively, though Tehran did react by beefing up its offensive cyber capabilities. Graeme Wood: Two questions to ask now that Qassem Soleimani is dead. Now the United States has taken out arguably the second-most-powerful figure in Iran, and has claimed responsibility for the killing publicly and boastfully.
In the 40 years of conflict between the two countries, such a moment has never come before. What is predictable is that Iran will seek to exact revenge, and that it will aim for elements of surprise that will throw the United States off balance. And they have weapons from advanced explosively formed penetrators that defeated some of the best counter-IED tech to rockets and other ways to harass U. The U. Central Command said on background. Any work that would be done behind enemy lines to disable missile threats, breaking supply lines or taking out nuclear fuel development sites would be taken on by special operations forces across the services.
That would include targeting, securing high risk areas such as nuclear sites, establishing forward airfields inside Iran conducting deep reconnaissance on the ground. It would look similar to work they did did during the Persian Gulf War where teams hunted down SCUD launchers being moved around Iraq to strike at Israel, hoping to pull them into the war and ignite a regional conflict.
Any air campaign against Iran would be vastly different from past U. To defeat their air defense and early warning systems, the United States would have to physically destroy them or disrupt them through electronic warfare.
To get close to advanced air defenses, aircraft must decrease their radar signature as much as possible. Bombing Iran would therefore require stealth aircraft to circumvent its Russian-made S missile systems air defense systems, and domestically produced Bavar surface-to-air missiles.
Countering those weapons systems would require the F and Fs due to their stealth capabilities, according to Deptula, the retired U.
Air Force three-star general. Staff Sgt. Strategic surprise is difficult to achieve these days, Deptula said, meaning the movement of necessary aircraft into theater would be well-known. But operational and tactical surprise remain. Air Force would likely be launching a strike campaign more similar to Desert Storm, than its fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
Even the Iraq War in involved about strike sorties per day. The country also possesses increasingly sophisticated cruise missiles, an array of shorter-ranged anti-ship missiles and challenging air defense systems. Those missile have ranges that run from kilometers up to 2, kilometers, giving them the ability to reach targets as far away as Italy, according to a CSIS Missile Threat report.
Using a UAV to target the radar for something that is designed to defend against a missile. The Iranians have put a lot of time and energy into missile systems as opposed to other items such as advanced attack aircraft.
While Iran already has a ballistic missile range in excess of 2, kilometers, it may soon have a cruise missile to layer on top of that bubble. That would allow Iran to potentially strike Israel, anywhere in the Gulf, any base in Afghanistan and parts of Egypt. After the U. In the Persian Gulf, coastal defense missiles help prop up an anti-access, area denial bubble.
While not as sophisticated as Russia or China, they may achieve their localized aim of making adversaries think twice about any kind of action against the Iranian homeland, he said. Anti-ship ballistic or anti-ship cruise missile pose a significant threat to U. In , for instance, the U. While any strike or combat action could be the result of reacting on the part of either the United States or Iran, the outcome is far from set.
Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since and was named a Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation.
Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War. Kyle Rempfer is an editor and reporter whose investigations have covered combat operations, criminal cases, foreign military assistance and training accidents. Before entering journalism, Kyle served in U. David B. Iran has excelled at executing a form of one-state, two-systems formula for conflict-ridden countries in the region.
The state e. For the West, for example, security sector reform would mean reconstructing conventional national armies that abide by international norms and laws. Iran, in contrast, opts for an approach centered around a host of armed non-state actors, and has no inclination to align such an approach with international norms and laws or encourage its allies to respect human rights.
It establishes networks and institutions that parallel national institutions, keeping them weak. This opens the space for Iran to subjugate governing structures and political systems. Specifically, Iran creates or co-opts militias and informal authorities, allowing it to fill and exploit the gaps that emerge in fragile states. However, ideology is only one part of the equation. Iran does not simply opportunistically back or deploy proxies like other states do.
Like its rivals and the U. And Iran has a marked capacity to exploit divisions among local movements that challenge its interests. Similarly, in Iraqi Kurdistan — following the Kurdish independence referendum — Iran divided the Kurdish leadership and mobilized its proxies into Kirkuk against the Kurdish Peshmerga. Arab Sunni groups backed by the U. Longtime U. The logic behind this would be two-fold: to ensure Iran does not have the luxury or the breathing space to restore its coercive capabilities, and to complicate a U.
Iran relies on exaggerated estimates of its military prowess and the mystique or aura of invincibility that surrounds some of its proxies, but these are diminished with each assassination, with severe implications for the authority and influence its proxies can exert in neighboring countries like Syria and Iraq that are essential to its long-term security.
It fails to account for the second- and third-order effects of Israeli or U. It is in these environments that Iran shapes the contours of regional security dynamics.
At worst, Iran has to contend with the possibility that its rivals can and will decapitate the cohort of individuals that are central to its nuclear program and its foreign legion of proxies.
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