Operational Excellence, Strategic Incompetence

The war in Iran has reaffirmed two truths. One is that the United States is blessed with the most professional and effective military in the world. The men and women of the American armed forces can conduct missions of almost any size with formidable competence, from special operations to seize a rogue-state president to a large-scale war. The other truth is that the Trump administration, when it comes to strategy, is incompetent.

Strategy is about matching the instruments of national power—and especially military force—to the goals of national policy. The president and his team, however, have not enunciated an overarching goal for this war—or, more accurately, they have presented multiple goals and chosen among them almost randomly, depending on the day or the hour. This means that highly effective military operations are taking place in a strategic vacuum.

Worse, Donald Trump is now pointing to these missions as if the excellence with which they have been conducted somehow constitutes a strategy in itself. He appears so enthralled by the execution of these missions that he has enlarged the goals of this war to include the complete destruction of the Iranian regime, after which he will “Make Iran Great Again.”

[Karim Sadjadpour: Trump has lost the plot in Iran]

This kind of thinking is an old problem, and it has a name: “victory disease,” meaning that victory in battle encourages leaders to seek out more battles, and then to believe that winning those battles means that they are winning the larger war or achieving some grand strategic aim—right up until the moment they realize that they have overreached and find themselves facing a military disaster or even total defeat. It is a condition that has afflicted many kinds of regimes over the course of history, one so common that my colleagues and I lectured military officers about it when I was a professor at the Naval War College. The issue is especially important for Americans, because when national leaders have exceptionally capable military forces at their disposal—as the United States does—they are even more likely to be seized by victory disease.

The Persian emperor Xerxes had it; that’s how he found himself eventually suffering a historic defeat in Greece at the Battle of Salamis. Napoleon had it; that’s how he ended up freezing in the Russian snow after years of brilliant victories over other European states. The French in 1870 had it; that’s how they confidently marched to catastrophes against a superior Prussian army. The Axis had it; that’s how Germany and Japan convinced themselves that their early successes meant that they could quickly defeat the Soviet Union and the United States, respectively.

The Americans caught the same bug in the Korean War, when they chased the North Koreans to the Yalu River, a drive that ended in disaster when Communist Chinese troops streamed across the border and joined the conflict. The U.S. fell prey to this syndrome again in Vietnam, when it poured men and material into the war for years yet remained unable to turn many battlefield triumphs into a strategic victory.

American policy in the Gulf War in 1991 is an honorable exception; George H. W. Bush avoided victory disease, calling an end to Operation Desert Storm rather than marching on Baghdad after achieving his stated aim of rescuing Kuwait. But his son, George W. Bush, chose to fight two wars at the same time. Once again, the men and women of the U.S. military managed to achieve remarkable operational successes, but it took years to stabilize Iraq, and Afghanistan today is back in the hands of the Taliban.

And now Trump seems to have contracted a whopping case of victory disease. He is clearly convinced that previous operations in Venezuela, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, and, of course, Iran are all evidence that a total victory over the regime in Tehran will be relatively quick. But he has provided no conception of what “victory” would look like. As of yesterday, his goals have expanded to include a demand for “unconditional surrender.”

Admiring the performance of the U.S. military is understandable. But it is not the same thing as using that military power to achieve some national purpose. Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth so far seem to be enjoying the fireworks. But the efficient and rapid destruction of buildings and machines, and the killing of some enemy leaders, is not the same thing as a strategy.

Today, the U.S. and Israeli militaries have achieved almost full control of the skies over Iran and the waters around it. They appear able to destroy any targets they choose with near impunity. The Iranians still have the ability to strike back by launching missiles and drones at various targets, and they managed to kill six American service members with an attack against a makeshift installation in Kuwait. Nevertheless, Iran has been bested at the operational level of war, and its air and naval forces cannot offer meaningful resistance.

American operations have not been flawless. Last week, a U.S. strike on an Iranian naval base may have destroyed an Iranian school and killed dozens of children. Every major military engagement is fraught with risks of targeting errors, friendly fire, and other accidents, and preliminary evidence indicates that the school bombing was a tragic American error, one that was made more likely by the U.S. and Israeli decision to attack during the day (when children would be in the building). Even so, American military operations have for the most part been astonishingly well executed. Years of training, study, and planning, along with careful use of intelligence, have all contributed to the rapid elimination of much of Iran’s capacity to project power, and almost all of its ability to resist allied attacks.

Operational competence, however, cannot answer the question of national purpose. What is the war about, and when will America know it’s done? Trump, when pressed, dodges the issue of war aims by pointing to the excellence of the military. “I hope you are impressed,” Trump said on Thursday to ABC’s Jonathan Karl. “How do you like the performance? I mean, Venezuela is obvious. This might be even better.” Trump then repeated, “How do you like the performance?” Karl noted that no one is questioning the success of military operations, and he asked the president what happens next. “Forget about ‘next,’” Trump answered. “They are decimated for a 10-year period before they could build it back.”

Likewise, the next day, CNN’s Dana Bash asked the president how he thought the war was going. Trump rated the war, Bash said, a 12 or 15 out of 10, and then said, “We’re doing very well militarily—better than anybody could have even dreamed.”

Each time Trump or one of his lieutenants speaks this way, they generate more questions than answers. Yes, military operations are proceeding impressively, with very few casualties among the U.S. and Israeli operators. But what would have constituted a “10” that we can now say that America is at a “15”? Now that Trump, at least for the time being, has issued a call for “unconditional surrender,” perhaps vaporizing every piece of military hardware with an Iranian flag on it is enough. Comments on Thursday by Hegseth and Admiral Brad Cooper of Central Command suggest that this seems to be the plan.

But “unconditional surrender” is unlikely to last. To effect such a total defeat, Iran would have to be occupied and administered by the victors. This kind of language is at odds with the reluctance of some in the Trump administration and other Republicans, including Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, to even call Operation Epic Fury a “war.” (I will exercise my prerogative here as someone who has studied and taught national security and international relations and confirm that when you bomb a nation, kill its leaders, and call for its people to rise up, you’re engaged in war, and if you call for “unconditional surrender,” you are definitely at war.)

Trump will likely find himself backpedaling from the demand for unconditional surrender. He might also redefine unconditional to denote more easily achieved aims. (Indeed, hours after Trump’s post, the White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt was already offering an interpretation of unconditional that was far more limited than absolute capitulation.) Soon, the Americans could find themselves retreating to the strategic incoherence that has characterized the administration’s approach since the first hours of the war. Military operations and national purpose will become more and more distanced from each other, because military prowess cannot clarify America’s war aims. As the old saying warns: If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.

My colleagues Marie-Rose Sheinerman and Isabel Ruehl have pointed out the severity of this problem by noting that Trump and his aides have offered at least 10 rationales for war over the course of only six days. Rationale No. 1 was “an imminent threat” from Iran, Rationale No. 2 was nuclear weapons, Rationale No. 5 was election interference, Rationale No. 6 was “world peace” writ large, Rationale No. 10 was that America had been dragged into the war by Israel. Some of these reasons might constitute a casus belli—others, such as Rationale No. 9 (“fulfill God’s purpose”), less so—but Trump’s team has thrown them all at the wall to see what sticks, perhaps in part because the war is still unpopular with the American public and Trump has so far seen no “rally ’round the flag” benefit from launching it.

[Read: Six days of war, 10 rationales]

But each of these rationales demands a different strategy; eliminating an imminent threat involves a different set of operations than establishing peace in the region (or the world). Instead, the Americans are choosing an “all of the above” approach, employing immense power across Iran. Entranced by the show, Trump, Hegseth, and others assume that because these operations are going well, something good will come of them. This kind of poor strategy, ironically, is an option only because of the excellence of the American and Israeli militaries: If Trump had to make decisions under greater material or military constraints, such as shortages of money, weapons, or talent, he would have to choose an actual war aim and stay with it.

If the goal is regime change and “unconditional surrender,” do current U.S. operations support that goal? Again, military prowess and victory disease may be encouraging the White House to avoid thinking about some hard realities. Regimes are not changed by bombing; they are put in place by men and women wearing boots and carrying guns. (These need not be American boots, but they have to be somebody’s boots.) Trump has called for the Iranians to surrender, but to whom? A U.S. occupation force? Or is an internal group of rebels assembling in Iran? In any case, a new regime will have to gain support by rebuilding infrastructure that’s being destroyed. Are the target sets being adjusted accordingly over time? No one can answer these questions, because the civilian leadership of the United States does not seem to have thought them through.

[Thomas Wright: America’s and Israel’s goals are already colliding]

Victory disease divorces military excellence from political wisdom and strategic discipline. It convinces leaders that whatever they’re doing must be working and that they should keep doing it, blinding them to the possibility that military operations may have become counterproductive or detached from achievable aims. The American military is given tasks—clear the skies, suppress air defenses, sink the enemy navy—and then it breaks those instructions down into discrete and granular missions against particular targets. The pilots and planners can execute those missions with courage and professionalism, but they cannot force them to make strategic sense.

Meanwhile, despite the successes of the military overseas, Trump now admits that a regime that was supposed to be eliminated quickly could reach the United States with terrorist attacks. He told Time this week that “we expect some things. Like I said, some people will die. When you go to war, some people will die.” The American people might be willing to tolerate such risks if they knew what their sons and and daughters were fighting for and how long they would be at war. Trump has retreated behind the skill of the U.S. military rather than answer such questions.

Perhaps the greatest danger of the current epidemic of victory disease is that it seems to be making Donald Trump think he’s a brilliant strategist: He is already talking about overthrowing the government of Cuba, even as American forces are still fighting in the Middle East, and the threat of terror may well be growing at home now that the United States is at war. At this point, all Americans can do is admire the fortitude and excellence of the U.S. military while hoping for victory—whatever that is, and whenever it comes.