The US campaign against Iran has been built on the assumption that air power - drones, missiles, and aircraft - could force the country into submission without a single soldier on the ground. That assumption has failed, George Friedman, founder of Geopolitical Futures, has argued in a podcast reported by "Hvylya".
"There was never a time when air power alone was able to force a government into capitulation," Friedman said. He cited one apparent exception - Japan in World War Two - but immediately qualified it: "The air power was used as atomic bombs and Japan had already lost that war - it was over." In every other historical case, air campaigns alone have failed to deliver decisive political outcomes.
In Iran, the limits of air power have become acutely visible. The White House has claimed to have destroyed much of Iran's military capability, but Friedman expressed skepticism. "I do not think it is true. Because if it collapsed, the war wouldn't be going on," he said. Missiles have continued to fly at targets including countries like Turkey that are not directly involved in the conflict.
The IRGC's decentralized structure compounds the problem. Its forces are "vastly distributed" across Iran's enormous territory, making them difficult to locate and destroy from the air. The IRGC also possesses its own drones and missiles and has used them to close the Strait of Hormuz - creating a crisis that airstrikes have so far been unable to resolve.
Friedman noted that the decline in Iranian retaliatory strikes could mean two very different things: the IRGC may be running out of weapons, or it may be deliberately conserving them. "They may be hoarding them, waiting for something else. That I do not know and I would hope that our intelligence services know," he said. Either way, the fundamental problem stands - air power has degraded the IRGC but has not broken it.
Also read: Iran Borrowed Russia's Playbook to Drain Gulf States of Their Most Expensive Missiles.