Scott Anderson writes:

America’s war with Iran has entered a calmer phase: diplomatic posturing, on-and-off-again negotiations and endless wrangling of a settlement. This, of course, is far preferable to the annihilation of Iranian civilization that President Trump was threatening just a few weeks ago. But it raises the question of just what has spurred this turnabout.

The answer is rather straightforward. The American and Israeli bombing of Iran failed to provoke either a popular uprising against the regime in Tehran or its capitulation, however painfully slow Mr. Trump and his advisers have been to acknowledge that. Instead, Iran discovered its ability to shut down the vital passageway of the Strait of Hormuz and send the global economy into chaos.

There are now only two outcomes to the conflict: either the kind of wholesale destruction of Iran that Mr. Trump posited, or a settlement that will leave the government intact and empowered, and a blustering American president humiliated.

The first option is increasingly remote. By publicly threatening the commission of war crimes on an enormous scale, Mr. Trump has given both his domestic and foreign opponents time to marshal resistance. As for the latter and more likely outcome, this was predictable, if only the president and his administration had bothered to take note of a new feature of modern warfare, a feature that can be boiled down to a single word: drones.

The weaponized drone has utterly transformed today’s battlefield. It is the modern-day equivalent of the machine gun of World War I. Because of the drone, the vastly outnumbered Ukrainian military has been able to withstand the Russian Army of Vladimir Putin for the past four years, not only inflicting far greater casualties on the invaders than expected, but doing so at a cost of pennies to the dollar. As the Ukrainians have shown time and again, a $1,000 drone can destroy a roughly $4.5 million T-90 tank. While the Russians have recently made significant strides in drone warfare, this simple weapon has ensured that they’ve grievously paid for their war both on the battlefield and in the pocketbook.

Much of this same dynamic has played out in Iran for the past two months, although without the staggering cost in human lives. Certainly, American and Israeli warplanes can bomb Iran’s military infrastructure at will — and they have, tens of thousands of times — but no amount of bombing can remove the primary retaliatory weapon at its disposal.

On the contrary, Iran can continue to mass-produce drones at a fraction of the cost of the weapons being produced by the other side. What Mr. Trump calls his “excursion” in Iran has already cost the United States at least $25 billion, according to the Pentagon, and significantly depleted its stockpile of sophisticated missiles. That depletion is already causing shortages in other strategic arenas and could take years to replenish. All the while, with their cheap and plentiful drones — assembling a top-of-the-line Shahed-136 drone costs Iran an estimated $35,000 — Iran continues to dictate the terms in the Strait of Hormuz choke point.

But what about continuing the American naval blockade of the strait or launching a ground assault on Iran’s shores, as Trump has also periodically proposed? Granted, matters might get ugly, but surely this will lead to American victory and an end to the impasse, right? Wrong. Build out an ironclad blockade or put 50,000 American troops on Persian Gulf beachheads, and the Iranians will still retain the ability to fire a drone over their heads to hit an oil-laden tanker and paralyze the global economy anew. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports:

The US has launched Donald Trump’s operation to open a route through the strait of Hormuz for hundreds of ships trapped with their crews in the Gulf, in a move that brought the region back to the brink of full-scale war as Iran sought to reassert its blockade.

The US operation, which got under way on Monday after being announced as “Project Freedom” by Trump on Sunday night on his social media site, dramatically raised the stakes in a conflict that had been in a month-long period of uneasy limbo.

Speaking hours after the operation began, the head of US Central Command, (Centcom), Adm Brad Cooper, said that US forces had destroyed six Iranian small boats and intercepted both Iranian cruise missiles and drones. He “strongly advised” Iranian forces to remain clear of US military assets in the region, which include guided-missile destroyers, more than 100 land- and sea-based aircraft, drones and 15,000 troops.

Iran swiftly denied the claim. On a day of successive claims and counter-claims, it also denied Centcom’s assertion that two US-flagged merchant vessels had “successfully transited” the strait, while US navy guided-missile destroyers had crossed in the opposite direction, travelling westwards, and had begun patrolling the Gulf. Late on Monday, the container shipping company Maersk said the Alliance Fairfax – a US-flagged vehicle carrier – exited the Gulf via the strait accompanied by US military assets. [Continue reading…]