Classical Greek historians had an ear for dialogue—real or invented—to rival the best Hollywood screenwriters. One of the exchanges attached to the 480 BCE battle of Thermopylae has a Persian emissary warning the Greeks that Xerxes’ archers were so numerous their volleys would blot out the sun—to which a Greek officer supposedly replied, “Good, then we will fight in the shade.”
Two and a half millennia later, Iranian drones have replaced the arrows of their ancestors, but the concept has not changed in essence: Volleys of drones attempt to saturate the battlefield, and for all their seeming novelty, drones simply continue the long evolution of stand-off weapons. Once again, we are enchanted by technical capability, only to find that mass still matters. While Pentagon acquisition plods on in the production of wonder weapons we can only produce (and afford) in small numbers, our enemies noted our obvious weakness. We can out-fight the Iranians on our own terms, but the Iranians refuse to fight fair and capitulate in the face of our magnificent war machines. Instead, the Iranians force us to deplete our specialized ammunition stocks and drain hundreds of billion dollars from our coffers.
That’s where our vision of war disintegrates. We assume we can simply buy victory. So, we initiate a war in the Persian Gulf without even a wisp of a plan to secure and shield the Strait of Hormuz, on which global economic well-being depends. That strait is this war’s Thermopylae; unfortunately, we’ve embraced the role of Xerxes’s invaders, not the mantle of heroic Greeks.
Indeed, our lack of self-awareness is a terrible vulnerability. We cast ourselves in the heroic role and increasingly get it backwards: In our other all-too-recent wars, our meager military intelligentsia, tasked to produce a manual for counter-insurgency operations, fell in blind love with the film version of “Lawrence of Arabia,” while utterly missing that, in Iraq and Afghanistan, al-Qaeda and the Taliban were the tribal jihadis of the sort T. E. Lawrence romanticized. We were the Turks.
Now we are at war with an enemy that has few illusions, but who possesses unsettling insights. It’s not only that we failed to plan for obvious Iranian responses. It’s that we didn’t think. The Iranians were an open book. But we don’t read.
Now, two-thousand Marines have reached the war zone (which continues to expand). And Army paratroopers may be in-theater by the time you read this. Which circles us back to another fact that annoys our defense industry: Stand-off weapons can strip away an enemy’s capabilities, but an opponent who has no incentive to quit still demands boots on the ground to be subdued.
Not to drone on…for all of our astonishing military technology, warfare remains a flesh-and-blood endeavor. And the ultimate utility of our weaponry is less than the sum of its exorbitant parts because we ignore war’s true essentials: Unsparing self-scrutiny; a willingness to see the world through the enemies’ eyes; and—not least—strength of will.
Even were the Iranians to surrender unconditionally tomorrow (which they will not do), we still will have lost far more than we might gain. Having begun with echoes of Herodotus, let us conclude with the advice of H. P. Lovecraft, a writer on a different sort of horror: “Do not call up what ye cannot put down.”
