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The writer is a Hoover fellow at Stanford University

On February 28, President Donald Trump launched America’s largest shock and awe campaign since the attack on Iraq in 2003. This may be Trump’s battle, but Operation Epic Fury is exactly the kind of war that, for the past half-century or so, the US has sought to fight.  

The campaign of precise long-range strikes against a weak Iranian regime is what social scientists call an “ideal” case to test the US vision of warfare. It is a chance to demonstrate that, despite two decades of counterinsurgency and the drone revolution in Ukraine, the American way of war is still possible.  

The challenge is that ideal cases are also double-edged swords. They can’t prove a theory will work in less than ideal situations. But when they fail, they can disprove entire theories. The implication here for the US is that if the American way of war can’t work against Iran, a weak regime with a middling military, there is no chance that it will work in a much harder case — China, say.

The American way of war is long-range, precise and depends on overwhelming domination. The assumption is that quality — expensive technology and well-trained personnel — can achieve victory with limited risk to American lives. By targeting key leadership, bases and capabilities, well-executed precision strikes can induce changes in the enemy’s foreign policy, regime collapse or even surrender, all without ever having to face the adversary on the ground.  

The US debuted an early version of this in the first Gulf war. And it experimented with it throughout the 1990s — in Kosovo, in the skies over Iraq and in coercive strikes in Africa and other parts of the Middle East — using new cruise missiles, stealth aircraft and precision bombs.

However, it seemed to meet its match in the subsequent two decades of counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even as the US built remote-controlled drones and increasingly precise munitions, it couldn’t hold or stabilise territory without ground troops becoming embroiled in close-quarters conflict with adversaries.

And then, with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it appeared as if the American way of war was over once and for all. New technologies, notably drones and AI, announced the return of long drawn-out wars of attrition.  

Some wonder why the US hasn’t more fully absorbed the lessons of Ukraine. Why hasn’t it replenished its arsenal with cheap munitions and drones, abandoned its expensive platforms and redesigned its campaigns to support multiyear fights to take or defend territory?

This is not merely the result of bureaucratic inertia, however. On the contrary, America has a deeply rooted belief in its own way of waging war and a distinctive understanding of how new technology (drones, AI and so on) can enable it.

Operation Epic Fury can, in many ways, be seen as a compelling counter-example to the dystopian vision of conflict that the war in Ukraine represents. On the first day, the US-Israeli operation decapitated the head of a despised regime. And it attacked more than 1,200 targets, with the loss of just six American military personnel. It has rebuffed one of the largest missile volleys ever launched and a US submarine destroyed an enemy warship with a torpedo for the first time since the second world war. 

But there are already cracks in this account. The US may have accidentally attacked a school, killing over 100 children. (As of the end of last week, defence secretary Pete Hegseth said the Pentagon was still “investigating”.) Three F-15s were shot down by friendly Kuwaiti fire. The Trump administration has been elusive on strategic objectives, the possibility of deploying ground troops or campaign timelines. Meanwhile, American missile and bomb arsenals are dwindling and costs soaring.

For nations watching and wondering whether to invest in the Ukrainian or American military model, Operation Epic Fury is an important test case. Should they be arming for wars of attrition or for the kind of technological dominance showcased over the past week?

How this all ends will shape Iran and the region, but it will also dictate the future of the American military. Imagine, for a moment, that the US is unable to achieve a decisive victory, and is instead drawn into a long, costly and complicated nation-building exercise or guerrilla war. If that happens, the failure of the ideal case will force the military to rebuild its arsenal and transform its strategy in order to equip it for a very different kind of warfare — one that looks a lot more like Ukraine than the first Gulf war.

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