told reporters<\/a> last month after a briefing on the war at U.S. Central Command.<\/p>\nThe campaign, when it restarted, would be more efficient and lethal than the earlier efforts, he promised.<\/p>\n
But, so far, that does not seem to be true. Since the cease-fire first took effect, Iran has been able to restore or reconstitute much of its ability to project power, two senior U.S. officials said. That includes Iran\u2019s ballistic missiles and missile launch sites, armed droned launch sites and other underground facilities.<\/p>\n
Many of the more than 300 sites that American warplanes have hit this month are targets the military struck during the initial assault that began in February, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.<\/p>\n
The new round of strikes so far has been mostly limited to military targets, like command centers, missile sites and coastal surveillance facilities, that threaten commercial vessels in the strait.<\/p>\n
U.S. forces also appeared to have hit sites that have military and civilian purposes, including a railway bridge in northeastern Iran more than 700 miles from the strait. The Iranians relied on the bridge to ferry bombs and other military supplies to units launching attacks on the strait, a defense official said.<\/p>\n
Despite the strikes, Iran has continued to fire at commercial shipping.<\/p>\n
Mr. Trump has suggested that there may not be many Iranian military targets left along the strait. \u201cWe\u2019re finding it hard to find where they have anything,\u201d he told Fox News.<\/p>\n
And so, he vowed that the U.S. military would expand the campaign and start striking civilian targets, like bridges and electrical infrastructure, that the Iranian military needed to fight back.<\/p>\n
A big question inside the Pentagon is whether such strikes constitute war crimes. Another concern is whether they will work: Will they cause Iran\u2019s leaders to capitulate or simply harden their resistance as the death toll rises?<\/p>\n
One theory holds that the Trump administration has struggled to achieve its goals because the U.S. and Israeli militaries used too much force in the opening days of the air war, decimating Iran\u2019s leadership and leaving the Trump administration without a coherent negotiating partner.<\/p>\n
\u201cDecapitation campaigns work, but not always in the way you want,\u201d said S. Clinton Hinote, a retired Air Force lieutenant general who served as a senior air strategist in the Middle East in the 2000s. They produce confusion and paralysis, but do not destroy the enemy\u2019s ability to fight back.<\/p>\n
Such is the case so far in Iran. \u201cThe enemy might have been brain-dead, but the body kept functioning as it had been trained to do for the last decade,\u201d General Hinote said. Iranian troops fired back at U.S. bases in the Middle East, struck America\u2019s Gulf Arab allies and effectively closed the strait.<\/p>\n
Now the Trump administration is in a spot where it is sitting across the negotiating table from a discombobulated, embittered and dug-in enemy that is either not willing or not capable of making lasting concessions.<\/p>\n
Mr. Trump alluded to this possibility in his interview this week.<\/p>\n
\u201cI knew the first group for a little while, and they were evil, and they\u2019re no longer with us,\u201d he said. \u201cI knew the second group also a little bit better, and they were evil, and they\u2019re no longer with us.\u201d<\/p>\n
He described the latest group of Iranian leaders as having \u201csome very bad ones in there.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI think they\u2019re the ones that are stopping a deal,\u201d Mr. Trump said.<\/p>\n
David Deptula, a retired lieutenant general who is widely credited as the creator of the firepower-focused strategy<\/a> that took hold in the early 1990s, said that a more intense air campaign aimed at Iran\u2019s power generation and electrical distribution network could cripple the Iranian military\u2019s ability to resist.<\/p>\nThose targets, he said, could be attacked in a calibrated and \u201creversible\u201d manner that would not violate the laws of war.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe air power lesson Trump must understand is that military action must be tied to clearly defined political objectives and sustained until the desired effects are achieved,\u201d General Deptula said. \u201cSporadic retaliation followed by pauses, shifting demands or premature declarations of victory gives Iran opportunities to absorb the blows, adapt and wait Washington out.\u201d<\/p>\n
General Hinote was skeptical that more American bombs would produce new Iranian concessions. The U.S. campaign has achieved most, if not all, of its military objectives. The same was true in 2001 when U.S. forces shattered the Taliban and in 2003 when they destroyed the Iraqi military and Saddam Hussein\u2019s dictatorship.<\/p>\n
But U.S. presidents have consistently failed to translate those military successes into anything resembling a lasting victory.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s been a constant disappointment throughout my career,\u201d General Hinote said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Trump has held fast to one belief over the course of the nearly five-month war with Iran:…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":299260,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[29880,15019,1452,14670,67339,164,9,11,10,1069,5251,1554,1876],"class_list":["post-299259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-afghanistan","tag-defense-department","tag-donald-j","tag-iran","tag-iraq","tag-middle-east","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-trump","tag-united-states-defense-and-military-forces","tag-united-states-international-relations","tag-united-states-politics-and-government"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=299259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299259\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/299260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}