Don't Drone Me, Bro!

A new kind of war from the Department of War. But where did it come from?

The attacks on the Islamic Republic of Iran are going almost comically well. Where before Iranian leaders used to mock the “Great Satan” as a pitiful helpless giant, now most of them are dead. The ones left alive are, well, comically begging “don’t drone me, bro!” like Iranian President Mazoud Pezeshkian, hilariously pictured below.

Really, I’m nobody. Not worth wasting a drone on! Nobody at all! (Source).

War critics have been reduced to worrying that there will be no one left to make a peace deal with if we kill all the leaders. I think we’ll find someone.

What’s going on is summarized pretty well in this post from Sean King:

The US’s and Israel’s strategy for regime change/reform in Iran is glaringly obvious and will eventually prove effective. Likely by mid to late April, Iran will be lead by somebody amenable to US interests. Here’s how that will happen:

1. Quickly assassinate any prominent or semi-prominent regime official hostile to the US agenda, and continue doing so forever until a moderate one eventually takes power.

2. Destroy the regime’s ability to fund itself and pay its thugs by (a) taking and holding or disabling Kharg Island (through which 90% of Iran’s oil flows), destroying Iran’s other oil distribution structure (the remaining 10%), and (b) destroying the bank, including its backup servers, that the Republican Guard’s uses to pay its people.

3. Relentlessly target police checkpoints and police officers in general with drone attacks, making it difficult for the regime to control the movement of the Iranian people.

4. Use superior drones to down or disable the drones that Iran uses to surveil and suppress the populace.

5. Provide drone air cover to anti-regime protestors.

6. Ensure that regime officials cannot reliably use electronic communications for fear of being surveilled, or worse, geolocated.

7. Ensure that regime officials cannot gather in person to communicate and coordinate for fear of being killed en masse with precision guided bombs (this has already happened multiple times)

8 Restore Internet (via Starlink or otherwise) so that anti-regime folk can communicate and coordinate.

9. By these means and others make defection by rank and file regime members the only sane move.

10. Have the people and defectors take to the streets and overthrow their Islamic oppressors.

Last night was a test run for number 10. With US and Iranian air cover and support, and with police stations and checkpoints systematically destroyed, Iranians took to the streets en masse to celebrate the “Festival of Fire”, a holiday with Zoroastrian roots that is DISDAINED by the Islamist regime and normally brutally suppressed. By all accounts the festival celebrations were large and mostly unmolested. The regime was unable to stop them this time. The test run was successful.

Regime change/reform is coming. Soon. I’ve said all along that I expected it to happen within 60 days of the initial hostilities. That would be the end of April. But it may well happen before then.

I think this is basically right. It’s being enabled by huge advantages in drones, intelligence, and automation. No one has ever waged a war where they were able to kill enemy leaders at will, decapitating the regime, and even blowing up police checkpoints wherever they appear.

Some of this is creditable to old-style intelligence: The Israelis have been infiltrating Iran for decades, to a degree that also seems almost comical. (The head of an Iranian team set up to fight Mossad infiltration was himself a Mossad agent, as were twenty members of his team.). On-the-ground human intelligence has been a weakness of the U.S., but the Israelis have clearly excelled at that.

But the incredible precision of attacks — you’ve probably seen the video of a top Iranian commander eliminated in his car by a drone strike while surrounding traffic was unharmed — is something new. So is the coordination.

This is something that the U.S. has never deployed before, and neither has anyone else. We saw foreshadowings in the second Iraq War, but nothing on this level. Our enemies can’t hide, and the U.S. has deployed cheap attack drones that nobody knew about before. Iran no longer has a navy, except on the floor of the ocean, its army and internal security forces are largely leaderless and in disarray, and its financial and oil-export infrastructure are in ruins.

And as the Wall Street Journal reports, it’s being made personal:

The Journal reviewed the contents of one call between a senior Iranian police commander and an agent of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign-intelligence service.

“Can you hear me?” a Mossad agent can be heard, speaking in Farsi. “We know everything about you. You are on our blacklist, and we have all the information about you.”

“OK,” the commander said in the recording.

“I called to warn you in advance that you should stand with your people’s side,” the Mossad agent said. “And if you will not do that, your destiny will be as your leader. Do you hear me?”

“Brother, I swear on the Quran, I’m not your enemy,” the commander said. “I’m a dead man already. Just please come help us.”

It’s a new kind of warfare, one to a degree foreseen in past years, but never achieved by anyone.

Some of this is leadership. We went from a Department of Defense to a Department of War, and it shows. (I believe it was a Robert Heinlein character in Starship Troopers who said “you don’t win a war by defense but by attack—no ‘Department of Defense’ ever won a war; see the histories.”) I don’t know if Trump and Hegseth had that particular quotation in mind when they pushed the renaming, but certainly they had the principle.

But there’s a lot of followership here too. We built a substantially new force and a new doctrine and none of it leaked. (The Iranians were certainly caught by surprise). The coordination has worked, apparently, very well. We’ve seen a degree of precision and competence that many of us doubted the American military was up to after years of DEI seminars in the place of training. This can be encouraged from the top, but it has to be implemented at the middle and lower tiers of command, and it wasn’t all developed in the past year. Some of the people sitting through Biden era DEI seminars must have still been thinking about their jobs. Kudos to the folks who kept the fires of competence burning (if sometimes shrouded, perhaps for self-protection) under the Obama and Biden administrations. I look forward to reading a history of the stages that got us to this position.

Meanwhile, we’re seeing a new kind of diplomacy, though that’s only beginning to show. Trump asked the Europeans for help, but he knew what the answer was going to be: A big nope, coupled with an admission that they couldn’t do much anyway. (Britain’s naval situation is particularly sad.) The Iran operation has exposed that U.S. capabilities are exceed what everyone (including the Chinese) thought, while it has also exposed that the Europeans aren’t even a paper tiger. A paper tiger, after all, at least has the semblance of a tiger. When the Europeans, and Canada’s Mark Carney, complained that no one consulted them the response was “why should we?” That works a permanent change in U.S. / Europe relations.

Now the Administration is floating the possibility that the end-state of this war may not be what some people expect. Iran may be vanquished, but the assumption that the Strait of Hormuz will open and oil will flow as before, but more freely, is now looking uncertain. Why should America spend its blood and treasure to protect the flow of oil to Europe and China?

Trump loves tariffs; maybe an “oil security fee” on each barrel exiting the Gulf will appear. Whatever it is, it won’t be business as usual.

And now a warning: Everything so far has worked very, very well. Much of it depends on advanced technology (including, apparently, extensive use of AI in targeting and damage assessment). That’s great, and a tremendous force multiplier. But you can bet that the Chinese, among others, are already reverse-engineering this stuff and coming up with ways to penetrate and subvert our AI systems, just as our side penetrated and subverted Iranian institutions. It won’t always be this easy.

In my second-favorite Han Solo quote,* “great kid! Don’t get cocky.”

___

* My favorite Han Solo quote is his response to “more money than you can imagine” — “I don’t know, I can imagine an awful lot.”

And if you enjoy these essays, please take out a paid subscription. It means a lot to me when you do.