What did we learn, CENTCOM?
Receipts for the Professional Class
Well CENTCOM, you finally got your war…and what did we learn?
That you didn’t bother to learn from any of the other wars.
I’ve always found the obsession with the Iran threat to be an insult to people’s intelligence. It’s not that I care for the regime, I’m quite glad the Ayatollah is dead. The regime was (and still is) evil. But it was also quite clear that with the death of Soleimani years ago, Israeli campaigns against Hezbollah, and the punch of COVID-19, Iranian power has been on the decline for some time. Despite this decline, Iran continued to be an obsession for a lot of DC, partially because of GWOT but also before, for a long time. In fact, it was a blind spot among many China hawks who would clearly recognize the PRC threat but who were unable to decouple that reality with the reality of a middling Iran they once fought against in Iraq. Now that we’re weeks into a war that has seen us touch a load-bearing wall of the global economy and burned through out weapons stockpiles, I’ve got some scores to settle. So let’s start with a little myth-busting.
Shattering Realities
Let’s review some talking points first to remind you of the sense of scale between the Iran and PRC threat:
1. The Iranian navy was an existential threat with a few dozen rusted ships (mostly amphibs and small boats)? The PLAN will soon have 400 and they’re a lot more capable.
2. The IRGC was a threat with a few hundred long-range missiles? The PLA has tens of thousands.
3. Iranian asymmetric warfare was a globe-spanning threat? Try PRC influence operations, dual-use infrastructure, and commercial ships loaded with containerized fires.
4. Iran might get a nuke? The PRC has embarked on the fastest and largest nuclear arsenal expansion in decades.
5. Oh the Iranian military industry was building conventional weapons? *Gestures at PRC industrial capacity*
6. We didn’t know the Iranian drone threat was so serious and confounding for our air defenses? The Ukrainians have been swatting Shaheds like flies for years now. Hell, we proudly reverse-engineered that very drone into LUCAS. WHICH WE THEN USED ON IRAN.
7. CUAS and Ukraine. Oh, we don’t need Ukraine’s help fighting drones? Because we keep burning exquisite assets on Shaheds and are running out of ammo. Maybe shot doctrine and cheap CUAS matters. The Ukrainians offered their help and we said no. Absolute malpractice.
8. SLOCs are hard. Yeah turns out that tightly contested littoral spaces are super hard. Maybe we should develop forces to control those. Sure hope CENTCOM advocates haven’t spent years trying to fight that sort of force development…oh wait. That is exactly what they were doing as the Marine Corps focused on Force Design 2030 and the creation of Marine Littoral Regiments.
9. Bombing to win, doesn’t. The Air Force keeps trying but it’s not working. Surely it’ll be different this time. Almost like all of history says ground forces are needed to seize and control territory in order to effect political change (ie war is politics) to meet strategic objectives.
10. This doesn’t guarantee the end of a regime friendly to the PRC. And the PRC only has friends to gain and we only have allies to lose. We haven’t yet identified a valid successor regime that would in fact be opposed to PRC influence. We’re costing out allies a lot of money and the PRC’s strategic efforts to protect themselves from these sorts of shocks sure look smart right about now.
On Lessons Unlearned
A common refrain in PLA military studies for American students is “the PLA is a learning organization” I always thought that was a dumb, patronizing comment. Of course the PLA is a learning organization, so is the US military. One only need look at all the PLA self-reflections on their shortcomings and their analysis of previous US wars to see that they are not mindless automatons. They are more like us than most care to admit. And as technologies proliferate and other militaries learn lessons from the wars of the world, we should be prepared for everyone to evolve. Thus, lessons are not confined to a particular theater when even middling powers can produce massed attritable systems and long-range missiles.
And I suppose that’s why I find myself staring in dumbstruck awe at CENTCOM’s (and thereby the US military’s) apparent inability to live beyond the year 2003. I have some questions. I’ve written more than a few articles here on lessons learned from Ukraine and elsewhere for the US military. There are plenty of US military publications on lessons learned and highlight reel upon highlight reel of open-source analysis. We have entire think tanks, journals, and internal knowledge repositories to share battlefield lessons learned and to understand the enemy. But it seems the rumors about those lessons being confined to small corners or hubristically ignored by leaders seem to be affirmed. It’s not that we’re taking mass casualties from the Iranians the way we would from the PRC, it’s that the way we are losing equipment is embarrassing because we know already how to mitigate these losses. We are making conscious choices to be stupid. I know there’s a lot of government scandals these days, but these are the kind that will get a lot of people killed.
On lessons from Ukraine
Back in checks notes 2023, I wrote an article on lessons learned from Ukraine for the Taiwan fight. Let’s review them:
There Will be Blood: “Public tolerance for casualties is higher when the threat is existential. But that tolerance comes at a price: the expectation of enemy bloodletting and counteroffensives.” In other words, you had better get results if you start a war. In this case the casualties aren’t just in bodies, but in money. Losing control of the Strait of Hormuz, losing access to production (and in some case losing production facilities) of vast quantities of hydrocarbons, fertilizer, and precious Helium is quite the price for a war nobody asked for. Given the apparent lack of expectation of resistance and these sorts of casualties (or folks just didn’t care), I’d say we certainly didn’t learn those costs from Ukraine. It’s not like the world didn’t panic over the potential loss of Ukrainian grain and the potential for famine.
Attrition comes for everyone: “Attriting a large, committed force, especially one backed by a powerful nationalist narrative takes a lot of time even for the best militaries.” Well, the war’s still on and this was supposed to be our version of a special military operation so….no we did not learn this lesson.
Your pre-war stockpile is never enough: Nope, we definitely didn’t learn that one given all the recent reports about us nearly going Winchester a couple weeks into the war with Iran.
Sanctions are slow: “Just like body count, they come at a cost of expected results. The longer sanctions take to take effect, the more pressure the sanctioning government will feel from third parties who suffer the costs.” As I pointed out above, we clearly were not prepared for the economic shockwaves here. We’ve been sanctioning Iran for decades, but the physical sanction of a shut down Strait of Hormuz is causing real pain to countries around the world.
Unity is fleeting: “You should never assume that the enemy’s morale will collapse at first sight of trouble, particularly when the populace is under heavy surveillance and nationalist propaganda manipulation. Nor should you assume that Americans will always support your war.” The Iranians are still fighting, the people are suppressed because we let the regime murder thousands of protesters and dissidents, and we keep killing the people who can negotiate with us.
Escalation and Deterrence Aren’t Dictated by Mathematical Formulas: “reality demands we understand that people are prone to hysteria, paranoia, and ill-informed decision-making.” Hitting 10,000 targets as the DOD claims doesn’t seem to have deterred Iranian strikes or the Houthis from entering the war. And clearly this war wasn’t thought through on our side…
Offensives aren’t Linear: “First-mover advantage matters, but it isn’t all-powerful.” We struck first, hard, and the Iranians are not only still fighting but now we have to open the Strait or the world goes into global recession. Great job everyone.
Defense Requires Depth: The lessons in this section more specifically applied to Taiwan, but given we keep having refuelers and other aircraft hit on the ground in Saudi…I don’t think we’ve quite mastered this. Certainly we didn’t learn how important layered air defenses are against a high-low mix of missiles and cheap drones.
Ingenuity is Tactical: “Innovation is only as good as the window in which the enemy is caught off guard. If the enemy is allowed to survive long enough to either adapt or out innovate your technology and tactics, then the cycle begins anew.” Our AI-enabled targeting and LUCAS drones did not magically win the war. Yes, they’re another useful tool in the toolbox but they only provided new opportunities for us to exploit and it seems we have not adequately seized upon them. And so, we’ve allowed the enemy time to adapt and survive. Technical innovation is only as good as the effective application of said technology. Since this admin loves video games so much, let me put it in terms everyone will understand. As General Shepherd once said: “Learning to use the tools of modern warfare is the difference between the prospering of your people, and utter destruction... Sure it matters who's got the biggest stick, but it matters a helluva lot more who's swinging it.”
More than meets the eye: “the visibility of the conflict has created a sense of transparency to conflict and operations that simply isn’t based in reality.” The highlight reels and AI-generated content is really proving we won the war…the obsession with comms over physical effects is mind-numbing. Body counts and killcams are not measures of effectiveness, they are bloody pageantry.
Clearly we’re not learning, or at least the learning is not evenly distributed. It’s embarrassing.
Some additional thoughts updated for 2026
Russian Revenge: We’ve helped kill countless Russians in our aid of Ukraine (this is a good thing), but were we really so politically blinded that we didn’t think the Russians wouldn’t seize this opportunity to help the Iranians hurt us? C’mon. That is great power politics 101.
Regime Change: So what’s the plan here? The regime doesn’t seem any more interested in being friends and while the old Ayatollah may be gone, this doesn’t really solve the larger problem of regional competition or radicalism. How does this end? Because we can’t just walk away or else we will come back to this same problem every 6-18 months and we don’t have that kind of ammo. Did we really learn from Iraq that the problem was thunder running to Baghdad and not the fact that we created a power vacuum with a bunch of munitions in the hands of various radical factions?
Force exhaustion: Boy, if you thought these deployments to CENTCOM were burning Navy assets, can you imagine how much hurt a Pacific fight will put on our forces?…And that’s before we even start talking enemy action and the PLA’s ability to bring the hurt upon us. Whatever damage we recovered from from the exhaustion and maintenance shortages of the 2010s, we just brought back into being. Great work.
Hall of Mirrors: We simultaneously overhyped the Iranian threat and underestimated them and we are now realizing that we took a sledgehammer to a load bearing wall of the global economy that we cannot easily repair. The economic shockwaves are only beginning and it’s likely we won’t see the full effects for sometime as global agriculture, industrial production, and semiconductor manufacturing are all impacted by a choked Hormuz Strait and decimated Gulf industrial sector.
Maybe it actually matters to have actual professionals as decisionmakers and staff. Maybe there’s actual a real world where understanding how and why the world functions as it does matters. Maybe what happens over there actually matters for the Homefront. Maybe we can’t just run away from global responsibility and smash things as we please in our retreat. Maybe there are metrics to success other than body counts, online engagement, and television ratings. Who knew?
We didn’t learn a damn thing.
If you would like to read more about the future of US-China conflict, the challenges of modern war, or what happens next, check out my novel, EX SUPRA. It’s all about the world after the fall of Taiwan, an isolationist and hyper-partisan America, and World War III. It was nominated for a Prometheus Award for best science fiction novel and there’s a sequel in the works! Don’t forget to share and subscribe!