Bringing Iran to ‘Goldilocks’ point underpins the rationale behind this war

It is a commonplace idea that the US and Israel have gone to war against Iran without a clear plan. But a military strategy is not only what a combatant country says; it is also what it does – and a week into the war, a lot has been done that speaks eloquently about the underlying strategy.

After the opportunistic strike that killed supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the early choices made by the US and Israel were driven by necessity and efficiency. The need to eliminate Iran’s air defences dictated that they were targeted first. With complete control of the skies, a war that was never likely to involve ground forces was safe to proceed.

Iran has been divided up: targets in its north and west have been apportioned mostly to Israel; the south, largely to the US. The reasons for this are not strategic,simply to do with the most effective conduct of the war from Israeli airbases and US ships. But they have led to a concentration of Israeli air superiority on the centres of power and decision-making in Tehran.

With the path cleared for an air war, and spheres of action decided, Burcu Ozcelik, senior fellow at the military and strategic thinktank the Royal United Services Institute, sees the shape of an overarching plan emerging: “The pattern… is to decapitate Iran’s leadership, dismantle its capacity to wage war and deny it the means to rearm and regroup.”

The former US ambassador Michael Carpenter, now at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in Washington, told The Observer that, within that overall strategy, it is possible to pick out subtle differences between the US and Israel. “Israel is more focused on striking Iran's leadership, security forces, and the missile launchers that most directly threaten it. The US is more focused on command-and-control networks, Iran’s naval forces, and missile launchers that threaten US forces and Gulf partners. Israel’s military and intelligence services appear to be more focused on trying to achieve regime change.”

The decapitation strategy has concentrated on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a paramilitary state within the state of Iran, and the guardian of its Islamic revolution. Attacks on IRGC bases throughout the country continued all week.

The most likely explanation for the deadly bombing of the girls’ school in Minab, southern Iran, in which the authorities say at least 168 people were killed, is that US forces were operating on old information that it was part of an IRGC compound.

On Friday, Israel’s air force struck 35 sites linked to the IRGC and other elements of the security state in western Iran, plus a military university. If the IRGC fractures, said Ozcelik, chaos is likely to ensue. But logic suggests that is envisaged as part of the planning because “it is difficult to imagine that, after a war effort of this scale, either the US or Israel would accept a political outcome that leaves the IRGC intact as the central governing power”.

The great gamble of the US and Israel may be that they can bring Iran to a sort of “Goldilocks point” – that is, just right – of near, but not complete, collapse. “In other words,” said Ozcelik, “they are predicated on regime transformation – something short of total state collapse, but still a decisive alteration in how state power is organised, exercised and enforced.” The next phase of the war, already under way, will focus harder on Iran’s drone and missile production, storage and launch facilities, to set back its ability to strike at other countries. The IISS sees evidence of this tactic in the repeated attacks in areas such as the city of Kermanshah. Many missile facilities there are partially underground and resilient against single strikes.

Where may an optimistic adviser to Donald Trump see all this leading long-term? “Planners,” said Ozcelik, “may be tempted to look to Syria as a reference point. A popular, non-violent uprising against the regime eventually led to the toppling of President Bashar al-Assad, despite deep external sponsorship of the entrenched dictator.” But, she noted, “between point A and B in Syria lay 13 brutal years that included a multisided civil war and the emergence of armed radical groups”.

Photograph by various sources / AFP via Getty Images