Iran May Defeat the United States and Conquer the Middle East… Unless!!!

By Col. Dan Dickerson

It is a common human tendency to continue to apply old rules and to follow old procedures and processes until such time as the cool, hard reality of catastrophe forces us to do otherwise. People behave this way. So do nations and armies.

In evaluating Iran’s military capabilities, Western political and military leaders, through their mindset and experience, have focused on Iran’s conventional approach to warfare and not on the actions of Iran’s military leaders. These discussions have centered on a war that would last no longer than three weeks, considering the inadequacies of Iran’s air and naval forces. U.S. naval forces would clear the sea of any naval threat while fighters and bombers would destroy key Iranian targets. These tactics were successful initially in Iraq and Afghanistan; then the U.S. forces became bogged down by an enemy who refused to fight by the Western concept of warfare. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. used modern weapons and tactics against an enemy who used low-tech weapons and asymmetrical warfare and was able to exhaust the will of the American people. Iran has the capacity to switch on and off, as Tehran sees fit, sabotage and terrorist attacks anywhere in the world. Iran’s concept of warfare is not restricted by borders or time and, while the West can deal with only one crisis at a time, Iran is capable of evoking multiple crises over widely dispersed geographic locations at the same time through proxies.

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