In last week's address, the US President Donald tramp said that "there has been a regime change" in Iran and that the US is "well on its way to achieving all of its goals very quickly."
"Never in the history of warfare has the enemy suffered such clear and devastating losses on such a large scale in just a few weeks," Trump said.
The United States and Israel claim that Iran's conventional navy, air force, major weapons systems and weapons production have been severely damaged after weeks of airstrikes, writes Deutsche Welle.
Trump recently told the Financial Times that since the start of the attack on Iran on February 28, 13.000 targets in that country have been hit. At the same time, the Israeli army announced that 80 percent of Iran's air defense systems had been destroyed, and that attacks on facilities for the production of military equipment were continuing.
The Iranian regime moans about that mass of firepower, but still holds on. He launches counterattacks and seemingly manages to coordinate his defensive strategy. Former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is dead, killed during the first attacks on Tehran.
His son Mojtaba has reportedly taken over, but has not been seen in public since the start of the war, prompting rumors about his condition. Much of the regime's senior leadership and security apparatus has been killed or continues to be the target of US and Israeli attacks.
"The steady decline in Iranian military capabilities due to US and Israeli airstrikes has absolutely limited Iran's ability to retaliate. But the regime has proven itself to be a master of asymmetric warfare, and it has had decades to plan for such a scenario," Jason H. Campbell, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Studies, told DW.
Iran had decades to prepare for war
For decades, the Islamic Republic regime has funded its extended arms across the Middle East while suppressing popular discontent at home while sanctions over its nuclear program hammered the economy. Whenever Iranians demanded civil rights or opposed the regime, as happened earlier this year, pro-regime forces such as the Basij militia would respond by killing thousands of protesters.
In a recent essay in the journal Foreign Affairs, Iranian-American anthropologist Narges Badjogli points out that international isolation is part of how the Iranian regime has developed its survival tactics. Tehran's strategy of asymmetric warfare "emerged out of necessity", when the US imposed an arms embargo on Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
After the bloody war with Iraq in the 1980s, “what began as improvisation evolved into a coherent doctrine” of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which is a kind of Praetorian Guard of the regime in Tehran.
APTOPIX Iran US IsraelExplosion in Tehran
Iran has begun developing its own missiles and drones that can be produced quickly and cheaply.
Today, that asymmetric capacity has grown into a well-coordinated combination of attack drones, cyber-warfare and militant proxy networks. Those capacities are largely financed by oil revenues, which Iran makes by selling to buyers such as China, successfully circumventing US sanctions even while the war is ongoing.
"Iran seems capable of maintaining a credible asymmetric threat for an extended period of time," Kelly A. Grieco, a strategic analyst at the research Stimson Center, told DW. She indicates that Iran's conventional air force, naval and ballistic missile capabilities have been severely weakened, but notes that there is still a residual missile capability.
Iranian cheap drones
Iran's drone threat, however, is more sustainable than its ballistic missiles. Tehran's strategy is based on the Shahed, a one-way attack drone that costs between $20.000 and $50.000. The small remote-controlled aircraft is equipped with precision guidance systems and has a range of 2.000 kilometers. Russia used it intensively against Ukraine.
Iran has fired thousands of such drones since the start of the war, combining them with more expensive ballistic missiles in an attempt to defeat air defenses. Most of the drones were shot down, but some managed to get through. In one such attack on the American base in Kuwait, six soldiers died.
Photo: AP / Efrem Lukatsky, FileShahed drone
Although the U.S. military uses mostly cheaper short-range systems, such as anti-aircraft guns and smaller missiles, for drone defense, Iran still has thousands of drones at its disposal, and they can still be produced quickly. When advanced air defense systems like the $4 million Patriot air defense system are used against Shahed, the costs quickly rise for the side using the US-made weapons.
Iran's drone production is "distributed, the components are mostly dual-purpose, and the assembly can be done in a garage," Grieco says, adding that there are reports that Russian-made variants of those drones have also been used in Iranian attacks.
"If Russian production supports Iranian supplies, Western degradation timelines become significantly more difficult to predict," Griko adds.
Bottleneck: Strait of Hormuz
In addition to cheap drones, Iran can boast of another huge advantage - geography. Tehran's threat to block 20 percent of the world's oil supplies in the narrow Strait of Hormuz has long served as a major deterrent against attempts to topple the Islamic regime by force.
According to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), senior Iranian officials, including the speaker of Iran's parliament, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, are now signaling that they want to use the strait as leverage "to force concessions and secure strategic objectives."
Using the rugged coastal terrain as cover, Iran is able to use drones, naval mines and speedboats to threaten slow-moving oil tankers. Just last week, Iran attacked two civilian ships in the Persian Gulf, ISW reported.
Photo: AP Photo/Altaf QadriStrait of Hormuz: Iran blocked the passage and caused a shock in the global oil market
"That's the crux of the challenge for the US, and therefore for much of the global economy," says Campbell of the Washington-based Near East Institute. "Iran does not need to attack regularly to maintain influence over the Strait of Hormuz, it can only periodically demonstrate that it is capable of attacking targets it considers a threat or simply those that do not obey Iranian dictates."
"Any purely military option that would actually 'open' the strait so that shipping could return to normal would require tens of thousands of troops to occupy and hold a significant portion of the coast," adds Campbell.
"Those forces would likely also face strong insurgent resistance on the ground, and would have to remain in their positions indefinitely. The cost, both in terms of casualties and funding, would be astronomical."
Campbell believes it will be difficult to see a return to open shipping in the strait "without a broader political agreement".
The Iranian regime just needs to survive.
If it is taken into account that the support in the US for some kind of ground war is weak, and that at the same time the global markets are nervous, Trump could relent. The US president has insisted that Tehran is the one seeking negotiations, although Iran's surviving leaders deny that they are in direct talks with the Trump administration.
Current senior Iranian officials are considered to be even more hard-line and more ready to escalate than their predecessors, Iran expert Ali Vaez told Foreign Policy magazine.
Photo: AP Photo/Vahid SalemiTehran: Support for Iran's leadership
It is also unclear what the Trump administration means when it says regime change has "already occurred." Iranian President Massoud Pezeshkian, who is in power until 2024, published an open letter to the American public last week warning that "the path of confrontation is more costly and futile than ever before."
Regardless of whether Trump backs down or escalates the situation by sending US troops into the field, there is no clear path to take away Tehran's ability to influence energy supplies. A quick victorious war and rapid regime change in Tehran are unlikely.
"If the criterion for the Iranian regime is that it can maintain some low-level threat to the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, it will probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future," concluded Campbell.
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