Iran Didn’t Need to Win The War. It Needed to Outlast It
Strategic success now belongs to international actors who embrace the guerrilla logic of asymmetry, attrition, decentralization, adaptation, and psychological exhaustion.
Introduction
The most enduring lesson of modern warfare may not come from advanced fighter jets, stealth bombers, or precision-guided munitions. It may come from guerrilla warfare.
For decades, military power has been measured through conventional metrics: the number of aircraft, tanks, ships, and soldiers a state can deploy. Western strategic thought has long been dominated by the search for a decisive battle, an idea that overwhelming force coupled with technological superiority and concentrated violence can compel an adversary into submission. Victory may thus be achieved through the destruction of an opponent’s military capacity and the erosion of its ability to continue fighting, or, as Clausewitz puts it, the breaking of its will to fight.
Yet recent conflicts have repeatedly challenged this. From Vietnam to Afghanistan, from Southern Lebanon to the Red Sea, materially weaker actors have demonstrated an extraordinary ability to frustrate, exhaust, and outlast militarily superior adversaries. This certainly was not the result of power accumulation in conventional hard power terms, but rather through the very refusal to fight on conventional terms.
The 2026 war involving Iran, Israel, and the United States offers the starkest reminder yet. As Erfan Fard observes, Israeli and US strikes substantially degraded Iran’s conventional military, damaging its air defense, navy, and command structure, and killing senior officials. The United States Central Command (CENTCOM) claims to have struck over 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours of the war and 5,000 within ten days. This was enabled by the Maven Smart System, built by Palantir and integrated with AI language models drawing from nearly 180 classified data sources to generate targeting and prioritization at a scale no human command chain could match. By any conventional measure, the campaign should have been decisive and the outcome unambiguous.
Yet declarations of decisive victory remain elusive, a paradox that has characterized the defining conflicts of the past half-century. The United States won most major battles in Vietnam, yet lost the war. Twenty years of military dominance in Afghanistan culminated in a Taliban return to power. Israel has repeatedly degraded Hezbollah’s military capabilities while remaining unable to eliminate it as a political and military force.
Winning Battles, But Not Wars
Dominant traditions in Western strategic thought, from Clausewitz’s decisive battle to Schelling’s coercive signaling, alongside their war-making institutions, rest on a quantifiable metric of success: body counts, numbers of destroyed launchers and navy ships, and the eliminated commander. All visible, politically actionable, and most importantly, announce-able. For more than two decades, it has shaped national security policy in Washington through one of its most seductive applications: decapitation strikes.
Trump’s declaration that Iran’s leaders were “all dead, so I think we won” was not an aberration of strategic illiteracy. It was the endpoint of a logic that Israel, Washington, and much of the Western security establishment have operated on for decades – the belief that killing the head kills the body.
Israel’s record is instructive precisely because of its consistency. Targeted killings stretch from German scientists assisting Egypt’s missile program in the 1960s to Iraqi scientists under Saddam, to Hamas commanders, to Hezbollah leadership, to Iranian military and political figures in 2026. The operational sophistication has only grown, particularly in terms of lethality, yet the strategic results have not. If every commander killed is replaced, and every decapitation produces adaptation, the failure has less to do with precision and more to do with defining success incorrectly.
The Guerrilla’s Logic Is a Strategy, Not a Tactic
Often, this occurs due to the treatment of asymmetry as a permanent advantage. That superior technology, like the F-35 Lightning II and Tomahawk missiles, and resources would reliably translate into decisive outcomes is opposite to the premise on which guerrilla strategies start. Instead, a political-military framework is designed to neutralize that advantage, built on the recognition that a weaker party cannot prevail by fighting on the stronger party’s terms.
This operates through two interlocking logics.
The first concerns the trade between time and space. Both Mao’s protracted warfare and Che Guevara’s Foco theory share a central premise: survival matters more than victory in any single engagement. By carefully regulating violence and exchanging space for time, a weaker force could convert an enemy’s material superiority into a logistical and political liability. The objective was not annihilation but endurance: sustaining pressure until the adversary’s domestic political constituency for continuing the war eroded faster than the capacity to fight.
In an era of deep economic interdependence, this logic carries greater force on the battlefield. As we have seen play out through Iran’s strategic and Mosaic defense doctrine, a strategic statement – denying America and Israel a decisive outcome by extending the conflict into a timeline where cumulative costs outpace potential gains – has essentially left the Trump administration “with no option but to settle for a deal that ends all fighting to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.” This not only represents protracted war logic at a state scale but also shows the development of guerrilla strategies in modern-day conflicts, where Iran traded military attrition for geo-economic disruption.
A targeted campaign of missile and drone strikes against commercial vessels, limited in number but calibrated for market impact, was sufficient to collapse transit volumes through the Strait of Hormuz by approximately 90%. The imposition of a coastal inspection corridor routing westbound tankers north around Larak Island under Iranian supervision allowed Tehran to reassert practical control over the waterway without formal interdiction, complicating any Western effort to force a clear resolution.
Critically, the costs were not absorbed by Iran alone. They were distributed across global energy markets, Asian fuel supplies, and international shipping and insurance industries. This is the geo-economic dimension of protracted warfare: the financial burden of conflict is exported well beyond the theatre of operations.
The second logic concerns where decisive pressure is applied. Conventional doctrine locates the centre of gravity on the battlefield – in the destruction of enemy forces and the seizure of territory. The guerrilla calculus places it in the political and psychological environment surrounding the conflict. The Houthis’ Red Sea campaign from 2023 onwards, for example, was not designed to defeat the US Navy in any conventional sense. Its objective was to demonstrate that the US Navy could not guarantee freedom of navigation; a narrower but strategically significant goal, and one they achieved. Global shipping rerouted, insurance premiums rose sharply, and naval assets were committed to open-ended deployments. These outcomes were produced by an actor with no air force, no blue-water navy, and defense resources that would not sustain a single American destroyer’s annual operating costs.
Attrition Has Become Democratized
The numbers make this argument more straightforward. Houthi drones costing between $20,000 and $40,000 forced US interceptor launches costing between $500,000 and $4 million per shot. The Navy expended nearly $1 billion in munitions over six months of Red Sea operations alone. During the Iran war, the US was reportedly spending $2 billion a day, with serious concern that interceptor stocks could be exhausted within weeks. Iran’s Shahed drones, at $20,000 to $35,000 each, were being met by Israeli Arrow interceptors at $3.5 million apiece. Israel’s Alma Research Centre summarized the dynamic plainly: “hundreds of dollars are defeating millions of dollars.”
This is a cost asymmetry deployed as a strategy. The point is not to match the adversary’s firepower but to make its deployment fiscally irrational over time – to grind the adversary’s political economy of weapons until continuation becomes more expensive than withdrawal. This is Mao’s logic, now expressed through industrial cost ratios rather than territorial exchange. By mid-2024, senior Pentagon officials were already describing their reliance on high-end interceptors as unsustainable, with production lags running to years rather than weeks.
Where air superiority was once the preserve of wealthy states able to afford advanced aircraft and the pilots to fly them, cheap attack drones are eroding that advantage with considerable speed. Hezbollah has moved towards locally manufactured drones costing approximately $300 to $400 each, produced using 3D printing, that penetrated Israeli armored vehicles and, on multiple occasions, defeated the Trophy active protection system on Merkava tanks.
Hamas, facing one of the most sophisticated surveillance architectures in the world, chose to minimize electronic communications entirely and used paragliders to breach Israeli defense, circumventing billions of dollars of technology through deliberate technological regression.
Iran, having lost most of its conventional naval capacity in the early strikes, deployed instead dispersed formations of armed speedboats – what analysts have called “mosquito fleets” – to assert practical control over the Strait of Hormuz without offering a concentrated target to strike. The informational dimension runs alongside this. A Shahed drone striking a US military position or penetrating the Iron Dome matters. The footage of that strike, released within hours across Telegram, may matter as much strategically.
What connects these cases goes beyond improvisation to an increasing adaptation by global political actors to the rise of irregular warfare and, therefore, to the development of alternative strategies. The Gulf states seemed to come to this conclusion during the attacks they faced from their neighbor, where, despite a formal American security commitment, some brought in Ukrainian military experts to advise on countering Shahed drone swarms. Ukraine’s relevance lay not in its conventional military capacity but in its experience adapting to irregular warfare and its military innovation in real time.
Battlefields of the Future, or the Past?
There is also a long-term dimension. Western militaries have prided themselves on the AI systems they have developed. But that technology no longer remains the exclusive property of states. Commercial drones, open-source satellite imagery, and AI-assisted planning tools are increasingly accessible to non-state and sub-state actors. The guerrilla of the twenty-first century may acquire in AI what the guerrilla of the twentieth acquired in the AK-47: a tool that dramatically lowers the barrier to effective, sustained warfare.
As Henry Kissinger observed of Vietnam, “the guerrilla wins if he does not lose; the conventional army loses if it does not win.” The 2026 war reproduced that same logic, only at a far greater scale. Until the strategic assumptions underpinning conventional military strategies are revised, the pattern will hold.
