President Trump, Secretary of Defense Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Cain all expressed great satisfaction with the military achievement of bombing three critical nuclear sites in Iran. From the description of “Operation Midnight Hammer” provided by General Cain, it was indeed an extraordinarily complex mission with dozens of critical elements of Army, Air Force, Navy and Space forces. To say nothing of the complex intelligence assets dedicated to the operation, prior, during and post-strike. Indeed, synchronizing such a mission with thousands of moving parts is incredible. President Trump declared that no other nation on earth could have done this. They were justifiably proud of all those involved.
That is one way of looking at it.
However, another perspective offers some useful context. Consider that it took all the incredible resources General Cain listed in an amazingly complicated operation (at very high cost), to blow up just three targets in Iran—a country with air defense that has been largely destroyed by Israel. The seven B-2s used are a third of the entire US inventory.
Analyzed by President Xi or Putin, they could conclude something different. A good portion of America’s military/intelligence capability was absorbed by three (albeit very hard) targets in a relatively lightly defended country.
I happened to be on an SAS flight on final approach into Dulles Airport at just about the exact time the B-2s were dropping their munitions in Iran. I was returning from a trip to Norway where there were meetings on shipping in Ålesund, a town on the west coast. Driving there from Oslo you experience amazing natural beauty. But almost as profoundly striking is the number of long, well-constructed tunnels through the very hard rock of Norway’s shear mountains. Some are miles long.
According to Perplexity, Norway has around 1800 road and rail tunnels totaling over 1,000 km. If you count hydropower tunnels there are thousands more (on order of 6000 km). It would take a lot of B-2 “packages” to destroy even a few of them.
The point is not that the US will find it difficult to bomb the hell out of Norway (though some Norwegians may worry about that), but that our “peer” or “near-peer” adversaries may conclude something about US capabilities that is different than the impression of indomitable US military prowess we might like. We should not deceive ourselves that we can deter our enemies convincingly based on the mission completed over Iran. Tunnels offer an advantage to the defender as Hamas has demonstrated in Gaza.
By the way, a peace agreement will be a hard target as well. Pity the poor weapons inspectors who will at some point have to account for all the nuclear materials and equipment that has just been blown to smithereens. The experience in Iraq proved how challenging creating a WMD “material balance” in a post-conflict landscape can be. It is hard to imagine a resolution of the Iran conflict without a mechanism to assure the accounting of all their pre-war capacity. It is also hard to imagine an inspection regime that will satisfy the skeptics after war that has destroyed or dispersed equipment, materials and documentation. But that is another political problem and another case where the experience in Iraq is cautionary.
The Iran problem has not gone away. It will dog the Administration for the rest of its term one way or another. President Trump will own it even if the yesterday’s mission was a “one and done” military event.