Iran Update: Day 6

I’ve been wondering for a while about a theory of victory that does not depend on ground troops. To have any realistic chance of toppling the Islamic Republic the US/Israel need someone on the ground, whether US forces or proxies supported by Special Operations Forces. It looks like our proxy force in Iran is going to be based on a Kurdish militia?

One person familiar with the discussions said that the idea would be for Kurdish armed forces to take on the Iranian security forces and pin them down to make it easier for unarmed Iranians in the major cities to turn out without getting massacred again as they were during unrest in January.

Another US official said the Kurds could help sow chaos in the region and stretch the Iranian regime’s military resources thin. Still other ideas have centered around whether the Kurds could take and hold territory in the northern part of Iran that would create a buffer zone for Israel.

None of that sounds like a good idea to me… encourages genocidal attacks by the IRGC without really have any kind of serious ends-ways-means thinking about how to displace the Iranian government. There seems to be an appreciation that while the Kurds could wreak havoc they’re extremely unlikely to be able to march on Tehran and eliminate the Islamic Republic by force, which is why we have the hope-and-prayer for urban protestors. This is a recipe for a lot of death; unlike the air campaign, also seems very difficult to “turn off” a Kurdish uprising. On the upside the US military has decades of experience working with the Kurds and generally speaking the relationship between the military and Kurdish authorities is quite good.

• The F-35I gets its first air-to-air kill, shooting down an Iranian Yak-130 trainer/light attack craft. More broadly, most of the military aviation community seems to assess that the wars against Iran have been Good for the F-35 in the sense of providing some proof of concept and no losses thus far.
• More on how the Pentagon is using Claude for target selection and for general campaign planning.
• Fault lines in the administration: Hegseth the Hawk, while Rubio backs de-escalation.
• Take extraordinary care with claims that the US is about to run short of munitions. Some categories are running short, especially long-range deep strike munitions. Other stuff (JDAMs) remains plentiful, and it’s not super likely that the US will be forced to quit the campaign because of a lack of weapons.
• Also there’s some pushback on the story about Christian evangelism in run up to the attack. I’m agnostic about this (no pun intended) but I’d say it’s probably wise to hesitate and evaluate the soundness of the claim before additional sharing.
• Steve Witkoff may not be very good at his job… except insofar as his job is about genuflecting before Trump.

Photo Credit: By I, Persia2099, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9454126