John W. Spencer is a retired United States Army officer, urban warfare researcher and author. He currently serves as chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute, codirector of the Urban Warfare Project, Chair of War Studies at the Madison Policy Forum, and host of the Urban Warfare Project Podcast at West Point. He is also a founding member of the International Working Group on Subterranean Warfare.

Spencer has provided expert commentary on contemporary conflicts, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine. His analyses of Israel’s campaign in Gaza following October 7 have been widely cited, including by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

You may be the most quoted military expert in history.
I’m honored.

Over the past week, we have witnessed one of the most amazing bombing campaigns of all time. Would you agree?
Absolutely. The synchronization and lethality are unparalleled. There has never been a military operation in history where the entire political and military leadership of the opposing force was eliminated in the first four hours, if not the first four minutes.

How significant is that when there are clearly others who can step into their roles?
I get that the bench is deep, but this is what I call the first neurological strike. War is always a contest of will. There have usually been other ways to attack the will of the political leadership, the military and even the population, but this is a change in the character of warfare, severing the brain before the other strikes begin. Those directing the enemy’s strategy—the commanders of their military forces, the defense minister, the chief of staff, the head of the missile command, etc.—were basically eliminated. I understand that they’ll just be replaced, but you can’t say that Israel and America haven’t made it clear, in both the 12-day war and this one, that whoever wants to be next in command will also be next on the target list.
I use the analogy—and of course all analogies have their limitations—that if before the boots hit the ground on D-Day they had eliminated Hitler, along with his successor and all of his field marshals, it might not have necessarily won the war, but it would have definitely changed the paradigm of what the enemy thought he was going to do. That’s the Sun Tzu aspect of The Art of War: you win by attacking the enemy’s strategy.

Sometimes it’s good to keep the enemy’s leadership intact so you know with whom to negotiate as the war progresses. In the current situation, who would that be?
They will appoint someone, and you also have to look at the goals for this war as stated by the political leadership. This is about changing behavior, and one of the strategies for that is this decapitation, but you also want to eliminate their capability. I believe that they realized in past negotiations that the differences were irreconcilable, so now they want to see if…well, not the next ones in line, but the third or fourth ones in line will be different.
They also want to see if the weakening of their power, which is also one of the outcomes of their elimination, leads to a popular uprising or whatever comes after that, and then those people will change the behavior of the regime. That’s why I believe this isn’t necessarily a regime-change war but a behavior-change war aimed at the leadership of Iran. If the outcome is regime change, as most people believe it will be, then you get that net result.
That’s why the other line of operation is to eliminate Iran’s capability. In some aspects, you hope for a change of behavior in the long run, but in the short run you eliminate anyone’s capability, regardless of their behavior. That means destroying their nuclear program, their missile program and their navy, which are definitely measurable, whereas when you get into the cognitive aspect it’s a lot harder.

There are experts such as Robert Pape and others saying that what America is trying to do flies against historical evidence showing that these types of wars cannot be won from the air. Does what America and Israel are trying to do contradict what we already know?
Not necessarily. I know Pape well, but if you want to look at bombing campaigns that changed regimes, there are two recent ones: Libya and Serbia. And if you want to look at campaigns that changed behavior, you can also look at the Persian Gulf War, which changed Saddam’s behavior not just in Kuwait but also with regard to his nuclear program.
When you start comparing what’s going on to past campaigns, you also have to look at whether bombing is really the only strategy here. That is why I don’t like it when analysts only judge what they can see versus what they know. You can’t make comparative analyses to similar situations and say that you won’t have success without boots on the ground, which gets you to the question of whether there will be boots on the ground.
Then there are nuances about whose boots on the ground you’re talking about, because right now there’s the threat of Kurdish boots and you also have the Azeris, the Baluchis and the possibility of a popular revolt. The administration has said that they aren’t done weakening the power of the regime. So I would challenge Pape and ask him, “Are you saying that no bombing campaign has ever weakened the power of the enemy?” That would clearly not hold up to historical comparison.
And after weakening that power, a popular revolt is absolutely in the cards, although America has told them not to come out yet. So is the goal to weaken the regime, remove its capabilities and then have the not-our-boots-on-the-ground part of the plan as phase two? We’ll see. But this is why you can’t create analysis based on what you infer the plan to be.

Do you think that the United States, Israel and the rest of the world have overestimated the potential for a popular revolt? Meaning that there may be millions of Iranians who would want to see that, but in a country that large they may still be the minority.
I don’t think so. You can’t overestimate what a popular revolt can do; that’s historical. In fact, I think people may have underestimated how much Iranians want a change in policy. But there are limitations to what a popular revolt without arms can do, which also comes with the assumption that there aren’t any plans to use arms.
This brings us back to the question of whose boots we’re talking about. During the 1979 Iranian Revolution, hundreds of thousands of soldiers refused to follow orders to put it down, and many even went over to the revolution. Is that a possibility? That has certainly been a very large part of the current plan with the psychological operations—the text messages and TV, and they even got hold of the prayer app—as well as public statements to the regime, the military and even the IRGC offering immunity, asking them to lay down their arms and for soldiers to defect. It isn’t a black-and-white question of whether the people will come out. I think that’s a given, because they’ve already shown that they would.
Again, this is why the plan isn’t only to attack the political leadership or the IRGC. You can see that they’re also attacking the Basij headquarters, the police headquarters and other important locations so that if there were a popular revolt, it would have a better chance of success. Hopefully we’ll see defections from people who recognize that the regime doesn’t have a future, which is also a goal in war. You want to convince the enemy that he has no hope of survival.

You are a man of science who understands military strategy. When you calculate, you make rational calculations. But do those calculations take into account the response of an irrational enemy?
They do. War is an act of force to compel your enemy to your will. You want the threat of force to compel him to do what you want, but there is also irrationality and uncertainty, so you have to account for both.
That is also why I say that the continued, unprecedented eliminations of political leadership and military command are part of getting rid of the irrational until you get to a rational actor. That is clearly all part of the plan.

 

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