In what we might wish was satire from the likes of The Onion, CNN reported Sunday that U.S. Central Command (the command running the war with Iran) sent an email last week to military analysts unabashedly proclaiming that top military leaders “are looking for new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran.” CNN cited a source familiar with the message when describing the email’s content and a second source who said a senior U.S. military officer sent the message.
This may be the most straight-forward admission we will get that the country’s plan in Iran is failing.
MS NOW has not independently confirmed the email, but Capt. Timothy Hawkins, a spokesman for CENTCOM, told CNN, “U.S. Central Command has a long history of thinking and working in innovative ways,” and he said Adm. Brad Cooper, head of CENTCOM, “reaches out to members of our great team, regardless of rank, to achieve the highest levels of operational performance possible.”
This may be the most straight-forward admission we will get that the country’s plan in Iran is failing. The floundering about for help directly reflects the Trump administration’s desperate hunt for an off-ramp to its unsuccessful war of choice. The Strait of Hormuz remains straitjacketed, the Iranian drive for nuclear weapons remains unchanged and slowly mounting U.S. military casualties and the price tag of ineffective air strikes are ratcheting up pressure on the White House to end this conflict.
And by the sound of this email, such high-level desperation to achieve something the Trump administration could tout as success while bringing the war to an end has trickled down the military chain of command.
In addition to it acknowledging the obvious — that the war is not going well — this email is disturbing on several fronts. First, it represents an admission that a long-known truism remains true: that an air campaign alone will not achieve strategic objectives. Such wisdom should have been heeded before the United States dropped thousands of missiles and bombs on Iran.
More worryingly, the request for “creative and unconventional ideas” reveals a military command carelessly subverting thoughtful, institutionalized and professional processes for developing operational plans in favor of a cavalier, ad hoc indiscriminate solicitation for war plans. Military plans are supposed to closely link tactics and plans to the achievement of strategic and operational objectives. Tactics are to be linked to strategic outcomes. Tactics and operations must also adhere to the laws and customs of war — rules our country helped create so that militaries can succeed even while lessening the inevitable suffering war causes.
It cannot be overstated that asking troops to brainstorm how to beat an enemy is not how professional, competent militaries achieve success. But even worse is the rhetoric about punishment. The laws of war, which are deeply ingrained in U.S. law and policy , are not about punishment.
Such laws, which leave ideas of medieval retribution in the past, make careful distinctions between combatants and civilians and between military objectives and protected civilian objects. Those laws grant our military a legal privilege to destroy military targets and kill military personnel and demand that they always take care to spare civilians and civilian objects, such as homes and infrastructure, from harm. The law recognizes that “the only legitimate object which States should endeavor to accomplish during war is to weaken the military forces of the enemy.” Punishment should not enter the equation.
Indeed, the Geneva Conventions strictly prohibit the practice of collective punishment — of penalizing Iranians for the wrongs of their government. And finally, the law only permits narrow “belligerent reprisal” measures to force an enemy back into compliance with the law of war. Such limited measures are not justified as punishment or revenge; they must follow a strict protocol, and they cannot be used, for example, against civilians and prisoners of war.
Punishment, therefore, is a dirty word in modern legal warfare, and it is not compatible with professionalism or fighting with honor. The idea that the U.S. should be punishing Iran signifies a removal of legal gloves and the issuing of just deserts. It erodes the law of war and its protections for those caught up in war.
Attacking Iranian military sites and killing Iranian military members are lawful acts of war designed to bring about operational and strategic ends. That’s not punishment. But calls for “creative and unconventional” ideas — after the previous thousands of U.S. strikes on military sites — sound dangerously like a willingness to destroy Iran’s power and water desalination plants, as President Donald Trump has already threatened.
In the entire body of the law of war, punishment only comes up in relation to states appropriately punishing those who violate its precepts. Case in point: The law of war requires that the U.S. investigate why its military destroyed an Iranian girls’ school in February, killing more than 120 girls and their teachers, and it mandates that the U.S. accordingly punish any grossly reckless or intentional conduct that may have caused that tragedy. The punishment rhetoric in CENTCOM’s email echoes the Trump administration’s trend of upending the international system and rule of law established after World War II to lessen war’s impact on civilians. In the context of Trump’s rhetoric about eliminating the Iranian civilianization and bombing Iran “back to the Stone Ages” to the illegality of the war with Iran in the first place, soliciting military tactics to “punish” Iran smacks of disregard of such pragmatic safeguards.
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