Lawfare Daily: Ukraine, Iran, Taiwan, and the Short War Illusion

So far, the new Bundesliga-Saison and the new Bundesliga-Saison still stands for "Motire ich Mental" to sport directors.

“Because all of the games is still on the kick-based side, and if there is a kick-based, what does that mean?”

The kick-based is the four-hand fantasy "Fußball Manager", and that's the principle. It's a really simple thing. You can take a look at the rules, or you can take a look at the real Bundesliga-Saison profile. So, this time, you will see that you know football and the new Bundesliga-Saison. It's a very good, dreamy-oriented, very important thing. You can take a look at the rules and the side of the table with the kick-based, you can just take a look at the rules and the new Bundesliga-Saison. Good kick and fun.

So really, a catastrophic set of assumptions. They bought a day decapitated or assassinated Zelensky, and they showed up with their tanks that the Ukrainians would see them and just stop fighting. And as we know now, nothing can be further than the two. So really, a catastrophic set of assumptions. They bought a day decapitated or assassinated Zelensky, and they showed up with their tanks that the Ukrainians would see them and just stop fighting. And as we know now, nothing can be further than the two.

It's the Lafaire Podcast. I'm Natalie Orpett, Executive Editor of Lafaire, with Darren Massicott, Ariana Tabada-by, and Julia Curley.

“Dara is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment's Russia and Eurasia program.”

Ari is a vice president at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a contributing editor at Lafaire. And Julia is a Lafaire Public Service fellow and a 25-year veteran of the CIA. Whether it is to hold back its forces and slowly attribute a PLA or hide its leadership in the vast urban jungles of tiny cities. There are ways of dragging this conflict out that will be very uncomfortable for Beijing and could play to the strengths of the U.S. intervening on the outside.

Today, we're talking about the short war illusion. The idea that countries are susceptible to believing, that with the right strategy,

they can accomplish their goals with a quick war. We look at how that illusion is playing out in the wars between Russia and Ukraine, and between the United States and Russia, and how it could play out in the future, in a conflict between China and Taiwan. Okay, Julia, you wrote a piece recently for us in Lafaire that looked at the potential conflict between China and Taiwan. In particular, how China might be observing the world's observing recent conflicts and thinking about and perhaps planning for what it might do with respect to Taiwan.

And in your piece, you put together a very useful framework that I invited you and Dara and Ari to come on and talk about in the context, both of your piece, but also the two other main conflicts on everyone's mind, including the Chinese's mind. Right now, which is of course, Russia, Ukraine, and U.S. Iran. So, to get us started,

“you talk about what Kathal Nolan has termed a short war illusion. So, can you start by telling us what that means?”

Yeah, thanks so much, Natalie. So, you know, it's almost cliché to think about wars beginning with the concept that the troops will be home by Christmas. And it's often built around this idea that induces countries to launch wars of aggression, where they think that it will be short, sharp, and accomplish their objectives before the other side has an opportunity to fight back and it'll solve their political problems on the battlefield. And countries are frequently susceptible to the

illusion that they will win quickly, and they quickly find out that these are going to be long, slow, slugs, wars of aggression. And throughout history, if you're a military analyst, you're very familiar with with the calculations of Germany before both world wars, Japan, before World War II. And so, it's a useful framework to then look at two current conflicts in Ukraine and in Iran, where in the Russian case and in the U.S. case, both countries thought that these would be short

and sharp, and that their opponents would yield quickly, and both were wrong. And so, as a person that is studied China Taiwan extensively, this is another element of Beijing's thinking on China Taiwan. And so, as Beijing often is studying modern conflict for lessons learned for its own potential military operations, the peace is performing that exercise, looking at the potential lessons learned that Beijing might have from both the Russian and U.S. failures to achieve this kind of

short, sharp war. So, it is a sort of modern day analysis of these two earlier wars and several

described it, the phenomenon does seem very familiar from both of these other conflicts. I want to

“stick with Nolan's vocabulary here because I think it does provide useful framing for picking”

apart the phenomenon a little bit. So, the three, as I understand it, are decapitation, choke point denial, and protraction. So, can you just define each of those terms and then we will proceed to use them in the context of each of these other conflicts? Yeah, so the idea, you know, is a country is thinking about launching a short, sharp conflict. Often they think of an opening decisive blow, whether that's against the enemy's military, or in the case that we're talking

about here today, against the enemy's leadership, as that will paralyze the opposition and induce, you know, the enemy to capitulate quickly. Then there is a persistent phenomenon when they launch these wars of choice, that the offense is often quite expensive. The seizure of territory,

“the holding of bodies of water, often turns into much more of a slog, much more expensive in the”

cost of going on the offensive than it is to counter on the defense. And as we'll talk about in Iran and Ukraine's scenario, that's proved the case, and that's another one of these lessons that

the Chinese will be looking at. And then finally, the third category is really the result of the

first two, not panning out the way that the country launching the war expects, where the failure of those opening moves turns the war into the long, slow, war of attrition of endurance, that the whole short-sharp war was supposed to avoid. And in these cases, with Beijing watching, the winner of these contexts, are who is best able to endure a long-term conflict, both the costs, the material costs, but also the political costs at home of the conflict that may have

gone on a lot longer than the country's leadership has sold to its own public. Okay, so let us proceed to use that framework and talk about Russia and Ukraine in the first instance.

So, Dara, I want to come to you first on this issue of decapitation. So, this sounds very familiar

for those of us who followed the beginning of the war in Ukraine all the way back in 2022. It seemed very much like Russia's strategy was to do a quick hit on Kiv to assassinate Zelensky, and things would undoubtedly be over from there. That's clearly not what happened. But before we talk about why it didn't happen the way that they had planned, I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on why that would have been the strategy that Russia landed on and frankly, in particular, because

Russians too are historians of the military and certainly were aware of the failure of this phenomenon in many, many other contexts over history. Well, thanks so much. This is actually a very common mistake that the Russians in before them, the Soviets used to make. When entering into a war, we can pull it back to Afghanistan where they thought they would do this lightning attack on the government and everything would fall into place and deploy quickly and everything would be over.

It didn't work out that way. They had a similar phenomenon for Chechnya I. It was a disaster for them. There was an attempt at this idea in 2008 against Georgia, but that that one is kind of outlier and that it only lasted a few days so we can't really put it in there. But if you go back to 2014,

Russia's first invasion of Ukraine, they had a very similar principle, which was we will deploy

to Crimea immediately and everyone will see us and lay down their arms. And that's largely what happened. The Ukrainians on the peninsula at the time were not in a position to fight back. The Russians did deploy there quickly. They really weren't any skirmishes and the government and Kiev at that time told them to stand down because there was no hope. And they left in a corridor. And the Russians thought, "Okay, resistance will be minimal. Ukraine is a, you know,

quote, brotherly country of Russia. They're not going to find us." And they learned the hard way in the Donbass in 2014 that that was not the case. So one might ask themselves in the Kremlin, which they don't ask themselves this question of, "Why were we so wrong strategically about where the Ukrainians were mentally between the years of 2014 and 2022? What types of improvements had they made to themselves? What kind of outreach were they doing with Western partners to

“improve their situational awareness? How had public sentiment shifted in Ukraine against Russia?”

You know, these are these are the strategic questions that were not evaluated amongst the very few

chamber, you know, whether it's Vladimir Putin's mind and maybe a handful of his advisors

and they bounced around the idea that they could repeat this plan. If they just recruited enough Ukrainians in various positions in municipal, state, federal level, that they could have a shadow government in waiting. And they could invade from five different directions. The Ukrainians would not fight back and they could install this public government. That was the legwork that they

“had laid down. That was the war that they designed. But as we know now, that network of, I think”

that Ukrainians arrested six to seven hundred people in the days running up to the invasion completely took out the guts of the Russian network that they wanted to install. And then others

that the Russians had paid just simply didn't show up once they saw the way that things were going

in which was not in Russia's favor. So really a catastrophic set of assumptions. They thought if they decapitated or assassinated Zelensky and they showed up with their tanks that the Ukrainians would see them and just stop fighting. And as we know now, nothing could be further than the two. And just to push on that a little bit more, do you have a sense of whether the issue was more that Russia overestimated its own power militarily in terms of sort of political persuasiveness

being able to have a public government in place, et cetera, or that it underestimated Ukraine,

“or was it really equal parts both? I think it really was equal parts both. They believed that”

they had a shadow government in waiting. They believed from some closed polling that they had done that Ukrainian public sentiment was 50/50. In terms of whether they would fight back against the Russians or not, that was not correct or their polling was wrong, a small sample. And then also just the way that they designed their campaign itself, they clearly designed it in a way that it assumed that there would be no armed resistance beyond a few days. And we see

that now from the elements of the plan that we have collected over time, it was a very rapid road-marched insertion. This is going to work out after three days of maybe some fighting will just do crowd control. And we just know this from multiple different parts of the organization at this point. Most importantly, there was no plan B. There wasn't a branch plan for if this went off the rails immediately, what can we bring to bear to rectify this situation and everything was kind of

“made up and in a very ad hoc way on the fly. So they were caught by surprise. I think learned a lot”

about themselves in the process, just how hollowed out and rusted out on the corners of combat effectiveness that their military had become. And they also learned that it turns out when Bill Burns went to Moscow and told them we're going to get involved. We, the West are going to get involved that he was telling the truth. He wasn't making that up. And I think they, the Russians completely failed to understand how we were already involved and how far we would get involved. And that I think was

a really dominant element in why things didn't play out the way they thought. It just never really

was a conflict between two parties. It was Ukraine's supporters and then over time Russia and its supporters. Interesting. So I guess one last question on that. Do you think it's the case that in looking back on its own history, as you mentioned, of using this same sort of strategy, Russia interprets the failures differently, or that it just truly thought that the situation this time in 2022 and Ukraine was different and often kind that history wouldn't repeat itself.

I think that they had told themselves a compelling story to themselves that, you know, we, we have already to go shadow government. The Ukrainians won't find back. Western military assistance will not be meaningful. Ukraine is a quote, brotherly nation and they, they truly internalize that and believed it. And I, I don't think that they really ever fully understood from one conflict to the next their failures and the opening phases because we see them repeat the same mistakes,

you know, historically every five years, every ten years. So I don't think that they've learned, I don't think that they've internalized that. That's an embarrassing thing to admit and it's a dangerous one, particularly in a system like that. Okay, Ari, let's move to you and to Iran, because as I recall with Iran, not so long ago, the conflict began, at least in some respects, with a quite targeted

quickly, despite this pretty clear strategy of getting rid of the entire leadership and it was in the context of some mass protests in Iran. And as I recall, there was some thinking or some discussion in the press at the time of the US strikes that, you know, this was a great time to capitalize on internal dissent in Iran. But still, we see this same sort of fallacy that is discussed in the framework of the short war illusion, which is that a quick decapitation will be an effective

way to have a short war. So talk about what happened in Iran, did I get that history right and then same question as I had for Dara, which is, why do you think that was the thinking? Yeah, well,

you got the very ancient history of five months ago exactly right. And first of all, thanks,

“it's the lightful to be here with the three of you. Yeah, I think, you know, we had some unrealistic”

timelines going into this, the administrations framing of the conflict was very much along the lines that we were just discussing in the context of Ukraine that this will be a quick operation. And I think part of it is that there was the parallel from last summer when we had Operation Midnight Hammer, that was, you know, that's also known as the 12-day war. That was actually a very specific campaign focused on Iran's nuclear program. And after the 12 days, you know, there was an expectation

that perhaps there would be some tit-for-tat activities that there might be escalation. A lot of

that didn't play out. And I think that perhaps reinforced the view within the administration that

it could do this relatively quickly. So I'm kind of jumping ahead to your final question. I do think

“that there are a couple of additional pieces here. I do think that as Dara was describing in the”

case of Russia, if you were just looking at Iran's own history over the past 50 years, it would have suggested that this conflict may not end on the timelines that the administration had envisioned. Right? Right after I keep going back to the Iran Iraq War as the kind of perfect case study for this, which is a conflict that starts after Saddam Hussein makes the decision in 1980 to invade Iran. Iran had just come out of the 1979 revolution. It was still going through

the hostage crisis and all of the ripple effects that that had created for the country with the United States and internationally. And so Saddam's view was that Iran is in this massive domestic crisis. It is having all these challenges internationally. Great. We can just go in and annex essentially these kinds of parts of Iran that are oil rich, where there is an Arab minority, and it will be done. And what actually happened was an eight-year brutal, brutal war

that left the two countries essentially where they were at the beginning, except for hundreds of thousands of deaths and the use of chemical weapons occurred in the process. So we're not there thankfully, but what I do think is essentially a peril is that our administration essentially underestimated Iran and its willingness to withstand its ability to withstand this and overestimated its own because it was thinking about the tactical and operational capabilities and advantages

that we have compared to Iran, not understanding fully that Iran has built an entire military doctrine for the past few decades that is focused on precisely deterring and fighting this kind of military and doing it on the cheap and doing it in an easier, not easier, but doing it with way fewer capabilities than the United States has. So I do think that the administration didn't really acknowledge that there were these timelines that are going to not really play out on its terms,

that Iran was going to get a vote, and Iran was going to be a lot more resilient than the

“administration was giving it credit for. The second piece is that there was this view, I think,”

in the administration, and one that was perhaps shared by the Israelis, that given the fact that Iran had just had mass protests, that it was in a very serious domestic crisis situation, economically, and in terms of just the broader society, that it was going to be able to take out the Supreme Leader, and a few IRGC Islamic Revolution Guard Corps commanders and other senior leaders, and one said that the regime would just collapse on itself, and that didn't happen,

and it didn't happen because Iran was actually not just the Supreme Leader. The regime was never

just the Supreme Leader. It was never just a few senior IRGC commanders, and that was not understood, I think, by the administration. And I want to pause here and note that it's not that we did

political leadership did not actually take that analysis and all of that knowledge into account partially because it has got the people who would be able to tell it that what we know about Iran. So I think fundamentally, all of this boils down to, there was just a lack of understanding of the adversary. And then coupled, coupling that with the fact that there was an overestimation

“of our own capabilities. And so I think fundamentally, we also didn't understand blue, right?”

Like, we didn't understand the United States, as well as we didn't understand Iran in some ways. And that was also translated in the shifting priorities and shifting goals that were associated with the conflict where initially the idea of the conflict was to take down Iran's leadership and create regime change, then it was, well, maybe we're not trying to actually change the regime ourselves. Maybe we're just trying to create the conditions for the people to rise and take

down the regime. And then from there, we kind of moved on to, okay, well, maybe we can't do that, but perhaps we can just take out their nuclear capabilities. Okay, well, we're probably not going to get there 100%. Let's just take out their missile capabilities and their drone sites and their drone capabilities. So the objectives kept shifting, there's still in some ways

“shifting. And so it makes it really hard to actually be able to plan if you don't know what you're”

trying to achieve at the end of the day. You can have all of the capabilities in the world. It's not going to do anything if you don't know what you're trying to do. Yeah, I was going to ask that specific question because I know you and I have spoken about that exact phenomenon before the changing goal posts, the lack of clarity of what exactly is the mission here, because it does seem in the case of both Russia and China, which we will come to

momentarily. There was much more of a sort of territory and people focused framework in my end, right? That Ukraine is part of a larger Russia and Taiwan. I know it's very simple if I

think here. And Taiwan is part of a larger China, but the United States never wanted to annex Iran.

And initially, you know, the messaging when the conflict was underway was first underway, even within the first couple of weeks was so mixed. And the evolution that you're describing,

“I think, is very much what we've seen. But I remember at the time in these early days when”

we were still in the sort of decapitation phase of the strategy, such as it is, it was that no one was quite sure which of those missions was the operative one. Do you have any sense of how that may have contributed to the decision to go with the decapitation strategy in the first instance? At least from what we've seen in the press reporting, it does seem like there was this kind of plan and place that we were going to go in that we were going to take out, you know,

senior leaders, and that was going to again create some sort of condition for regime change.

I think the confusion comes in in a few different places. First is the fact that

I don't know that this was the United States, but certainly Israel, which is, you know, in this combined operation with the United States in Iran, was also taking out a lot of the opposition within the regime that could have actually stepped up. And these are, in some cases, individuals who've been under house arrest for years or if not decades, because of their push for reform within the system. And so if you're trying not to actually create a whole, you know,

a structural regime change, you're trying to kind of get a leadership change that is advantageous to your interest and to your goals, then those are potentially the people that you would want to see rise at the top and help kind of shepherd that process. And that does not seem like it was the

case. The second piece is that even within days of the conflict where regime change was still very

much on the table, there were so many different conflicting views of what that might look like, not just between the US and Israel, but even within the United States where there were candidates, potential candidates that were put forward as people who would be, you know, the kind of the leaders of this transition or of this new system. And then the president would come out and say, "Well, I don't think that's going to work." So there was this kind of back and forth internally about

what might that system look like, what is a transition going to look like, who might be leading that transition? And we've gotten into war already. So we're already actively shooting and we have not done that prep work, right? Typically, you want that work to have happened ahead of time if you're going to engage in such a campaign. But that work had not happened and it seems like we're just trying to build this ship as we're flying it and trying to figure out what we did know, what we didn't

by any means is, you know, a linear and you just kind of, you know, do planning at the front frontend

“and you kind of follow that process. You typically do have changes that happen. You have to be flexible.”

You have to answer two things that are happening in the real world. But there does need to be some level of planning at the frontend that takes some of these realities into account. And that seems like it was just not the case. Okay, that's really helpful. So speaking of planning, Julia, your piece looked at how the Chinese might be observing these two conflicts and thinking about these issues more broadly with respect to Iran. So talk about the decapitation phase of this

framework in that context. Yeah. Well, first, first, I want to start by acknowledging the limits

of analogy in making the pivot to the Taiwan case. Now, obviously, there are significant differences between what has happened in Ukraine and Iran. And these are large land powers with vast spaces, with borders, versus an island in the Western Pacific. So, we can acknowledge that there will be significant differences there. I, with this piece, was trying to focus on aspects of conflict that

“could carry. And that's what leads us to these specific areas, not to say that these are going”

to play out in the exact same way. So first, the dynamic of a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan, the key variable that occupies the mind of PLA planners and that has been at the center of their public writings for years, is the potential intervention of the United States. Obviously, this

small democracy of 23 million people off of China's border is nothing compared with the global

power of the US inability to, you know, obviously with nuclear weapons, but also just to, to wage a protracted conflict around the world that could threaten China's future rise. And so they have mostly been focused on this in the development of capabilities. Xi Jinping has given his military until 2027, a significant anniversary of note for China to have the capability to invade Taiwan,

“specifically in the face of US intervention. No one has doubted for some time that without US”

intervention, China has the capability of defeating Taiwan. But it is US intervention that occupies most of their mind. So to head that off to ensure that an invasion would succeed without either failure, a economic catastrophe for China, or the intervention of a superpower like the United States, who could defeat the PLA, they have focused on speed above almost all, as at the center of decades of military modernization and capabilities that would keep out the United States

anti-access area denial capabilities to keep the US at base so that it could achieve Taiwan's capitulation as rapidly as possible. So there's nothing left for the United States to save if Taiwan itself has already fallen to the mainland. And so to get there, they have focused publicly on a few things in first and foremost to achieve this short war that they desperately want. They have focused on the decapitation destruction of the Taiwan political leadership with the idea

that an opening war strike on the leadership that the decapitates the Taiwan government will induce paralysis that the parts will not be able to organize themselves into a cohesive resistance and whether through direct negotiations with who's left or just simply in the absence of organized resistance marching into Taipei and declaring that this is now a province of mainland China. And so they have very much focused on these capabilities, Chinese hypersonic weapons,

other ballistic missile capabilities, it is widely expected that that is how a war with Taiwan would begin. As my colleagues have noted, that is precisely the opening move that both Putin and our own leadership believed would open a war that they also expected would end in a short chart conflict and as Beijing does study modern conflict very closely, they have not fought a war since 1979. I would expect they would be examining that assumption. And they have invested quite

a bit in this critical opening war assumption. They actually have built a mock-up buildings in

mainland China that commercial satellites have observed of a mock-up of the presidential palace of the president of Taiwan and they can regularly war game with their special forces and what it would let be like to land and do an operation to capture or kill the Taiwanese

now twice in just a few years and would not abandon by any means their desires to incorporate Taiwan

“and have a short war, but move to other ways of achieving that beyond just that opening strike.”

And so I would expect them to double down on things like raising fifth columns on the island, trying to pay off other members of the Taiwanese government to defect or the military to lay down its arms, cyber attacks upon the Taiwanese civil society, so the whole society comes to a stance still and perhaps opening up additional fronts rather than just simply trying to march into

Taipei. Okay, so let's transition to the second part of the framework which looks more at the

defender of the attack that was attempting the decapitation to continue using this helpful framework and vocabulary. So Dari, I want to come back to you on Russia and Ukraine. You spoke about it a bit but as we have seen, despite the what appeared to be quite significant capacity asymmetry between

“Russia and Ukraine and bracket, the fact that that seems to have just been a quite inaccurate”

understanding of the Russian capacities certainly technologically and militarily as the war unfolded. But there was still quite a difference, right? I mean, it's a Russia is just a much, much bigger country and it's understood to have a lot of prowess and yet Ukraine was able to put on and has been able to put on a really remarkable defense. So talk a little bit about this, the terminology that Nolan gives it is choke point denial. What has Ukraine done to impose costs on Russia

despite this at least apparent capacity asymmetry to make it the fact that the conflict has protracted as much as it has and the decapitation strategy was not effective. Sure, so I'll talk about some of the literal choke points that Ukraine imposed on Russia inside Ukraine but I'd also like the second part to focus on some of these broader issues of global

“choke points that we have collectively, I think, in the West and in our partners elsewhere,”

have failed to cut off vital Russian supplies for various reasons. So in the first instance,

when we talk about choke points in geography, there were a few critical nodes on Russia's

invasions route into Ukraine and we know now that those plans were essentially blown to Western intelligence in Ukraine before the war and so they were able to literally create literal choke points on the roads backing up Russian forces, a trading them, killing off their most trained soldiers, some of their most modern equipment in the beginning of the war and causing Russia to withdraw about half of its geographically half of its objectives, which were capturing Kiev,

this very large metropolis and then other parts of northern Ukraine. Within a few months, they had to completely abandon that objective and then focus more so on the the Dom best region in southern Ukraine. That's a very simple application of choke point but it is one that the Russians, again, and I go back to the failures to learn here. The Russians learned the hard way in Afghanistan, how to do route management. They learned this over the course of a decade and yet

they forgot all of that in Chechnya five years later. They forgot all of that in Georgia and they didn't do it this time either in Ukraine because catastrophic issues for them at the strategic level

with this campaign. They're never going to occupy Ukraine to the extent that they thought that they

were going to do now. The war has shifted in terms of what it is. Ukraine has over time now that the front line has settled into defensive networks of trenches and mind fields, they have started imposing different kinds of costs on the Russians with their expanding precision strike game, whether that's middle strike in occupied areas or deep strike of drones into Ukraine and increasing missiles to try to give Moscow a taste of its own medicine, although at a much smaller level.

So what we see at this point in the war four years on and this was very, you know, a palpable feeling there, which is there recently, the front line is not really moving a lot. Both sides are facing nearly complete suppression on the ground because of all the drones in the air. The different types of drones. It's very hard to fight. It's very hard to re-supply. It's just very hard to do anything

forward at the same rate, although they keep trying and losing, you know, just really significant amount

“of personnel. What we are seeing to get around this choke point on the ground is Moscow is accelerating”

its missile strike campaign against Kiev, with increasingly ballistic missiles. They know that we're running short of Patriot Supply and we're not going to be able to sustain Kiev at the level that we need to. We just don't have the stock anymore. So we're seeing Russia trying to break out of ground choke points by a much more sharp vicious campaign in the air, and Ukraine trying to do the same to force tradeoffs. Where the choke point issue for Russia's is tough, is on this global

issue of trying to cut off its economy, whether that's through sanctioning a lot of its industry, oil and gas, secondary sanctions. It's been very difficult to cause enough harm to the Russian economy to compel them to stop even the Ukrainian strike campaign against Russian oil and gas.

It's disrupted 30 to 40 percent of Russia's oil and gas industry, which is astronomical. It's

still not causing them to stop. You know, they're still getting a lot of supply from China. This war would not be possible without all of the support that China is providing. It wouldn't have been impossible without the intellectual property that they basically purchased from Iran to have the Shahed drones and now they've made them go wrong. 345 variant drone and North Korea even came in at a clutch moment for helping them in cursed. So it's we constantly see attempts to put Russia in

a strategic choke point and Russia's finding ways out of it through evasion and through its partners. So tactically choke point, yes, strategic choke point, very difficult. Okay, Ari, let's come to you and tell us about Iran and what sorts of defenses it has put up despite as you were saying earlier, a real tactical advantage, particularly in the realm of technology from the United States.

“Yes, so Iran, I think, has really tried number one to unlike the United States, which has had”

these maximalists and shifting goals, as we've discussed, has really tried to be laser-focused on a couple of things, and I think that has been part of a strength. And that's not just something that happened over the course of this war. Again, it's part of how Iran has been developing its military doctrine for a long time, because it has known that it was going to potentially be in conflict with a conventionally way superior adversary, be with a nuclear weapon state in the United States and

potentially Israel nuclear arm state. And three, with an adversary that would have a network of allies

and partners and installation and forces and assets in its immediate region. So Iran was never

going to be responding in kind because it couldn't. Iran cannot really reach the U.S. homeland, like the United States can reach the Iranian homeland. And so it really had to kind of think about had to level that playing field. And it had settled on two main courses of action, which have played out during this conflict. The first one is obviously the Strait of Hormos and how it's been weaponizing the Strait Freedom of Navigation. And that early you and I have talked about this

million times in various law fair podcasts and articles and so on, but essentially we had known for a long time that this would be one of the main tools that Iran would use in a conflict with the United States. We didn't necessarily have exactly how it would do it. And this has played

“that in a bit more of a tailored manner than I think many of us had anticipated, but we knew”

that that was going to be the case. And it has done so fairly effectively. The second is just its own network of non-state partners in the region and its ability to reach U.S. installations from using missiles and drones that there discuss as well throughout the region and be able to

hold that risk. The United States, U.S. service members and U.S. installations as well as the critical

infrastructure and key sectors of U.S. partners in the region. This is why it started Iran started attacking golf energy sector installations and infrastructure and tourism because those are two things that Iran knew would really raise the cost of the conflict. And so it's really been laser-focused on essentially surviving this conflict, number one, and that included also ensuring that its own domestic situation was essentially under control while the United, what it was

fighting the U.S. And two raising the cost of this conflict for the U.S. and for its partners,

And I think all of this is underpinned by the fact that Iran knows that any U.S. administration

“always has a built in timeline. Right? There is the political calendar, which is obviously”

we're feeling very acutely right now because we're just a few months away from the midterms. But that is just generally going to be the case. In any given moment, if Iran were to be fighting the United States, it would have to deal -- any U.S. administration would have to deal with the political calendar in a way that Iran just doesn't have to deal with in the same way just by virtue of being an authoritarian states state that has a very different set of considerations.

So the two main things are really the kind of increasing the political and economic cost and doing good via the strait for moves and doing it via the targeting of allies and partners and forces in the region. Okay, Julia, over to you to project all of this on thinking about

“what the Chinese are planning and how they're perceiving both of these conflicts and all of the”

features of the conflicts that Iran already were just describing. I mean, the first thing to know about

invasion of Taiwan and amphibious invasion is that what we're talking about here is the largest amphibious invasion launched by any country since day by a force that has not fought a war since 1979 across one of the most forbidding straits, bodies of water, it's about 100 miles at its short point. It is a truly forbidding military operation that has to go right the first day of the war. And so this is already a high degree of difficulty for any country on earth to be

engaging in and it is why Taiwan still exists as an independent society. So to look at some specific aspects of this, you know, as the PLA has been working through this plan for decades now,

“what's really, I think we're really talking about in the key lesson that I would draw out of”

the Iran cases, the cost differential here. And this comes in the form of denial weapons like mines and then with the Iranians are showing now also with one way attack UAVs. And so just to tease out a couple more points from the Iran side of things, this has been a huge problem in the strait of our moves for decades now, going back to the Iran-Arock war. A Iranian contact mine, which estimated to have cost at $1.500, had crippled a U.S. frigate in the Iran-Arock war time frame.

It took 18 months to repair and $100 million of damage. So just the cost of some of these weapons

that are trivial easy to lay and then by comparison and then very difficult to sweep and if your main goal is speed, naval mines are tremendously difficult, even the threat of them are tremendously difficult problem for any modern navy to deal with. And then the Iranian evolution and, you know, their development of these cheap one-way attack drones that she needs that have found their way into the Ukraine conflict, these are, you know, $20 to $50,000 a piece in which a sophisticated modern

interceptor is going to run into the millions of dollars a piece and we'll have a limited magazine depth. And so Chinese force looking at the price of countering both of these very inexpensive weapons has got to be very nervous that Taiwan will implement the same kind of denial defense that Iran has and it is just the unforgiving math of the denial versus the offense. I should say also that this isn't a new problem that Beijing has. It's just been reinforced. We have seen in recent

years some developments by the PLA to try to counter these, but they're still a long way from reaching that. And so for just for some example, the PLA has developed its own unman-nable vehicles to try to do the mines sweeping so it doesn't have to use all of its man-mind sweepers. And we've also seen that the PLA developing the use of these water bridge barges that are effectively

like the mulberry harbors that the US used in D-Day where they've basically been self-propelled

barges or bridges that can pull up onto the shoreline to try to create these docks for further vessels to come in to try to buy down the time that would otherwise take fighting through these Taiwanese layered defenses. All right, did you have something at? Yeah, so what Julia just said prompted something for me, which is that, you know, we've talked about how the Russians, the Iranians, and the Chinese might see centers of gravity or choke points, right? On the US side, you know,

I think we're still treating the defense industrial base as a really important center of gravity.

there specifically how it's playing out on the Russia Ukraine side. But one of the, we've talked

about the shifting objectives. One of the things that the administration goes back to a lot is regardless of how this war ends and regardless of how many billions of dollars were spending and regardless of how many service members end up dying. One thing we can really get out of this war is that we have rolled back Iranian capabilities in terms of their missile and drone programs. And the challenge is that fundamentally as Julia is describing, these are not particularly sophisticated

expensive capabilities and they're not particularly difficult to build. I mean, and Derek can talk about this a lot better than I can, but Russia really ramped up its production of these Shahid drones that it got from Iran at the beginning of the Ukraine war. And so if we continue to think about the defense industrial base as a center of gravity for everybody in the same way that it would be

“for us and in the way it has been historically, I think we're potentially, there is a mismatch in”

terms of the return on investment that we can have in any conflict. Derek, did you want to respond on that one? Yeah. So, you know, I would, I would just say that, you know, I, I think the limitations in our defense industrial base output in our stockpile have really boxed us in from the beginning with supporting Ukraine. And, you know, this, this isn't something we can lay on on the Trump administration alone. It's a Biden administration. It was, you know, before that it was Trump, there are many

administrations that got us here in terms of what they were purchasing and what the orders were for some of these capabilities. We have global requirements and we really, you know, the math isn't mathing on stockpiles that we have to execute those global defense requirements for ourselves and our allies. So, you know, we, we walked into this situation and I saw it time and again, we're experiencing it

“now and more extreme forms where we, we want to help out a partner, but we can't or we won't,”

because we cannot produce interceptors fast enough. Or our allies have a very limited stockpile, and they don't want to give up what they have left because we're already late on our contracts, and they have no idea when they'll get replenished. Whether that's, whether that's in the Asia Pacific or Europe or, you know, there are partners in the Gulf who don't want to trade with Ukraine for experience, for patriots. Like, they don't want to make the deal because they're scared they won't get

patriots. And this, this is a real problem for our alliance management. It's a real problem for national security. It is a problem that has been known for over a decade and it seems resistant to any kind of stimulus to change this. So, I, you know, I, whether it's patriot, whether it is high-mars, whether it was something else, we introduced a very limited amount of capacity into Ukraine and the Russians adopted against it and then it became less effective over time.

And the, the analogy that I give, it's like, if you get strep throat and you go to the doctor and they give you a week's worth of penicillin and you stop taking it after day two because you feel

better, like, you're, you know, you've, you've just created like a super bug and that's basically

the dynamic that I've seen play out in, in Ukraine and, and I just worry about it proliferating elsewhere.

“Yeah, so I think we've, we've touched on this third category from the shortware illusion,”

but I, I do want to use it refer to it specifically as a way to pull those couple of threads together. So, this third category is the protraction phenomenon. So, why all of these have continued as long as they have and, I mean, particularly in the case of Ukraine, this thing that was supposed to be a quick strike on give has now been going on since 2022 and Iran also likewise was supposed to be very quick and we're into the sixth month already. But each of you has spoken about a number of

different factors that go into protraction and this idea that the advantage will shift to whichever side is able to are willing to endure and sort of keep the conflict live. And the couple of factors I've heard that I'd love to hear from each of you how it applies in the conflict that you've been thinking about and and which factors are more or less meaningful. The ones I've heard are, you know, there's geography, there's the limitations of material and stockpiles and production,

there's the political calendar, their economic pressures, they're obviously a future we haven't gone into quite as much shifting alliances, a sort of reordering of the global order that is, of course, not a static thing and certainly not a certain thing, but everyone is observing everyone else

and strategic thinking is changing as the facts change. So Dara, to come to you first on Russian

and Ukraine are able to endure? And as we've seen throughout this conflict, you know, the commentary

“at will say, "Oh, this is evidence of Ukraine's ability to persevere and keep this going." And, "Oh,”

this is evidence of Russia's ability to just keep throwing people at this conflict." But there are a lot of different variables that play here. So how do you think about all of that constellation of things? So I'll go from the outside and there's a few different factors that are contributing to why the war in Ukraine is getting so protracted. One is that, you know, both parties to the conflict have a group of partners and allies behind them supporting them. So, you know, Ukraine has been

supplied with multiple different types of weapons, battle space management tools, all financial support that has allowed them to develop their own industrial capacity after Russia tried to eliminate it early on. So there's that external element of protraction coming from Ukraine's partners, Russia is getting a lot of support that allows it to produce these elevated levels from China.

It's getting critical support over time, maybe going down a little bit from Iran, and then also

when it needs to, it can tap into artillery and rockets and people from North Korea. So that's the

“external side of why the war machine keeps humming. Secondly, I think for Ukraine, you know,”

this is like a classic theory, but Ukraine's on death ground. You know, it's not like Russia is saying, hey, you know, why do we peacefully coexist? And I'll just take over your territory and, you know, you just pay me taxes. No, it's they're trying to erase the Ukrainian identity. They kidnapped and torture people using rape as a weapon. I mean, stealing children, erasing their Ukrainian heritage. I mean, this is a horrible outcome. So Ukraine has no choice, but to resist this. It's awful.

The alternative to them is erasure. From Russia's perspective, you know, I think this war means, this is my analytic opinion. I think the war means a lot more to Putin and his elites who are locked in with him than it does to your average Russian citizen. They have learned to turn a blind eye to the war, blind eye to all the death, as long as it's not impacting them in particular, like, you know, people aren't being mobilized and mass. The other reason that it's protracted, and this is the final,

like interior layer here, is that Russia actually does have excess capacity to accelerate this war. They could mobilize, again, a very large group. They have excess armor. They have excess drones. They have a little bit excess missiles, and they're not using them. And so I have to ask myself, you know, why do they persist in this way of fighting that is very predictable? It's very slow. You know, and I think it's a political calculus. It's something that Putin understands. If I keep

the temperature to a manageable level, my people will not rise up against me, because that's always

the number one issue. How much can I get away with before the Russian people say they've had enough of me? And he's managing this war in a very particular casualty intense way, but in way that's acceptable. He doesn't sacrifice the air force. He does not expend everything that he has to force the issue and don't yet, right now. You know, so there's a there's a authoritarianism here that does influence the why this war is dragging out in the way that it is. And I think he's waiting out

“the Trump team. That's what I think he's doing. What can I get from this group? Okay. That's really”

helpful. Are you over to you on Iran? And I'm particularly interested in the sense of Iran's ability to endure a protracted conflict. I think a lot of the discussion we're hearing in even in mainstream press right now is this notion that even with respect to the leadership that, you know, they're had long been a plan among the political elite to contingency plan for the loss of high-level political leaders that the economy of Iran has been with standing this crippling sanctions regime

for years and years. But there's a lot more at play here. So talk to us about how Iran is engaged in this protracted thus far and seems to be continued to be protracted conflict and also how the U.S. is there are some some parallels here to what there was describing in the Russia Ukraine conflict. Although it's not entirely overlapping. There are some external factors here which on the Iranian side includes the fact that Iran also receives support from Russia just as Russia does from Iran.

with drones. Russia is now also supplying Iran with the same drones essentially that Iran

“had sent to Russia but they're modified and upgraded and now sent to Iran to use against U.S. forces”

and partners in the region. So that's on the Iranian side. On the U.S. side there is the question of Israel. We haven't talked that much about Israel in this but again this is a combined operation that the United States and Israel undertook together and Israel has its own interests, it has its own threat perceptions that are somewhat different from that of quite different from the one that we have with regard to Iran and the appetite for a continued conflict with Iran is very

different in Israel than it is here. Again this is from the Israeli perspective, the Iranian regime is an existential threat from the U.S. perspective Iran is a regional threat and then you have the very specific kind of not to get too much into the leadership reading the T-Leaves of leadership personalities and such but President Trump is quite different from Prime Minister Netanyahu in the way that he thinks about Iran and in the way that Iran factors into the way they are perceived

domestically. This is for Netanyahu, he has been known and he has really been on this platform of keeping Israel secure from Iran for the entirety of his political career. So this is quite different for him and again from the press reporting that we've seen at least over the past few months that especially in recent weeks, it does seem like Israel wants to keep going forward, it wants to push for potential regime change and that appetite is simply not true on the U.S. side. So there

is the external factor. Then there is the domestic pieces that you just alluded to which is that on the Iranian side, yes number one Iran had been preparing for this conflict for a long time

and they had a taste of what the Trump administration might do after the first Trump administration

killed one of the top commanders in the IRGC, because of Soleimanian 2020, and then with Operation Midnight Hammer last summer targeting Iranian nuclear capabilities. So they they have been preparing

“for this for decades. I think they were preparing for it even more. So knowing the type of leader that”

President Trump would be and the type of action that he would be willing to take with regard to Iran. There's also the domestic piece. And I think here, you know, I disagree with a lot of some of some colleagues that I respect very deeply have put out, which is that to me that the domestic tensions within Iran are not a limiting factor actually. They're not constraining Iran. They're not going to limit Iran's decision space when it comes to the war. They're doing the opposite,

which is to say that the second shooting stops Iranian leaders will need to think about real

responses to the really poor domestic situation they have in front of them. They need to think about and they need to address the economic situation that created the mass protests that we saw earlier this year. And they have no answers to that. The previous crew didn't have answers and they were much more experienced than the current crew that has come in since the war started. And by the way, there is still that this contend from the mass repression that happened back in January,

that repression is still going on on a smaller scale from what we can tell but is still going on. And so the second the war stops, Iranian leaders will have to actually try to address that domestic situation and they can't and they don't have real answers for people. So the longer this war goes on, the further they can kick that can down the road in my opinion. And so this kind of, you know,

“on and off cycle of escalation, I think actually probably serves their purpose in in some ways.”

On the US side, you know, I think the Trump administration has just boxed in at this point. There is no good way forward. There is no real deal for the president to take. There was that MOU that was signed a few weeks ago. You know, the administration made a huge deal out of it. You know, it's going to stop the war. It is going to resolve Iran's nuclear program. The problems around Iran's nuclear program, it's going to reopen the street and it didn't do any of those things. And that was

pretty apparent from the get go. And what was also apparent, I think from the get go was that that deal that MOU was not going to translate into a deal that would resolve everything in a meaningful way. And so there is no deal on the table. The president can simply say, well, okay, I've done the thing. I'm going to withdraw now because that's just not his style. I don't think. And the other options

are basically groups on the ground, which he also doesn't want to do to actually try to finish the job.

So I think he just doesn't have very good options here. And so he's finding himself in this gray

we're back to negotiating and so on and so forth. And so I think this is probably a trend that we're going to keep seeing for a bit here. Because on neither side there are real incentives to actually change this that as well. Okay, so Julia, as we have been discussing the Chinese and of course, Taiwan are observing these trends that we've been looking at and talking about. And with respect to

this third category of Nolan's short-war illusion, this question of protraction and which party

is going to be in the position to endure over a longer term. How would you characterize how they're thinking about it and how we should understand it? So with each of the other two areas,

“it kind of was flipped around where Beijing would be in the tougher position. I think in this,”

in this case, there's a really good case to be made that of course that the island nation fighting for its existence that can be cut off from the world is the one that is in trouble when it comes to to protraction. But I think there's a few different ways to look at this. First is that Taiwan does not have the ability to hide in a vast territory and refuse battle and

wait it out. But it does have one of the densest urban environments in the world and a defensive

strategy on the Taiwanese side that took maximum advantage of those places, whether it is to hold back its forces and slowly a trip of PLA or hide its leadership in the vast urban jungles of Taiwanese cities. There are ways of dragging this conflict out that will be very uncomfortable for

“Beijing and could play the strengths of the US intervening on the outside. Obviously China has”

significant economic vulnerabilities. It's very export-focused. It's huge amount of its income. It's oil that keeps the lights on. It imports from the Middle East famously the strengths of Malaka could be shut down. China is going out into the world trying to develop its own military capability abroad precisely because of its own vulnerabilities in a long conflict. However,

at the same time, Taiwan has been very slow to make the critical changes to its defensive

strategy for many, many years. The Taiwanese seem to approach their weapons and acquisitions from the United States as if they were purchasing intervention insurance. Rather than focusing on the kind of asymmetric weapons that would be most needed, a few examples of this off the top,

“Taiwan has invested billions of dollars in acquisitions of ships that probably will never leave”

the harbor when the war starts or aircraft, manned aircraft, which probably won't be able to take off because of the cratering of Taiwanese airfields in the opening hour of the war. But they bought these things and have invested heavily in the U.S. div and the money going to the districts of prominent appropriators for this reason to cultivate the U.S. ties that will hopefully and their views lead to intervention. Rather than the kind of weapons that they would actually need

that would be survivable to win the war and drag this out. So there is a mixed bag in this case that is not seen in other cases. I will just flip it around a little bit though. There's another aspect of this where Beijing is thinking about contraction and that is contraction of the United States. If the U.S. does intervene here. And in this case, Beijing is in a really difficult position with materially where the U.S. is a global power and we could significantly

hurt China's ability to maintain a protracted conflict, especially if we could bring it around our allies and isolate China from its growing alliances. Of course, we haven't been doing that very good very well in the last couple of years. We've been alienating our friends and uniting our enemies, but we still do have significant global capacity to China does not. However, keeping an analyst on one hand and on the other, you'll see that China has very good

reason to doubt that the U.S. will be willing to intervene in such a conflict. And so looking at how the U.S. has responded to casualties and a protraction and in Iran with an upcoming election might assume that a U.S. that got involved in a war with China would not be willing to just stick it out. So it is a mixed bag on both sides. The last thing I will say while Taiwan does have significant disadvantages and is very late in the day in preparing Taiwan. In this case,

it is fighting for its political life. This is not a war of choice for Taiwan. The leadership of Taiwan knows very well what would happen if they capitulate most countries when they are bombed,

that if Taiwan can get its act together and find the will to prepare that the silent couldn't

very least hold out significantly longer than Beijing is counting on and allow for the opportunity

“for external intervention. Okay. Well, I think that is a very helpful framework, conceptual framework”

for three extremely complicated conflicts. So thank you for for walking through all of them.

And I think there's a lot to learn both in comparing and contrasting across the three. Julia, Dara, and Ari, thank you so much for joining. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

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