Military historian Big Serge points out there are fundamental inconsistencies in the new Gulf war:
It’s a very weird war.
Iran prepared for decapitation strikes by pre-authorizing field commanders to retaliate at will. You have the Iranian Foreign minister admitting that military units are mostly out of command at the moment. So in a sense, Iran turned itself into a giant bomb, primed to detonate when it got hit. The Iranian military is essentially weapons free, which makes it hard for them to coordinate or mass strikes. It also makes them unpredictable and difficult to control.
On the other hand, you have the United States pursuing contradictory war aims. The White House seems to want to negotiate, but decapitation leaves you with nobody who is clearly empowered to negotiate. Since Iran’s military is basically emptying the clip without central direction, it’s not even clear that a ceasefire could be implemented by Iran if they want it. Trump explicitly said that the people they expected to take charge in Tehran are now dead.
It’s all a recipe for maximum chaos with few brakes. The US has to commit to a throw weight game either until Iran’s strike capability is completely degraded, or until Tehran reasserts central control and can submit to some sort of negotiated ceasefire. The latter doesn’t seem likely because the US is systematically degrading Iranian command and control.
The fundamental problem is that no one is in full control on either side. The Iranian central command is dead and their military structure is entirely decentralized, so there is no way for them to stand down even if most of the operational commanders were inclined to do so, which they almost certainly are not. It’s the Gamergate strategy applied to war: everyone knows that central command equals unwanted attention from hostile forces, so everyone focus on shutting up and emailing. The Gulf States are the advertisers and the objective is to prevent them from supporting the US military.
And it’s working. The US Navy has retreated and is running out of its ability to defend itself or Israel.
On the Israeli side, there is also a bifurcation between command, which is Netanyahu, and control, which is the US military. Netanyahu is giving the orders and setting the objectives for the Trump administration, but he has neither direct control over nor accountability to the US military. So the structure is fundamentally unstable and inefficient; even if Fake Trump wasn’t a natural agent of chaos, his inability to know exactly what Netanyahu wants in any given moment and the inherent degradation of information passing through an intermediary is going to reduce the effectiveness of implementing any strategy.
Which is why the ground offensive is going to be one enlisting Kurdish proxies, which is unlikely to be any more successful than past Kurdish proxy wars. These reliably ended up with the Kurds needing to be protected from being eliminated by the Turks and the Syrians, so even with a higher level of air support from the US and Israel, Iran’s drone inventory doesn’t bode well for the offensive.
Hundreds of Kurdish fighters have begun ground activity inside Iran from areas near the Iraqi border, Israeli and American officials confirmed to The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday, in a development that could open an additional front against Tehran as regional tensions continue to escalate.
The Kurdish forces operating along the Iran-Iraq border are considered one of the most prominent armed opposition groups confronting the regime in Tehran. The organizations involved are Iranian Kurdish groups that maintain thousands of fighters, most of whom operate from territory in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq along the frontier with Iran.
According to Kurdish sources, these forces have been preparing in recent days to participate in ground operations in western Iran with the aim of pressuring Iranian security forces and dispersing them across multiple arenas.
The strategic concept behind the activity, the sources said, is that fighting along the border areas would force the Iranian regime to divert military and security resources there, potentially easing pressure on protesters and opposition elements in major cities inside Iran.
In other words, the strategic objective is still color revolution against a regime with a nonexistent leadership on behalf of the foreign countries actively bombing the populace. That sounds more like a means of ensuring that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps becomes a military dictatorship than anything else, although if Israel has someone inside the IRGC in a position to become that military dictator, that strategy could make sense.