An important geography lesson concerning a war with Iran

The neocons are now proposing that we can defeat Iran with air power alone. Okay, maybe it will require American airpower. A few Bunker Busters and it will be all wrapped up. Air power alone will bring victory.

This has never happened before, so let’s just say that despite their optimistic forecast, we do ultimately have to put “boots on the ground” to force a final Iranian defeat.

Time for a brief comparative geography lesson related to just how many boots might be needed, if Iran doesn’t surrender after we shock and awe them with our air power.

It required 8 full divisions of the US Army and Marines three full months to subdue tiny Okinawa in 1945. These 8 divisions added up to about 130,000 American “boots on the ground” just on little Okinawa. There were 12,500 Americans KIA, and more than 200,000 were killed in total, including Japanese soldiers and Okinawan civilians.

Iran is more than a thousand times the size of Okinawa, with a 2025 population of 92 million. Iran is 2.5 times the size of Afghanistan, 3.8 times the size of Iraq, and 5 times the size of South Vietnam or modern Germany. Somebody please inform Senators Cruz and Graham, and the other Israel Lobby War Hawks.

I made the map meme below to show the difference in scale between the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, and a potential future Battle of Taiwan. Okinawa and Taiwan are both tiny in comparison to Iran, and they are islands that can be cut off from resupply. Iran is 46 times bigger than Taiwan, and 1,370 times bigger than Okinawa, the location of the longest and bloodiest battle in the Pacific during WW2.

If Iran fails to surrender after American air attacks, and keeps lobbing missiles at Israel, and possibly also at U.S. bases and ships in the region, we will certainly continue to hammer Iran very hard. But what if they still don’t quit?

If Israel and/or the USA destroy Iran’s oil refining capacity, and also destroys Iran’s oil export terminals, Iran will have zero incentive to allow the other nations in the region to profit while they perish. At some point Iran may exercise it’s own “Sampson Option” and close the Strait of Hormuz.

Hundreds or even thousands of mobile anti-ship missiles are concealed in caves along the Iranian side of the strait. If their operators are ordered to hold out, and not to fire their missiles for weeks or months, they will do so.

Then what? Making the rubble bounce in Teheran will not open the Strait of Hormuz.

Meanwhile, the global economy will be in freefall. Just to name three major nations: China gets over a third of its petroleum from the Persian Gulf. Japan and South Korea obtain more than 80% of their oil from the Persian Gulf.

Within weeks, many nations in addition to those three will have to decide between keeping their electrical grids running, or shutting down their industries. This is why I call closing the Strait of Hormuz “Iran’s Sampson Option.” It’s not a step they will take lightly, not until they are backed against the wall. But they will not perish alone, while the other Gulf states profit from the cutoff of Iranian oil exports.

Only those dirty old “boots on the ground” will be able to root out the last of Iran’s mobile anti-ship missiles. Israel can’t stop Iran from firing giant medium-range ballistic missiles at Tel Aviv after a week of rocket war, and these much smaller solid-fuel mobile anti-ship missile launchers can be hidden much more easily. They will be ready to launch their missiles only minutes after coming out of concealment.

So I ignore the folks who say, “Nobody is talking about boots on the ground.” Not yet, they’re not. But if the global economy is in freefall, what other options will we have? Tactical nuclear bombs dropped along hundreds of miles of Iran’s Hormuz littoral? Will that be a better option than “boots on the ground?”

Dan Greenfield responded to my X thread on this topic with this comment:

This was my reply to Mr. Greenfield:

Yes, the Japanese in 1945 were fierce, but the fact remains that Okinawa was an island cut off from any resupply. It still required 8 Army and USMC divisions 3 months to subdue when surrounded at point-blank-range by one of the largest naval fleets assembled in the history of the world.

Iran is over a thousand times larger than Okinawa, with a population of 92 million, and a large industrial base, and Iran can be resupplied forever by Russia across the Caspian. [Unless you are suggesting we also go to a direct kinetic war with Russia.]

Our experience in Korea and Vietnam shows the great importance of an enemy being able to be resupplied across contiguous borders, while we have to ship every bullet and bandage across thousands of miles of ocean. How did our experiences in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan turn out? Are you willing to repeat them at 5X scale?

Will Schryver responded to my X thread with this comment, which received many replies of its own.

Compare those 175,000 total U.S. troops to the eight Army and Marine Corps divisions needed just to subdue Okinawa, which was cut off from resupply and surrounded by one of the mightiest fleets in the history of amphibious warfare, a fleet comparable only to the one assembled for the Normandy D-Day landings. A reminder: our current naval assets are a tiny fraction of what they were in 1945.

Schryver also dropped some relevant maps of his own.

Hop over to X and join the discussion, or comment to this Substack post.

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