Leo Hohmann author/journalist

📝 🇮🇷 🇺🇸 Debasification: Iranian air war strategy The broad picture of the Iranian air war in this phase has been a steady wave of concentrated missile and drone strikes sweeping its way across the region. In contrast to the previous hot phase of the war, in which Iran targeted bases across the entire theater simultaneously, this wave started with the targets close to Iranian shores, and has progressed steadily to the Israeli border. After destroying much of the radar network protecting regional US Axis bases in the previous hot phase of the war, Iranian planners have prioritized targeting fuel storage, drone hangers, refueling tankers, and barracks. The American response has been to pull assets back ever further from Iran, to bases in Israel and Jordan. We’ll call this process debasification. Iran’s debasification strategy takes advantage of the inherent asymmetry between the vastly different force structure and capabilities of Iranian rocket forces and US Axis air forces. The first asymmetry we’ll cover is the American need for casualty avoidance. Political support for the war is low, and US narratives to shore it up hinge on overwhelming American superiority and a perception of the war presenting minimal risk. Casualties and the loss of major assets fly in the face of this narrative and erode support for the war. The Department of War clearly takes this seriously, as evidenced by their decision to evacuate the most vulnerable bases (moving personnel to hotels) before the war began. When the US force in the region has taken major risks by leaving valuable assets in the open at bases subject to Iranian targeting, the results have been disastrous, with the loss of near-irreplaceable assets like the E-3 Sentry destroyed on the tarmac at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. Iranian military sources claimed to have damaged refueling tankers on the ground at Al Udeid in Qatar, Al Kharj in Saudi Arabia, and Muwaffaq Salti in Jordan in a single wave of attacks on Friday. Multiple US personnel were killed and as many as dozens injured two days ago in an Iranian missile attack on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan. Subsequent disclosures from the New York Times revealed that this was the fourth Iranian attack on Jordan to result in casualties and major losses of air assets in the previous week. A strike on King Faisal Air Base days prior wounded five, and another attack on a base—unidentified by the NYT but confirmed by mappers to be Prince Hassan Air Base—damaged multiple Black Hawk helicopters on the ground. Then, 20 personnel were wounded in an attack on Muwaffaq Salti on the 16th. The attack that killed at least two US personnel occurred the next day. The next line of bases for US air forces to fall back to is within Israel itself. While falling back to Israel will bring US assets within the protective range of Israeli air defenses, it isn’t clear that the Israelis want any part in this phase of the war. There’s also little reason to think they’ve been able to replenish their own interceptor stocks in the brief pause in the fighting, and the IDF was facing a crisis in that area before the pause. Even when interceptors were more plentiful, the Israelis were unable to fully protect their own airbases. ⬇️ Continued: https://www.amerikanets.com/p/debasification