The Ghost of Saigon in Tehran: Why Ships and Planes Won’t Break a Holy War
As a retired Green Beret with 25 years in the U.S. Army, I have spent much of my life in the dust of Iraq and Afghanistan. I have seen, firsthand, what happens when a superpower tries to trade blood for progress. Today, as I watch the escalating tension with Iran and the new U.S. naval blockade now choking the Strait of Hormuz, I don’t see a “surgical” strategic solution. I see a hauntingly familiar pattern of over-reliance on technical superiority to solve a human problem.
We are making the Vietnam mistake all over again. Just as Washington once believed that a massive aerial bombing campaign—Operation Rolling Thunder—would break Hanoi’s will and end the war from the air without a messy ground commitment, we are again betting that ships, precision strikes, and economic pressure alone will force the regime to fold.
The prevailing wisdom in Washington and among our allies suggests that if we squeeze Iran’s economy tight enough with a blockade and strike their military infrastructure with enough precision, the regime will buckle. But as someone who fought the Taliban—a group that cared more about holding power than the economic or physical well-being of their nation—I know that religious zealots measure “victory” differently than we do.
While the very phrase “regime change” has become politically toxic in America after the hard lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan, we are now at war with the ideology of a revolutionary theocratic regime. If that ideology is not confronted and displaced, it will simply regroup and rise again for another half century—just as it has endured and adapted since 1979.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has spent the last 45 years “coup-proofing” their existence. They have watched their world change from the 1979 revolution to the brink of nuclear capability in 2025. They have survived losing their top generals and seeing their currency crater. Why? Because they still have loyalists with rifles on every street corner.
History has proven, time and again, that air and naval power are tools of denial, not tools of governance. You can prevent an enemy from moving, but you cannot force them to change their hearts or relinquish their grip on a population from 30,000 feet. In the early days of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), we saw a flash of what works: small teams of Special Forces on the ground, working with indigenous partners like the Northern Alliance to provide the “eyes” and the human element that airpower lacks.
But Iran is a different animal. I have long hoped the CIA or Mossad cultivated a HUMINT (human intelligence) network capable of standing up an Iranian resistance core. That network—if it exists—has yet to produce results on the ground.
Without a credible, organized internal resistance to act as a ground force, the IRGC knows they can simply wait us out. They are willing to let their people starve and their ships sink so long as they maintain the internal security apparatus to suppress the Iranian public and retain power.
A naval blockade is a slow-motion weapon that targets the innocent before it ever touches the powerful. Unless there is a strategic shift that accounts for the “human geography” of Iran—either through an overwhelmingly devastating campaign that physically breaks the regime’s ability to govern or the long-overdue activation of a legitimate internal resistance—we are just “mowing the grass.” A ground component doesn’t have to mean U.S. boots in Tehran. It means empowering partners who can actually hold territory and legitimacy once the regime’s coercion apparatus cracks.
If we continue to rely solely on standoff warfare, the IRGC will do exactly what the Taliban did: retreat into the shadows, wait for the Western appetite for conflict to wane, and rise to power again in a relatively short time.
Make no mistake: I want to see Iran defeated. I support the decision to finally confront the threat this regime poses both regionally and globally. I lost friends in Iraq to EFPs (explosively formed penetrators) supplied by Iran and used against our forces. But the United States does not get to define defeat for our enemies. They decide when they are defeated—and they define it differently. They are generally unconcerned with the loss of military hardware or a failed economy. As long as their ideology survives and the zealots retain power, they will see themselves as the victors, living to rebuild for another day. We are taking away their ships, air defenses, missiles, drones, and economy—but we are still leaving them with their most valuable resource: armed loyalists on the ground to control the populace.
We cannot continue to treat 21st-century zealotry as a problem that can be solved with 20th-century blockades. Control is a human endeavor. Until we have a plan for the ground, we don’t have a plan for the future.
Stephen D Cook is a retired U.S. Army Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel with 25 years of service. A combat veteran decorated for both heroism and valor, he is the author of the field manuals Plan Like a Green Beret and Choose the Heavier Ruck, and the techno-thriller In the Shadows of the Sky. His work explores the intersection of elite military decision-making, intuition, and disruptive leadership. He is based in St. Augustine, Florida.
This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.
