President Trump has held fast to one belief over the course of the nearly five-month war with Iran: If the U.S. military hit Iran hard enough, eventually the country’s leaders would bend to his demands.
“We’re going to knock out all their power plants,” Mr. Trump told Fox News this week. “We’re going to knock out all their bridges unless they get to the table and negotiate.”
“Do you believe the Iranians are serious about making a deal?” he was asked.
“I think they have no choice,” Mr. Trump replied.
Only a few years earlier, the long, frustrating wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had largely discredited this vision of military power.
In their early months, both wars were fueled by a novel military strategy that rose to prominence after the 1991 Persian Gulf war. It posited that by simultaneously attacking with precision weapons on multiple fronts, the U.S. military could paralyze its enemy and achieve a swift, low-casualty victory.
As the Iraq and Afghanistan wars dragged on, the military’s faith in this new approach began to wane. By 2007, a new theory of warfare — summed up in the Army’s counterinsurgency doctrine — took hold.
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