The long-standing inability of the United States to achieve a decisive victory in Iran (i.e., defined as forcing total submission, enacting regime change, or achieving complete disarmament) remains a debated issue in contemporary geopolitics. Despite extensive analysis by American universities, think tanks, intelligence agencies, and the military, a convincing explanation has proved elusive, writes ANBOUND founder Kung Chan.
Following the resumption of direct US airstrikes in 2026 after the collapse of a brief truce, high-intensity conflict again failed to yield a conclusive outcome. Even after heavy military pressure and the death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Washington’s ultimate reliance on returning to the negotiating tables showed the limits of conventional military power.
An analysis using AI produces what purported to be five deep structural factors:
“First, Iran’s military geography presents a formidable obstacle. Spanning 1.64 million square kilometers, the country is a natural mountain fortress, with its core heartland ringed by the Zagros and Alborz ranges. This terrain prevents the U.S. from replicating its rapid armored and air campaigns from the flat deserts of Iraq and Kuwait. Capturing Tehran would require hundreds of thousands of ground troops engaged in brutal, protracted urban and mountain warfare, a cost in casualties and finance that post-Afghanistan Washington is unwilling to bear.
Second, Iran has offset its conventional military inferiority by investing in an asymmetric “Axis of Resistance” proxy network, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthi movement in Yemen, and Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria. An all-out assault on the Iranian homeland risks detonating a regional war, triggering mass rocket and drone strikes against U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Israel. Furthermore, Iran’s low-cost asymmetric assets, such as Shahed drones and anti-ship missiles, allow it to harass the Strait of Hormuz, disrupting global shipping and imposing unsustainable economic attrition on the West.
Third, the Strait of Hormuz itself serves as a critical economic leverage point. Accounting for approximately 20% of global petroleum and liquefied natural gas shipments, the narrow waterway is highly vulnerable to an Iranian blockade. Periodic disruptions during the 2026 conflict caused international oil prices to spike, fueling global inflation. For a U.S. administration facing a domestic general election, the political fallout of surging energy prices is an untouchable red line.
Fourth, global multipolarity prevents the absolute isolation of Tehran. Despite stringent U.S. blockades, Iran maintains its wartime economy by channeling oil to international markets, particularly in Asia, through clandestine networks. Concurrently, powers like Russia provide informal cooperation in electronic warfare, air defense technology, missile hardware, and satellite intelligence, preventing the U.S. from establishing the total technological dominance it enjoyed in past conflicts.
Fifth, the internal stability of the Iranian regime is frequently underestimated. The dual structure of a theocratic leader and a secular president allows for rapid succession; following Khamenei’s death, the clerical establishment and the Revolutionary Guards can swiftly install a successor like Mojtaba, and channel the crisis into a religious mobilization. Additionally, faced with foreign intervention, Iran’s domestic political grievances would give way to intense nationalist sentiments rooted in millennia of Persian history, neutralizing U.S. expectations of an internal collapse. Consequently, U.S. strategy has shifted from regime change to containment and dynamic gaming under maximum pressure.”
While such AI-generated responses might sound reasonable at first glance, these structural explanations actually overlook a fundamental tactical reality from the perspective of military science, which is the fact that the U.S. and Western nations currently lack the specific tool required for a decisive victory against a resilient adversary like Iran. This tool is none other than the integrated, low-cost unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems. Conversely, this modern warfare paradigm has been mastered by Ukraine and Azerbaijan. Ukraine utilized cheap drone tactics to maintain a years-long stalemate against a massive Russian army, even when Western aid dried up, extending strikes into Moscow for the first time since World War II. Similarly, Azerbaijan deployed Turkish-manufactured TB2 drones to dismantle Armenian defenses, forcing Yerevan to negotiate.
The strategic blind spot for the U.S. and its allies stems from a dogmatic reliance on high-priced weapons systems and an institutional disdain for low-cost alternatives. While U.S. and Israeli forces established near-total air supremacy over Iran and neutralized high-value assets, they could not control the streets, where Iranian government forces, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and the Basij militia maintained administrative dominance. Airpower can duel equivalent military forces, but it cannot replace a land army present in every corner of a territory. In modern conflict, cheap drones act as the necessary extension of the ground soldier to achieve this level of pervasive spatial control.
While the West possesses the foundational components for unmanned ground warfare, it has lagged in integration and production. A viable future doctrine requires a multi-layered approach, which includes establishing absolute air supremacy; utilizing large, high-altitude reconnaissance drones to deploy swarms of cheap attack drones controlled via remote networks; achieving day-and-night coverage across urban and rural sectors to dismantle the adversary’s administrative apparatus; and maintaining long-term spatial suppression by occupying high altitudes with premium platforms and low altitudes with low-cost systems.
This remains absent from traditional military academies like West Point, existing instead within commercial tech sectors. The current predicament in Iran reflects an obsolete reliance on past confidence in Venezuela, blind trust in Israeli intelligence, and a failure to master the dynamics of modern unmanned warfare. While the realities of the Iranian theater serve as a critical wake-up call that will inevitably force Western military procurement to adapt, the current strategic impasse is left to be explained away by President Donald Trump’s political rhetoric.
