Lawfare Daily: Ukraine, Iran, Taiwan, and the Short War Illusion

[Intro]

Dara Massicot: So really a, a catastrophic set of assumptions. They thought if they decapitated or assassinated Zelensky and they showed up with their tanks, that the Ukrainians would see them and just stop fighting. And as we know now, nothing could be further from the truth.

Natalie Orpett: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Natalie Orpett, executive editor of Lawfare, with Dara Massicot, Ariane Tabatabai, and Julia Curlee. Dara is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment's Russia and Eurasia Program, Ari is a vice president at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a contributing editor at Lawfare, and Julia is a Lawfare public service fellow and a 25-year veteran of the CIA.

Julia Curlee: Whether it is to hold back its forces and slowly attrit PLA or hide its leadership in the vast urban jungles of Taiwanese cities, there are ways of dragging this conflict out that will be very uncomfortable for Beijing and could play to the strengths of the U.S. intervening on the outside.

Natalie Orpett: Today, we're talking about the short war illusion, the idea that countries are susceptible to believing that with the right strategy they can accomplish their goals with a quick war. We look at how that illusion is playing out in the wars between Russia and Ukraine and between the United States and Russia, and how it could play out in the future in a conflict between China and Taiwan.

[Main Podcast]

Natalie Orpett: Okay, Julia, you wrote a piece recently for us in Lawfare that looked at the potential conflict between China and Taiwan, and in particular how China might be observing the worlds observing recent conflicts, and thinking about, and perhaps planning for, what it might do with respect to Taiwan.

And in your piece, you put together a very useful framework that I invited you and Dara and Ari to come on and talk about in the context both of your piece, but also the two other main conflicts on everyone's mind, including the Chinese's mind right now, which is of course Russia/Ukraine and U.S./Iran. So to get us started, you talk about what Cathal Nolan has termed a “short war illusion.” So can you start by telling us what that means?

Julia Curlee: Yeah. Thanks so much, Natalie. So, you know, it is, it's almost cliche to think about wars beginning with the, the concept that, that the troops will be home by Christmas, and it, it's often built around this, this idea that induces countries to launch wars of aggression, where they think that it'll be short, sharp, and accomplish their objectives before the other side has an opportunity to fight back, and it'll solve their political problems on, on the battlefield.

And countries are, are frequently susceptible to the illusion that they will win quickly and they quickly find out that these are going to be long, slow slogs, wars of attrition. And throughout history, if you're a military analyst, you're very familiar with, with the calculations of Germany before both world wars, Japan before World War II.

And so it, it's a, a useful framework to then look at two current conflicts in Ukraine and in Iran, where in the Russian case and in the U.S. case, both countries thought that these would be short and sharp and that their opponents would yield quickly, and both were wrong.

And so as a person that, that has studied China-Taiwan extensively, this is another element of Beijing's thinking on China and Taiwan. And so as Beijing often is studying modern conflict for lessons learned for its own potential military operations, the piece is, is performing that exercise, looking at the potential lessons learned that Beijing might have from both the Russian and U.S. failures to achieve this kind of short, sharp war.

Natalie Orpett: So it is a sort of modern-day analysis of these two earlier wars and several actors that you mentioned. And I think that's, it's, it's particularly interesting because as you described it, the phenomenon does seem very familiar from both of these other conflicts.

I want to stick with Nolan's vocabulary here because I think it does provide useful framing for picking apart the phenomenon a little bit. So the three, as I understand it, are decapitation, choke point denial, and protraction. So can you just define each of those terms, and then we will proceed to use them in the context of each of these other conflicts?

Julia Curlee: Yeah. So the idea, you know, as, as a country is thinking about launching a short, sharp conflict, often they think of an opening decisive blow, whether that's against the enemy's military or as in the case that we're talking about here today, against the enemy's leadership, as that will paralyze the opposition and induce, you know, the, the, the enemy to capitulate quickly.

Then there is a persistent phenomena when they, when they launch these wars of choice that the offense is often quite expensive as the seizure of territory, the holding of bodies of water often turns into much more of, of a slog, much more expensive in the cost of going on the offensive than it is to counter on the defense. And, and as we'll talk about in Iran and the Ukraine scenario, that's proved the case, and that's another one of these lessons that the, the Chinese will be looking at.

And then finally, the third category is really the result of the, the first two not panning out the way that the, the country launching the war expects, where the failure of those opening moves turns the war into the long, slow war of attrition, of endurance that the whole short, sharp war was supposed to avoid.

And in these cases, with Beijing watching, the, the winner of these contests are who is best able to endure a long-term conflict, both the, the cost, the material cost, but also the political cost at home of a conflict that may have gone on a lot longer than the country's leadership has sold to its own public

Natalie Orpett: Okay, so let us proceed to use that framework and talk about Russia and Ukraine in the first instance. So Dara, I wanna come to you, first on this issue of decapitation. So this sounds very familiar for those of us who followed the beginning of the war in Ukraine all the way back in 2022. It seemed very much like Russia's strategy was to do a quick hit on Kyiv to assassinate Zelensky, and things would undoubtedly be over from there.

That's clearly not what happened, but before we talk about why it didn't happen the way that they had planned, I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on why that would have been the strategy that Russia landed on, and frankly, in particular, because Russians too are historians of, of the military and certainly were aware of the failure of this phenomenon in many, many other contexts over history.

Dara Massicot: Well, thanks so much. This is actually a very common mistake that the Russians, and before them, the Soviets used to make when entering into a war. We can, we can pull it back to Afghanistan, where they thought they would do this lightning attack on the government, and everything would fall into place and deploy quickly, and everything would be over. It didn't work out that way. They had a similar phenomenon for Chechnya I. It was a, a disaster for them. There was an attempt at this idea in 2008 against Georgia, but that, that, that one is kind of a outlier in that it only lasted a few days, so we can't really put it in there.

But if you go back to 2014, Russia's first invasion of Ukraine, they had a very similar principle, which was, "We will deploy to Crimea immediately, and everyone will see us and, and lay down their arms," and that's largely what happened. The Ukrainians on the peninsula at the time were not in a position to fight back. The Russians did deploy there quickly. There really weren't any skirmishes, and the government in Kyiv at that time told them to stand down because there was no hope. And they left in a corridor.

And, and, you know, the Russians thought, “Okay, resistance will be minimal.” You know, Ukraine is a, you know, quote, unquote, "brotherly country of Russia." They're not going to fight us. And they learned the hard way in the Donbas in 2014 that that was not the case.

So one might ask themselves in the Kremlin, which they don't ask themselves this question of why were we so wrong strategically about where the Ukrainians were, were mentally between the years of 2014 and 2022? What types of improvements had they made to themselves? What kind of outreach were they doing with Western partners to improve their situational awareness? How had public sentiment shifted in Ukraine against Russia?

You know, these are, these are the strategic questions that were not evaluated amongst the very few number of people in the Kremlin who made the decision to go back in in 2022. That is a, a very closed chamber, you know, whether it, it's Vladimir Putin's mind and maybe a handful of his advisors.

And they bounced around the idea that they could repeat this plan if they just recruited enough Ukrainians in various positions at mu- municipal, s- state, federal level, that they could have a shadow government in waiting, and they could invade from five different directions. The Ukrainians would not fight back, and they could install this puppet government. That was the legwork that they had laid down. That was the war that they designed.

But as we know now, that network of, I think the Ukrainians arrested 6 to 700 people in the days r- running up to the invasion, completely took out the guts of the Russian network that they wanted to install, and then others that the Russians had paid just simply didn't show up once they saw the way that things were going, and which was not in Russia's favor.

So really a, a catastrophic set of assumptions. They thought if they decapitated or assassinated Zelensky and they showed up with their tanks, that the Ukrainians would see them and just stop fighting. And as we know now, nothing could be further from the truth.

Natalie Orpett: And just to push on that a little bit more, do you have a sense of whether the issue was more that Russia overestimated its own power militarily in terms of sort of political persuasiveness, being able to have a public government in place, et cetera, or that it underestimated Ukraine, or, or was it really equal parts both?

Dara Massicot: I, I think it really was equal parts both. They believed that they had a shadow government in waiting. They believed from some closed polling that they had done that Ukrainian public sentiment was 50/50 in terms of whether they would fight back against the Russians or not. That was, you know, not correct, or their polling was, was wrong. Small sample.

And then also just the way that they designed their campaign itself, they clearly designed it in a way that there, th- it assumed that there would be no armed resistance beyond a few days. And we see that now from the elements of the plan that we h- we have collected over time. It was a very rapid road march insertion, you know, this is gonna work out after three days of, of maybe some fighting, we'll just do crowd control. And, and we just know this from multiple different parts of the organization at this point. Most importantly, there was no plan B. There wasn't a branch plan for if this went off the rails immediately what can we bring to bear to, to rectify the situation? And everything was kind of made up in a very ad hoc way on the fly.

So they were caught by surprise, I think learned a lot about themselves in the process, just how kind of hollowed out and rusted out on the corners of combat effectiveness that their military had become. And they also learned that, you know, it turns out when Bill Burns went to Moscow and told them, "We're going to get involved, we, the West, are going to get involved," that he was telling the truth. He wasn't making that up. And I, I think they the Russians completely failed to understand, you know, how we were already involved and how far we would get involved, and that, I think, was a really dominant element in, in why things didn't play out the way they thought. It, it, it just never really was a conflict between two parties. It was Ukraine supporters, and then over time, Russia and its supporters.

Natalie Orpett: Interesting. So I guess one last question on that, Dara. Do you think it's the case that in looking back on its own history, as you mentioned, of using this same sort of strategy, Russia interprets the failures differently, or that it just truly thought that the situation this time in 2022 in Ukraine was different enough in kind that history wouldn't repeat itself?

Dara Massicot: I, I think that they had told themselves a compelling story to themselves that, you know, we, we have a ready-to-go shadow government. The Ukrainians won't fight back. Western military assistance will not be meaningful. Ukraine is a, quote, "brotherly nation," and they've, they truly internalized that and believed it.

And I, I don't think that they really ever fully understood from one conflict to the next their failures in the opening phases, because we see them repeat the same mistakes, you know, historically every five years, every 10 years. So, so I don't think that they, they've learned, I, I don't think that they've internalized that. That's an embarrassing thing to admit, and it's a dangerous one, particularly in a system like that.

Natalie Orpett: Okay, Ari, let's move to you and to Iran because as I recall with Iran not so long ago, the conflict began, at least in some respects, with a quite targeted U.S. and Israeli strike on the leadership of Iran, and the war has since then not been over very quickly despite this pretty clear strategy of getting rid of the entire leadership, and it was in the context of some mass protests in Iran.

And I, as I recall, there was some thinking or some discussion in the press at the time of the U.S. strikes that, you know, this was a great time to capitalize on internal dissent in Iran. But still, we see this same sort of fallacy that is discussed in the framework of the short war illusion, which is that a quick decapitation will be an effective way to have a short war. So talk about what happened in Iran. Did I get that history right? And then same question as I had for Dara, which is why do you think that was the thinking?

Ariane Tabatabai: Yeah, well, you got the very ancient history of five months ago exa- exactly right. And first of all, thanks, it's, it's delightful to be here with the three of you. Yeah, I, I think, you know, we had some unrealistic timelines going into this. The administration's framing of the conflict was very much along the lines that we were just discussing in the context of Ukraine, that this will be a quick operation, and I think part of it is that there was the parallel from last summer when we had Operation Midnight Hammer that was, you know, that's also known as the 12-day war that was actually a very specific campaign focused on Iran's nuclear program.

And after the 12 days, you know, there was an expectation that perhaps there would be some tit for tat activities, that there might be escalation. A lot of that didn't play out, and, and I think that perhaps reinforced the view within the administration that it could do this relatively quickly. So I'm kind of jumping ahead to your, to your final question, though I, I'll I do think that there are a couple of additional pieces here.

I do think that as Dara was describing in the case of Russia, if you were just looking at Iran's own history over the past 50 years, it would have suggested that this conflict may not end on the timelines that the administration had envisioned, right? Right after I keep going back to the Iran-Iraq War as the kind of perfect case study for this, which is a conflict that starts after Saddam Hussein makes the decision in 1980 to invade Iran. Iran had just come out of the 1979 revolution. It was still going through the hostage crisis and the, all of the ripple effects that that had created for the country with the United States and internationally.

And so Saddam's view was that, you know, Iran is in this massive domestic crisis, it is having all these challenges internationally. Great, we can just go in and annex essentially these, kind of, parts of Iran that are oil-rich, where there's an Arab minority, and it'll be done. And what actually happened was an eight-year brutal, brutal war that m- left the two countries essentially where they were at the beginning, except for hundreds of thousands of deaths and the use of chemical weapons occurred in the process.

So we're not there, thankfully, but what I do think is essentially a parallel is that the, our administration essentially underestimated Iran and its willingness to withstand and its ability to withstand this, and overestimated its own, because it was thinking about the tactical and operational capabilities and advantages that we have compared to Iran, not understanding fully that Iran has built an entire military doctrine for the past few decades that is focused on precisely deterring and fighting this kind of military, and doing it on the cheap and doing it in an easier, well not easier, but doing it with way fewer capabilities than the United States has.

So I do think that the administration didn't really acknowledge that there were these timelines that are going to not really play out on its terms, that Iran was going to get a vote, and Iran was going to be a lot more resilient than the administration was giving it credit for.

The second piece is that there was this view, I think, in the administration, and one that was perhaps shared by the Israelis, that given the fact that Iran had just had mass protests, that it was in a very serious domestic crisis situation economically and s- in terms of just the broader society, that it was going to be able to take out the Supreme Leader and a few IRGC, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, commanders and other senior leaders, and once it did that, that the regime would just collapse on itself, and that didn't happen. And it didn't happen because Iran was actually not just a Supreme Leader. It, the, the regime was never just a Supreme Leader. It was never just a few senior IRGC commanders, and that was not understood, I think, by the administration.

And I'm gonna pause here and note that it's not that we didn't know these things as a U.S. government. It's not that these things had not been foreseen. It's that the political leadership did not actually take that analysis and all of that knowledge into account, partially because it has gutted the, the people who would be able to tell it that what we know about Iran. So I think fundamentally, all of this boils down to there was just a lack of understanding of the adversary.

And then coupled coupling that with the fact that there was an overestimation of our own capabilities, and so I think fundamentally, we also didn't understand blue, right? Like, we didn't understand the United States as well as we didn't understand Iran in some ways. And that was also translated into shifting priorities and shifting goals that were associated with the conflict, where initially the idea of the conflict was to take down Iran's leadership and create regime change. Then it was, well, maybe we're not trying to actually change the regime ourselves. Maybe we're just trying to c-create the conditions for the people to rise and take down the regime. And then from there, we kind of sh- moved on to, okay, well, maybe we can't do that, but perhaps we can just take out their nuclear capabilities. Okay, well, we're probably not gonna get there 100%. Let's just take out their missile capabilities and their drone sites and their drone capabilities.

So the, the objectives kept shifting. They're still in some ways shifting. And so it makes it really hard to actually be able to plan if you don't know what you're trying to achieve at the end of the day. You can have all of the capabilities in the world, it's not going to do anything if you don't know what you're trying to do.

Natalie Orpett: Yeah, I was gonna ask that specific question, 'cause I know you and I have spoken about that exact phenomenon before, the, the changing goalposts, the lack of clarity of what exactly is the mission here. Because it does seem, in the case of both Russia and China, which we will come to momentarily, there was much more of a sort of territory and people-focused framework in mind, right? That Ukraine is, is part of a larger Russia, and Taiwan, I know I'm oversimplifying here, and Taiwan is part of a larger China.

But the United States never wanted to annex Iran, and initially, you know, the mes- the messaging when the conflict was underway, was first underway, even within the first couple of weeks, was so mixed, and the evolution that you're describing, I think, is very much what we've seen. But I remember at the time, in these early days, when we were still in the sort of decapitation phase of the strategy, such as it is, it was that no one was quite sure which of those missions was the operative one. Do you have any sense of how that may have contributed to the decision to go with the decapitation strategy in the first instance?

Ariane Tabatabai: Well, at least from what we've seen in the press reporting, it does seem like there was this kind of plan in place that we were gonna go in, that we were going to take out, you know, senior leaders, and that was going to, again, create some sort of condition for regime change. I think the confusion comes in in a few different places.

First is the fact that I don't know that this was the United States, but certainly Israel, which is, you know, in this combined operation with the United States and Iran, was also taking out a lot of the opposition within the regime that could have actually stepped up. And these are, in some cases, individuals who've been under house arrest for years, or if not decades, because of their push for reform within the system. And so if you're trying not to actually create a whole, you know, a structural regime change, you're trying to kind of get a leadership change that is advantageous to your, to your interests and to your goals, then those are pote- potentially the people that you would want to see rise to the top and help kind of, shepherd that process, and that does not seem like it was the case.

The second piece is that even within days of the conflict where regime change was still very much on the table, there were so many different conflicting views of what that might look like, not just between the U.S. and Israel, but even within the United States, where there were candidates, potential candidates that were put forward as people who would be, you know, the kind of the leaders of this transition or of this new system, and then the president would come out and say, "Well, I don't think that's gonna work."

So there, there was this kind of back and forth internally about what might that system look like, what is the transition going to look like, who might be leading that transition? And we've gone into war already, so we're already actively shooting, and we have not done that prep work, right? Typically, you want that work to have happened ahead of time if you're going to engage in such a, a campaign but that work had not happened, and it seems like we're just trying to build the ship as we're flying it and trying to figure out what we did know, what we didn't know, and at that point, it's already too late.

So, you know, and I'm not suggesting that a conflict by any means is, you know, linear and you just kind of, you know, do planning at the fro- front end and you kind of follow that process. You typically do have changes that happen. You have to be flexible. You have to, to answer to things that are happening in the real world. But there does need to be some level of planning at the front end that takes some of these realities into account, and that seems like it was just not the case.

Natalie Orpett: Okay, that's really helpful. So speaking of planning, Julia, your piece looked at how the Chinese might be observing these two conflicts and thinking about these issues more broadly with respect to Iran. So talk about the decapitation phase of this framework in that context.

Julia Curlee: Yeah. Well, first, first I wanna start by acknowledging the limits of analogy in, in, in making the, the pivot to the, the Taiwan case. Now, obviously there are significant differences between what has happened in, you know, in Ukraine and in Iran, and the, the, you know, these are large land powers with vast spaces, with, with borders versus an island in the Western Pacific. So, we can acknowledge that there will be significant differences there. I, with this piece, was trying to focus on aspects of conflict that could carry and that's what, what leads us to these, these specific areas. Not to say that these are going to play out in exactly the same way.

So first, the dynamic of a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan, the key variable that occupies the mind of PLA planners and that has been at the center of their public writings for, for years, is the potential intervention of the United States. Obviously, this small democracy of 23 million people off of China's border is nothing compared with the global power of, of the U.S. and ability to, to, you know, obviously with nuclear weapons, but also just to, to, to wage a protracted conflict around the world that could threaten China's future rise.

And so they have mostly been focused on this in the development of capabilities. Xi Jinping has given his military until 2027 a significant anniversary of, of note for, for China to have the capability to invade Taiwan, specifically in the face of U.S. intervention. No one has doubted for some time that without U.S. intervention, China has the capability of defeating Taiwan. But it is U.S. intervention that occupies most of their mind.

So to head that off, to ensure that an invasion would succeed without either failure, a economic catastrophe for China, or the intervention of a superpower like the United States who could defeat the PLA, they have focused on speed above, above almost all is at the center of, of decades of military modernization and capabilities that would keep out the United States’ anti-access/area denial capabilities, would keep the U.S. at bay so that it could achieve Taiwan's capitulation as rapidly as possible so there's, there's nothing left for the United States to save if Taiwan itself has already fallen to the mainland.

And so to get there, they have focused publicly on a few things. And, and first and foremost, to achieve this short war that they desperately want, they have focused on the decapitation, destruction of the Taiwan political leadership with the idea that a opening war strike on the leadership that, that decapitates the Taiwan government will induce paralysis, that the parts will not be able to organize themselves into a cohesive resistance and whether through direct negotiations of with who's left or just simply in the absence of organized resistance, marching into Taipei and, and declaring that this is now a province of, of, of mainland China.

And so they have very much focused on these capabilities, Chinese hypersonic weapons, other, other ballistic missile capabilities. It is widely expected that that is how a war with Taiwan would begin. As my colleagues have noted, that is precisely the, the, the opening move that both Putin and, and our own leadership believed would, would open a, a war that they also expected would, would end in a short, sharp conflict.

And as Beijing does study modern conflict very closely, they have not fought a, a war since 1979, I would expect they would be examining that, that assumption. And they've invested quite a bit in this critical opening war assumption. They actually have built mock-up buildings in mainland China that commercial satellites have observed of, of, you know, a mock-up of the presidential palace of the president of Taiwan, and they can regularly war game with their special forces and what it would l- be like to, to land and, and do an operation to capture or kill the Taiwanese leadership.

And so they would be quite concerned that this opening war gambit has, has failed now twice in just a few years and would not abandon by any means their desires to incorporate Taiwan and have a short war, but pro- but move to other ways of achieving that beyond just that opening strike. And so I would expect them to double down on things like raising fifth columns on the island, trying to pay off other members of the Taiwanese government to, to defect the military to, to, to lay down its arms, cyberattacks upon the Taiwanese civil society, so the whole society comes to a standstill and, you know, perhaps opening up additional fronts rather than just simply trying to march into Taipei

Natalie Orpett: Okay, so let's transition to the second part of the framework, which looks more at the defender of the attack that was attempting the, the decapitation, to continue using this helpful framework and vocabulary.

So Dara, I wanna come back to you on Russia and Ukraine. You s- you spoke about it a bit, but as we have seen, despite the, what appeared to be, quite significant capacity asymmetry between Russia and Ukraine, and bracket the fact that that seems to have just been a, a quite inaccurate understanding of the Russian capacity, certainly technologically and, and militarily as the war unfolded, but there was still quite a, a, a difference, right? I mean, it's, it's a... Russia is just a much, much bigger country and s- is understood to have a lot of prowess, and yet Ukraine was able to put on, and has been able to put on a really remarkable defense.

So talk a little bit about this, the, the terminology that Nolan gives it is, is choke point denial. What has Ukraine done to impose costs on Russia despite this at least apparent capacity asymmetry to make it the fact that the, the conflict has protracted as much as it has, and the decapitation strategy was not effective?

Dara Massicot: Sure. So, so I'll talk about some of the literal choke points that, that Ukraine imposed on Russia inside Ukraine, but I'd also like the second part to focus on some of these broader issues of global choke points that we have collectively, I think, in the West and, and our partners elsewhere have, have failed to cut off vital Russian supplies for various reasons.

So in the first instance, when we talk about choke points and geography, there were a few critical nodes on Russia's invasion route into Ukraine, and, you know, we know now that, that those plans were essentially blown to Western intelligence in Ukraine before the war. And so they were able to literally create literal choke points on the roads, backing up Russian forces, attriting them, killing off their most trained soldiers, some of their most modern equipment in the beginning of the war, and causing Russia to withdraw about half of its, I think geographically half of its objectives, which were capturing Kyiv, th- this very large metropolis, and then other parts of northern Ukraine. Within a few months, they had to completely abandon that objective and then focus more so on the, the, the Donbas region in southern Ukraine.

I mean, that's, that's a very simple application of choke point, but it is one that the Russians, again, and I, I go back to the, the failures to learn here. The, the Russians learned the hard way in Afghanistan how to do route management. They learned this over the course of a decade, and yet they forgot all of that in Chechnya five years later. They forgot all of that in Georgia, and they didn't do it this time either in Ukraine, caus- catastrophic issues for them at the strategic level with this campaign. They're, they're never going to occupy Ukraine to the extent that they thought that they were going to do now. The, the war has shifted in terms of, of, of what it is.

Ukraine has, over time, now that the front line has settled into, you know, defensive networks of trenches and, you know, minefields, they have started imposing different kinds of costs on the Russians with their expanding precision strike game, whether that's middle strike in occupied areas or deep strike of, of drones into Ukraine and increasing missiles, to try to give Moscow a taste of its own medicine, although at a much smaller level.

So what we see, at this point in the war, four years on, and, and this was very, you know, a palpable feeling there, I was just there recently, the front line is not really moving a lot. Both sides are facing nearly complete suppression on the ground because of all the drones in the air, the different types of drones. It's very hard to fight. It's very hard to resupply. It's just very hard to do anything once you're inside the kill zone. So the progress is really kind of slowing down. Russia's not moving forward at the same rate, although they keep trying and losing you know, just really significant amount of personnel.

What we are seeing to get around this choke point on the ground is Moscow is accelerating its missile strike campaign against Kyiv with increasingly ballistic missiles. They know that we're running short of Patriot supply, and we're not gonna be able to sustain Kyiv at the level that we need to. We just don't have, we just don't have the stock anymore. So we're, we're seeing Russia trying to break out of ground choke points by a much more sharp, vicious campaign in the air, and Ukraine trying to do the same to force trade-offs.

Where the choke point issue for Russia is, is tough be- is on this global issue of trying to cut off its economy whether that's through sanctioning a lot of its industry, oil and gas, secondary sanctions, it's, it's been very difficult to cause enough harm to the Russian economy to compel them to stop. Even the Ukrainian strike campaign against Russian oil and gas, it's disrupted 30 to 40% of Russia's oil and gas industry, which is astronomical. It's still not causing them to stop.

You know, they're still getting a lot of supply from China. This war would not be possible without all of the support that China's providing. It, it wouldn't have been s- possible without the intellectual property that they basically purchased from Iran to have the Shahed drones, and now they've made the Geran 345 variant drone. And North Korea even came in at a clutch moment for helping them in Kursk. So it's, we constantly see attempts to put Russia in a, a strategic choke point, and Russia's finding ways out of it through evasion and through its, its partners. So tactically, choke point, yes. Strategic choke point, very difficult.

Natalie Orpett: Okay. Ari, let's come to you, and tell us about Iran and what sorts of defenses it has put up despite, as you were saying earlier, a real tactical advantage, particularly in the realm of technology from the United States.

Ariane Tabatabai: Yeah, so Iran, I think, has really tried, number one, to unlike the United States, which has had these maximalist and shifting goals, as we've discussed, has really tried to be laser-focused on a couple of things, and I think that has been part of its strength. And that's not just something that happened over the course of this war. Again, it's part of how Iran has been developing its military doctrine for a long time because it has known that it was going to potentially be in conflict with A, a, conventionally way superior adversary, B, with a nuclear weapon state in the United States, and potentially Israel, a nuclear armed state, and three, with an adversary that would have a network of allies and partners and installation and forces and assets in its immediate region.

So Iran was never going to be responding in kind because it couldn't, right? The Unit- Iran cannot really reach the U.S. homeland like the United States can reach the Iranian homeland. And so it really had to kind of think about how to level that playing field. And it had settled on two main courses of action which have played out during this conflict.

The first one is obviously the Strait of Hormuz, and how it's been weaponizing the strait, freedom of navigation. Natalie, you and I have talked about this a million times in various Lawfare podcasts and, and articles and so on, but essentially we had known for a long time that this would be one of the main tools that Iran would use in a conflict with the United States. We didn't necessarily have exactly how it would do it, and this has played out in a bit more of a tailored manner than I think many of us had anticipated, but we knew that that was going to be the case. And it has done so fairly effectively.

The second is just its own network of non-state partners in the region, and its ability to reach U.S. installations from, using missiles and drones that Dara discussed as well, throughout the region, and be able to hold at risk the United States, U.S. service members, and U.S. installations, as well as the critical infrastructure and cr- key sectors of U.S. partners in the region. This is why it started, Iran started attacking Gulf energy sector installations and infrastructure and tourism, because those are two things that Iran knew would really raise the cost of the conflict.

And so it's really been laser focused on essentially surviving this conflict, number one, and that included also ensuring that its own domestic situation was essentially under control while the Unit- while it was, you know, fighting the U.S. And two, raising the cost of this conflict for the U.S. and for its partners, which would in turn put pressure on the United States to have to change how it was doing things.

And I think all of this is underpinned by the fact that Iran knows that any U.S. administration always has a built-in timeline, right? There is the political calendar, which is obviously, we're feeling very acutely right now because we're just a few months away from the midterms. But that is just generally going to be the case in any, at any given moment if Iran were to be fighting the United States, it would have to deal, the U- any U.S. administration would have to deal with the political calendar in a way that Iran just doesn't have to deal with in the same way, just by virtue of being an authoritarian states, state that, you know, has a very different set of considerations. So the two main things are really the kind of increasing the political and economic cost, and doing it via the Strait of Hormuz and doing it via the targeting of allies and partners and forces in the region.

Natalie Orpett: Okay, Julia, over to you to project all of this on thinking about what the Chinese are planning and how they're perceiving both of these conflicts and all of the features of the conflicts that Dara and Ari were just describing.

Julia Curlee: I mean, the first thing to know about an invasion of Taiwan, an amphibious invasion, is that what we're talking about here is the largest amphibious invasion launched by any country since D-Day by a force that has not fought a war since 1979, across one of the most forbidding straits, bodies of water. It's, it's about 100 miles the, at its short point. Like, it is a, a truly forbidding military operation that has to go right the first day of the war. And so, this is already a high degree of difficulty for any country on Earth to be, to be engaging in, and it is why Taiwan still exists as an independent society.

So to look at some specific aspects of this, you know, as the PLA has been working through this plan for, for, for decades now, what's really, I think what we're really talking about and the key lesson that I would draw out of, out of the Iran case is the cost differential here. And this, this comes in the form of denial weapons like mines and then the, what the Iranians are showing now also with one-way attack UAVs.

And so just to tease out a couple more points from the Iran side of things, you know, this has been a huge problem in the Strait of Hormuz for, for decades now, going back to the Iran-Iraq War. I mean, an Iranian contact mine, which, which estimated to have cost at one point $1,500, had crippled a U.S. frigate, you know, in the Iran-Iraq War timeframe. It, it took 18 months to repair and $100 million of, of damage. So, like, just the cost of, of, of some of these weapons that are trivially easy to lay and then by comparison, and, and then very difficult to sweep. And if your main goal is speed, naval mines are a tremendously difficult, even the threat of them are a tremendously difficult problem for any modern navy to deal with.

And then the, the Iranian evolution and, and in, you know, their development of these cheap one-way attack drones, the Shaheds, that have found their way into the Ukraine conflict. These are, you know, 20 to $50,000 apiece, in which in, a, a sophisticated modern in- interceptor is gonna run into the millions of dollars apiece and will have a, a limited magazine depth.

And so a Chinese force looking at the price of countering both of these very inexpensive weapons has gotta be very nervous that Taiwan will implement the same kind of denial defense that Iran has, and it is just the unforgiving math of, of the denial versus the offense.

I should say also that this isn't a new problem that, that, that Beijing has. It's just been reinforced. We have seen, in recent years, some developments by the PLA to try to counter these, but they're still a long way from, from reaching that. And so for, just for some example, the PLA has developed its own unmanned naval vehicles to try to do the, the, the mine sweeping so it doesn't have to use all of its manned mine sweepers. And we've also seen the, the PLA developing the use of these water bridge barges that are effectively like the Mulberry harbors that the U.S. used in D-Day, where they basically these self-propelled barges or bridges that can, that can pull up onto the shoreline to try to create these docks for, for other vessels to come in to try to buy down the time that it would otherwise take fighting through these Taiwanese layered defenses.

Natalie Orpett: Ari, did you have something to add?

Ariane Tabatabai: Yeah. So what Julia just said prompted something for me, which is that, you know, we've talked about how the Russians, the Iranians, and the Chinese might see centers of gravity or choke points, right? On the U.S. side, you know, I think we're still treating the defense industrial base as a really important center of gravity, and you're seeing that really play out in the Iran context. I would love to hear from Dara specifically how it's playing out on the Russia-Ukraine side.

But one of the, we've, we've talked about the shifting objectives. One of the things that the administration goes back to a lot is regardless of how this war ends and regardless of how many billions of dollars we're spending and regardless of how many service members end up dying, one thing we can really get out of this war is that we have rolled back Iranian capabilities in terms of their missile and drone programs.

And the challenge is that fundamentally, as Julia's describing, these are not particularly sophisticated, expensive capabilities, and they're not particularly difficult to build. I mean, and Dara can talk about this a lot better than I can, but Russia really ramped up its production of these Shahed drones that it got from Iran at the beginning of the Ukraine war.

And so, if we continue to think about the defense industrial base as a, a center of gravity for everybody in the same way that it would be for us and in the way it has been historically, I think we're potentially, there is a mismatch in terms of the return on investment that we can have in any, in any conflict.

Natalie Orpett: Dara, did you want to respond on that one?

Dara Massicot: Yeah, so, you know, I would, I would just say that, you know, I, I think the limitations in our defense industrial base output and our stockpile have really boxed us in from the beginning with supporting Ukraine. And you know, this, this isn't something we can lay on, on the Trump administration alone. It's the Biden administration. It was, you know, before that it was Trump. There, there are many administrations that got us here in terms of what they were purchasing and what the orders were for some of these capabilities. W- we have global requirements And th- we really, you know, the math isn't mathing on the stockpiles that we have to execute those global defense requirements for ourselves and, and our allies.

So, you know, we, we walked into this situation, and I saw it time and again. We're experiencing it now in more extreme forms, where, you know, we, we want to help out a partner, but we can't or we won't because we cannot produce interceptors fast enough, or our allies have a very limited stockpile and they don't want to give up what they have left because we're already late on our contracts, and they have no idea when they'll get replenished, whether that's whether that's in the Asia-Pacific or Europe or, or, you know, they’re, our partners in the Gulf who don't want to trade with Ukraine for experience for Patriots. Like, they don't want to make the deal because they're scared they won't get Patriots.

And this, this is a real problem for our alliance management. It's a real problem for national security. It is a problem that has been known for over a decade, and it seems resistant to any kind of stimulus to change this. So I, you know, I, whether it's Patriot, whether it was HIMARS, whether it was something else, we introduced a very limited amount of capacity into Ukraine, and the Russians adapted against it, and then it became less effective over time.

And the, the analogy that I give, it's like if you get strep throat and you go to the doctor and they give you a week's worth of penicillin, and you stop taking it after day two because you feel better, like, you're, you know, you've, you've just created, like, a superbug, and that's basically the dynamic that I've seen play out in, in Ukraine, and, and I just worry about it proliferating elsewhere.

Natalie Orpett: Yeah. So I think we've, we've touched on this third category from the short war illusion. But I, I do wanna use it, refer to it specifically as a way to pull those couple of threads together. So this third category is the protraction phenomenon, so why all of these have continued as long as they have. And I mean, particularly in the case of Ukraine, this thing that was supposed to be a quick strike on Kyiv has now been going on since 2022, and Iran also likewise was supposed to be very quick, and we're into the sixth month already.

But each of you has spoken about a number of different factors that go into protraction, and this idea that the advantage will shift to whichever side is able to or willing to endure and sort of keep the conflict live. And the couple of factors I've heard, but I'd love to hear from each of you how it applies in the conflict that you've been thinking about and, and which factors are more or less meaningful.

The ones I've heard are, you know, there's geography, there's the limitations of material and stockpiles and production, there's the political calendar, there are economic pressures, there are obviously, a future we haven't gone into quite as much, shifting alliances a sort of reordering of the global order that is, of course, not a static thing and certainly not a certain thing, but everyone is observing everyone else, and strategic thinking is changing as the facts change.

So Dara, to come to you first on, on Russia and Ukraine, what of these do you think are the most important ways to think about why both Russia and Ukraine are able to endure? And as we've seen throughout this conflict, you know, the commentariat will say, “Oh, this is evidence of Ukraine's ability to persevere and, and keep this going,” and, “Oh, this is evidence of Russia's ability to just keeping, keep throwing people at this conflict.” And but there are a lot of different variables at play here. So how do you think about all of that constellation of things?

Dara Massicot: So, so I'll go from the outside in. There's a few different factors that are contributing to, to why the war in Ukraine is getting so protracted. One is that, you know, both parties to the conflict have a group of partners and allies behind them supporting them. So, you know, Ukraine has been supplied with multiple different types of weapons, battle space management tools, all financial support that has allowed them to develop their own industrial capacity after Russia tried to eliminate it early on. So there's, there's that external element of protraction coming from Ukraine's partners.

Russia is getting a lot of support that allows it to produce these elevated levels from China. It's getting critical support over time, maybe going down a little bit from Iran. And then also when it needs to, it can tap into artillery and rockets and people from North Korea. So that's the external side of, of why the war machine keeps humming.

Secondly, I think for Ukraine, you know, this is like a classic theory, but Ukraine's on death ground. You know, it's, it's not like Russia is saying, "Hey, you know, why don't we peacefully coexist and I'll just take over your territory and, you know, you just pay me taxes?" No. It's they're trying to erase the Ukrainian identity. They kidnap and torture people, using rape as a weapon. I mean, stealing children, erasing their Ukrainian heritage. I mean, this, this is a horrible outcome, so Ukraine has no choice but to resist this. It's awful. The alternative to them is erasure.

From Russia's perspective you know, I think this, this war means, this is, this is my analytic opinion, I think the war means a lot more to Putin and his elites who are locked in with him than it does to your average Russian citizen. They have learned to turn a blind eye to the war, blind eye to all the death as long as it's not impacting them in particular, like, you know, people aren't being mobilized en masse.

The other reason that it's protracted, and this is the final, like, interior layer here, is that Russia actually does have excess capacity to accelerate this war. They could mobilize, again, a very large group. They have excess armor, they have excess drones, they have a little bit excess missiles, and they're not using them.

And so I have to ask myself, you know, why do they persist in this way of fighting that is very predictable, it's very slow, you know, and I think it's a political calculus. It's something that Putin understands, "If I keep the temperature to a manageable level, my people will not rise up against me," because that's always the number one issue. How much can I get away with before the Russian people say they've had enough of me?

And he's managing this war in a very particular casualty intense way, but in a way that's acceptable. He doesn't sacrifice the air force. He does not expend everything that he has to force the issue in Donetsk right now. You know, so it's, there's a, there's a authoritarianism here that does influence the why this war is, is dragging out in the way that it is, and I think he's waiting out the Trump team. That's what, that's what I think he's doing. "What can I get from this group?"

Natalie Orpett: Okay, that's really helpful. Ari, over to you on Iran, and I'm particularly interested in the sense of Iran's ability to endure a protracted conflict. I think a lot of the discussion we're hearing in, even in mainstream press right now is this notion that even with respect to the leadership that, you know, there had long been a plan among the political elite to contingency plan for the loss of high-level political leaders, that the economy of Iran has been withstanding this crippling sanctions regime for years and years. But there's a, a lot more at play here, so talk to us about how Iran is engaged in this protracted thus far and seems to be continued to be protracted conflict, and also how the U.S. is.

Ariane Tabatabai: Yeah, there are some, some parallels here to what Dara was describing in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, although it's not, it's not entirely overlapping. There are some int- external factors here, which on the Iranian side includes the fact that Iran also receives support from Russia, just as Russia does from Iran. We know that there is intelligence sharing, and, you know, we've talked about Iran supplying Russia with drones. Russia is now also supplying Iran with the same drones essentially that Iran had sent to Russia, but they're modified and upgraded and now sent to Iran to use against U.S. forces and partners in the region.

So that's on the Iranian side. On the U.S. side, there is the question of Israel. We haven't talked that much about Israel in this, but again, this is a combined operation that the United States and Israel undertook together, and Israel has its own interests. It has its own threat perceptions that are, you know, somewhat different from that of, quite different from the one that we have with regard to Iran, and the appetite for a continued conflict with Iran is very different in Israel than it is here. You know, again, this is from the Israeli perspective, the Iranian regime is an existential threat. From the U.S. perspective, Iran is a regional threat.

A- and then you have the very specific kind of, not to get too much into the leadership, reading the tea leaves of leadership personalities and such, but President Trump is quite different from Prime Minister Netanyahu in the way that he thinks about Iran and in the way that Iran factors into the way they are perceived domestically. This is, you know, for Netanyahu, he has been known, and he has really been on this platform of keeping Israel secure from Iran for the entirety of his political career. So this is quite different for him.

And again, from the press reporting that we've seen at least over the past few months, and especially in recent weeks, it does seem like Israel wants to keep going forward. It wants to push for potential regime change, and that appetite is simply not true on the U.S. side. So, there is the external factor.

Then there is the domestic pieces that you just alluded to, which is that on the Iranian side, yes, number one, Iran had been preparing for this conflict for a long time, and they had a taste of what the Trump administration might do after the first Trump administration killed one of the top commanders in the IRGC, Qasem Soleimani, in 2020, and then with Operation Midnight Hammer last summer, targeting Iranian nuclear capabilities. So they, they have been prepare- they had been preparing for this for decades. I think they were preparing for it even more so knowing the type of leader that President Trump would be and the type of action that he would be willing to take with regard to Iran.

There's also the domestic piece, and I think here, you know, I, I disagree with a lot of some of some colleagues that I respect very deeply have, have put out, which is that to me, the domestic tensions within Iran are not a limiting factor, actually. They're not constraining Iran. They're not going to limit Iran's decision space when it comes to the war. They're doing the opposite, which is to say that the second the shooting stops, Iranian leaders will need to think about real responses to the really poor domestic situation they have in front of them. They need to think about and they need to address the economic situation that created the mass protests that we saw earlier this year, and they have no answers to that. The previous crew didn't have answers, and they were much more experienced than the current crew that has come in since the war started.

And, by the way, there is still that discontent from the mass repression that happened back in January. That repression is still going on on a smaller scale from what we can tell, but it's still going on. And so the second the war stops, Iranian leaders will have to actually try to address that domestic situation, and they can't, and they don't have real answers for people. So the longer this war goes on, the further they can kick that can down the road in, in my opinion. And so this kind of, you know, on and off cycle of escalation I think actually probably serves their purpose in, in some ways.

On the U.S. side you know, I, I think the Trump administration is just boxed in at this point. There is no good way forward. There is no real deal for the president to take. There was that MOU that was signed a few weeks ago. You know, the, the administration made a huge deal out of it. You know, it's going to stop the war. It is going to resolve Iran's nuclear program, the problems around Iran's nuclear program. It's going to reopen the strait. And it didn't do any of those things, and that was pretty apparent from the get-go.

And what was also apparent, I think, from the get-go was that that deal, that MOU, was not going to translate into a deal that would resolve everything in a meaningful way. And so there is no deal on the table. The president can't simply say, "Well, okay, I've done the thing. I'm gonna withdraw now," 'cause that's just not his style, I don't think. And the other options are basically boots on the ground, which he also doesn't want to do to actually try to finish the job.

So I think he just doesn't have very good options here, and so he's finding himself in this gray space where he is going from, you know, negotiating period to we're shooting at each other to we're back to negotiating, and so on and so forth. And so I think this is probably a trend that we're gonna keep seeing for, for a bit here because on neither side there are real incentives to actually change the status quo.

Natalie Orpett: Okay, so Julia, as we have been discussing, the Chinese and, and of course Taiwan, are observing these trends that we've been looking at and talking about. And with respect to this third category of Nolan's short war illusion, this question of protraction and which party is going to be in the position to endure over a longer term, how would you characterize each side, how they're thinking about it, and, and how we should understand it?

Julia Curlee: So with each of the other two areas, it kind of was flipped around where Beijing would be in the tougher position. I think in this, in this case, there's a really good case to be made that, of course, that the island nation fighting for its existence that can be cut off from the world is the one that is in trouble when it comes to, to protraction. But I think there's a few different ways to look at this.

First is that, you know, Taiwan does not have the ability to hide in, in a vast territory and, and refuse battle and wait it out, but it does have one of the densest urban environments in the world, and a defensive strategy on the Taiwanese side that took maximum advantage of those places, whether it is to hold back its forces and slowly attrit PLA or hide its leadership in the vast urban jungles of Taiwanese cities. There are ways of dragging this conflict out that will be very uncomfortable for Beijing and could play to the strengths of the U.S. intervening on the outside.

Obviously, China has significant economic vulnerabilities. It's very export focused. It, you know, a huge amount of its, of its income, its oil that, that keeps the lights on. It imports from the Middle East. Famously, the, the Straits of Malacca could be shut down. China is going out into the world trying to develop its own military capability abroad precisely because of its own vulnerabilities in a long conflict.

However, at the same time Taiwan has been very slow to make the critical changes to its defensive strategy. For many, many years the Taiwanese seemed to approach their weapons acquisitions from the United States as if they were purchasing intervention insurance, rather than focusing on the kind of asymmetric weapons that would be most needed.

A, a few just examples of this off the top, Taiwan has invested billions of dollars in acquisitions of ships that probably will never leave the harbor when the war starts, or aircraft, manned aircraft, which probably won't be able to take off because of the cratering of, of Taiwanese airfields in the opening hour of the war. But they bought these things and, and have invested heavily in the U.S. DIB and, and the money going to the districts of prominent appropriators for this reason, to cultivate the, you know, U.S. ties that will hopefully, in their, their views, lead to intervention rather than the kind of weapons that they would actually need that would be survivable to win the war and drag this out. So there is a mixed bag in this, in this case that is, is not seen in other cases.

I, I will just flip it around a little bit though. There's another aspect of this where Beijing is thinking about protraction, and that is protraction vis-a-vis the United States if the U.S. does intervene here. And in this case, you know, Beijing is in a really difficult position with materially, where the U.S. is a global power, and we could, could significantly hurt China's ability to maintain a protracted conflict, especially if we could bring around our allies and isolate China from its growing alliances. Of course, we haven't been doing that very, very well in the last couple of years. We've been alienating our friends and uniting our enemies. But we still do have significant global capacity that China does not.

However, to, to keep, keep being an analyst, on one hand and on the other, you'll see that China has very good reason to doubt that the U.S. would be willing to intervene in, in such a conflict. And so looking at how the U.S. has responded to casualties and a protraction in, in Iran with an upcoming election might assume that a U.S. that got involved in a war with China would not be willing to, to, to stick it out. So it is, it is a, a mixed bag on, on both sides.

The last thing I will say, while Taiwan does have significant disadvantages and is very late in the day in preparing, Taiwan in this case is fighting for its political life. This is not a war of choice for Taiwan. The leadership of Taiwan knows very well what would happen if they capitulate. Most countries when they are bombed tend to unite rather than side with the country that's bombing them. And so there is a chance here that if Taiwan can get its act together and find the will to prepare, that this island could at very least hold out significantly longer than Beijing is counting on and allow for the opportunity for external intervention.

Natalie Orpett: Okay. Well, I think that is a very helpful framework, conceptual framework for three extremely complicated conflicts. So thank you for, for walking through all of them, and I think there's a lot to learn both in comparing and contrasting across the three. Julia, Dara, and Ari, thank you so much for joining.

Julia Curlee: Thank you.

Ariane Tabatabai: Thank you.

Dara Massicot: Thank you.

[Outro]

Natalie Orpett: The Lawfare Podcast is produced by the Lawfare Institute. If you want to support the show and listen ad-free, you can become a Lawfare material supporter at lawfaremedia.org/support. Supporters also get access to special events and other bonus content we don't share anywhere else. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review us wherever you listen. It really does help.

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