IRAN WARWarden’s Five Rings and Regime Change in Iran
The war in Iran began with one of the most effective decapitation strikes in history but while it may have caused temporary paralysis, it neither brought down the regime nor brought victory. Should the United States and Israel truly desire regime change in the near term, their success so far will not be enough. Rather than targeting the heads of the regime, they will have to target the proverbial arms and fingers of repression. The Basij, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Law Enforcement Command at the local level must begin to bear the brunt of U.S. and Israeli airpower.
In 1995 Colonel John Warden published The Enemy as a System, in which he posited a five-ring model for understanding and targeting enemy states, with leadership at the center and fielded forces as the outermost ring. In between were rings representing the population, infrastructure, and resources like energy. His work followed the tradition of B.H. Liddel Hart’s The Strategy of Indirect Approach and Giulio Douhet’s Command of the Air in searching for a way to defeat an enemy without the costly and ultimately attritional endeavor of grinding down their military to achieve victory. The result of this model was the concept that when properly applied, the use of airpower could allow the United States to bypass the outermost rings and target the enemy leadership directly. This “decapitation” would at the very least cause complete strategic paralysis in the enemy and possibly even cause regime collapse but in either case, it would bring victory.
The war in Iran began with one of the most effective decapitation strikes in history, but while it may have caused temporary paralysis, it neither brought down the regime nor brought victory. This is because while Warden’s five ring model may apply, the importance of the rings changes radically based on the nature of the state and the system. Bringing down a robust regime like Iran is still possible but requires a radically different approach from defeating a fragile one.
Why the Inner Ring is not Enough in Iran
In a fragile state, the leadership might control a population that wishes them removed, have little inherent support from security forces (or have encouraged unhealthy competition among them), an underdeveloped bureaucracy, and little capability for organized succession. In such a state, subordinates have little to no ability to take initiative and, other than a few regime loyalists who benefit from the system, few would shed tears over its collapse. An alternative model of a fragile state might be one where the state and the population are motivated by the efforts of a charismatic leadership that any prospective alternatives would be unable to replace. Regardless of the exact nature of the fragile state, killing the leadership might have the desired effect that Warden anticipated.
