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The Perils of Putting American Troops on the Ground

Why the United States Should Declare Victory and Resist the Temptation of Ground War

By Wahab Raofier

 

A Strategic Achievement — and Its Limits

The American and Israeli air campaign against Iran has achieved something remarkable: it has destroyed much of Iran’s military infrastructure, eliminated its supreme religious leader, and left the regime badly weakened. The strikes have degraded Iran’s capacity to project regional power, at least in the near term. For an administration that prizes decisive action, the temptation to press further — to demand unconditional surrender and send troops to finish the job — must be considerable. That temptation should be firmly resisted.

Before proceeding, the moral and legal questions raised by this campaign — including the killing of Iran’s supreme leader and the civilian toll of the bombing — deserve serious attention and cannot be brushed aside by military success alone. A full accounting of these issues is beyond the scope of this article, but they must remain part of any honest policy debate going forward.

What I Saw: The Limits of the World’s Strongest Military

I write not only as an analyst but as someone who witnessed these dynamics firsthand. From 2008 to 2020, I served as a translator for the United States Army — first in Iraq, then in Afghanistan. I stood alongside the most powerful military force in human history and watched, year after year, as it was harassed, bled, and exhausted by adversaries who owned almost nothing: no air force, no navy, no satellites, no supply chains worth the name. It was like watching an elephant tormented by a swarm of bees — the elephant cannot be killed, but it cannot rest either, and eventually the stinging takes its toll.

Those years taught me something that no think-tank report quite captures: military dominance does not translate into political control on the ground. Superior firepower can destroy an army. It cannot pacify a population that has decided, for reasons of faith, nationalism, or simple survival, that the foreign soldier must go. I saw that lesson written in the faces of young American soldiers who arrived full of confidence and left full of questions. I do not want to see it written again — this time in Iran.

Iran Is Not Afghanistan — It Could Be Worse

Much has been made of the Afghan parallel: the way that American ground intervention in 2001 eventually produced a grinding insurgency, a two-decade occupation, and a humiliating withdrawal. Iran carries that same risk, but with a crucial and more dangerous addition. In Afghanistan, it was Sunni jihadists — drawn from across the Arab world and Central Asia by the call to repel the infidel invader — who swelled the insurgency’s ranks. Iran is a Shia nation, and any American ground presence there would trigger a mirror-image mobilization from the other half of the Muslim world. Shia fighters from Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, and the Gulf would find their own jihad, their own sacred cause, in defending Persian soil against occupation.

The geography makes this threat concrete. Iran shares long, rugged, and effectively ungovernable borders with Afghanistan to the east, Iraq to the west, and Pakistan’s Balochistan province to the southeast — one of the most lawless and porous frontier regions on earth. These borders would become highways for fighters, weapons, and suicide bombers moving in and out of the conflict at will. American forces would find themselves not fighting Iran’s broken military, but a regionalized insurgency with near-unlimited depth, fueled by sectarian conviction and supplied through borders no air campaign can seal.

The Problem with “Unconditional Surrender”

President Trump’s call for Iran’s unconditional surrender, while politically satisfying, raises a question that military power alone cannot answer: surrender to whom, and by whom? As Francis Fukuyama has argued, unconditional surrender assumes the existence of a coherent government capable of ordering its forces to stand down — the way Japan’s Emperor did in 1945. Iran does not fit that model. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the Basij, and the regular military are highly decentralized, and with much of the command-and-control hierarchy destroyed by U.S. and Israeli strikes, no single authority remains capable of delivering a formal capitulation.

There is a second, equally serious obstacle. Iran’s regime has ruled by force, and a large portion of its population has long despised the clerical order responsible for killing tens of thousands of protesters. The IRGC and Basij know that surrender means their own destruction — not just political defeat, but physical elimination. They will not lay down their arms. And even without a functioning high command, tens of thousands of individual fighters remain in the field, retaining a residual capacity to conduct attacks on American-aligned Gulf states and facilities for the foreseeable future.

The Limits of Airpower: Historical Lessons

History offers a sobering record on the use of airpower to achieve decisive political outcomes. The Allied bombing campaign of World War II flattened German cities, yet — as the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey concluded after the war — it did not bring down the Nazi regime. Germany collapsed only after Russian and Western forces physically occupied the country. The lesson is one that military planners have learned repeatedly: destroying infrastructure does not, by itself, destroy the will to resist.

There are only two clear cases in modern history where strategic bombing alone achieved a decisive political result. The first is Japan’s surrender in 1945, which came only after the United States demonstrated an entirely new and catastrophic weapon capable of destroying a city in a single strike. The second is Kosovo in 1999, where NATO airpower helped trigger a popular revolt against Slobodan Milošević. But even Kosovo required a NATO ground force — the Kosovo Force (KFOR) — which remains stationed in the region to this day. Neither example offers a usable template for Iran.

The Gaza analogy is instructive. Nearly two and a half years of sustained Israeli military operations have severely degraded Hamas’s offensive capacity. Yet Hamas has not surrendered. It retains some popular support and continues to operate from tunnels and shelters. Gaza is a small, densely bounded territory, and Israel was willing to commit substantial ground forces. Iran is a vast country with mountains, deserts, and countless places for a surviving regime to regroup, rearm, and continue fighting.

Iran’s Internal Wounds May Do the Work

Iran is not only damaged from without. The regime enters this moment already suffering from severe internal wounds: a collapsing economy, a worthless currency, and a citizenry that has grown openly contemptuous of clerical rule. As the Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker has noted, it is worth asking what kind of regime survives this moment — leaderless, impoverished, isolated, besieged, and mostly disarmed. The conditions for internal transformation, or even collapse, are more favorable now than at any point in the Islamic Republic’s history.

The United States does not need to occupy Iran to finish it. It needs only to let Iran finish itself.

A Concrete Policy Recommendation

The administration should take three clear steps. First, declare the air campaign a success — because it is one — and end offensive strikes before strategic gains are squandered in an unwinnable ground war. Second, support through diplomatic and economic means the Iranian population’s aspiration for political change, rather than gifting the regime a foreign enemy around which to rally domestic support. Third, work with Gulf partners to establish a credible deterrent posture against residual Iranian missile and drone threats, without committing American ground forces.

I have spent more than a decade translating between two worlds — the world of American military power and the world of those upon whom it is applied. The lesson I carry from those years is simple: the United States is at its strongest when it knows when to stop. President Trump has so far avoided the catastrophic overreach his critics predicted. He should consolidate that record now. Call it a victory — because it is — and let the forces already at work inside Iran complete what the bombs began.

 

Wahab Raofier served as a translator for the United States Army from 2008 to 2020 and is a commentator on Middle Eastern affairs.