critique of IRI's dovishness and naivety:
There is much to be said about Iran’s glorification of martyrdom. While one’s ultimate death on the battlefield is admirable, it shouldn’t lead to careless actions and lack of proper planning.
This where western armies excel in the last 50 years - they managed to raise the threshold of value for an individual soldier/officer. This means building tanks that protect the crew in event of catastrophic failure, this means extensive planning before an operation, this means painstaking efforts to reduce casualties.
Meanwhile under Iranian and Soviet doctrine, soldiers, officers, and even commanders are little more than cannon fodder. Cogs in an engine. To be replaced. Weapon systems are made with the thinking of lower cost rather than crew or soldier safety.
The impact is quite clear, the astronomical costs Russia is enduring on the battlefield in terms of human life end up translating to monetary costs as well. Building weapon systems that focus on quantity vs quality has lead to thousands of tanks in the junk yard and having to use tanks from 1950’s or worse borrow from North Korea!
Even Solemani while a brilliant tactician in many aspects was infamous for sustaining high casualties to secure objectives. There was some criticism about the way he fought on the battlefield. He didn’t care about his own or others as martyrdom was something to seek not run away from.
That in core lies the problem. If you treat everyone like cannon fodder, you aren’t going to have the best of the best want to join the military. And eventually you will run into degradation of officer corps and high command as the most capable ones died on the battlefield seeking martyrdom. So you will
Get either more risk averse generals or incompetent ones. Rarely will you draw another Alexander the Great or Solemani or Napoleon out of the hat. Doesn’t work that way.
As for copying Israeli scorched earth tactics. That’s not the answer either. The issue is Iran doesn’t want to put all its chips on the table and FIGHT for peace.
To get the terms iran wants, it needs to fight a war to impose heavy costs on its enemy to convince them that peace is better than a long war. It had a massive window of opportunity after 10/7, but Instead Iran wants to nimble its way via a perpetual shadow war and proxy fights. This will never get Iran what it wants and it lost the capability of it proxies in the process.
