The success of Operation Epic Fury, the U.S. air and missile campaign being waged jointly with Israel against Iran, depends on two things: precision weapons and accurate intelligence. Pentagon shortages of cutting-edge ordnance, which is expensive and inherently slower to replace than is commonly understood, are already causing concerns.
If this operation continues longer than the four weeks which President Donald Trump claims will be necessary to bring the Islamic Republic to its knees, Pentagon stockpiles will be in big trouble. The U.S. military is expending high-end missiles, including Terminal High Altitude Area Defense and Patriot interceptors, the Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile, plus ship-launched missiles such as the SM-2, SM-3, and SM-6 at an unprecedented pace. However, there’s also a real chance that the United States and Israel will run out of high-priority targets inside Iran before we expend all our modern missiles.
Accurately assessing such complex matters requires superlative battle damage assessment. BDA, as it’s known in the trade, is fundamentally an intelligence problem. At root, BDA is about determining how much damage has been inflicted on a given target to answer the vital question: Do we need to hit this target again, or can we move on to new ones?
Answering such questions in real time during a war can be vexingly difficult. Accurate and timely BDA requires multiple sources of intelligence, carefully analyzed, while under time constraints. Also, the enemy gets a vote, as in all warfare, and we should expect that the Iranians are trying to fool our BDA efforts.
The U.S.-Israeli intelligence posture going into this war was formidable. As demonstrated during last June’s Operation Midnight Hammer, this joint force possessed a wealth of accurate targeting intelligence, based on espionage from overlapping sources. The decapitation strikes that began Operation Epic Fury again demonstrated that U.S. and Israeli intelligence possessed superb information regarding the whereabouts of Iranian regime leaders.
Israeli human intelligence, thanks to its Mossad foreign intelligence service, paid substantial dividends last June and again this week. Collecting timely human intelligence inside Iran is more difficult for Washington since that country has been a “denied area” for U.S. intelligence since 1979 when revolutionary hotheads seized our Tehran embassy. Ever since, America has lacked diplomatic facilities and businesses in Iran that offer the customary cover for American spies, principally from the Central Intelligence Agency, to collect human intelligence inside Iran.
Wartime conditions make everything more complicated, and the CIA is careful about risking its officers inside Iran, where captured American spies can expect to be executed. That said, given reports that the White House is using the CIA for covert action inside Iran to arm anti-regime fighters, especially Kurds, there can be no doubt that there are U.S. intelligence personnel on the ground in Iran. Given standard intelligence community practice, any CIA-led covert action is getting support from Pentagon special operators from the hush-hush Joint Special Operations Command, which includes deep reconnaissance troops accustomed to operating in hostile territory.
The challenge is that human intelligence has limitations regarding BDA and targeting, in part due to timeliness. Signals intelligence usually matters more in assessing how much we’ve hurt the enemy. Per the venerable spook cliché, HUMINT makes movies while SIGINT makes history. Here, the National Security Agency, the world’s top SIGINT collector, is playing an outsize role, given its global intelligence capabilities, which are buttressed by the NSA’s intelligence partnerships with spy agencies all over the world — including the Israeli military’s Unit 8200, its own NSA.
SIGINT is vital for BDA and targeting since such intelligence reveals what the enemy is thinking and claiming among themselves about this war’s progress. One of the major problems facing the NSA and its partner, U.S. Cyber Command, in the Iran war is how much to destroy Iran’s communications and cyber capabilities. Although the military generally wants to shut down enemy command and control, the NSA and CYBERCOM don’t want to lose vital sources of actionable intelligence. In every case, a classified “gain-loss” assessment must be made before the Pentagon targets Iranian communications.
Equally vital is geospatial intelligence, called GEOINT in the spy trade, and that’s the job of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, most of whose analysis comes from imagery from spy satellites orbiting the earth. High-resolution pictures reveal what damage has been done. The NGA’s GEOINT, particularly when fused with the NSA’s SIGINT, can enable detailed BDA with speed. That, at least, is the concept. By fusing timely all-source intelligence, Pentagon targeters are right now attempting to assess what’s left to bomb.
Regrettably, such assessments are sometimes marred by flawed analysis, inaccurate intelligence, and wishful thinking. Take Operation Allied Force, which was the official name for our spring 1999 Kosovo War, during which U.S.-led NATO forces bombed Serbia for 78 days before Belgrade submitted and agreed to withdraw its military from the renegade province of Kosovo. This lopsided campaign offers a cautionary tale for our new Iran War. Little Serbia had a small, outmoded air force and barely any navy. Operation Allied Force was expected to last a week at most. How long could isolated Belgrade hold out against all of NATO and its airpower?
Indeed, NATO targeters soon ran out of high-priority facilities and bases in Serbia to bomb. BDA indicated that the enemy’s military was being destroyed rapidly. However, our assessment was incorrect. NATO personnel during the Kosovo War made several mistakes regarding BDA, including unduly optimistic assessments and misreading some intelligence. Above all, NATO war planners woefully underestimated Serbia’s capabilities in denial and deception. The enemy got their vote by constructing elaborate camouflage schemes to protect their military from NATO bombing, including electronic deception.
As a result, most of NATO’s bombs were missing their supposed targets. I was there, and many U.S. intelligence officers privately assessed that up to 90% of NATO’s bombing during Allied Force hit no military targets worth mentioning. Forty-odd days into the Kosovo War, some pushy intelligence officers managed to convince the targeters to be more accurate and strategically focused in their selection of bombing targets.
That eventually worked, and after nearly three months of bombing, Belgrade capitulated. Kosovo eventually got its independence, but the war was a messy affair. Overthrowing Serbia’s strongman, Slobodan Milošević, was the unstated objective of Allied Force, yet that didn’t happen until October 2000, more than a year after the Kosovo War’s end. The regime, although deeply unpopular among most Serbs who loathed its brutality and corruption, possessed more staying power than NATO believed was possible.
There are lessons aplenty here for our Iran war. Although it’s impossible to imagine a weak Iran defeating the combined might of Israel and the U.S., we are perfectly capable of defeating ourselves through arrogance and overconfidence. To avoid that, you need excellent intelligence assessments. Here’s how you get them.
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First, never believe your own propaganda. Always approach intelligence with open eyes, admitting your biases. Never listen to any intelligence simply because it tells you what you want to hear. Understand that the enemy gets a vote, and he’s trying to deceive you like his life depends on it — because it might.
Above all, appreciate that deception is as old as war itself, and thinking you’re automatically smarter than your enemy is the quick road to getting played.
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.