No Plan Survives First Contact With The Enemy
Anyone who complains there was 'no plan' is telling you to stop listening to them
“No plan of operations can be at all relied upon beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main force”, Helmuth von Moltke the Elder once wrote. Widely rephrased today as ‘No plan survives first contact with the enemy’, it is a pure truth of battle that has never failed even once, for ‘the enemy always gets a vote’.
For this reason alone, anyone who criticizes Donald Trump for having ‘no plan’ to win a war with Iran is telling you to stop listening to whatever else they have to say about the matter.
Set aside your feelings about Trump because this is objectively true. Either such persons lack any expertise they might claim, or they do actually know better, and are simply pretending (read: lying) that wars are won through detailed planning of every move in advance. It has never happened.
Alexander crossed the Hellespont with only the barest outline of a plan for reaching Persepolis. American armies drove from Normandy to Berlin with only a very basic plan that had to be changed numerous times, for example during the Battle of the Bulge.
The Zanzibar War only lasted 38 or 45 minutes, depending on the source. The plan was to simply bombard the palace until the sultan surrendered, and it worked, yet one British petty officer was wounded, and he had not planned on this chance event. The enemy was utterly incompetent, but still got a vote.
I defy the reader to find me a war that went entirely according to the pre-existing plan of any combatant, ever. All wars are extemporaneous. Good plans anticipate friction and leave room for adaptation to changed circumstances, for battle is chaos.
Gulf states put a pause on operations this week. They worried the United States was not responding strongly enough to Iranian provocations. Now they have stopped blocking American aircraft from operations to force the strait. This 48-hour pause in ‘Project Freedom’ demonstrates a corollary rule that no plan can survive first contact with an ally, much less an enemy.
Nor has Iran proven reliable as a partner to anyone. The IRGC struck a Chinese-flagged vessel today, apparently abandoning the quiet alliance with Beijing that had allowed Chinese-flagged tankers to transit the strait.
“The unnamed vessel’s deck caught fire and the ship was marked ‘CHINA OWNER & CREW,’” according to Chinese news service Caixin. “It was not clear if any of the vessel’s crew were injured.”
Intense propaganda efforts to undermine the Trump administration do not change the material realities of the situation. The Washington Post is touting a “confidential CIA analysis” that supposedly says the regime can last three or four months instead of one or two months.
Iran is “decreasing the flows in its oil fields to ensure the wells remain functional”, which only sounds good to people who don’t know how oil wells work. If the regime is already reducing flows, it means they are already reaching the limits of storage capacity.
Furthermore, prolonged low flow rates can still disrupt pressure maintenance and allow some fracture equilibration and water intrusion over time. Slow flow is less risky than zero flow, but it still carries risks.
“The CIA analysis might even be underestimating Iran’s economic resilience if Tehran is able to smuggle oil via overland routes”, WaPo blithely announces. The word “if” does an incredible amount of heavy lifting, here.
We have already been through this: roads and rail links will never move a fraction of the oil that goes through the strait. Iran simply lacks the overland capacity to make up for the lost shipping and does not have years to build new infrastructure. This is cope masquerading as analysis.
Pentagon officials claim they have severely degraded Iran’s fleet of missile launchers and missile stocks. Naysayers “estimate” that Iran still has most of both. Whereas the Pentagon is relying on battle damage assessments (BDAs), it is unclear what the criteria of this single purported CIA estimate are.
Given that this is the CIA, it is likely that human sources — i.e. people in Iran — are telling this story to American spies, and they may very well have ulterior motives. I would trust the BDAs over the humans, quite frankly. Reports that begin from pessimistic assumptions have their place, but they cannot substitute for hard evidence — or hard power.
As I write these words, explosions are being reported on the coast of Iran along the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has reportedly rejected the latest offer of terms for peace from the White House, demanding reparations for war damage.
Once again, the IRGC has chosen to die by strangulation. This is the only plan that matters. Everything else is just noise, and most of that noise is coming from people who know the least, but pretend to know best.
It is possible, meaning within the realm of possibility, that Iran lasts until 2027 by building a new railroad through central Asia. However, I would put the odds of this happening roughly equal to the scenario where Jewish space lasers bring an instant end to the conflict.
What really worries most of the hand-wringers right now is that the plan to strangle the IRGC might actually work, that no amount of willingness on the part of the IRGC to let Iranians endure suffering will stop the oil wells from shutting down when storage inevitably runs out.
Time is not on their side, though there are many in the west who would have you believe it is. Like the IRGC, they are desperate to save face, but the only plan they have for victory is denial.