The past month and a half have shown that the nature of modern warfare is shifting.
By Abdulla Banndar Al-Etaibi
On Saturday, the United States and Iran held direct negotiations for the first time in more than a decade. The talks ended without a deal, as the US and Iranian positions remain far apart.
While it is unclear what will happen next, the past month and a half of fighting has cast light on important lessons to be learned not just about this conflict but also the nature of modern warfare. These may turn into key considerations for decision-makers in Washington as they determine what to do next.
Scale and geography matter
Iran operates on a scale that immediately complicates any direct confrontation. With a landmass of approximately 1.64 million sq km (more than 633,200sq miles) and a population exceeding 90 million, the country dwarfs the environments in which recent major wars have taken place.
By comparison, Iraq — invaded by a US-led coalition in 2003 — has roughly one quarter of Iran’s land area and half its population. Afghanistan and Ukraine, while sizeable, are still significantly smaller in both territory and demographic weight.
This matters because military operations scale nonlinearly. Larger territory does not simply require more troops and weapons; it requires exponentially more logistics, longer supply lines, and expanded intelligence coverage.
If scale complicates the planning of a war, geography compounds it even more. The US invasion of Iraq benefitted from favourable terrain. Coalition forces advanced rapidly through the relatively flat southern desert and river valleys, enabling a swift push towards Baghdad. Russian forces also benefitted from the relatively even landscape in Ukraine, easily crossing through the steppe in the eastern part of the country. The problem with flat terrain is that it exposes troops to enemy attacks, as their movements can easily be detected.
Afghanistan presented the opposite challenge: mountainous terrain that limited conventional operations and forced reliance on airpower, special forces, and local allies.
Iran, however, combines the worst of both environments at a much larger scale.
Strong and cohesive defence
The assumption that internal diversity translates into vulnerability is often overstated. Iran is ethnically diverse, with minorities such as the Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Arabs, Baloch, and others forming a significant part of its population. Yet historical experience suggests that external threats tend to strengthen national cohesion rather than fracture it.
Ukraine provides the most recent example. Despite linguistic and regional differences, Russia’s invasion reinforced Ukrainian national identity and resistance.
Iran followed a similar trajectory. External military pressure did not dissolve the state; it consolidated it.
This is particularly significant given Iran’s military structure. With more than 800,000 active personnel, including both the regular army and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran possesses a layered defence system designed for both conventional and asymmetric warfare. Its doctrine emphasises dispersal, survivability, and long-term resistance.
Unlike Iraq in 2003, whose military had been weakened by sanctions and prior conflict, Iran maintains a functioning state apparatus, integrated command structures, and extensive missile and drone capabilities.
Here, Ukraine offers another important lesson: even a large, modern military can fail to achieve decisive results against a smaller but determined and organised defender.
Limits of conventional arms
There are also lessons to be learned about the effectiveness of conventional arms. The past month and a half has shown that even overwhelming air superiority does not necessarily translate into decisive results when deployed against a state designed to absorb and outlast attacks.
What this means strategically
Iran is not Afghanistan in 2001, nor Iraq in 2003, nor Ukraine in 2022. It is a hybrid of all three — combining scale, complexity and resilience.
Taken together, these factors reinforce a central conclusion of this conflict: Iran is not simply a harder target; it fundamentally alters the strategic calculus of war…
Source: aljazeera.com/opinions
