https://bigserge.substack.com/p/the-insurgent-empire
Big Serge
Apr 08, 2026

As we cross the one month mark of the Israeli-American war on Iran, a sufficient corpus of data is emerging to contemplate the kinetic dynamics of the conflict. This is a very strange war. It is not merely the fact that the roster of combatants and associated parties - Netanyahu, President Trump, Lindsay “Holden Bloodfeast” Graham - comprise the most polarizing figures in world politics today. As if to punctuate this fact, I fully anticipate angry comments berating me for using a sanitized and emotionally titrated word like “polarizing.” But we digress.

Far more interesting than endless apoplexy over Israel or Trump is a look at the kinetic scheme of the war and what its long term strategic ramifications might be. We are using the term “war”, although it has somewhat humorously taken on life as a “Special Military Operation” - a riff on Russia’s idiosyncratic bureaucratic parlance for the war in Ukraine, which the White House inadvertently stepped in when they referred to Operation Epic Fury as a “special combat operation.”

The idea of a Special Military Operation is interesting in its own right, and carries a connotation of regime change achieved through a mixture of military force and subversive coercion. Such a label was highly appropriate in the case of America’s January operation in Venezuela, where an overwhelming strike package was combined with political preparations which had Vice President Delcy Rodríguez in position for a favorable transfer of power. In contrast, the conflict in Ukraine has clearly spiraled beyond the scope of a “special operation”, which we can loosely define as kinetically coerced regime change or diplomacy. As early as 2022, Russia was prepared to transition to a conventional war with multiple army groupings and a robust logistical apparatus. While the Kremlin continues to call the war a Special Military Operation, this is mainly a device for domestic political purposes and signals the intent to fight the war without materially disrupting daily life in Russia, and has little bearing on the fact that the war is precisely that.

The war in Iran, however, is something else. Unlike in the Venezuelan case, there was no political preparation for a managed transition of power, and neither the United States nor Israel have substantive ground forces in position for operations against Iran. Israeli ground forces are engaged in Lebanon, and notwithstanding the deployment of several rapid reaction light infantry forces to the Middle East, the US is still only beginning a staging process which was not implemented until after hostilities had commenced.

When one looks past the political overtones, we see a war that, to this point, appears to be practically sui generis: a war conducted almost exclusively from standoff by both sides. This is a novel experiment in striking power, but it leaves us with a poor conceptual framework and vocabulary. Most of the verbiage and conceptual framing of warfare is built on a long history of ground-oriented combat, and there are few obvious comparisons to what is being attempted right now in Iran. War exclusively from standoff would appear to be a new frontier in armed conflict. It may be that it will fail - either through the outright failure by the Israeli-American alliance to achieve its objectives, or by forcing them to take recourse to ground forces. Such a failure would be meaningful, but so too would success. If America can succeed in degrading or destroying a powerful Iranian regime through striking power alone, this would have dangerous ramifications and create an entirely new calculus of deterrence and risk.

A war successfully waged from standoff might be conceived as the realization, nearly a century later, of the more extreme prognostications for air power in the interwar period of the 20th Century. The most famous prewar air power enthusiast, Italian general Giulio Douhet, argued in his influential 1921 book The Command of the Air that strategic bombing could win a war with minimal involvement of ground forces, by breaking the will of the enemy population. In Douhet’s vision, the force with superior striking power could bomb enemy cities with impunity and leave the enemy utterly without recourse. In a similar vein, although tinted with a sense of futility and despair, former British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin famously bemoaned:

I think it is well also for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through. The only defense is in offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.

Strategic bombing did prove to be a powerful new kinetic platform, but it certainly fell far short of these lofty expectations. Douhet’s belief that unstoppable aerial reduction of cities would destroy the enemy’s will to fight - “normal life would be unable to continue under the constant threat of death” - was thoroughly debunked, and even in Japan, which was particularly vulnerable to strategic bombing, effects on the “will” of the population were negligible.

Furthermore, Baldwin’s warning that “the bomber will always get through” proved to be poorly worded. It was certainly true that, given a large enough strike package, some bombers were sure to reach their targets, but strategic bombers proved extremely vulnerable. The overawing quality of strategic bombing belies the fact that losses of aircraft and crews were frequently exorbitant. In 1942 and 1943, loss rates frequently ranged between 5 and 7% per mission. RAF bomber command suffered an overall fatality rate of nearly 45% among its air crews, and the US Army Air Force’s Eight Air Force took losses of around 20%. Somewhat counterintuitively, the fatality rate among bomber crews was substantially higher than among ground forces. A private in a rifle company was far more likely to survive the war in Europe than the pilot of a powerful B-17.

Losses per sortie fell sharply in the Korean War relative to the Second World War in Europe (from 9.7 to 1.3 losses per 1,000 sorties), aided partially by the shorter penetration distances and the lower density of the air defense environment, and the burn rate in Vietnam was lower still. However, the sheer number of sorties flown in Vietnam led to nearly 10,000 lost aircraft on the American side, including just over 3,700 fixed wing aircraft, with more than 90% of these losses inflicted by ground defenses, rather than the paltry North Vietnamese fighter wing.

Although loss rates had fallen significantly on a per-flight basis, in Vietnam - just as in the Second World War - air crews had a more dangerous job than the infantry. Both fixed wing and helicopter flight crews had fatality rates above the overall US average (2.2%), and helicopters pilots in particular were horribly attrited. The 5.4% fatality rate among helicopter pilots was, yet again, higher even than among the 11Bs who formed the backbone of the infantry force grinding away on the ground. High airframe loss rates were also experienced by the Israeli Air Force in both the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War, when combat losses were approximately 14 and 8 per 1,000 sorties respectively.

None of this is to suggest that air power has not been an absolutely vital component of military operations over the last century. Rather, what we are suggesting is that the modern framing of air power as an essentially safe kinetic platform - that is, sparing of both airframes and personnel - is relatively new, and dates only to the 1990’s and the Gulf War, where losses plummeted to just 0.16 per 1,000 sorties.

In essence, the first 50 years of strategic air power connoted two important limitations. First, that the use of air power was expensive in both airframes and personnel, and secondly that air power was limited as a strategic lever in the absence of ground forces. The first of these assumptions began to crumble, at least on the American side, in the 1990’s, and the frame of reference on losses in the war against Iran renders the losses in Vietnam incomprehensible to Americans. That same war in Iran is also challenging the second assumption of air power, which presumes that air strikes in the absence of a ground component can achieve only limited results.

What I am arguing, in a sense, is that we are living through an attempt to birth the third epoch of air power. The first epoch, which lasted from 1939 to 1990, was an era of low strategic leverage and relatively high (albeit steadily falling) loss rates. From 1990 until now, we have seen American aircraft operate in relative safety, but with only modest strategic leverage. In Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, American forces with essentially uncontested access to airspace still required on the ground proxies to control territory and create enduring area denial against adversaries like ISIS and the Taliban. Now, we are witnessing a real time experiment to topple and submit a regional power using air strikes alone. This is the first high intensity war to be fought from standoff.

Conventionally, it was taken as an axiom that airpower cannot provide an enduring presence and the ever elusive “control” of territory that makes decisive victory possible. What seems to have changed in this conflict is a new theory of victory, apparently embraced by Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth, which celebrates denial as a substitute for control and embraces the Trashcanistan as a victorious end state.
Insurgency by Other Means

Pete Hegseth finds himself as an unlikely heir of Vladimir Lenin. Not in the ideological sense, of course, but in the pursuit of anarchy and denial as a lever of victory. One of Lenin’s many political talents was his ability to appreciate anarchy as a political lever and to ruthlessly promote it. In the early revolutionary period in Russia, even after their “seizure of power” in the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks exerted very little real control in the vast Russian internal space. Although Bolshevism later became synonymous with an authoritarian bureaucratic hydra, the infant regime was thin on the ground and had few levers of power. The nascent Leninist program was less focused on exerting political authority than it was on denying competitors the ability to do so. The Bolsheviks promoted mutinies in the armed forces, paralyzed what remained of the Tsarist bureaucracy, looted the state bank, and encouraged unrest in the countryside through the expropriation of landed estates. Long before Lenin actually held meaningful political authority in Russia, he successfully promoted the collapse of authority as such and denied competing governing bodies the ability to consolidate control.

This is the war of the insurgent.

Insurgency, in its classical form, is the strategy of the weak against the strong. Unable to match a superior adversary in direct conventional combat, the insurgent instead pursues a strategy of exhaustion and cost imposition: make the occupation expensive, make it bloody, make it politically unsustainable, deny the occupier the fruits of victory. This is a kinetic manifestation of the Leninist political strategy: if control cannot be attained outright, denying others that same possibility becomes an intermediate objective. The insurgent cannot persistently control territory, but he can deny the occupier control over anything beyond the immediate radius of his fortified positions. Mao articulated this logic most clearly, but its principles are as old as warfare itself: Fabius Maximus against Hannibal, the Spanish guerrillas against Napoleon, the Viet Cong against the Americans, the Taliban against everyone. The fundamental insight is that insurgents wage an asymmetric war of denial.

Now consider what the United States is doing to Iran, and notice the structural similarity. The Americans are not occupying Iran. They have no intention of occupying Iran. The American strategy, as articulated by various administration officials and as discernible from the pattern of operations, does not envision ground forces seizing and holding Iranian territory. What it does envision is something remarkably similar to the insurgent’s playbook, executed from the opposite end of the technological spectrum: make the Iranian regime’s existence as the governing authority of its own territory impossibly expensive; deny it the exercise of sovereign control over its own military and industrial assets; impose costs that accumulate faster than they can be absorbed; and through this sustained pressure, either compel behavioral change or create the conditions for the regime’s internal collapse.

To begin, we must consider that the air campaign Iran is not only, or even primarily based on military calculations — it is a political act, which strikes at the apparatus of Iranian deterrence, legitimacy, and cohesion, designed to create a crisis of legitimacy and authority at the heart of the Iranian state. Hegseth’s declaration that CENTCOM had been instructed to “dismantle the Iranian regime’s security apparatus” made the political objective explicit. This is not the language of limited military action. It is the language of a campaign designed to hollow out the Iranian state from the air.

This is the insurgency logic, but it is now applied by the kinetically stronger side. Where the classical insurgent is a fish swimming in the sea of the people, operating below the threshold of the occupier’s conventional military power, the American standoff campaign operates above the threshold of the defender’s conventional military power. The insurgent wins by making the cost of occupation unbearable. The standoff power wins by making the cost of resistance unbearable, and denying the enemy state the mechanisms and political cohesion needed to exert control over its own territory. The insurgent cannot be killed from the air because he blends into the civilian population; the standoff power cannot be exhausted by occupation if he does not care about the political end state. In both cases, the fundamental asymmetry of the conflict lies not in raw military power but in the asymmetric value of political authority. Neither a guerilla force nor the American air forces care much about exerting political authority of their own, because their paradigm of victory requires only that they deny that control to the enemy.

There is, of course, a crucial disanalogy. The insurgent’s strategy succeeds, when it succeeds, by making occupation politically unsustainable — by imposing costs that the occupying power’s domestic politics cannot absorb over time. The American standoff campaign imposes costs that Iranian domestic politics cannot absorb, precisely because the economic and human devastation falls on Iran rather than on the United States. Fifteen American dead, if we take the casualty figures at face value, in forty days of war is not a political liability for the administration in Washington; it is practically a recruiting poster. This asymmetry of cost absorption is, in fact, the entire strategic premise of the standoff campaign.

And yet the campaign has not been without its strategic complications. Iran has demonstrated a residual capacity for cost imposition of its own — missile strikes against Gulf state partners, closure of the Strait of Hormuz, drone attacks against American bases that have inflicted real if modest casualties. The economic costs of the campaign, running at approximately a billion dollars per day in American expenditure, are not trivial, particularly as the war strains inventories of valuable munitions across multiple theaters simultaneously. CSIS analysts have noted, with evident concern, that the Iran campaign is consuming THAAD interceptors and SM-3 missiles at rates that create real risks in the Pacific theater. The standoff campaign is not free, even if its costs are distributed very differently than those of a ground war.

But the essential logic holds. America has found a way to wage war on a state more populous and vast than France or Germany — a state with ninety million people, a sophisticated military apparatus, and decades of preparation for exactly this kind of confrontation — without suffering the kind of casualties that would make continued prosecution of the war politically impossible. This is a genuine strategic innovation, and it deserves to be analyzed with the seriousness it commands.
Sovereignty in Trashcanistan

There is a concept in counterinsurgency doctrine — ungoverned space — that refers to territory nominally under a government’s sovereignty but effectively beyond its administrative and security reach. The canonical examples might include the tribal areas of Pakistan, the deserts of the Sahel, and the archipelagos of the southern Philippines. These spaces become dangerous precisely because the absence of effective governance creates vacuums that non-state actors, criminal networks, and terrorist organizations rush to fill. The problem of ungoverned space has been a persistent preoccupation of American foreign policy for the better part of three decades.

What is happening in Iran today is something structurally similar, but America is attempting to generate it from the outside by air power rather than from the inside by the failure of state capacity. The American and Israeli air campaign is, in a very real sense, a try at manufacturing ungoverned space within Iranian territory — rendering the Iranian government unable to exercise effective control over large swaths of its own military and industrial infrastructure, unable to guarantee the security of its own leadership and command apparatus, unable to project force across its borders or even to defend its own airspace with any reliability. This is sovereignty denial as a strategic objective, achieved not by occupation but by aerial pulverization of the instruments through which sovereignty is exercised. The recent move to expand targeting to include infrastructure is perfectly consistent with this theory.

The mechanism is worth tracing carefully, because it illuminates both the sophistication of the American approach and the limits of what it can achieve. Sovereignty, in the modern state system, is not merely a legal fiction decreed by treaty and recognized by the United Nations — it is an operational reality grounded in the state’s capacity within its territory, to enforce its laws, to collect its taxes, to conscript its soldiers, to defend its borders. Strip away these functional capacities, and the legal fiction of sovereignty becomes just that — a fiction, a paper claim to authority that commands no real obedience because it commands no real power.

The American campaign has been systematically targeting the operational foundations of Iranian sovereignty. The strikes against the IRGC are strikes against the organization that has served as the muscular arm of the Islamic Republic — the entity that suppresses dissent, that runs the proxy networks, that operates the missile forces that give Iran its regional deterrent. The strikes against missile manufacturing facilities are strikes against the tools through which Iran projects its own version of power beyond its borders. The assassination of Khamenei is, in the most literal sense, a strike against the apex of Iranian sovereign authority — the man from whom all authority in the Islamic Republic ultimately derived. The strikes against military-industrial facilities are strikes against the economic and technological sinews through which a state translates its national resources into military capacity.

What the Americans are building, in effect, is a hollow Iranian state — a government that persists in some formal administrative sense, that continues to issue decrees and collect some portion of its revenues and administer its bureaucracies, but that has been stripped of the capacity to enforce its will against determined external pressure. This is not regime change in the conventional sense — it is something more subtle and arguably more insidious. Regime change implies the replacement of one governing authority with another; what the Americans seem to be pursuing is the progressive incapacitation of the existing regime without necessarily having a clear vision of what comes after.

The parallel to insurgent strategy deepens here. The classic counterinsurgency theorist would recognize immediately what is being attempted: denying the opponent control over the contested terrain, in this case not geographical terrain but the functional terrain of state capacity. Mao’s insight that political power grows from the barrel of a gun cuts both ways — he who controls the means of violence controls the political environment. Strip the Iranian regime of its missiles, discombobulate the Republican Guard and its nuclear program and its ability to project power, and you strip it of the instruments through which it has maintained its political authority, both domestically and regionally. The regime that survives Operation Epic Fury will be a fundamentally different entity than the one that preceded it — not because it has been replaced, but because it has been hollowed.

Whether this produces the behavioral changes that Washington desires is a separate and genuinely open question. The historical record of coercive air campaigns is decidedly mixed. The bombing of Serbia in 1999 produced the desired concessions within seventy-eight days; the bombing of North Vietnam produced nothing of the kind across years of sustained effort. The difference, scholars have argued, lies in the alignment between the specific costs imposed and the specific political objectives pursued, and in the coherence of the coercive bargain being offered. The Trump administration’s articulation of its objectives has been, to put it charitably, fluid — ranging from destruction of nuclear capabilities, to regime change, to maximizing pressure, to negotiation, sometimes across the span of a single press conference. This incoherence of political objective, juxtaposed against the impressive coherence of operational execution, represents perhaps the deepest structural vulnerability of the campaign.

What I would argue, in effect, is that the Trump administration has embraced the strategic logic of what I affectionately call a Trashcanistan (a phrase which I saw used by Professor Stephen Kotkin in a different context, which I am determined to coin as an American strategic concept). A Trashcanistan, in my parlance, refers to a state which has been shattered to the point where it is both unable to resist external pressure and maintain uncontested internal legitimacy, putting it in a perennial state of dependence and siege. The late Syrian Arab Republic under Assad was an ideal example, as it was both dependent on foreign backers to stay solvent and unable to control all of its nominal territory. The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan might offer another example, as it was unable to survive without American support and never fully controlled its territories.

Trashcanistans have frequently emerged after short-sided foreign intervention, which either hollows out the existing state or creates a new one with limited capacity and legitimacy. The function of a Trashcanistan has always been, primarily, as a symbol of America’s strategic standoff. Failed interventions and wars leave shattered states behind, but the point is that they can be left behind. The resurgence of the Taliban, for example, is mainly a problem for Afghanistan’s neighbors, like Pakistan.

In Iran, however, the Trump administration seems to have recognized and embraced the possibility that creating a Trashcanistan can be a strategic objective in and of itself. If Iran is unable to reset deterrence, if its economy is shattered and its security services hollowed out, it is of no difference to Washington which direction a toppling state falls.
The Fallout

Let us stipulate, for the sake of argument, that the American campaign succeeds on its own terms. The Iranian nuclear program is set back by a decade or more. The IRGC is so comprehensively degraded that it cannot reconstitute its regional proxy networks for years. The Iranian economy, already reeling from maximum pressure sanctions and now subjected to the physical destruction of its military-industrial base, enters a prolonged depression. The regime, with much of its senior leadership dead, confronting both external devastation and internal protests of a magnitude unseen since 1979, either negotiates a comprehensive settlement or collapses in favor of a successor government more amenable to American preferences. In this optimistic scenario, Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon, and the United States achieves a regional order more to its liking, with a defanged and internally spiraling Iran.

What has the world learned from this success?

It has learned several things, and they are not comforting.

The first lesson is simple and brutal: the United States can, at will and at acceptable cost, reach into any country that lacks nuclear weapons and comprehensively destroy its military capacity and state apparatus. This is not a new lesson in principle — American military superiority has been a fact of international life since at least the 1990s. What is new, however, is an apparent American indifference to political end states. The possibility of being sucked into a costly ground occupation and “nation building” project carried its own sort of deterrence. If, however, the United States is willing to create Trashcanistans from the air with little care for the particulars of the political outcome, this correspondingly raises America’s capacity to act with indifference.

The second lesson follows immediately from the first: Iran did not have nuclear weapons, and Iran is being bombed. North Korea has nuclear weapons, and North Korea is not being bombed. Whatever else one might say about Kim Jong-un’s governance of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, his decision to develop and demonstrate a credible nuclear arsenal has achieved its primary strategic objective with textbook efficiency — it has made his country immune to exactly the kind of treatment that Iran is currently receiving. The logic of this observation does not require sophisticated strategic reasoning to grasp. It will be grasped by every government in the world, including governments currently operating under American security guarantees, including governments that the United States would prefer not to see nuclearize.

The third lesson is about the limits of American security guarantees. The Gulf states — Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia — hosted American forces and accepted the consequences in the form of Iranian missile and drone strikes. They absorbed damage to their civilian infrastructure, their airports, their residential areas. They served, in effect, as the logistical and basing foundation of the American campaign. And they will have noticed something: American security guarantees are real but contingent, and they involve accepting costs that the guarantor does not itself bear. The Iranian strikes on Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, on the US Navy Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, on Dubai, on Riyadh — these strikes were aimed not merely at military targets but at demonstrating to American partners that the price of partnership with Washington includes absorption of enemy retaliation. For some partners this calculus will hold. For others, particularly those in geographic proximity to potential future adversaries armed with long-range missiles, it may begin to look insufficient. In short, America’s actions in Iran show tremendous power, but they also reveal a new indifference to the costs borne by both the target and by America’s allies in the region.

The fourth and most structurally significant lesson is about the relationship between the standoff campaign as a strategic model and the specific conditions that make it possible. The American campaign against Iran worked because Iran did not have nuclear weapons. This is not a subtle or complicated observation, but it is one whose implications ramify outward in ways that are genuinely alarming. The American standoff campaign is, at its core, a model of coercion premised on the adversary’s inability to threaten catastrophic retaliation. Conventional deterrence — the threat to impose unacceptable costs on an aggressor through conventional military means — failed Iran utterly. Its missiles could reach American bases, could impose costs, could complicate the campaign; but they could not threaten the American homeland, could not threaten American cities, could not make the costs of the campaign genuinely unbearable for the American political system. Nuclear weapons would have changed this calculus entirely.

What should be emphasized, in all this, is that the Iranians had good reason to believe that they had exceptionally strong deterrents. They had a large and diverse array of munitions capable of ranging the entire theater, a distributed and well motivated command apparatus that was prepared to endure casualties, and they had unique leverage over one of the world’s great economic chokepoints. There are few non-nuclear powers capable of boasting such a robust deterrent profile. It failed.

Ultimately, a few important trends are dovetailing in a dangerous way. First, America has shown exceptional willingness to use coercion, even against nominal allies. The relationship with NATO is strained, to say the least, and Japan and South Korea are even drawing fire. The Trump administration has shown an eagerness to use violent coercion in Venezuela and Iran, and it is mostly indifferent to both the political end-state and the retaliatory damage suffered by regional allies. The world is becoming increasingly kinetic, and the chaos in Iran has shown that even a powerful conventional deterrent package is not a deterrent at all.
A New Strategic Architecture

A brief digression into history is warranted here, because the relationship between demonstrated conventional military dominance and nuclear proliferation incentives is not merely theoretical — it has played out before, and the historical record is instructive.

The nuclear age was inaugurated by a demonstration of precisely this kind of overwhelming military advantage. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, among other things, a demonstration to the world, and specifically to the Soviet Union, of an American superiority so complete as to be effectively absolute. The American monopoly on nuclear weapons lasted precisely four years before the Soviets detonated their first device in 1949. The acceleration of the Soviet nuclear program after Hiroshima was not coincidental; it was the direct response of a state that had witnessed a qualitative demonstration of what American power could do, and had drawn the rational conclusion that matching it was an existential priority. Stalin’s famous remark after Hiroshima — that Soviet scientists would need to correct the situation — was the most consequential policy statement of the twentieth century. Ctd....