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The Pentagon’s aircraft have been striking Iranian targets for weeks. But behind the footage of precision munitions and battle-damage assessments, a more uncomfortable conversation is unfolding within the American military and intelligence establishment — one that the official narrative has largely avoided confronting in public.
Air campaigns, however sophisticated, do not win wars. And for Iran, the ground alternative may not exist.
That is the central argument advanced by two veterans of America’s national security apparatus who have spent decades inside the institutions now driving U.S. policy: Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst with extensive Middle East experience, and retired U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. Speaking on the Nima Alkhorshid podcast, both men offered an assessment that cuts against the prevailing confidence of American strategic communications — and that carries the weight of institutional knowledge accumulated across multiple wars.
The Airpower Illusion
No war in the modern era has been won by airpower alone. Strategic bombing campaigns can destroy infrastructure, degrade military capability, and impose enormous economic costs. They cannot hold territory, compel an adversary’s political capitulation on their own, or prevent an enemy from reconstituting its forces once the bombs stop falling.
Iran is not an exception to this principle — it may be its most emphatic illustration. The Islamic Republic has spent four decades constructing a military architecture explicitly designed to survive and absorb air campaigns. Critical military infrastructure is buried deep underground, dispersed across a country the size of Western Europe, and hardened against all but the most specialised munitions. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has rehearsed continuity of operations under sustained bombardment as a core institutional competency.
More fundamentally, airpower cannot resolve the political question at the heart of any Iran campaign: what comes after? Destroying Iranian military capability from the air leaves a population of 90 million, a deeply entrenched revolutionary state apparatus, and a regional network of aligned militias intact. The strategic objective — whether that is behavioural change, regime transformation, or permanent disarmament — requires a presence on the ground that airstrikes cannot provide.
The 48-Hour Problem
The United States does have ground forces in the region. The 82nd Airborne Division — one of the most rapidly deployable combat formations in the American military, designed to insert anywhere in the world within 18 hours — is present in the Iran war zone. Johnson, drawing on his intelligence background, does not dispute this. What he disputes is the conclusion that their presence constitutes a viable ground option.
“The 82nd is not equipped to sustain a ground fight in Iran for more than 48 hours,” Johnson says. The assessment is not a criticism of the 82nd’s fighting capability — it is a statement about logistics. Airborne units are designed for rapid insertion and short-duration operations. Their combat power degrades rapidly as ammunition, fuel, food, and medical supplies are consumed, and their resupply chains — dependent on airfields that may not be secure — are among the most vulnerable components of any airborne operation.
Against a conventional adversary on flat terrain with degraded air defences, 48 hours of airborne combat power may be sufficient to seize an objective and hold until heavier forces arrive. Against Iran — a country with formidable anti-aircraft systems, mountainous interior terrain, and a military specifically trained to contest airborne and amphibious operations — it is not.
Johnson’s frustration with the public discourse around this reality is pointed. “People watch too many of these damn Hollywood movies where soldiers can do superhuman feats and do not have to worry about logistics,” he says. The observation is blunt, but it captures a genuine pathology in American strategic culture: a tendency, cultivated by decades of relatively low-cost military interventions, to underestimate the grinding physical demands of sustained combat against a prepared adversary on their home soil.
The Manpower Reality
Beneath the operational constraints lies a more fundamental problem that Wilkerson identifies as the binding constraint on any large-scale Iran operation: the United States simply does not have the ground forces required.
“It’s not just the difficulty of getting it there in the first place without massive casualties,” Wilkerson says. “We don’t have the manpower.”
The observation reflects a structural reality of the post-2001 American military. Two decades of counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan consumed the Army’s force structure, degraded readiness across the institutional force, and produced a recruitment crisis from which the service has not fully recovered. The all-volunteer force, while producing high-quality individual soldiers, caps the size of the military at what the volunteer pool can sustain — and that pool has been shrinking relative to the demands placed upon it.
A ground campaign against Iran would not resemble Iraq in 2003, when a relatively small American force toppled a conventional military in three weeks. Iran’s armed forces are larger, better equipped, more motivated, and fighting on home terrain against an adversary they have been preparing to face for four decades. Conservative estimates of the force required for a serious ground campaign run into the hundreds of thousands — a number that strains the current active-duty Army’s capacity even before accounting for the forces already committed elsewhere.
The manpower ceiling, combined with the logistical challenges, the geographic obstacles, and the lethality of Iran’s defensive systems, produces a strategic picture that the veterans describe with consistent bleakness: there is no good ground option. There is no combination of available forces, accessible routes, and acceptable casualty projections that produces a viable path to the kind of decisive military outcome that ground campaigns are supposed to deliver.
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