Target: Iran
The boardgame, not the actual clusterfuck that we're in now
I don’t intend on getting too deep into the topic of whether the president will make the decision to bomb Iran or not. It’s a ridiculous and insane concept that will have no good outcome, but others have expressed better political and military analyses than I can provide at this time. The fact that Israel has succeeded in a first-strike attack against critical Iranian targets is not in dispute. The probability is that Israel is not going to be able to cause a regime change short of using a nuclear weapon against Iran. The possibility that the U.S. government would be stupid enough to join in on the campaign is still a variable. But let’s put that discussion aside for a moment.
When I was still a professor at the Air War College, I taught a course called “Nuclear Wargaming” in which I invited Air Command and Staff College students to participate in three boardgames in which nuclear weapons were a topic. It was an idea that, if I could trick them into thinking this was a low-burden course, they just might learn something about nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence at the same time. The three boardgames were “Target: Iran,” “Showdown: The Coming Indo-Pakistani War,” and “Fail Safe” (based on the 1964 film). All three games were relatively simple to pick up and play out, which was a critical characteristic for a student population that was largely ignorant of military gaming concepts. In a way, it’s a shame that I left the AWC (exactly a year ago), because these three wargames certainly would be in vogue.
Anyway, I thought I’d talk about “Target: Iran” for the sake of the current news cycle. This game came out of a 2014 Modern War magazine, which unfortunately is no longer in print, and this particular game edition is out of stock. This was a solitaire game in which the player assumes the role of a U.S. coalition commander responsible for destroying Iran’s “WMD” program (really just nuclear, but whatever). There are two phases, a strategic phase in which the player uses reconnaissance and cyber tools to discover where on the map the WMD-marked chits are, and at the same time, they mobilize attack forces (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine) and coalition allies (NATO, Israel, GCC) to support operations. Once the U.S. forces are in place, then the game turns to a tactical phase in which the military forces move to attack Iran’s critical defense infrastructure.
There are some variables in play during this conflict. One of them is that, as the U.S. coalition increases its forces, the price of oil goes up. As U.S. forces eliminate Iranian targets, the price of oil goes down.1 There is an opportunity for the Iranian government to retaliate back against bases with U.S. forces (a random die roll) and there are Iranian military units against which the U.S. forces must fight. There is a limited time frame by which the player must find all of the WMD sites, which are hidden and randomly placed in the circles on the map. There are other targets as well - Iranian C2, missile bases, arms depots, terror training camps. Air task forces have to move from airbases (in the boxes in at the end of the lines) to specific regions of the map. Meanwhile, a naval task force comes up the Persian Gulf to engage Iranian forces and targets on the coast. The Army role is pretty limited to insertions into specific cities for the purposes of beating back Iranian combat forces and securing WMD sites. Because the game uses randomly placed markers, the “WMD” markers are not at the currently known locations of Iran’s nuclear research program.
This is a very easy game for any military service member or civilian, regardless of one’s experience, to pick up and play (assuming that one does the reading to understand the very basic rules of this game). You literally cannot lose in this game unless you get some very bad die rolls - either the Iranian strategic table makes you start the conflict before you mobilize all the forces you want, or the price of oil fluctuates high enough so as to force an end to hostilities. I used this game as an opportunity to discuss why Iran might want a nuclear weapon, using Judith Yaphe’s monograph “Nuclear Politics in Iran,” a chapter from “The Spread of Nuclear Weapons” by Scott Sagan and Kenneth Waltz, and a 2015 CRS report. So what can we learn from this game?
The game does allow for a variation in which Israel attacks alone. To be clear, this game was released in 2014 and didn’t include Israeli commandos with drone forces infiltrating the country and conducting a preventive strike on the leadership and military bases. U.S. and Israeli forces can attack any Iranian zone, but NATO and the GCC are limited to hitting the zones in which their air routes end. The size of the Israeli forces is the limiting factor in doing an “Israeli only” game. It’s certainly possible to try that option, but odds are that you would run out of time to find all of the WMD sites before the game ends. Having the U.S. forces fly out of the United States ensures an air base that’s safe from Iranian attack, but it’s a long leg and you’re only going to use that once during the game. It’s possible to use the air bases east of Iran to more quickly hit the Iranian targets.
The Iranian resistance is pretty limited. They have air defense, military and militia units, and old fighters, but they’re outgunned and easily disposed of. There are mines in the Persian Gulf, but as long as the U.S. player buys a few minesweepers, keeping the Strait of Hormuz open is relatively easy. There are no “hard and deeply buried targets” in the game, and there are no Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs. All of this is simplified to allow for an easy solitaire game in which one can learn about the military value of geography and the execution of a joint task force in its attack against Iranian targets. There are no political constraints other than the rise of oil prices. There are no fiscal constraints as to the overall cost of the operation or morality discussions over the impact of bombing major population centers.
There’s a longer discussion as to the entire question of whether Iran is actually trying to build a nuclear weapon or just using the pretext of a nuclear weapons program to bargain for relief from economic sanctions. There’s a term “nuclear latency” to suggest that Iran might settle for making its adversaries understand that it could build a nuke if it wanted to. I’ve personally thought that the U.S. government’s position that “Iran must never have a nuclear bomb” was particularly ridiculous and hypocritical, given that Israel uses its nuclear weapons as a basic threat to do whatever conventional attacks against any Middle East target it chooses.2 I recommend viewing this Sagan-Waltz debate to better appreciate this issue.
My two cents, this Israeli adventure is going to backfire in a spectacular fashion. Israel does not have the capability to eliminate Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and it very may well encourage Iran to pursue such a capability even faster. It’s a race between Israel’s ability to replenish its missile defense capabilities and Iran’s ability to build and fire more ballistic missiles. Of course, Iran has other, more unconventional options that it has not yet pursued, and with or without American support, it’s likely that U.S. national security interests will be imperiled. The number of civilian deaths and the cost of these military operations will not be trivial, and if a regime change occurs, it is far from certain that the next Iranian leadership - even if more “moderate” than the current regime - will not continue a nuclear weapons program. When one’s neighbors keep attacking one’s country, that drives the stronger urge to build nuclear weapons as a defensive capability.
Yes, it’s a ridiculous system that tries to penalize the player for overbuilding or not taking military action against key Iranian targets. As if the oil market would go down as U.S. forces are attacking Iran’s military and economic infrastructure.
The U.S. government position on North Korea used to be “North Korea must never get a nuclear bomb” until it did in fact explode a nuclear device. It’s stupid to make political rhetorical threats that fail to change the adversarial nation’s position.