War is not merely or even mainly about slaughtering and conquering. It is more often a form of signalling.
Iran’s recent volley of missiles directed at Israel and Ukraine’s invasion of the Kursk region in the Russian Federation are prime examples of the latter.
No tactical or strategic war aims could possibly be served by these two manoeuvres.
To overwhelm the combined US-Israeli defences, Iran would have needed to dispatch many more than 180 projectiles. The Kursk invasion is but a needle prick in Russia’s side.
But both operations contained important messages:
Iran is only partly deterred by Israel and is not loth to escalate every time the “Zionist enemy” ostentatiously violates its sovereignty and territorial integrity.
Putin is Russia’s only real vulnerability and humiliating him by breaching its borders is in itself a strategic coup.
In wars of attrition – and both these campaigns have long come to resemble the trench warfare of 110 years ago – signalling is everything. Territorial advances are halting and glacial. Decimating the enemy is out of the question. What is left to accomplish is impression management, a form of psychological warfare.
The idea is to ultimately mobilize the hinterland against the conflict and against its own leaders. Both Putin and Netanyahu are ripe for the plucking. The former is becoming increasingly less popular among the venal elites, the latter is virulently hated by half the population of his country and by most of the rest of the world.
Raining missiles on Israel, however inefficaciously, may alienate the Israelis and turn them against the prospect of a devastating Armageddon. Taking over Russian territory and engulfing its infrastructure in flames may open the eyes of the Russian people to finally grasp what a hapless psychopathic thug Putin is.
In both cases, there is the anticipation of a pacifist revolution against the leadership. It is not a forlorn hope. History teaches us that this course of action could be fruitful: recall the Russian Revolution, for example.
Only when signalling fails spectacularly does a no-holds-barred warfare begin. This is what happened when appeasement failed with Hitler.
Should Israel use the opportunity to massively retaliate against the recent Iranian gesture or should Putin resort to tactical nuclear weapons in his “special military operation”, all hell will break loose.
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