Will a "narrowly tailored" response to aggression deter Iran?

As of yesterday, Iran had launched 20 attacks on American outposts in Iraq and Syria in just 8 days. These attacks injured around 20 U.S. troops.

Finally, under growing pressure to do something, the Biden administration responded with force. It attacked an Iranian Revolutionary Guard position and an Iranian-backed militia position, both in Syria.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin stressed the limited nature of this response. He stated: “These narrowly tailored strikes in self-defense were intended solely to protect and defend U.S. personnel in Iraq and Syria.” In other words, the administration seeks only to deter Iran from attacking again. It does not want to wage war with Iran or the forces it backs.

But can a “narrowly tailored” response, coupled with a clear indication that the U.S. wants to avoid war, deter Iran? Jennifer Griffin’s reporting on Fox News last night said her sources at the Pentagon doubt it.

I doubt it, too. Iran is sitting pretty right now. The mullahs pull the strings while forces they control attack Americans in Iraq and Syria and kill more than a dozen Americans in Israel. All of this, at no cost to its homeland — neither to Iran’s oil producing facilities nor its nuclear program.

Under these circumstances, it seems unlikely that the mullahs will back down just because two outposts in Iraq and Syria have been hit. Not when they have good reason to believe that more attacks will produce only another narrowly tailored U.S. response.

Narrow tailoring is not the optimal way to deter Iran. In fact, the best way is quite the opposite — to threaten a large-scale response that targets Iran directly. This sort of response has always been at the core of effective deterrence. During the Cold War, for example, deterrence was achieved for decades through “mutually assured destruction.”

Thus, if the goal is purely to deter Iran, which we can destroy but which can’t destroy us, the optimal approach is to threaten to attack Iran itself with missiles aimed at critical facilities.

The problem, of course, is that such deterrence depends on Iran believing that Joe Biden will carry through on such a threat. And if Iran doesn’t believe this and continues to attack our forces, Biden will have to carry through on his threat. This might well mean an all-out war with Iran.

I’m not convinced that an all-out war with Iran would be a bad thing. My view is that (1) it’s unacceptable for Iran to have nuclear weapons and (2) attacking Iran is the only way to prevent Iran from getting them.

But with Israel on the verge of all-out war, probably on more than one front, and with an incompetent U.S. president, this may not be the best time to go to war with Iran. In any event, Biden isn’t going to attack Iran.

But attacking Iran directly and Biden’s minimalist “narrow tailoring” aren’t the only options. Indeed, Biden’s tailored response falls short even of the “proportionality” standard we hear so much about. The two air strikes he ordered are not proportionate to the 20 attacks launched against U.S. outposts in just 8 days.

I hope my pessimism about the deterrent effect of Biden’s response turns out to be misplaced. I hope his response does deter future attacks.

But if it doesn’t, our next response needs to be considerably more forceful. And it should not be “proportionate.” It should be disproportionately strong.

“Narrow tailoring” is an important concept in the legal world. Lawyers and judges talk about it all the time.

I lack the expertise to say for sure that the concept is foreign to traditional military thinking. But it seems out of place in the martial context.

Biden and Austin may believe that talking in such fashion makes them sound prudent and smart. But sounding prudent and smart isn’t the same thing as being that way.