🇮🇷🏆🇺🇸 They Saw It Coming

How American military planners anticipated failure in Iran

In mid-February 2026, before the US military initiated the airstrikes that began Operation “Epic Fury,” the National Intelligence Council (NIC), an agency of the executive branch created to synthesize the analysis of the US’s 18 intelligence agencies, submitted to the president a classified report detailing the prospects of an attack on Iran. This assessment, first reported on in the Washington Post and subsequently confirmed by the Associated Press, painted a grim picture.

It concluded that an offensive operation launched by the US military would be unlikely to dismantle the central pillars of the Iranian government. Assassinating Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei could backfire, resulting in the consolidation of Iranian military and political structures and the activation of emergency protocols the Iranians had been preparing for years. Iran’s domestic opposition was unlikely to be able to seize power in such a scenario. A limited air campaign or even a protracted war stood a serious chance of failing to achieve regime change.

The NIC report was the final warning in a decades-long, documented history of US military and intelligence planners predicting grim strategic outcomes in a war with Iran. Official analysis anticipated every major failure of a potential conflict, from the brutal arithmetic of interceptor production to the possibility that Iran might close the Strait of Hormuz.

Given the clear historical record of American anticipation of these failures, it should now be asked why these warnings went largely ignored. If the Pentagon and intelligence community understood the bleak prospect for success in Iran, if their assessments anticipated debasification, munition shortages, the closure of Hormuz, the superiority of diplomacy, the difficulties with achieving air supremacy, and the unlikely prospect of regime change, how did they find themselves embarking on what was, by all available evidence, an unwinnable war? The answer to this question can be found in a series of leaks made shortly after the war began to The New York Times.

In the lead-up to the war, every assessment made by the Pentagon and US intelligence apparatus was directly contradicted by competing assessments made by Israeli planners and presented directly to the Trump administration. Mossad chief David Barnea traveled to Washington in mid-January and delivered a comprehensive plan to assassinate the Iranian leadership and stir mass protests to accomplish regime change.

The Israelis also presented a supporting plan to invade Iran with Kurdish proxy forces, but American strategists had already identified that the Kurds were too dispersed and disorganized to be used for this purpose, and doing so would strain relations with Turkey. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu heavily lobbied the Trump administration to convince them the plan was achievable. Throughout this process, US military and intelligence officials fought fiercely to convince the administration that the plan would fail, but were overruled.

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🔗 https://open.substack.com/pub/amerikanets/p/they-saw-it-coming