War with Iran – Initial Analysis

“COA2 Military initially appears to be more successful at reducing ISIS’s territory and number of combatants (Figure 11a,b) and continues to successfully contain ISIS’s territory for much of the simulation. Commanders on the ground and policy makers in the rear might mistakenly think this approach is superior. In addition, those performances are only in the manifest, or visible, system. The latent system, what is not visible, depicted in Figure 11c,d, which together show the competition in perceived legitimacy between Red and Green, respectively. This creates a “better-before-worse” behavior pattern of early promise leading to later failure. By not improving the legitimacy of the Green actor or reducing the legitimacy of the Red actor COA2 Military Only allows several dynamics to appear. COA2 Emerging-State benefits from targeting ISIS’s governance structure, eroding its legitimacy (Figure 11c). This forces ISIS to take more troops off the front-line advances and focus on garrisoning (Figure 11e) and dealing with more internal uprisings against ISIS control (Figure 11f). These uprisings are not specified in the simulation but could be considered similar to the Anbar Awakening backlash that occurred against ISIS’s predecessor AQI in 2006–2007. Likewise, because Green isn’t a credible government in the COA2 Military Only scenario to Arab Sunni’s or Kurdish Sunni’s (Figure 11d), it requires more garrison (Figure 11g) and also has to contend with higher a rate of internal opposition unaffiliated with ISIS conducting attacks against Green (Figure 11h) COA2 Emerging-State on the other hand, focusing on legitimacy improvement in Phase I has created conditions greater success when the military intervention does happen. This means Green in COA2 Emerging-State has more local troops available to confront ISIS than COA2 Military Only. The consequences of this latent system appear shortly after 2017, four years after the initial deployment. In COA2 Military Only, ISIS affects a break-out territorially while consistently increasing its combatant force towards the 100k mark. A common proposal is that state-actors should be willing to accept the reality of political reconciliation with competing non-state actors to end a conflict. What these results show, however, is that a state-actor should also seek political reconciliation with its own people to cut off the grievance feedback loop that fuels the competing non-state actors support base. A political-only solution, however, won’t be enough either. COA2 Political Only performs poorly on all fronts, as, although it focuses on legitimacy, it does not have an answer for improving security or containing the military actions of ISIS. This undermines the benefits of legitimacy-building when it comes to total garrison required (Figure 11g) and opposition fighters opposed to Green (Figure 11h). This is because ISIS can keep a high-level of violence against all ethnographies, but especially the Arab Shia population, which Green depends on for support. This appears by looking at the Killed in Action (KIA) per Million Population in Figure 12.”