Invading Iran, the US Forgot all the Lessons of WW I
John Walbridge 04/01/2026
Bloomington, IN (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – If you plan to make a living guiding the affairs of great nations, it probably behooves you to pay attention in high school history class. In the interest of remedying this possible negligence, I offer the follow lesson on World War I, which my grandfather who fought in it called “the Great War.”
Of course, the lesson everyone knows is that the war broke out because Serbian terrorists assassinated the Austrian heir to the throne, an event that Bismarck is said have predicted would be the “some damn fool thing in the Balkans” that would start a world war. We can probably be assured that no Austrian grand dukes, if there are still any, are going to be assassinated by Serbian terrorists and restart World War I, but this time it is likely to be some damn thing in the Middle East.
Moral: Beware of damn fool things and try very hard not to commit any yourself.
The second lesson is that no matter how confident you may be of your military’s superiority, it is very likely that the troops are not going to be home for Christmas. In the Great War the European powers went to war, each confident of a quick victory, only to find themselves in various stalemates by the time Christmas 1914 rolled around. The troops understood this; they took the day off in the famous Christmas Truce. Austria, confident of defeating Serbia, was thrown back out by the Serbs three times before the first Christmas.
Moral: Just because you think you will win easily, it doesn’t mean the enemy will cooperate, so don’t buy your Christmas turkey just yet. President Putin learned this to his chagrin. The campaign he expected to overthrow the Ukrainian government in a week has now lasted through four Christmases and will likely soon surpass the length of World War I. President Trump’s war with Iran is not yet close to Christmas, but it clearly has lasted longer than he expected with no obvious way to stop it.
Third lesson: Beware of new technology. The weapon most associated with World War I was the machine gun—though actually artillery caused more casualties. For some time, the Europeans had been happily using machine guns to slaughter natives in their colonial wars, but it seemed not to have occurred to their generals that these modern wonder weapons could be used against them. The 20,000 young Britons who died at the Somme on July 1, 1916, proved otherwise. In actuality, machine guns and their heavier cousins, the cannons, proved that all the pre-war training and tactical and strategic thinking was deadly folly.
The contemporary counterpart is the drone, which has made tanks obsolete. Armor was the lord of the battlefield as late as 2003. It isn’t any more. Even before the arrival of the drone, the United States lost two guerilla wars to enemies who did not have such toys. Since 2022 the Ukrainians have wiped out virtually all front-line Russian armor, starting by dropping hand grenades from drones. In the years since there has been a Cambrian explosion of drones with the result that any soldier, Russian or Ukrainian, who sticks his head above ground is likely to be dead within minutes and the Russian Black Sea Fleet, its flagship on the bottom, remains holed up in port as far away as it can get from Ukraine.
Moral: What worked last time may not work this time, and God help you if cheap new tech can defeat your expensive old technology, whether that be highly trained cavalry or state-of-the-art tanks. The Russians had some excuse, but the United States military, despite close relations with Ukraine, seems not to have prepared for drones.
Fourth lesson: By the end of 1914, all the belligerents were running low on artillery shells, having run through the supplies they had assumed would last for a whole war. In Britain this caused a major political crisis, but all the major powers had to reorganize their industries to feed the need for munitions of every sort, especially artillery shells, the only effective weapon against deeply entrenched troops. Millions were fired, and the work of clearing French battlefields of unexploded shells goes on to this day.
The Ukrainian War has generated its own shell crisis, with the battlefield dominated by drones and artillery. In the current U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, the counterpart is the looming shortage of missile interceptors, as well as advanced drones like the Tomahawk. These weapons are sophisticated and highly capable but are extremely expensive and take a long time to build. They are being used in quantity to shoot down much cheaper ballistic missiles and very cheap Iranian drones. Questions are being asked about how quickly the stockpiles are being used and what will happen if they run out. It’s much like the shell crisis except that it will not be possible to quickly begin turning out these weapons in large quantities.
Moral: In peacetime it’s fun and good for your career to build ever fancier weapons systems, astonishingly complex planes and ships, and armored vehicles worthy of a Star Wars movie. It’s hard to get budget for stockpiling large quantities of ammunition, and bad for your career to be the crank arguing for that necessity. But if you don’t, your armories are likely to be empty far sooner than you would imagine.
Fifth lesson: Early in 1915, the British and French, facing stalemate on the Western Front and collapse on the Eastern Front, hit on the scheme of sending a fleet of older battleships through the Dardanelles, the forty-mile strait connecting the Aegean to the Sea of Marmara. They would reduce the old Turkish fortifications at its mouth and sail through unopposed. Once Istanbul was under Allied guns the next day, the Turks would drop out of the war. The only obstacle was the minefield blocking the entrance. No problem. Minesweepers manned by civilians would clear the mines, and Bob’s your uncle. Unfortunately, the Turks had mobile artillery on the other side of the hills where the battleships couldn’t see them, and the civilians in the mine sweepers did not think they were paid to be shot at. The battleships went round one at a time blasting away at the invisible guns without much effect. Unfortunately, one Lt. Hakki, the commander of the small Turkish minelayer Nusret, snuck out that night and laid a line of mines in the bay where the battleships turned around. The next day three Allied battleships were sunk and a battlecruiser badly damaged. Today every Turkish schoolchild knows the names Nusret and Lt. Hakki.
Undaunted—though the Royal Navy refused to try again—the British landed troops that April on the Gallipoli Peninsula, the tongue of land forming the northern side of the Dardanelles. Come Christmas and a quarter million casualties and three more battleships later, the Allies pulled out, having achieved nothing.
Moral: Beware of naval mines. They are easy to lay, hard to detect, and likely to sink or badly damage any ship that wanders by. Granted, minesweeping technology is better today than it was a century ago, but unfortunately so are the mines. There is a very good reason that neither the U.S. Navy nor its European allies have any appetite for trying to open the Strait of Hormuz, particularly when the shoreline is ideal for taking potshots at passing ships, launching drones, or sheltering fast boats that can drop a mine and run away. And modern warships are a lot more delicate than the armored leviathans of a century ago.
Oh, and if you are going to try to clear a narrow passage of mines against enemy opposition, you probably will need troops ashore, and that may not go so well either.
British troops in Hamadan, Iran, under command of Lionel Dunsterville during First World War. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons
Sixth lesson: Although the airplane developed rapidly during the Great War, the most impressive aircraft were the German zeppelins that bombed British cities. They didn’t do a lot of damage compared to the Blitz a quarter century later, but they did kill people and they were certainly impressive. Their advocates argued that the damage to civilian morale would suffice to drive the British out of the war. While they did annoy the British public, they stayed in the war, and the British eventually figured out how to shoot them down.
During the Second World War, the Germans tried again, this time with more aircraft and better technology, and British and Americans soon turned the strategy against the Germans, creating massive destruction of German cities—but the British and the Germans fought on. American air attacks on Japan failed to break the Japanese until they had been defeated at sea and were facing imminent invasion. The Americans tried again on an even larger scale in the Vietnam War but ended up withdrawing in humiliation. The two American wars with Iraq just showed that air power was only decisive when combined with ground troops.
Moral: When the air power advocates come telling you that they can win the war for you from the air without any ground troops involved, turn them out of your office and tell security not to let them back in.
Final lesson: It’s hard to come up with a new mistake in war, so it’s a very good idea to understand the old ones. It’s particularly dangerous if you have won the last war, because your generals and politicians will be complacent whereas your enemies will be making every effort to ensure you don’t beat them again. I leave the contemporary application of this principle to the reader.