Ending the Iranian Conflict: The Battle And Beyond the Battlefield

Let’s be Frank – Can we get real for a second?

Something happened this week that we Americans should not overlook. On September 29, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) released a lengthy open letter addressed directly to the American people. Coming just weeks before the November 3 midterm elections, the IRGC urged Americans to reject the policies of President Trump and his congressional allies.

Whatever one’s politics, stop and think about that for a moment. An arm of the Iranian government is now openly appealing to American voters during an American election cycle. That caught my attention—not primarily as a former elected official, but as a retired Marine Reserve Colonel.

During my years in the Marine Corps Reserve, I spent considerable time involved in contingency operations, including in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. I served briefly in Afghanistan in 2002, worked as the Central Command Special Operations Officer during Operation Enduring Freedom, and was recalled from retirement in 2004 for service in Iraq, where my responsibilities included work associated with the January 2005 elections and reconstitution of the Iraqi interim government.

I also served as the Commanding Officer of a Civil Affairs group and developed considerable experience with economic warfare and the interaction of military, political, economic and psychological pressure during my tours of duty.

Those experiences taught me that an adversary does not always have to defeat you militarily. Sometimes it merely has to convince you that continuing the struggle costs more than you are willing to bear and that is precisely why the IRGC’s letter and Iran’s prior conduct deserve more attention than another piece of wartime rhetoric.

Iran has understood for decades that it cannot defeat the United States in a conventional force-on-force war and its military doctrine evolved accordingly.

The Iran-Iraq War profoundly influenced modern Iranian strategic thinking. That terrible eight-year conflict demonstrated both Iran’s willingness to absorb extraordinary losses and the importance its leaders place on endurance.

I saw evidence of that history personally while serving in Baghdad in 2004 and 2005. I visited the enormous memorial commemorating Iraqis killed during the Iran-Iraq War. I remember being stunned by the scale of the losses both countries had been willing to absorb without achieving a decisive result. That experience matters today.

Iranian doctrine subsequently developed around asymmetric warfare: don’t fight a technologically superior opponent exclusively on the battlefield where that opponent is strongest. Instead, exploit its vulnerabilities. Increase its costs. Extend the conflict. Create uncertainty. Undermine its willingness to continue.

Analyses of Iranian military doctrine have described precisely this strategy: attrition intended to raise an opponent’s risks and costs sufficiently to weaken its willingness to fight. That sounds remarkably similar to principles Americans themselves understand from psychological and economic warfare.  President Kennedy valued the concept of asymmetric warfare when he established the Green Berets.  His own World War II experiences with the PT boats reinforced the value of this tool in a nation’s arsenal.

And it brings us back to the IRGC’s letter because it underscores the Iranian understanding that Americans are experiencing real economic consequences from this conflict and that gas and diesel prices matter! They matter to the family commuting to work. They matter to the truck driver. They matter to farmers and small businesses. Higher transportation costs eventually work their way through supply chains and into the prices of other goods.

We should never dismiss those concerns as selfishness or lack of patriotism. Economic pain is real, but we must ask the difficult question which is what if creating or prolonging that economic discomfort helps an adversary accomplish strategically what it cannot accomplish militarily?

Iran does not need Americans to support Iran. It doesn’t even necessarily need Americans to believe Iranian propaganda. It merely needs enough Americans to conclude that the economic cost of continuing current policy exceeds whatever benefit that policy might eventually produce.

Economic pressure becomes political pressure and political pressure can eventually become strategic change be it a short term impact with long term consequences or not. Where there is economic pain, the unintended consequences become secondary, whether or not that is in our own long term best interests.

This discussion is not a weakness of democracy. It is democracy but foreign governments understand our system too.

U.S. intelligence agencies have previously concluded that Iran sought to influence American elections, exploit social divisions and shape political outcomes. In 2024, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency publicly warned of increasingly aggressive Iranian influence operations targeting the American public and presidential campaigns.

So when the IRGC now openly addresses American voters before another national election, we should at least recognize the strategic context. Iran is not discovering American politics for the first time. It has been studying them.  They realize all too well that America’s political system contains something Iran’s does not: leaders who must regularly answer to voters.

That is one of our greatest strengths but from the Iranian’s perspective, it can also create an opportunity. If an adversary believes American strategy has a two-year or four-year expiration date, why would the Iranians make difficult concessions today particularly when they see the same polling numbers that we all do? The Iranian influencing of our political system is politics AND warfare.

All the IRGC has to do is to wait and see what happens on November 3.

While as a legislator, I have long worried that America sometimes confuses tactics with strategy. Tactics respond to circumstances but a strategy defines an objective and coordinates military, diplomatic, economic and political power to achieve it over time.

For decades, American approaches toward Iran have changed substantially across administrations. Sanctions have tightened and loosened. Negotiations have begun and ended. Agreements have been reached and abandoned. Military pressure has increased and decreased. But Iran sees something else as well: continuity—or the absence of it.

Our current strategy includes substantial economic pressure against Iran after intense bombing. Iran’s economy is under severe strain and is likely to collapse with the right “trigger”. Its currency recently fell to a record low amid the effects of war, sanctions and restrictions on its oil trade. At the same time, Iran continues negotiating indirectly over reopening the Strait of Hormuz and easing economic restrictions.

If economic pressure is going to influence the IRGC and I believe it will, they must believe the pressure will last longer than its ability to withstand it. That is where American political endurance becomes strategically important. The November election matters because Americans will determine the composition of Congress and therefore influence national policy during the final two years of President Trump’s term. The November elections will be the “trigger” that the IRGC is betting on.

But November matters for another reason because Iran is watching. Indeed, the IRGC has now made unmistakably clear that it is not merely watching our political debate—it is attempting to participate in it.

That should neither frighten nor silence us. It should make us more thoughtful. We should vote according to our own judgment about the direction of the country, including whether they believe the present Iran strategy is wise. But before making that judgment, we should understand that our adversaries are also evaluating our willingness to sustain a strategy when the cost becomes uncomfortable in the short run.

I think often about the Americans who served in this region, especially those who never returned home. We honor them by insisting that future sacrifices—whether measured in lives, deployments, tax dollars or dollars at the gasoline pump—serve a clearly defined objective and a strategy capable of achieving it.

The pain Americans are experiencing is real. So are the consequences of strategic failure. A mature nation should be capable of holding both thoughts at the same time.

Perhaps the most important question raised by the IRGC’s extraordinary letter is therefore not whether Americans should listen to Iran. The question is whether Iran has correctly identified something about us: Can economic discomfort persuade Americans to abandon a long-term strategic objective before the strategy has had time to work?

Frank Ryan is a CPA, retired U.S. Marine Corps Reserve Colonel, former member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, and former Vice Chair of the Pennsylvania Public School Employees’ Retirement System (PSERS).