Safety in Numbers?

John Isaacs and Travis Sharp of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation have produced a side-by-side comparison of the military capacities of American and Iranian forces, which illustrates the staggering disparity between the two countries. America will spend almost 100 times as much on defense as Iran does in FY09 ($711b vs. $7.2b). We have almost 35 times more armored infantry fighting vehicles and over 17 times more helicopters than the Iranians do. We have 170 long-range bombers and 53 airborne early-warning aircraft; the Iranians have none of either.

Isaacs and Sharp, along with Matt Yglesias, cite these numbers as proof that Iran doesn't pose the "existential threat" that some in Washington have been saying it does. And that is true. But I think that saying so fundamentally misses the point. Haven't we learned anything from Iraq? If we had done the same side-by-side comparison in February 2003, the Iraqi military would have looked about as pathetic as the Iranian one does today. And, true to the predictions, the Iraqi military did fall without much resistance when the Americans rolled in.

Unfortunately, though, it's no longer that simple. The report mentions (but only in the fine print at the bottom) that estimates of the number of paramilitary forces available in wartime range from 450,000 to 12.6 million, the latter figure being the Iranian government's (probably overstated) estimate. If we assume that we send a force into Iran that is roughly comparable in size to the one we sent into Iraq (which would be tactically questionable but probably all that the military could get politically), we'd be outnumbered anywhere from 2.5-to-1 all the way up to 63-to-1, assuming an American invasion force of 200,000. And this is in addition to the 900,000-strong Iranian Army - remember that while that number is substantially smaller than the size of the American Army, the Iranians would be able to bring a hefty percentage of their total forces to bear in the defense of their homeland.

So Yglesias, Isaacs, and Sharp make the right point, but for the wrong reason. We should not invade Iran, partially because they are unthreatening, but mostly because it would be counterproductive. In the old days of warfare, technology and manpower dictated the outcome. But these aren't the old days, a fact which the Iraq debacle should have indelibly stamped into our collective consciousness. The road to Tehran, should we make the colossal mistake of invading, will look much like the road to Baghdad: littered with IEDs, car bombs, and all of the other fiendishly clever and frighteningly effective cards up the insurgents' sleeves. It happened to the British and Russians in Afghanistan, it happened to us in Iraq, and it would happen to us again in Iran, APC counts be damned.