Eran Ortal
Subject: Fine Tuning the OODA Loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act Loop to Win the War in Iran
Bio: Former IDF officer, previously served as the Commander of the Dado Center for Interdisciplinary Military Thinking in IDF Operations Directorate. Head of the Military Program at Begin–Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA Center), visiting scholar at the American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC). Author of The Battle Before the War.
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and history. Today’s topic is Fine Tuning the OODA Loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act Loop to Win the War in Iran.
Our speaker is Brig. Gen. (Res.) Eran Ortal is a former Israeli Defense Forces officer who previously served as the Commander of the Dado Center for Interdisciplinary Military Thinking in the IDF Operations Directorate. Today he is the Head of the Military Program at the Begin–Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA Center) and a visiting scholar at the American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC). Eran is the author of the book “The Battle Before the War.”
I want to learn from Eran about how the American and Israeli military have moved their command center to the battlefield so that the target can be destroyed before the Iranians have time to react.
Eran Ortal:
This war, how is it going to end? How do we know we are winning? What are the chances this regime collapses? And before we can answer, I have to offer some framework to discuss the current events.
Iran intervened with war directly the first time in April ‘24. The IDF retaliated modestly, some said even weakly, to Iran, but retrospectively, it was a trial for the IDF. It proved the capability to strike Iran from a very far range. Another thing that happened was the key component of the air defenses in Tehran was already gone that set the stage in June for an operation focused on preventing a breakthrough to a nuclear bomb for the Iranians.
June contributed enormously to the populist demonstrations in Iranian major cities and created the conditions for now the combined American and Israeli operation against Iran. I don’t think anyone can promise that this regime will be gone when this operation is over. But military force can only destroy things. Nevertheless, I’m quite positive that this operation is pushing forward in the right direction.
Larry Bernstein:
What do you see? What is effective? What is ineffective? What has happened so far and how do you evaluate it?
Eran Ortal:
We live in a time where standoff weapons and air defenses, coastal defenses, cyber capabilities, electronic warfare capabilities make it extremely hard for troops to move around. You can see that happening in Ukraine, where the war is stuck in a frozen front for the last four years. What you can see in Iran is a breakthrough because Israel in June demonstrated the ability to gain control over Iranian skies.
The Iranian air defenses and its coastal defenses are Chinese-made, or Chinese copied. What you have here is a closely coordinated American and IAF campaign that is punching a hole in the A2AD, that is an American phrase, in this case of the Iranians and proving these capabilities.
Larry Bernstein:
Just to define A2AD for our audience, that acronym stands for Anti-Access/Area-Denial which is a military strategy using long-range missiles, sensors and air defenses which is the anti-access part to restrict or area-denial an opponent’s freedom of action in a region. As an example, this is what China wants to do in the South China Sea if there was a war between China and the US.
Eran Ortal:
I’m sure the American military is thinking about the future possible campaigns in the Pacific. I’m sure the Chinese are watching. So military speaking, you have a dry trial before you go into actual battle.
This is a miniature China that is now being punctured with its air defenses, air forces and coastal defenses. And it’s no coincidence that CENTCOM is mainly focused on the Iranian Navy and coastal defenses.
Larry Bernstein:
The Americans destroyed the Iranian Navy in a single day that war is already over. Is there more to say about the coastal defenses?
Eran Ortal:
You are right. I do not think the Iranian naval ships are the main issue here. The more complicated capability to take out is the coastal missiles that threaten both merchant ships and the American Navy. They are connected to radars and command control systems and air defenses that have the responsibility to defend the coastal defenses. That is complex to take out. It is not the ranges or the density of what the American military might face in a Pacific war, but it is a good case to try the American capabilities.
This war is about Iran, but it is also useful to gather some relevant combat experience in the face of future conflicts that might come.
Larry Bernstein:
Iran employed Chinese missiles, radar, and weapons, and a combination of American and Israeli forces have been able to destroy those weapon systems with relative ease. That gives the Americans confidence that if China employs these same weapon systems that Chinese coastal defenses are in great danger. Is that your key point?
Eran Ortal:
It is, and it is not about the specific weapon system. It’s about the tactical know-how of how to identify the command centers, how to neutralize for critical periods of time, the networks, the cyber capabilities. What both sides, the IAF, the IDF, the American forces, CENTCOM are learning together is how to break this network, how to exploit the small gaps in the enemy’s capabilities.
Air defenses and long-range munitions and missiles are the key factors in warfare today. If you can take them out, if you can create a complex system of technologies and capabilities that can neutralize them effectivity, you can avoid the tough reality of four years of attrition happening in Ukraine. And if we go back to those future scenarios the United States is facing in the Pacific, prolonged war of attrition between China and the United States is something that everyone wishes to avoid.
Larry Bernstein:
A few decades ago, there was an American military theorist, his last name was John Boyd who had this idea that you needed to get within the decision-making process of your enemy so that the American aircraft needs to react faster than its opponent’s decision-making process so that even before it could turn around and shoot you, you’ve already destroyed that aircraft.
Eran Ortal:
Exactly. And he called that OODA loop. OODA meant orientation, observation, decision, and action. Back in the old days, the breaking of the OODA loop was a burden of the local commander on the field or the pilot in the cockpit. And what we created since the 1990s, is a system where that burden is laid more upon the higher echelons. In the IDF, it’s the command posts in Tel Aviv that has the broader picture.
The 1990s military transformation was about computer and networks combining sensors and precision munitions. Nowadays, we are living in the fourth industrial age revolution, the age of AIs and robots and drones. Things happen much faster than they have used to happen just 15 years ago and much more capabilities are now on the edge, not with the command post, but with the tactical units in the field and the response of systems is much faster. And if you want to break the OODA loop of the other side, you must be even quicker and more accurate. And that means you cannot rely solely anymore on delivering data from the battlefield to the headpost in Tel Aviv and then having the correct orders coming from Tel Aviv back to the field.
It needs to happen right now with proximity of time and space to the other side. And so much of the burden right now lays on the shoulders of the pilots over Tehran more than they have maybe trained to carry. There is a struggle within militaries between the ways we were built for the last few decades, and then new needs, new technologies and new tactics that needs to be created. So, this is a crucial learning experience that we are having today above Iran.
Larry Bernstein:
Can I try to repeat back what you said in layman’s terms? The first breakthrough in the early 1980s that the Israelis developed was to get the decision-making process faster. At a special headquarters in Tel Aviv, all the information coming from the battlefield could be used and a combination of weapon systems could be employed to destroy the targets before they even had a chance to react. This same philosophy is being played out now in Iran, except that the amount of time necessary to go back and forth to Tel Aviv is no longer an available option, and therefore this decision loop must be done instantaneously on the battlefield without a central command. And therefore, decision making is decentralized to the battlefield using the same OODA strategy to be inside the decision-making loop of its opponent.
Eran Ortal:
That is a perfectly accurate description of the general idea. Now, practically we are not all the way there. And a lot of the burden is still being managed by the headquarters in Tel Aviv and elsewhere, but yes, more of it is now on the shoulders of the pilots in the cockpit, the soldiers on the ground, and they are going to have to carry much more of this burden and have much more of what used to be only higher echelon capabilities, like the capability to identify an enemy soldier, rapid fires capabilities. And this all must be closer to the enemy position because the enemy realizes it’s threatened by precision capabilities and tends to move faster. Let’s just take the starting strike of this war, the taking out of Ali Khamenei and the 40 leaders gathering in his house.
This meeting was recognized by intelligence hours before it happened, and it was only there to go on for maybe one hour or two. Now, getting an armada of jets from the airports and flying all the way to Iran, that takes hours.
Getting into the OODA loop and striking this target in a timely manner is a much harder challenge than even taking out those same sites in 1982 that could change places in a matter of hours, not in a matter of minutes.
Larry Bernstein:
That said, the Iranians learned something. They cannot have another meeting of 40 of their leaders in a single location. That’s over. So, they too have learned that command and control operations need to be a Zoom call like we’re doing right now.
Eran Ortal:
That is beautiful, Larry, because you’re hitting the point because I was surprised that this meeting actually even happened at all.
“Is the other side stupid?” And I strongly urge you not to think that way. You cannot have a complex network of capabilities coordinated efficiently without having command and controls. You can decentralize command and control, but then you give up battle efficiency. What we see right now is missiles dropping on Israel one at a time, three or four times a day. That is a huge difference from the 100 missiles and 200 missiles coordinated at once, that failure in April ‘24 and October. To survive decentralized, one gives up communications, coordination and therefore stops being efficient.
This is the way you break down what we have called earlier, this A2AD complexes. Once the enemy must survive, run for his life, give up radio signature, give up cyber signature, give up phone calls, coordination is gone. And this is the point exactly where missiles and air defenses stop to be as efficient. And we hope internal security ceases to be efficient. This is true for any military force, but this is especially true for a military force that serves a dictatorship because dictatorships do not encourage initiatives. They do not teach their junior commanders to initiate, to think for themselves, to take responsibility. They fear initiatives. They fear people taking more responsibilities upon themselves. So, this development of the battlefield truly benefits more the Western democracies than it is for the other side.
Larry Bernstein:
One of the big surprises in the war was the decision to attack a UK base located on Cyprus. I was totally baffled by this decision to attack NATO forces. Ridiculous because NATO seemed to be a constraint on American and Israeli efforts, and to attack NATO and bring them into the war would have been a catastrophe. What I’ve heard is that this was not an Iranian attack, but instead was a drone fired by one of their proxies in Lebanon. A Hezbollah warrior took the initiative and decided to attack UK forces.
This goes against the strategic interests of the Iranian regime and that’s why they would be very wary of decision making that’s decentralized.
Eran Ortal:
You can see the incoherence of the other side’s strategy, not just with the Hezbollah striking Cyprus and bringing NATO into the fight but listen to the Iranian president apologizing for the strikes on the Gulf States. And as he finishes his broadcast apologizing, the IRGCs are firing a drone into Doha’s international airport. All authoritarian regimes have factions, and they find it exceedingly difficult to run a strategy without Khamenei. I do not put that on the hardship of communications. That is just the way this loose coalition of bad guys is being run.
Larry Bernstein:
I want to give an historical example when in 1982, Argentina and the UK were at war over the Falklands. It was a mismatch with a leading NATO country fighting a backward authoritarian Latin American dictatorship.
The UK sent their fleet to the South Atlantic and an Argentine battleship successfully fired an Exocet missile that blew up the HMS Sheffield. It was a shock that a single missile shot from miles away could destroy a major naval vessel that resulted in substantial loss of life.
Earlier you were discussing coastal defenses for Iran, will their missiles deter the American naval presence and undermine our ability to protect oil tankers going through the Strait of Hormuz?
Eran Ortal:
Margaret Thatcher was prime minister. Taking out a ship is more than just an operational blow. It is a blow for political will. Understanding what missiles are about, what anti-axis area-denial (A2AD) tactics is about. It’s about the political will. People ask, “How did we get to the point where Hamas has 40,000 strong military based right outside our Kibbutz on October 6th, 2023?” We knew about them, we followed their exercises, the military drills, the digging of the tunnels. We knew about their plans to strike our side, and yet Israel was reluctant for at least a decade and a half to do anything significant about it.
The rocket umbrella that Hamas developed has a lot to do with the huge failure of October 7th, because the rocket umbrella is the deterrence umbrella that allows the other side to equip himself and weaken Israeli political will to take that capability out.
Larry Bernstein:
I want to step back and think about the stakes that are involved. In the war in 1973, the question that Israel was asking itself, if we lose the war, have we lost the nation state? Will Israel cease to exist?
In this case, Iran will survive the war. That is not in question. No one is thinking about taking out Iran as a nation state and then have it be subjugated by its neighbors. The only question is, will this regime stay? President Trump has said that his goal is to allow the Iranian people to have an election and establish a democratic nation state, not a revolutionary guard nation state for Iran.
And as a result, the decision making for the armed forces is different. What does losing mean? Every day that the war continues, the American and Israeli forces are going to destroy Iran’s military capabilities. And if it surrenders sooner, those will not be destroyed.
How do you think about the question of this is not an existential threat for the nation state, it’s only an existential threat for the regime?
Eran Ortal:
Ben-Gurion has called it the basic asymmetry, no matter how successful Israel is in battle, we will never change the neighborhood. We will not change the ideology. We will not even change the capabilities. We can repel immediate threats. They will come back a few years from now. All the other side has to do is win once and we’re gone.
As you’ve said, there’s going to be Iran on the map no matter what. And although the optics is about Israeli military air and technological superiority and still the Iranian network is here to stay even if this regime is done. The Houthis are going to be there, the Shiites in Lebanon are going to be there even if we defeat Hezbollah this time, and there’s going to be some new Islamic forces coming up to replace it. All that Israeli strategy can do is make sure we have another period of time to rebuild, bring more Jews to Israel, build our nation, make some more technologies, thrive, and be ready for a next round.
Military success does not change that. We speak about regime change, I do not like this term because military force does not change anything. All we can do is take out Iranian capabilities and threats and hope for a better future to come. We do not politically engineer the Iranian society. We hope that someday a consensus will be reached that Israel is a legitimate entity in this region.
The good news is that more players in this region do accept this idea. And it has a lot to do with the alliance with America and Israeli technological and economical success, but it also has to do with the fact that Israel is a military power not to be thrown off the map.
Larry Bernstein:
There are certain rank order of targets available in Iran. And if they knock out the first hundred targets, then they start working on the next hundred targets. And Trump has said that he wants unconditional surrender. The question is, at least from my perspective, is if you’re losing badly, when do you call it quits? Enough already. I’ve already lost the top 200 targets. What’s the point of having my next 300 targets destroyed? We’re an ongoing nation state. We don’t want to lose these extra 300 targets. Or alternatively, are the people who oversee this decision, think of their own and the regime’s livelihood as their top priority, and they don’t value the next 300 targets in their decision making.
How do you think that the Iranian opponents will evaluate when to give up?
Eran Ortal:
No one knows whether there will be an Iranian leader that decides, “Well, this is enough. I want to save my life, my family’s life. I want to save my economy.” Or whether the decision makers in the other side are resilient to any amount of pain inflicted on the nation to keep this regime. And no one knows whether there is a military leader in Iran that will flip sides and in what circumstances that might happen. And no one really knows whether it’s the 1,000th target or the 10,000 target point where people rise up.
One must evaluate with good intelligence and some gut hunches. We stripped Iran’s capabilities to rebuild itself in a few years. They will always be able to rebuild someday, but we’ve postponed it. This might be the final campaign against this regime, or it can be just one very dramatic, very important step in this ladder.
All that military force can do is destroy things and create conditions. Whether those conditions are met with the more positive forces on the ground is not for us to decide. Some forces are bigger than military force.
Larry Bernstein:
You spoke today about the organization at the battlefield with the military command back in Tel Aviv, the lack of command and control and organization available in Iran. What else can you tell us about organizational development being the key aspect to success for the American and Israeli forces and its relative weakness for the Iranians?
Eran Ortal:
We are very satisfied with the aerial campaigns in June and right now over Iranian skies. But as we speak, rockets are fired from Lebanon into Tel Aviv. Our conversation can be interrupted any second by sirens and new missiles coming in from either Lebanon or Iran. And the question is, with military superiority, how come Hezbollah is still out there? We had an offensive operation a year and a half ago in Lebanon. How come the IDF right now is still on the defense in the Lebanese front? It has to do with your questions because the last period of military change was focused mainly on aerial capabilities.
We have ground forces on defense in Lebanon, being fired on by long range anti-tank missiles, but still against Hezbollah the big offensive, needs to wait till the end of the Iranian campaign. The dependency of ground forces in what Western militaries has called in the last three decades joint efforts is so deeply rooted that we are now paralyzed in our northern front against an enemy who is way weaker than it used to be just a year and a half ago.
If you go back to Ukraine, you can see that the drone warfare has paralyzed ground maneuver and they are stuck. And so, whoever comes out first with the capability to much more efficiently identify and target, not the drones, but the drone operators will have the upper hand. In the ground battle, we still haven’t figured out how to achieve what the Air Force has achieved in Tehran.
The parallel for the Iranian air defenses is the Hezbollah’s anti-tank missiles warfare or in Ukraine, the FPV or tactical drone warfare. And if we can’t pull ourselves together and combine the new technologies to regain maneuverability and push tactical power in ground operations, just air superiority will not be enough.
Larry Bernstein:
I end each podcast on a note of optimism. What are you optimistic about as it relates to this war?
Eran Ortal:
Whether we throw out this regime or not, we have moved forward by taking out its capabilities. In a broader point of view for the Americans, this war has tried out and made a learning experience to strengthen standing up to Mr. Putin in Europe or the Chinese Communist Party in the Pacific.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Eran for joining us.
If you missed the previous podcast, the topic was Evaluating Success on the Iranian Battlefield.
Our speaker was Amir Avivi who is a retired Israeli Brigadier General and the Chairman of the Israel Defense and Security Forum – ISDF. Amir is the author of a recent book entitled No Retreat: How to Secure Israel for Generations to Come.
Amir detailed Israel’s decision making to achieve surprise with its decapitation of the Iranian leadership. We discussed the implications of a compromised Iranian command and control structure and why Iran is attacking its neutral neighbors.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website
whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, Evaluating Success on the Iranian Battlefield, here.
