Iran’s Next Move: How to Counter Tehran’s Multidomain Punishment Campaign

Iran's Next Move: How to Counter Tehran's Multidomain Punishment Campaign

Photo: Stringer/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

This pattern follows earlier Iranian multidomain punishment campaigns that combined ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, drones, and cyberattacks to hold critical infrastructure at risk. In 2012, Iran launched a sophisticated cyber campaign attacking Saudi Aramco. In 2016 and 2018, Tehran continued cyber-enabled economic warfare targeting Saudi Arabia and the UAE with similar malware. Iran supplied proxies like the Houthis with ballistic missiles and drones to carry out similar attacks, including striking energy infrastructure in Jeddah and Jazan Saudi Arabia in 2021.

Iran is not alone in adopting this approach in modern war. Russian doctrine has long called for "strategic operations for the destruction of critically important targets," or SODCIT. This approach seeks to get critical infrastructure, as well as command and control nodes, to cause severe economic and social disruption. The end state is not military defeat as much as popular pressure on political centers to shorten a war to avoid future harm. In early airpower theory, proponents like Giulio Douhet called for bypassing military targets to strike vital centers like critical infrastructure in order to induce psychological collapse.

This focus on counter-value targeting designed to maximize political pressure remained a key concept until the technology enabled more precise, counter-force targeting. In this school of thought, the key was to focus on targeting leadership and command control to achieve strategic paralysis. The air campaigns envisioned by early theorists like Douhet, Trenchard, and Mitchell gave way to John Warden's five ring model, in which critical infrastructure was secondary to targeting command and control. Other advocates prefaced coercion by denial and destroyed the military materials an adversary needed to sustain combat operations.

In modern doctrine, the emphasis is on systematic analysis of adversaries using processes like Target Systems Analysis to determine the mix of preplanned and dynamic targets required to achieve strategic objectives. That is, intelligence can map an adversary system and help select the right points therein to strike and the best combination of strikes (i.e., a campaign) to generate effects that align with operational objectives and strategic end states. In this manner, the approach is consistent with earlier calls for effects-based operations and network-centric warfare.

Iran's Next Move

What the record shows is not random escalation, but a deliberate multidomain punishment campaign. First, the coercion is horizontal. Rather than focusing only on military targets in select countries, the pressure is distributed across neighboring states, maritime chokepoints, and commercially vital nodes. Second, the campaign is hybrid. Strikes, cyber operations, and public threats work together, with rhetoric designed to move shipping, insurance, and market behavior ahead of physical damage. Iran combines its punishment strikes with botnets designed to reinforce psychological pressure. Third, the targets are connected systems rather than isolated sites. Ports, refineries, storage terminals, airports, desalination plants, data centers, telecom nodes, and banks sit in the same kill chain because the real target is flow: fuel, water, cargo, electricity, data, and money. In fact, Iran has reactivated threats to target the U.S. banking sector reminiscent of its 2011-2013 Operation Ababil.

Over the next 30 days, an increasingly desperate Iran will continue attacking critical infrastructure across the Gulf while expanding its campaign in cyberspace, to include computational propaganda and targeted influence campaigns. Tehran needs to buy time to determine if and when it can get additional military support from Russia and China to hold out longer. Iranian leaders do not need a decisive battlefield success to gain leverage. Rather, they need repeated, strategically timed disruption that undermines trust in Gulf energy supplies. In that sense, punishment campaigns are hostage taking by other means. They hold critical infrastructure at risk in order to constrain an adversary's freedom of action, hoping each strike will compel Gulf states and angry domestic voters around the world to pressure politicians to constrain U.S. and Israel military strikes.

This produces an asymmetry of interests. Iran is confident its leaders, who die by the day and are fighting for survival, can hold out longer than politicians in the United States and Israel, who are fighting for a vital interest amid growing diplomatic isolation. Tehran is not concerned about its citizens and popular discontent, meaning that responding to the regime's multidomain punishment campaign with a punishment campaign targeting its energy sector and domestic population reflects misaligned ways and ends. Rather, the best option to end the campaign is to attack the plan.

How the United States Should Respond

The United States must build an international coalition, even if its role is limited, to open the Strait of Hormuz while strengthening the ability of U.S. regional partners to defend against cyber, drone, and missile strikes. The European Union has a track record of dispatching ships to secure sea lines of communication. In the current fight, it could limit a similar mission to defending critical infrastructure in the Gulf states that its citizens rely on for energy more than voters in the United States. That could include not just ships, but defensive cyber teams and ground-based air defenses, including Ukrainian experts. Japan and South Korea have previously supported anti-piracy missions in the Gulf of Aden. This mission could expand to provide air defense to Gulf partners while positioning surface combatants just outside the Strait of Hormuz to free up U.S. ships for convoy escorts in the more dangerous areas. Put simply, the United States can bring in key partners to play a defensive role consistent with their national interests.

The more partners the United States can bring in, the more combat power it can free up to transition to convoy operations and opening the Strait of Hormuz. That is, the United States must pivot from offense to the defense of key terrain to gain an operational advantage. This transition will likely take over 30 days and involve a major military operation that could include seizing small islands just off the coast of Iran. The mission will include large numbers of drones, like the MQ-9 monitoring the Iranian coast, while aircraft like the A-10 cover kill boxes and conduct air interdiction. Their ability to operate will require sustained suppression of enemy defense and combat air patrol to maintain air superiority and neutralize surface-to-air missile systems. These kill boxes will need to be deep enough into Iran to counter any mobile anti-ship cruise missile batteries as well as identify teams moving into position to launch one-way attack drones and unmanned surface vehicles. That requires constant sortie generation and ensuring a tight kill chain able to move from identifying to neutralizing a target within minutes. It also requires airborne intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets like additional E-2Ds to close kill webs.

The next defensive layer will involve attack helicopters establishing a covering force against fast attack craft and fast inshore attack craft, unmanned surface vehicles, and one-way attack drones that make it out of the kill boxes. Underneath this umbrella, unmanned vehicles and specialty systems will conduct mine-counter mine sweeps to free up sea lanes for moving commercial ships.

The last defensive layer will be major surface combatants. These ships will use a mix of electronic warfare, missiles, and close-in weapon systems to protect tankers. Naval planners will need to work out the optimal ratio of surface combatants to tankers to determine the number of convoys run per day, but it is unlikely to be more than one convoy per 72-hour period in the opening stages.

Last, there will need to be robust command and control (C2) and counter command, control, communications, intelligence surveillance, and targeting (C-C5ISR-T) efforts that use information warfare to disrupt Iranian decisionmaking and operational reach. Disrupting Iranian anti-access, area denial efforts in the Strait of Hormuz starts with disorienting its targeting complex through a mix of deception, electronic warfare, and offensive cyber operations that limit its ability to coordinate fires. In addition, there is a need for counter-messaging and both identifying Iranian cyber-enabled propaganda campaigns and disrupting them to limit regime psychological warfare.

By transitioning from offensive strikes against the regime to defending key maritime terrain, the United States gains the advantage. It forces Iran to reveal its remaining asymmetric capabilities to conduct sea denial, presenting drones and aircraft with high-value targets to interdict. Furthermore, it signals to the world that the United States, despite the strategic ambiguity and changing end states of the current campaign, is committed to protecting global energy markets.

Benjamin Jensen is director of the Futures Lab and a senior fellow for the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.