“Unconditional surrender” demands occupation. Historical examples required years of military governance, hundreds of billions, and hundreds of thousands of troops. Occupying Iran, four times Iraq’s size, would need the entire US Army. Trump demands capitulation without acknowledging the cost.
Historically, unconditional surrender to the United States has been followed by prolonged US military occupation.
On March 13, The Wall Street Journal reported that President Donald Trump ordered an amphibious group of 5,000 Marines and sailors and several warships to the Middle East, strengthening his declared end state for the war with Iran: unconditional surrender.
The American historical record of unconditional surrenders is generally positive: Ulysses Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia; Douglas MacArthur on the USS Missouri; and Walter Bedell Smith in Reims, France. Yet those surrenders came with high costs of occupation, governance, and finance, and these are missing from discussions of the current war.
Failing to accept the costs of unconditional surrender in the current war risks repeating the mistakes made after the Treaty of Versailles ended World War I, which is generally accepted as the proximate cause of the rise of Hitler’s Germany.
The three American wars required extensive, prolonged occupations. The military occupation of the Reconstruction South under martial law lasted 10 years. In post-World War II Japan, the Allied occupation lasted seven years; in Germany, 10 years.
By contrast, the occupation of post-World War I Germany lasted for 11 years, but was limited to the Rhineland, a mere 6.5 percent of German territory. The Allies ran the Rhineland with a very light hand to keep the occupation’s costs minimal, and they made little attempt to interfere with the Weimar Republic that governed the rest of Germany. The cost of that loose hand was high.
In the US wars, governance in the defeated countries was transformed. The former Confederate States were required to submit to federal authority, abolish slavery, repudiate secession, and allow for black voting rights. It wasn’t until after the occupation that the loathsome Jim Crow laws emerged. In Japan, a complete overhaul of the militaristic imperial system transformed the country into a pacifist, parliamentary democracy guaranteed by a constitution written by the occupation authorities.
In Germany, the totalitarian fascist state was similarly transformed into a bicameral parliamentary system with multiparty rule, federalism, and an independent judiciary. By contrast, in post-WWI Germany, the reign of the kaisers gave way to the feeble Weimar Republic, which lasted only 14 years before Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933.
This confronts the US administration with two unenviable choices. Come to an accommodation of the remains of the Islamic Republic or aim to restore a variant of the pre-1979 monarchy or some other form of non-clerical regime. The former, unique to Iran, would perpetuate the role of a supreme leader committed to spreading the precepts of the Iranian Revolution worldwide. Transforming it to a non-clerical monarchy or republic where the major losers would be the beneficiaries of the present regime, primarily the security forces, could set off a counterinsurgency far greater than Iraq.
Last, the costs of pursuing unconditional surrender on Iran’s part would require massive sums of money, some already spent on fighting the war and far more for the occupation. If past operations are prologue, it would add hundreds of billions of dollars annually to an already huge federal debt or require significant diversion of defense dollars needed to face other adversaries worldwide.
But the greatest cost would be in troop numbers. It is not an exaggeration to suggest it would require the entire US Army to occupy Iran. Japan required well over 400,000 troops, Germany 250,000. For the occupation of Iraq in 2003, General Eric Shinseki testified that “Something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers are probably…a figure that would be required.”
Occupying Iran, a country almost four times the size and more than twice the population of Iraq, with well over 1.5 million security forces, would certainly require a force larger than the current US Army’s roughly 450,000 soldiers. The United States did it on the cheap in Iraq with only 120,000 troops while also dismantling the security forces. The results speak for themselves.
The implications of an unconditional surrender demand are startlingly clear. As the historian TR Fehrenbach once counseled politicians in 1953, “You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life—but if you desire to defend it, protect it and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men in the mud.”
This administration seeks a quick, unconditional capitulation whereby the new Iranian regime forfeits its nuclear program, its ballistic missiles, and its proxies and submits to popular rule. This is an ambitious endgame that, if not narrowed in scope, would require the American people to bear the costs of sinking our nation further into debt, fighting a “forever war,” and planting our boots firmly on the ground.