Now approaching its second month, the war in Iran is precariously paused by a cease-fire. Though the future is impossible to predict, there will come a time when major hostilities end. It is entirely possible that the United States, in tandem with or in support of Israel, could attempt to replicate an Israeli template against Iran called “mowing the grass” to limit Iran’s ability to threaten the region.
Whether adapting that strategy to Iran could be successful is difficult to say with certainty. But what is clearer is the challenges or limitations the strategy could face.
F-35I Adir serving in Israel’s Air Force. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
Mowing the Grass: The Real Iran Strategy?
The phrase “mowing the grass” is used by some military officials and security analysts to describe Israel’s strategy of limited but periodic military operations against militant groups to degrade their capabilities without necessarily solving the underlying conflict permanently.
The idea behind mowing the grass is that armed groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, bent on the destruction of the Israeli state, can rebuild their weapons capacity, fighter numbers, tunnels, and other support infrastructure over time.
The premise for mowing the grass is that, in the short term, the total elimination of these groups or a negotiated settlement is unlikely, if not impossible.
The strategy aims, through repeated operations, to restore deterrence by killing or capturing the militant group’s leadership, reducing rocket stockpiles, destroying material infrastructure, and buying time.
F-35I Adir Fighter from Israel
Like maintaining a lawn, the strategy trims back the adversary rather than uprooting it completely.
The Lawn in Iran
In the course of coordinated Israeli and American operations in Iran, strikes against nuclear research and development sites, including Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, inflicted intense physical damage to those sites, essentially halting uranium enrichment at those sites.
But intelligence assessments following the strikes indicate that, though severely degraded, some elements of Iran’s nuclear program persist. Underground infrastructure, including centrifuges used in enrichment and enriched uranium stockpiles, survives. Iran’s nuclear ambitions have likely been set back and degraded significantly, but not destroyed entirely.
But the technical know-how of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems can persist beyond strikes.
A cadre of trained personnel and the ability to disperse nuclear material and associated equipment deep underground make permanent disarmament via periodic bombing a tall order, and each round of airstrikes aims at different and potentially even more resilient targets than from a baseline of zero. Future air campaigns could become progressively more difficult.
Regional Differences
Mowing the grass as a strategy of deterrence and containment is perhaps less applicable to state actors than to non-state actors like Hamas or Hezbollah. Iran’s population exceeds 90 million, making it the second-largest in the Middle East.
It already possesses around 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium and continues to exert control over the Strait of Hormuz.
Additionally, Iran does not need to have the military capability, via drone and missile stocks, to decimate Israel; it needs only enough of these weapons to threaten disruption to energy markets and to Israel should it choose to. The strategy was crafted to degrade the capabilities of terrorist organizations, not to conclude a long-simmering war nor address political dynamics.
A Question of Politics
Strikes against Iran add credence to the theory advocated by the IRGC and some of Iran’s political leaders that say only a viable nuclear deterrent can prevent coercion by outsiders.
Hardliners inside the regime can argue, not inaccurately, that if Iran had a nuclear weapon already, Israel’s calculus would be greatly complicated, potentially to the conclusion that strikes are too risky.
The Economic Question
Repeated rounds of conflict around Iran and the Strait of Hormuz subjected global energy markets to repeated shocks and maintained pressure on the Asian and European economies in particular. For Israel and the United States, maintaining the capacity to strike Iran repeatedly is, militarily, achievable.
But political will is, by comparison, fickle. In the face of burgeoning security commitments elsewhere, in Ukraine and the Indo-Pacific, the burden seems unsustainable in the longer term.
Viability
A series of periodic strikes against Iranian political leadership, military capabilities, and particularly those of the IRGC, as well as Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, could complicate Iran’s path toward a viable nuclear weapon as well as that regime’s ability to threaten its neighbors in the region. But periodically mowing the grass would become increasingly difficult as Iran adapts to continuous American and Israeli bombardment.
Periodic military action, though useful to buy time, to enforce red lines, and degrade Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities and nuclear ambitions, is a useful tool — but as a main strategy risks turning into the very type of forever war that was emblematic of American involvement in the Middle East following 9/11.
About the Author: Caleb Larson
Caleb Larson is an American multiformat journalist based in Berlin, Germany. His work covers the intersection of conflict and society, focusing on American foreign policy and European security. He has reported from Germany, Russia, and the United States. Most recently, he covered the war in Ukraine, reporting extensively on the war’s shifting battle lines from Donbas and writing on the war’s civilian and humanitarian toll. Previously, he worked as a Defense Reporter for POLITICO Europe. You can follow his latest work on X.
