Countryside Looking toward Iranian Border – Outside Halabja – Kurdistan
Iran’s greatest weakness may have been the static posture it maintained while its external defense in depth was progressively dismantled. However, that comes with a caveat.
Its regional network through Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon had once resembled a modern strategic ribat, extending Iran’s defensive frontier outward and pushing the battlefield away from Iranian territory. When that network weakened, Tehran remained dependent upon fixed facilities, such as established command structures, hardened positions, and long-range retaliation. This allowed its enemies to determine the tempo and sequence of the war.
That does not mean Iran would remain static if foreign troops entered the country. This is where my caveat comes in. Because a ground invasion would likely activate a different form of defense in depth, Iran could fall back through mountains, cities, and tunnels. This, in turn, could help preserve and fortify its internal-security networks, militias, and other irregular or conventional units. The Iranian state appears suppressed under aerial attack for the time being and likely will be for the foreseeable future. The question, and the concern, is whether, if boots were to hit the ground, Iran would shift from a static defense to a mobile defense in depth.
However, the greatest danger to Tehran may not come from American troops advancing directly toward the capital. Rather, it may come from the interaction between external pressure and internal fragmentation. Kurdish forces and other opposition groups could create disturbances along the periphery, forcing the government to divide its forces and attention. However, Iranian command would know better than to venture out en masse to confront a much smaller enemy. The reason for this is that it would expose Iranian forces to U.S. fighters, drones, bombers, and missiles. More consequentially, factions within the Iranian military, bureaucracy, and political establishment could decide that the survival of the present regime no longer coincides with their own survival. In other words, the regime may lose the faith of the very institutions expected to defend it.
Such internal fragmentation could arise by Iran’s own hand or be encouraged through outside assistance. Understand that foreign black-operations personnel may already be operating inside Iran, supported by a much larger clandestine intelligence system working through the country’s institutions, commercial networks, political factions, and administrative structures. Yet the bureaucracy does not end with the institution. Every person encountered represents a bureaucracy of his own. What do I mean by that? Each person has a network of loyalties, ambitions, grievances, fears, obligations, and personal relationships waiting to be understood and, where possible, exploited.
As for the American presence, it is almost phantom-like. It surrounds Iran without presenting a single conventional army for Iran to confront. It appears through air, sea, and cyber, causing sudden destruction against selected targets. Its physical body remains largely outside Iran, while its effects are felt inside the country. It is not merely a phantom, but a deadly phantom: difficult to locate, difficult to engage, and capable of reaching deep into a state that cannot strike it with equal precision.
The strategic purpose of such a presence is not necessarily to conquer Iran from the outside, but to create the conditions under which Iran begins to conquer itself from within. External attacks weaken the connections holding the state together, peripheral factions generate movement, and political uncertainty forces every component of the system to reconsider where its loyalty and survival truly lie. The decisive moment would arrive not when American troops entered Tehran, but when Tehran could no longer be certain which Iranian forces would defend it.
The broader objective is to cripple Iran. The operational apparatus presently employed is largely air, sea, and cyber. A land campaign may eventually follow, but even the possibility of one can serve as a weapon in itself. The threat of American forces entering the country, combined with Kurdish activity and other pressures along the borders, could force Tehran to look in several directions at once while confronting no single conventional invasion force. In other words, Tehran could be forced to defend against deliberately exaggerated or ambiguous armies that might appear.
While Tehran searches for the physical body of the invasion, the United States can continue striking the systems that serve as the regime’s eyes and ears and enable it to defend itself.
Therefore, a land invasion does not have to occur to produce operational effects. Its possibility alone can compel and expose movement, divide attention, and deepen uncertainty. Iran is forced to defend against something that remains largely absent while absorbing punishment from capabilities that are already present. The phantom is not simply the American force itself, but the invasion that Iran must continually anticipate without knowing whether, where, or when it will materialize.
Ever since the start of the U.S.-Iran war, or conflict, however one wants to describe it, the situation has placed a tremendous amount of pressure on China. That pressure comes from several directions: tariffs, technological restrictions, energy insecurity involving oil and other resources, and declining access to certain markets.
Because of that, I have started reconsidering the usual way we discuss the Thucydides Trap, or at least the way it is commonly presented.
Now, in no way, shape, or form am I saying that the Thucydides Trap is wrong. The trap is still the trap. I am simply looking at it from a slightly different direction, which I will explain in a moment.
The danger may not come only from an established power fearing the rise of a challenger. That fear may also come from the challenger itself. China’s fear may not simply be that it cannot keep up with the United States. It may be that its own rise is slowing, which in turn creates the impression that its strategic window is closing. If that happens, then its opportunity to achieve its objectives, whatever those objectives may be, could begin to disappear.
Professor Graham Allison uses the term Thucydides Trap to describe the increased likelihood of war when a rising power, such as China, threatens to displace an established power, such as the United States.
However, I personally see it somewhat in reverse—or, rather, as a reversed Thucydides Trap. Frankly, it is still a Thucydides Trap regardless, but the reversal identifies which side of the power transition feels the greatest urgency.
The classic formula is that a rising power threatens an established power, and the resulting fear makes war more likely. However, both sides can experience different versions of the same trap. The established power fears displacement and may act before the challenger becomes unbeatable. At the same time, the rising power may fear that its rise is stalling or reversing and act before its best opportunity disappears.
Those pressures can operate simultaneously. The United States may fear that China will become too powerful if left unchecked. China, however, may fear that containment, tariffs, energy vulnerability, demographic problems, technological restrictions, and other pressures will prevent it from ever reaching its strategic objectives.
Each side interprets delay differently, but dangerously. Washington may believe that waiting strengthens China. Beijing may believe that waiting weakens China.
This is not really a separate trap moving backward. It is the same competitive mechanism closing from different directions.
Another way of putting it is that the Thucydides Trap in reverse occurs when a rising power, such as China, fears that its rise is stalling, its strategic window is closing, and delay will leave it permanently weaker. Instead of war emerging only because an established power fears being overtaken, conflict may also arise when the challenger fears it may never achieve its objectives or realize its true potential. It therefore believes it must act to defend its position before that position deteriorates any further.
In that sense, the trap is reciprocal: the established power fears the challenger’s continued rise, while the challenger fears that its own rise may be arrested before it can achieve its objectives.
In a nutshell: The United States fears the China of tomorrow. China fears it may never reach tomorrow.
In war, an action can accomplish its immediate purpose while simultaneously altering the surrounding environment in ways that strengthen, weaken, reverse, or transform the original success.
Take counterinsurgency, or COIN, as an example. The United States employed COIN extensively in Iraq and Afghanistan. Its immediate purpose was often to secure territory and protect the population from insurgent activity. In the process, forces gathered intelligence, identified and removed insurgents, and attempted to build relationships with local communities. One operation could accomplish all of these objectives and therefore appear successful.
However, that same operation could also generate resentment, dependency, political distortion, and further resistance. Resentment could arise simply because foreign forces were present, regardless of whether they intended to protect the population. Local groups that allied with those forces could also become dependent on their protection, money, intelligence, or logistical support. Once that happened, they might struggle to operate or maintain their political position without outside assistance.
This dependency could then produce political distortion. Alliances were fragile. A tribe might cooperate with American forces against one enemy while remaining hostile toward another tribe that was also cooperating with them. A local ally could therefore become connected to a network of rivalries and obligations that extended well beyond the immediate operation. The question was no longer simply who supported the counterinsurgency effort, but why they supported it, whom they opposed, and what they expected to gain.
Over time, these relationships could generate further resistance. While American forces might not initially feel the brunt of that resistance, it could eventually turn against them. It might begin as an intertribal conflict, in which support for one group could indirectly alienate another, turning a local rivalry into resistance against the outside force itself. An operation might secure an area, remove insurgents, and protect part of the population while simultaneously remodeling the surrounding environment in ways that create new enemies, strengthen old rivalries, or transform the original success. Successful distortion is risky.
II. So, what is an interpositive?
An interpositive is a positive image printed directly from the original camera negative. In simple terms, the original image is reproduced as a copy. That copy resembles the original, but it is no longer the original itself.
Defining Interpositive Warfare
Warfare comes from human decisions. Humans interpret, implement, manipulate, and respond to everything involved. Technology does not choose its objective; humans determine its purpose and how it will be used. Terrain does not formulate strategy, but it can redirect human action. Institutions are also made up of people making decisions, and those decisions shape what happens next.
Interpositive warfare shares a basic premise with praxeology: war begins with purposeful human action. The difference is that interpositive warfare is concerned not only with the intention behind an action, but with what happens after that action passes through human relationships, political institutions, and the wider environment of war. Along the way, the original intention is filtered and transformed.
Effects Are Recursive
A response not only changes the conditions under which the next action is planned and understood, but may also manipulate them. The process is not merely a linear exchange of action and reaction. Instead, it frequently returns to the past, reinterprets it through the present, and carries that altered understanding into the future.
In a linear model, action produces reaction, and the past provides a fixed baseline. In a recursive model, action and reaction form a continuing loop. The event remains fixed in the past, but its meaning changes as actors reinterpret it. Control therefore produces not only an intended result but also an emergent transformation that shapes what follows.
Success Can Produce Its Own Negation
An action may succeed according to its immediate measurement while producing consequences that weaken the larger objective. A tactical success can create operational difficulties. An operational success can produce strategic failure. Political success can also create future military liabilities.
Effects Can Be Delayed or Indirect
As for effects, they may return through memory, resentment, institutional behavior, doctrine, ideological change, economic dependency or lack thereof, and technological adaptation. While some of these may not appear in the current generation, they may appear in the next. In either case, the original action need not produce an immediate or direct response. It may simply nudge events in a particular direction, leaving later actors to carry the effect forward without recognizing where it began.
Actors Transform and Reposition Relationships
Whether it is soldiers, commanders, civilians, government workers, media organizations, allies, enemies, or institutions, they do not merely react; they interpret, transform, and retransmit effects. Think of it this way: improvise, adapt, and overcome.
Lastly, there are relationships. An action changes not only the actors involved but also the relationships among them. Once again, think of praxeology, the study of human action. Every interaction produces a response, which then produces another. The result is a chain reaction. Watch people moving through a crowded mall, constantly adjusting their paths to avoid colliding with one another. Each person’s movement causes others to reposition themselves.
Warfare operates in much the same manner. Allies may become less dependable. Populations may become hostile. Who needs conspiracies when you have bureaucracies growing defensive? Meanwhile, enemies may adapt in unexpected directions. Every action repositions the relationships surrounding it, changing how the actors respond to one another and what they may do next.
III. The Problem with Existing Models
Multi-Domain and Systems Models
Land, maritime, air, space, cyberspace, physical, informational, and human categories remain useful for organization, planning, and analysis. The problem begins when these analytical categories are treated as independent parts of reality.
Multi-domain models generally show effects moving across or between domains. Interpositive warfare asks how those exchanges transform the actors, relationships, institutions, and boundaries through which later action must pass. The boxes do not merely exchange effects. The boxes themselves, and the people who operate through them, are altered by the exchange.
Think of the Columbian Exchange. It did not simply transfer people, goods, diseases, and ideas between otherwise unchanged worlds; it transformed the worlds involved.
Linear and Geometric Assumptions
A diagram captures the structure of a particular moment, but it cannot represent the transformation that follows. Interpositive warfare focuses on the organized chaos beyond the diagram: one action creates a vacancy, the opening passes through intermediaries, and the entire field rearranges itself—rather like a line of hermit crabs exchanging shells.
Distinctions from Existing Concepts
Interpositive warfare overlaps with many concepts, but it is not identical to any of them. Its purpose is not to replace established military theories, but to identify a particular feature of war. That feature is the study of human action and the institutions through which it operates, both on and off the battlefield.
Second- and Third-Order Effects
Second- and third-order effects describe consequences that extend beyond the immediate result of an action. A tactical decision may produce a cascade of operational, strategic, political, or social consequences that were neither intended nor immediately visible. In other words, blowback.
Interpositive warfare is built for these consequences but places greater emphasis on the process through which they emerge. The issue is not merely that one action causes another effect later. Instead, the action passes through intermediaries that interpret, redirect, delay, strengthen, weaken, or transform it, sometimes making it stronger while causing it to appear weaker. Intermediaries also change in the process. The result is not merely a chain of consequences, but a continuing alteration of the environment through which future history must pass.
Feedback, Complexity, and Friction
Feedback and complexity explain how actions produce responses that alter the conditions of later action. Clausewitzian friction explains how the human element disrupts intention.
Interpositive warfare shares these concerns but focuses on the reproduction of action in altered form. Friction may obstruct an action, and feedback may return information or consequences to the original actor. Interpositive warfare asks what the action becomes after it has passed through the wider field of war. In doing so, it may return in a misinterpreted form or even work against the purpose for which it was originally produced.
Praxeology
Praxeology begins with purposeful human action. Human beings choose objectives, employ means, and interpret circumstances, all in pursuit of a preferred outcome. Warfare likewise begins with human decisions, even when those decisions operate through various institutions.
Interpositive warfare begins with the same premise but extends the action beyond its original intent. Once purposeful action enters war, it passes through other human beings and the institutions they represent. Along the way, it is filtered, bottled, and transformed. Praxeology explains why the action begins; interpositive warfare examines what that action becomes after it enters a conflict, reshapes the surrounding conditions, and influences what happens next.
IV. Historical or Contemporary Illustrations
Counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan
Counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan offers a clear example of self-negating success. In theory, COIN seeks to protect the population, secure territory, and win the confidence of local communities rather than simply destroy the enemy. It also attempts to address the political, economic, and social grievances that sustain insurgent movements, including poverty, corruption, weak infrastructure, and the absence of legitimate government.
COIN also depends heavily on intelligence. The more trust military forces establish with the population, the more information they hope to gather. That information helps identify insurgents, map relationships, and build case-by-case dossiers on individuals and networks. In the long term, the goal is to leave behind a legitimate and self-sustaining host-nation government capable of maintaining security without foreign assistance.
On paper, these are obvious strengths. In practice, however, they also reveal the doctrine’s self-negating character. COIN is extremely resource-intensive. It requires large numbers of personnel, money, and time, as well as repeated deployments. The longer forces remain, the more vulnerable they become to ambushes, IEDs (improvised explosive devices), and other forms of asymmetric attack. What begins as counterinsurgency can gradually expand into nation-building, creating an open-ended mission funded by outside taxpayers and carried out in a political environment that may never have possessed a strong sense of national unity to begin with.
A prolonged focus on COIN can also erode conventional military readiness. A force that spends years preparing for patrols, population security, intelligence collection, and small-unit engagements may become highly experienced in one form of warfare while allowing other capabilities to weaken.
The greatest difficulty, however, lies in human loyalty. Loyalties shift. Local actors may cooperate because the money is right, because one rival poses a greater threat, or because foreign support temporarily strengthens their position. That relationship may change as soon as another tribe, militia, political faction, foreign government, or outside economic interest enters the picture. An ally in one situation may become an obstacle in another. Trust remains conditional, and intelligence gathered through those relationships may be incomplete, manipulated, or directed against local rivals.
Counterinsurgency could therefore succeed tactically while undermining itself strategically. American forces won engagement after engagement, secured territory, removed insurgents, and often built enough trust to gain intelligence and local cooperation. In that immediate sense, COIN worked.
The strategic problem was that the groups involved were not unified in any meaningful way. In many areas, the real political units were tribes, militias, religious factions, local power brokers, and patronage networks. American forces were trying to win their support, but these groups were also competing among themselves for money, influence, protection, and position. The United States became another actor within the same field of rivalries rather than a power standing above it.
Winning the hearts and minds of one tribe did not necessarily strengthen the larger political order. It could weaken another tribe, deepen an existing rivalry, or make one group dependent on American protection. There was no true unifying apparatus capable of turning these separate tactical relationships into a lasting national settlement. COIN could therefore create local success without producing strategic unity.
This leads to COIN’s central weakness: the absence of a clearly defined end state. What does victory look like? How much stability is enough? When does a host-nation government become self-sustaining? At what point does the foreign force leave without undoing the gains it helped create? Without clear answers, tactical and operational success can continue indefinitely while strategic success remains undefined and elusive.
COIN could therefore protect populations, remove insurgents, gather intelligence, and secure territory while simultaneously creating dependency, weakening conventional readiness, distorting local politics, and extending the mission without a measurable end. Its successes were real, but they often altered the environment in ways that made those successes difficult to preserve. In that sense, counterinsurgency became a self-negating success.
V. The Military Mechanics of Interpositive Warfare
Inside the Box of Mirrors
A tactic is never static. It exists inside a box of mirrors, multiplied, distorted, and reinterpreted by every observer. The box represents the operational environment. Its six faces represent six primary sides that refract the tactic: enemy forces, allied partners, command structures, institutional logistics, populations within the domain, and the physical and cultural terrain itself. These six faces are illustrative rather than fixed. Depending on the conflict, there may be many more.
Each reflection differs because perspective warps it. A flanking maneuver may appear to the enemy as a vulnerability, to an ally as resolve, to commanders as data, and to populations as a narrative. When the tactic is executed, adapted, or redirected, every reflection changes with it. There is no isolated action.
The Negative–Interpositive Cycle
The photographic analogy of the negative and interpositive beautifully captures how one effect becomes the source of the next. The original negative is the intent: the plan as conceived. The interpositive is the first-order effect, or how reality develops the image through human action, interpretation, and Clausewitzian friction.
The interpositive then becomes the new negative. The altered reality—enemy adaptations, unintended consequences, alliances, and fractures—becomes the baseline for the next cycle. Each iteration inverts and evolves the tactic. What begins as deception may harden into a predictable pattern if it is not refreshed. What once looked like strength may reveal fragility under a different light.
This is why rigid doctrines fail and why truly effective operators treat every success as a potential trap. The environment has already begun adapting to yesterday’s move.
Adaptation, Deception, and Predictability
In warfare and beyond, this dynamic helps explain several enduring principles. Take the OODA loop developed by U.S. Air Force Colonel John Boyd (observe, orient, decide, act): observe the reflections, orient to their distortions, decide when and how to turn, act, and immediately begin the next loop before the enemy’s reflections stabilize.
Reflexive control deliberately shapes what the mirrors show the adversary so that the adversary’s reflected decisions serve one’s intent. Emergent strategy operates through a similar process. Real plans are not simply executed from the top down; they coevolve with the reflections that conflict produces.
The best commanders do not merely impose a plan. They design systems that learn from inside the box of mirrors faster than their opponents do. Entropy and surprise are useful only for a short time because repeated tactics lose their contrast. The box becomes familiar. New light, such as novelty, deception, and tempo, must be introduced before the reflections flatten into predictability.
Tactical Reproduction
At the tactical level, a single action—an ambush, feint, or drone strike—does not merely succeed or fail. It alters local conditions: enemy morale, alertness, ammunition stocks, small-unit trust, terrain usability, electromagnetic signatures, and civilian perceptions.
The result becomes a new negative. Tomorrow’s patrol operates in the world that today’s action helped create. Even inaction reproduces the same dynamic. Hesitation becomes data that the enemy develops into the next interpositive.
A battle does more than produce a result. It reproduces the actors who must fight the next battle. Enemy soldiers learn. Allied forces form new expectations. Commanders revise their judgments. Populations assign new meanings to what they have witnessed. The tactic survives not as an unchanged event, but as a series of altered interpretations carried forward by everyone involved.
Operational Reproduction
At the operational level, the mirrors multiply. An operation—a campaign phase, major offensive, or sustained air interdiction effort—reshapes force ratios, logistical nodes, command relationships, intelligence advantages, and political will. It changes what future operations can accomplish and what courses of action remain possible.
A successful breakthrough may advance too far without secure flanks, creating a vulnerable salient while also establishing a new base for further action. A deliberate withdrawal may cede ground but preserve forces, restore operational tempo, or strengthen political cohesion.
In either case, the altered battlefield, alliance dynamics, and resource picture become the fresh negative. Future operational art must develop from this plate rather than from the original plan. The operation that follows does not begin where the previous one began. It begins inside the environment that the previous operation helped manufacture.
Strategic Reproduction
Strategy is the highest-order darkroom. It does not merely win battles or campaigns; it redefines the war itself. Every strategic choice—forming alliances, imposing economic sanctions, conducting information campaigns, or changing war aims—reconfigures the enemy’s options, the home front’s endurance, third-party involvement, and even the conflict’s moral and legal framing.
The interpositive of one strategic decision becomes the negative for the next. Expanding war aims after early victories, for example, may make later restraint or de-escalation more difficult. A strategy of attrition, as seen in the Russo-Ukrainian war, may exhaust the enemy while also exhausting one’s own military and society, altering the political terrain upon which any negotiated settlement must eventually rest.
The introduction of new domains, including cyberspace and economic warfare, changes the purpose and character of the conflict. At this level, recursion can become self-referential. Strategy begins to reproduce the nature of the war, which in turn reshapes strategy. Wars begun for limited objectives may metastasize into existential struggles, or existential struggles may eventually contract into limited settlements. The means shape the ends, and the ends reshape the means.
The Recursive Loop
Tactics alter conditions and create the basis for new operations. Operations alter the conditions from which new strategies emerge. Strategies alter the conditions for a different war or for a different peace. Each level is both produced by and productive of the levels above and below it.
This is why linear planning eventually collapses. Effective practitioners treat every outcome as provisional source material rather than final validation and design for adaptability across tactical, operational, and strategic levels.
Victory belongs less to the side with the best initial negative than to the side that masters the repeated development process: the side that sees the reflections clearly, turns at the right moment, and develops cleaner, more useful interpositives faster than its opponent.
VI. Conclusion
War is often planned and analyzed in terms of action and reaction. Objectives are identified, forces are assigned, and operations are conducted. As for success and failure, well, those are measured through the outcome. Yet war does not remain still, nor do its conditions remain stable long enough for this process to unfold exactly as intended. Every reaction changes the actors, their relationships, the institutions they represent, and the conditions through which later action must pass.
Interpositive warfare does not promise control over this process, nor does it offer a formula for predicting every consequence. Human action cannot be predicted with certainty. Its value lies in recognizing that action and environment cannot be separated; that is its strongest suit. The battlefield is not simply the place where war occurs. It is continually reproduced by the people acting within it.
Humans are interpositives: 360-degree transparent images of time and space, drawn inward toward a center that looks back from every direction. Conflict lives in a geometric box of mirrors that never sits still.
