Probably even worse than you realized

Historian Bret Devereaux (who has been on our must read list for a long time) has posted the best military overview of the war I've seen so far. It's a long piece (around 7,500 words) that takes a deep dive into the strategic and tactical state of the conflict. I'm not even going to try to summarize the essay, but I did want to highlight a couple of passages.

Iran is a large country

It has a population just over 90 million (somewhat more than Germany, about the same as Turkey), and a land area over more than 600,000 square miles (more than four times the size of Germany). Put another way Iran is more than twice as large as Texas, with roughly three times the population. 

More relevantly for us, Iran is 3.5 times larger than Iraq and roughly twice the population. That’s a handy comparison because we know what it took to invade and then hold Iraq: coalition forces peaked at half a million deployed personnel during the invasion. Iran is bigger in every way and so would demand a larger army and thus an absolutely enormous investment of troops, money and fundamentally lives in order to subdue.

...

And you may then ask, here at the end: if I am saying that Iran is being hammered, that they are suffering huge costs, how can I also be suggesting that the United States is on some level losing? 

 

And the answer is simple: it is not possible for two sides to both win a war. But it is absolutely possible for both sides to lose; mutual ruin is an option. Every actor involved in this war – the United States, Iran, arguably Israel, the Gulf states, the rest of the energy-using world – is on net poorer, more vulnerable, more resource-precarious as a result.

For more historical context, I recommend Devereaux's post Strategic Airpower 101.