EXPERT Q&A — There are more questions than answers around the reported delivery of a U.S. 15-point plan presented to Iranian officials via a Pakistani interlocutor, with the intention to end the war, including whether the plan has been outright rejected by Iran.
It’s not clear for example, whether Israel is onboard with the proposal, as airstrikes continue, and it is unclear how open Iran would be to any kind of deal after weeks of bombings and days of conflicting messages about whether negotiations are really underway.
Despite U.S. and Israeli air superiority and a significant degradation of Iran’s missile capabilities, Iran still has a number of ways that it is fighting back.
The Cipher Brief spoke with former senior CIA Executive Dave Pitts, who is the co-founder of The Cipher Brief’s Gray Zone Group, about what Iran’s surprising resilience in the face of the U.S. – Israeli led attacks, tells us about what we should expect next.
Pitts: Iran’s staying power and effective asymmetric response despite sustained U.S. and Israeli strikes has surprised analysts and frustrated Western and regional officials. By conventional metrics, Tehran should have crumbled or sued for peace under the sustained pressure of two of the world’s strongest militaries dominating its skies. Instead, decades of gray zone operations – gray warfare – prepared Iran for this moment.
The gray zone is the geopolitical space between peace and war, where nations take action to advance their own national interests, attack and undermine their adversaries, and set the conditions for a future war without triggering an armed response. In other words, operations below the threshold of war calculated to gain a strategic advantage and to limit deterrence and discourage a persuasive response.
Gray warfare and asymmetric warfare function as counterparts along the spectrum of conflict – one below the threshold, the other above. The same tools allowed Iran to transition rapidly from the gray zone to asymmetric warfare against superior conventional forces. How asymmetric warfare exposes the limitations of traditional military power is a topic for separate discussion.
Iran’s preparation was extensive: building surrogate armies, stockpiling concealable stand-off munitions, honing capabilities to disrupt maritime shipping, expanding the IRGC’s ability to coerce and intimidate its neighbors, conducting influence operations against Israel and the U.S., and forging transactional ties with Russia and China. These efforts produced forces and capabilities with depth, dispersion, and autonomy, shrouded in ambiguity and propagandized as undefeatable.
Today, rather than surrender or collapse, Iran is waging a deliberate asymmetric campaign relying on drones and missiles, that has destabilized the region, forced evacuations, closed airspace, and injected volatility into global energy markets. Its objective is not a military victory but cognitive and political effect: to stoke fears of a broader regional war, erode public and political will, and influence decisions that will force an end to the war on terms favorable to Tehran.
Iran’s response is not a new military development. It is the predictable outcome of years spent waging gray warfare against the West. Washington and its allies should see this as the culmination of long-term gray zone strategy, not an aberration, to avoid strategic surprise with other adversaries.
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