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Bombed the Wrong Target We Bombed the Wrong Target March 10, 2026 by Joe Funderburke Leave a Comment Editor’s Note: this article is being republished with the permission of Small Wars Journal as part of a republishing arrangement between IWI and SWJ. The original article was published on 03.02.2026 and is available here. SWJ Logo Tall Abstract Operation Epic Fury, the joint U.S.-Israeli campaign launched on February 28, 2026, has destroyed significant elements of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and decapitated portions of its leadership. What it has not destroyed, and what no air campaign alone can destroy, is Iran’s forty-year strategic investment in a distributed proxy architecture spanning Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Gaza. The nuclear program was always the headline threat; the proxy network is the enduring one. As the Houthis resume attacks on Red Sea shipping and Kataib Hezbollah threatens U.S. bases across Iraq, the morning after Operation Epic Fury reveals a strategic truth that American planners have long resisted: when you remove a state’s conventional deterrent, you do not produce a compliant state, you produce a state with every incentive to fight asymmetrically, indefinitely, and below the threshold of direct confrontation. This article argues that Iran’s proxy network now functions as its primary strategic center of gravity, that the network was specifically designed to survive exactly this kind of decapitation strike, and that the United States must develop a coherent post-kinetic strategy to address it, or risk winning the battle and losing the war.

A core challenge in modern great power competition is effectively responding to the ambiguous, non-military forms of activities characterized as part of the “gray zone”. Russia is actively engaging in these operations in critical areas where the West has its shared interest, such as the Western Balkans. Moscow’s goals in this tense region are to diminish European Union and the U.S. influence, reverse Euro-Atlantic integration, and keep the countries of former Yugoslavia in a constant state of turmoil.

In an era of strategic competition, America’s adversaries are engaged in persistent operations against US interests in a spectrum of low-intensity conflict frequently referred to as the “gray zone”. The legal and bureaucratic limitations for the use of power that have served America well in the past are being effectively exploited by peer and near-peer adversaries. The US should proactively aim to divert, distract, and degrade enemy capabilities through restructuring the US Special Operations Forces’ (SOF) mission set to operate against its adversaries in the gray zone. Counterinsurgency and Foreign Humanitarian Assistance should be removed from SOF’s Core Activities and given to other entities, and Persistent Gray Zone Operations (PGZO) should be added to SOF’s Core Activities. PGZO will seek to deter enemy provocations by lowering the threshold for attribution of subnational actors’ operations to the foreign states whose interests they serve, increasing SOF’s information warfare capability to project US messaging into adversarial countries, and fomenting instability in diverse regions where the US seeks to gain an asymmetric advantage over its adversaries.

Department of Defense Instruction 3000.07 defines Irregular Warfare with ambiguous criteria, including indirect approaches and asymmetric activities, which are also characteristic of conventional warfare. This lack of differentiating criteria complicates planning and approval processes. To provide a clearer distinction, this article proposes adding a complementary criterion, the level of state stewardship (state authority, entitlement, and responsibility), to differentiate state, or conventional, forces from irregular forces such as private militias, criminals, and disenfranchised groups. This model also proposes a model for visualizing and categorizing operations and activities within the spectrum of irregular and conventional warfare. Recognizing the presence of irregular forces in a contest will allow commanders to better apply the specific laws, authorities, and doctrines for supporting or targeting non-state forces.