OPINION | An ecosystem of resilience

In the pristine, climate-controlled lecture halls of Westpoint, the teachings of Carl von Clausewitz are approached with a reverence akin to scripture. Chief among his concepts is the search for the enemy’s Centre of Gravity (CoG), that elusive hub of all power and movement upon which everything depends. Identify it, mass your effects against it, strike it with sufficient violence, and the enemy’s will collapses. Total victory follows. As codified in the United States military’s Joint Publication 3-0 (Doctrine for Joint Operations), this logic seems flawless on a PowerPoint slide: "The essence of operational art lies in being able to mass effects against the enemy's sources of power in order to destroy or neutralise them." It is a clean, corporate, and highly kinetic formula for triumph.

Yet, having spent years watching these neat theoretical models collide with the messy, unpredictable realities of actual conflict zones, one has come to realise a fundamental truth, modern strategic doctrines suffer from a profound, materialist blind spot. We routinely confuse a nation’s administrative apparatus with its existential soul. Nowhere is this operational hubris more apparent than in the West's protracted, multi-decade confrontation with Iran.

The "Godzilla Method" and the Iranian mirage

To understand contemporary Western policy toward Tehran, one must look to what Professor James P. Butler termed the "Godzilla Method." It is a strategy of systematic, layered peeling. The premise is simple, if you cannot immediately locate or crush the ultimate Center of Gravity, you must methodically strip away the adversary’s perceived secondary strengths until the core is exposed and vulnerable.

For years, Washington and Tel Aviv have executed this playbook against Iran with clinical, asymmetric precision through a multi-layered campaign. This began with leadership decapitation, utilising high-profile kinetic strikes to target and eliminate top military commanders, intelligence architects, key nuclear scientists and finally the Supreme Leader of Iran himself. Concurrently, an economic siege was mounted by weaponising the global financial system, imposing a stranglehold of sanctions designed to induce hyperinflation and systemic collapse. This was reinforced by infrastructure deprivation, where covert cyber operations and kinetic attacks repeatedly targeted civilian and military infrastructure to degrade the regime's operational capacity or degrade the will of the people. Finally, relentless information warfare campaigns were launched to provoke international delegitimisation, exploit internal fractures and break the domestic will of the Iranian populace. By every standard metric of Western military modelling, the target should have imploded by now. Any standard, Westphalian state, subjected to this level of sustained, multi-domain pressure would “neutralise”.

Yet, Iran stands.

The decisive victory promised by doctrine remains elusive. The state has adapted, absorbed the shocks, and maintained its strategic posture. This begs a critical inquiry that spreadsheets and satellite imagery cannot answer. What is the intangible element keeping Iran on its feet against a technologically and economically superior adversary?

The ghost in the machine: The civilisational state

To find the answer, modern strategists must put down their target lists and pick up Samuel Huntington. We must confront the reality that we are not merely fighting a government or a regime, we are confronting a civilisational society. A civilisational state is fundamentally different from the synthetic borders drawn in 17th century Europe. It is an entity bound together not merely by administrative bureaucracy, but by millennia of shared memory, deeply ingrained cultural identity, and a collective psychological baseline that views current geopolitical crises through the lens of epochs, not election cycles.

When a society possesses this level of historical depth, its true Centre of Gravity is decentralised. It does not reside in a command bunker, a central bank, or even a Supreme Leader. It lives in the collective resilience of its people. To understand how such states survive prolonged, existential aggression, we must look to history’s great survivors.

The 67-year lessons of the Brahmaputra

Consider the history of my great nation. India remains a vast civilisational matrix that has outlasted countless empires. To understand its resilience at a micro-level, one can look to the region of northeast and the long-forgotten operations of the Mughal Empire.

Beginning with an organised invasion in late 1615 at the Battle of Samdhara under Swargadeo Pratap Singha’s reign, the mighty Mughal war machine, a superpower of its day, attempted to conquer and assimilate the Ahom kingdom. The conflict dragged on for over 67 gruelling years. While the Mughal Empire brought overwhelming numerical superiority to the battlefield, we Assamese responded with an absolute knowledge and weaponisation of our local terrain. The vast financial and logistical networks of the imperial superpower were met with a decentralised, asymmetric societal mobilisation that could not be easily targeted. Even when the Mughals achieved the transient capture of major administrative capitals, they were ultimately subverted by a fluid, unrelenting psychological resistance from the population.

The Mughals frequently won tactical victories, captured forts, and occupied territory. Yet, they could never achieve a "total victory". They were fighting an entire societal ecosystem that refused to be digested. Eventually, the imperial forces exhausted their resources, fractured their morale, and failed. The Assamese civilisation endured because its core power was organic, localised, and culturally unsaturable.

The 14-year crucible of China

A similar phenomenon occurred during Imperial Japan's 14-year campaign to conquer and neutralise China. What began as a localised pretext during the Mukden Incident of September 1931, expanded into the setting up of the puppet state of Manchukuo. For years, Japan engaged in localised skirmishes and territorial encroachment, culminating in the full-scale, total invasion following the Marco Polo Bridge incident in July 1937.

Japan possessed staggering technological, industrial, and military superiority. They subjected Chinese cities to unimaginable violence, decimated its formal military forces, and occupied its economic heartlands. Yet, China did not break. The Japanese military command continually expected a "total victory" that never arrived. They found themselves bogged down in a civilisational quicksand where the sheer strategic depth of Chinese society absorbed every blow. By September 1945, Japan surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. Today, China stands as a global superpower, while the empire that tried to neutralise it was utterly remade.

The phoenix of the Pacific

Even Japan itself provides a profound lesson in civilisational continuity. Following its miscalculated strike on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent total war with the United States, Japan was subjected to a level of destruction rarely seen in human history which culminated in the fire-bombing of cities like Kawasaki, Nagoya, Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama and Kobe. And finally, the atomic levelling of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan’s military was completely dismantled, its infrastructure lay in ashes, and its territory was occupied by a foreign power. Yet, the civilisational core of Japan remained entirely intact. Because its societal fabric, discipline, and cultural identity were deep-rooted, Japan did not dissolve into chaos. Instead, it executed one of the most spectacular peaceful reconstructions in human history, transforming itself into an economic and technological titan within a single generation.

A cautionary note for modern policy architects

The operational takeaway for today's strategic planners is stark. Material asymmetry is an unreliable predictor of victory when war is waged against a civilisational state. When they design campaigns around the "Godzilla Method", they assume that their opponents view survival through a transactional, short-term lens. They believe that if they make the economic pain high enough, or the kinetic strikes precise enough, the adversary will make the "rational" choice to capitulate.

But a civilisational state like ours, operates on a different clock. We view suffering not as a trigger for surrender, but as another chapter in a long history of overcoming foreign tribulations. When they strike our infrastructure or target our leadership, they do not weaken our Centre of Gravity, they solidify it. It transforms a political regime's struggle into a societal fight for existential survival.

As we navigate an increasingly multipolar world, western decision-makers must look beyond the sterile metrics of modern military doctrine. If they continue to ignore the deep, historical forces that animate their adversaries, they will find themselves perpetually trapped in protracted conflicts, wondering why their formulae fail to deliver the victories that they so confidently projected.

Abhijan Das is a strategic consulting and national security expert, and a governing body member of SHARE (Society to Harmonise Aspirations for Responsible Engagement).

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK.