Why Would Iran Ever Own Up to the Shoot-down?

The astonishing admission that Iran accidentally shot down the Ukrainian flight reveals many layers and consequences

On Friday, I published a piece about the Ukrainian passenger flight that went down in Iran. In it, I suggested two things:

1. the tragedy was probably due to a combination of shoddy equipment, heightened tensions and a terrible judgement call; and
2. we might never know the truth of the matter.

Then, less than 6 hours later, the Iranian government announced responsibility for the shoot-down.

Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 crashed. All 176 passengers of the Boeing 737–800 died.

This announcement shocked me. And so, this second piece. Here’s what I’d like to stress:

1. it’s astonishing that Iran would take public responsibility for the tragedy,
2. we still don’t know everything that happened and probably never will.

On Wednesday, January 8th, a Boeing 737–800 flight out of Tehran—Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 — crashed. All 176 people on board died. The crash came shortly after Iran had launched a number of missiles at U.S. bases. Those strikes had — in turn — happened shortly after the U.S. assassinated an Iranian general via missile strike.

Let’s not forget that Qasem Soleimani’s assassination was more than just a violation of international law: it is and was a huge deal in Iran.

It immediately became hard to follow all the details of each story, since so much was being said by so many different people. At first there was shock. Then, slowly, different countries reported that there was evidence that a missile from inside Iran had downed the jet. There was even a video of the crash that seemed to show a missile striking the plane.

Iran went from denying any involvement, to saying the jet had been flying toward a sensitive military area when it was shot down, to saying that actually wasn’t the case and it was simply human error — which as of this writing is the current story.

Admitting that the shoot-down was an error is astonishing. But reading in-between the lines reveals what I think is an unbelievable blunder on Iran’s part.

Imagine you’re the head coach of a football team and your team is on its way to ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶S̶u̶p̶e̶r̶ ̶B̶ The Big Game. You have two weeks to prepare when disaster strikes: your star quarterback suffers a neck injury. The injury has a strange side effect: he struggles to turn his head to the left.

Choice of teams entirely incidental and has nothing to do with the metaphor

For the sake of argument, he’s your only quarterback. Since he struggles to turn left, he starts going to the right with every play. Passes, handoffs, all his plays go to the right. With great effort, he can make a play to his left, but it’s always slower, less accurate and riskier.

What do you do?

• Your team has to play in The Big Game.
• He’s your only quarterback.
• You have a huge setback: over 95% of plays are going to the right.
• But, if the other team never figures it out — and especially can’t prepare, you could still win.

So if you’re in charge of this team, your best bet is to tell no one, and practice your right-side plays until they’re incredible. After all, if you announce his injury and its consequences, your opponents will just overwhelm your right side with their defense.

Wouldn’t your communication strategy have to be having interviews where you drop hints about your upcoming strategy while ‘casually’ mentioning a few of your favorite plays from this year, plays when your quarterback — oops — went left? In other words, be intentional with what you say and use it to your advantage.

If your opponents hear this and think you’re gearing up for left-oriented plays, they’ll practice accordingly. Then in The Big Game, you might have bought yourself enough time to win despite the shortcoming.

Obviously that’s a simple and flawed analogy, but it carries a kernel of similarity. Iran and the United States have been openly hostile with one another for decades. No one — no one — doubts that the United States has the clear advantage in military strength, equipment and training. But Iran is large enough, rich enough and well-connected enough that a full-blown war is a terrible idea for everyone.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t keep irritating one another, and testing one another’s boundaries. Sometimes America will fly a plane or drone in a way that flagrantly violates Iran’s airspace. Sometimes Iran shoots down a drone or funds and equips quasi-terrorist militia groups in warzones we’re trying to stabilize. We’re constantly screwing with each other.

Watching how the bad guys react to our planes is a pillar of peacetime operations

The history between Iran and the U.S. is complicated, and the future doesn’t look great. The reasons for that are very complicated, but in extremely simple terms: Iran wants to call the shots in the Middle East, and so does the United States. What each country wants to achieve is in opposition with each other. Historically, when countries have conflicting territorial, political, economic and/or military objectives, they often come to war.

In other words, we keep preparing for The Big Game between us.

Compared to the U.S., Iran doesn’t have the best equipment. It’s serviceable, but it’s outdated. They have a lot of it, but different equipment has different limitations. Some radar/missile combos go very, very high and very, very fast, but they have short range. Some are very accurate, but slow-moving. On top of that, Iran is very, very mountainous — radars have a hard time seeing through mountains, and missiles have an even harder time traveling through them.

But just because we know they have limitations doesn’t always mean we know what they are. To use our earlier example, maybe the quarterback’s trip to the hospital was in the news — but no one knows what it was for, or what got injured. He’s still a great quarterback, and if the opposing team underestimates him, they’ll definitely lose.

So with all that in mind, consider Iran’s announcements following the crash:

1. First, as the U.S. claimed there was evidence of a missile strike, an Iranian government spokesman denied this.
2. Then, different Iranian officials claimed mechanical failures brought the plane down.
3. Eventually, President Hassan Rouhani claimed human error was responsible — via tweet.
4. Then, the Iranian military “blamed human error because of what it called the plane’s sharp, unexpected turn toward a sensitive military base.”
5. Iran’s foreign minister placed some of the blame on “U.S. adventurism.”
6. Finally, a general announced, “The plane was flying in its normal direction without any error and everybody was doing their job correctly.”

There is much to be learned from all of this if we return to our football analogy.

As far as Iran is concerned, The Big Game is yet to come. What happened with Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 was evidence of their quarterback’s limitations after his injury.

What astonished me about Iran accepting responsibility for the shoot-down is that by doing so, they indicated several things:

• Their kill-chain (the process and chain-of-command that must vet and approve targets before shooting at them) must be very weak.
• Their equipment must be faulty enough that they couldn’t accurately identify a passenger plane just miles away from their capital city.
• But most importantly: their air defense units are clearly under the impression that an American warplane could reach their capital city undetected.
• And then on top of all that, they shouted these things out loud.

As I tried to explain in my earlier piece, radar is finicky, complicated and challenging. But it’s usually robust. By that I mean there’s no giant red button that only one person can just push to shoot down a plane. Or at least there shouldn’t be.

Iran is either admitting to total human error or human error compounded by poor equipment. If the first, what does that say about their training and protocol? If the second, they’re completely showing their hand when it comes to what they are and aren’t capable of detecting, and where.

But the assumptions Iran seems to operate under is most important. Iran is huge and Tehran is landlocked. No matter what their equipment told them, if they operated as though it were entirely possible that a blip near their capital was an enemy plane, they must think that it’s entirely possible for that to happen!

Note that Tehran is very far away from the likeliest place for an American plane to come from: the Persian Gulf or Iraq

Iran shooting down a passenger plane is a shocking tragedy, but it’s revealing. They’re clearly on a thin edge, and evidently don’t have faith in their long-range radar defenses. What’s astonishing is Iran all but announced their lack of confidence in their own air defense systems for the world to know.

And then — as if that weren’t enough — they compounded the whole ordeal with confused and competing narratives.

Return to the football team metaphor, and imagine that in the days running up to The Big Game, different people on the team gave different stories. The Offensive Coordinator says there was an injury, but we’re practicing plays to make up for it. The Quarterback says there was an injury, but it definitely didn’t impair him. The Press Office says there was no injury, it was all heat-related.

If you were the rival team, you’d understandably think there was no one in charge! Look at Iran’s response — where was their coordination, planning or leadership? Who authorized so many people to make so many different statements, each of which did so much harm — in different ways — to Iran’s reputation, credibility and military readiness?

Maybe the assassination of Qasem Soleimani shook the country’s military and government structure more than America realized.

And so, in closing, I stand by what I said in my earlier piece: the full truth to this shoot-down will probably never come out. In just a week, multiple stories have come out with different levels of corroboration. Exact details will probably always be classified.

For all we know, there’s something even more complicated than simply human error. Conspiracies always spring up around plane crashes, and I’m sure this one will be no different — maybe Russia wanted a Ukrainian on that plane eliminated and leaned on Iran to use the chaotic moment?

International relations is complicated. Iran’s relationship with the United States is long, ugly and messy. What I hope I’ve shown is that the Boeing 737–800 crash was originally just a tragedy, but it’s since become a bizarre and astonishing strategic blunder for Iran.