As American aircraft once again flew combat missions over the Middle East, a generation of veterans who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan watched with a complex mix of expertise, anxiety, and deja vu. These men and women — roughly 3.5 million Americans who served in post-9/11 conflicts — bring hard-won tactical knowledge and deep institutional memory to the Iran campaign, but also profound questions about whether the nation has learned from its previous wars.
The Experience Advantage
The US military conducting Epic Fury is fundamentally shaped by two decades of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. Senior leaders across every branch carry scars — physical and psychological — from those campaigns. This experience manifests in concrete operational advantages:
- Iranian proxy expertise: Veterans who fought Shia militias in Iraq from 2004-2011 have direct experience with Iranian weapons, tactics, and organizational methods. They tracked Iranian EFPs (explosively formed penetrators) to IRGC Quds Force supply chains, fought Kata'ib Hezbollah and Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq, and understand Iranian proxy warfare from the receiving end.
- Precision targeting culture: The painful lessons of civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan instilled a targeting discipline that pervades Epic Fury's operations. Collateral damage estimates, legal reviews, and proportionality assessments reflect institutional learning from past mistakes.
- Combined arms integration: Veterans of complex operations in Fallujah, Helmand, and Mosul bring an intuitive understanding of how air, ground, naval, and special operations forces work together — or fail to.
The Skeptic's Perspective
Not all veteran voices support the campaign. A significant portion of the Iraq and Afghanistan veteran community has expressed deep skepticism about another Middle East military operation. Their concerns echo the hard lessons of the past two decades:
"We heard the same certainty about WMDs in Iraq. We were told Afghanistan would be quick. Every military operation starts with a clear objective and ends with mission creep. I support our troops, but I'm not convinced anyone in Washington has thought through what happens after the bombs stop falling."
Veterans' organizations report a range of perspectives, but several themes recur:
- Exit strategy: What are the conditions for ending operations? The absence of ground forces does not guarantee a quick conclusion — the air campaign against ISIS lasted years.
- Mission creep: Operations that begin as "limited strikes" have a historical tendency to expand. Afghanistan started as a punitive expedition and lasted 20 years.
- The human cost: Even an air-centric campaign puts thousands of service members in harm's way. Each deployment means families separated, careers disrupted, and the accumulated psychological toll of combat operations.
- Veterans' care: The VA system is still processing claims from Iraq and Afghanistan. Adding another generation of combat veterans strains an already overwhelmed system.
Fourth and Fifth Deployments
For many service members, Epic Fury represents their fourth or fifth combat deployment. A typical senior NCO or field-grade officer in 2025 may have deployed to Iraq in 2005-2006, Afghanistan in 2010-2011, returned to Iraq for the ISIS campaign in 2016-2017, and now serves in the Iran operation. This cumulative operational tempo has consequences:
- Family strain: Multiple deployments correlate with higher divorce rates, child behavioral issues, and family instability
- Mental health: Cumulative exposure to combat stress increases PTSD risk. The VA estimates that 11-20% of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans experience PTSD in a given year
- Retention: Experienced officers and NCOs, exhausted by repeated deployments, face difficult decisions about whether to continue serving or transition to civilian life
Institutional Learning
The military's institutional response to Epic Fury reflects lessons learned from previous campaigns. Mental health support is embedded at the unit level from day one rather than being an afterthought. Deployment rotations are planned with dwell time ratios that attempt to prevent the burnout that plagued the Iraq surge. And the campaign's avoidance of ground combat operations reflects, in part, institutional recognition that the American military and public have limited appetite for another ground war in the Middle East.
The Broader Conversation
Iraq and Afghanistan veterans occupy a unique position in the national conversation about Iran. They are simultaneously the most knowledgeable Americans about Middle East warfare and among the most skeptical about its strategic utility. Their voices carry moral authority that politicians and pundits cannot match — they have paid the price of previous military adventures in blood and years of their lives.
The veteran community's divided response to Epic Fury mirrors the nation's broader ambivalence. Americans generally support preventing a nuclear Iran but worry about the costs and consequences of another open-ended military commitment. That tension — between the genuine threat and the hard-learned costs of addressing it — defines the domestic political landscape of the Iran campaign.
What distinguishes the veteran perspective from that of civilian commentators is experiential authority. Veterans know what it means to receive a deployment order, to leave families behind, to operate in hostile environments where the consequences of policy decisions are measured in blood rather than polling points. Their divided counsel on Epic Fury reflects not confusion but wisdom — the hard-won understanding that military operations are simultaneously necessary and costly, effective and insufficient, a tool of last resort that too often becomes a tool of first resort.