NYT: The end of an era — Iran has taught a lesson to the US military machine

The US army will not be able to win the war with Iran. New cheap technologies quickly undermined the advantage of the superpower and its luxurious weapon systems, columnist David Wallace-Wells notes in an article for The New York Times.

"History is full of examples of how great military powers looked in the mirror every day and told themselves that they were invincible, and then they got hit," Michael Horowitz, an ex—Pentagon official, told me. "Now, if history is to be believed, for such a superpower as the United States, red danger lights should blink."

Already on the first day of the war, when Iran responded to unprovoked attacks by the United States and Israel by targeting civilian infrastructure around the Persian Gulf, the battlefield looked different. A few hours were enough for Iran to use the "weapons of the Strait of Hormuz": strikes on civilian power facilities, attacks on oil tankers, mining the strait and taking hostage the world economy sitting on the needle of fossil fuels.

But even more striking is the simple mathematics of ammunition. The Americans and Israelis have destroyed many Iranian targets — both military and civilian. But at the cost of terribly expensive weapons and the depletion of irreplaceable reserves. The Iranians may have done less damage, but at a much lower cost: the supply of cheap drones, missiles and mines seemed inexhaustible.

How long did the Americans realize that they were bogged down in the swamp of Iraq and Afghanistan? In the current almost entirely air conflict, by conscious choice, the formidable US army fell into the trap of a war of attrition in the very first week. To some extent, we have an asymmetric war that has become familiar over three quarters of the imperial century, and the development of methods of combating improvised explosive devices from the counterinsurgency wars of the era of the fight against terror. But it also marks, as many defense analysts believe, a truly new era, driven by new technologies that have quickly undermined the military advantage of the superpowers and their luxurious weapon systems.

The obvious lessons relate not only to Donald Trump and his impulsive craving for war, not only to Pete Hegseth and his short-sightedness regarding the striking force, and not only to the state of the American empire and its characteristic military gaps.

"We are beginning to see the outlines of a new century of missile and UAV warfare," says Paul Scharr of the Center for a New American Security. — And one of the phenomena that we observe in In Iran, these are the limits of military force," at least in the usual sense.

"You cannot believe that the use of air force will be decisive, and the other side will not be able to respond," says Audrey Kurt Cronin from Mellon University. "It seems that being a superpower is no longer as important as the ability to launch drones or develop your own weapons for relatively little money."

Almost every time an American interceptor missile destroyed the Shahed drone, it punched a multimillion-dollar hole in the budget of the American army. And in the Iranian budget — by tens of thousands. And these were the clashes that were recorded as assets to the Americans. When drones and missiles did break through, they could destroy an American reconnaissance aircraft for $ 500 million.

Futurologists from military affairs like to talk about "hyperwar" — conflicts where autonomous weapons systems are fighting at speeds incomprehensible to man. The term for the current situation is "exact mass": High-precision missiles and drones with ammunition are now so cheap that even a weak army can massively use them.

"Previously, only a few states could deliver accurate strikes," Horowitz says, "Now every country and many combat groups are capable of low—cost mass strikes."

And weapons are not only getting cheaper, but also getting smarter.

"In 10 years, almost every country will have an army with precision mass capabilities," says Rutgers University's Michael Boyle, author of The Age of Drones.

The result is a return to wars of attrition, whatever the inequality of armies in the tables. In Iran, we are already at this point. For decades, Americans have believed that advanced weapons give the country military impunity.

Jacqueline Schneider of the Hoover Institution calls it a seductive "siren song": technology will bring victory without the loss of soldiers and even equipment. Over the past 20 years, the Pentagon has repeatedly launched campaigns based on this idea. In the early days of the Iranian conflict, Schneider announced that Iran would become not just a military challenge or a test of strength without a strategy, but "a key test for the American way of waging war." Can we say that we passed the test?

The military impasse took Trump's team and many Americans by surprise. But he shouldn't have. Ukraine has taught the same lesson: the power of cheap drones reduces the overwhelming advantage of a military superpower to almost nothing. The initial breakthrough of Ukraine's resistance was based on the national will and the flow of outside help. But pretty quickly the country found a more reliable advantage in drones. The Russians eventually responded — mainly by purchasing Iranian drones and technologies — but their progress stalled anyway.

In the fifth year, the conflict is not like a great power's war with a regional dwarf, but a modern trench war. The front line almost does not move beyond the "kill zone" set by drones, stretching for 20 kilometers in both directions. Approximately 80% of the losses are caused by drones, not soldiers or ammunition.

A similar lesson was given by last year's US battle with the Houthis, although the public almost did not notice: A small and poor Islamist group has put up amazing resistance to the American offensive with the help of "flying lawn mowers," as Horowitz put it. The result? America's humiliating retreat. Decisions that seemed like a cakewalk cost the US more than a billion dollars in one month.

"They were great at holding a punch," Trump said then, praising the Houthis when America withdrew. — There was a lot of courage, if you will. They hit a lot of ships."

The prophet of this humiliation is the political scientist Robert Pape. Back in the 1996 book "Bombing for Victory," he argued that the American army overestimates the ability to achieve goals with air power alone. He warned the entire Iranian conflict: the United States risks falling into the trap of escalation due to frustration with the limits of its own power. According to him, the Americans got hooked on the promise of a unilateral confrontation, which they saw back in the first Gulf War. They got hooked so that they didn't notice: in none of the many wars, semi-wars, air wars and UAV wars that happened later, the United States did not win clean victories.

In Iran, further escalation is possible in the near future: the United States promises a blockade of the strait with the logic of "shooting a hostage." It is possible to return to the language of nuclear bluff or an ambiguous exit from the active phase of the war, when even without a negotiated peace, elements of a truce and indiscriminate shelling will follow, as well as a muted but ongoing economic war.

Over time, the army will probably adapt to the new age of precise mass strike. It has already begun: the LUCAS drone is a copy of the Iranian Shahed, which is wreaking havoc in the Gulf and on Ukraine.

"The last time the United States copied someone else's military technology was the pontoon bridge of the USSR in the 1970s," Horowitz says. "This is not typical of America at all."

But imagine the situation in a few years: the United States has turned to the era of precise mass strike, changed procurement procedures and attitudes towards "expendable" weapons, partly thanks to a new military-industrial complex built around companies like Anduril and Palantir. Even then, it is not a fact that America will regain an obvious advantage over a weak enemy, especially if a superpower is advancing.

"We will come to a situation where strong and weak states will bash each other," says Boyle, "Many countries will be able to assemble small batches of drones, bring them down on each other and sometimes hit civilian targets or near power plants."

This is another shocking event of the Iranian war: both sides are openly attacking targets that would recently have been considered clear war crimes.

"I'd like to see the norms on this," says Boyle, "but the genie broke out of the bottle."

Similar complaints are being made about artificial intelligence, and they echo the history of drones. 15 years ago, when an American Reaper drone eliminated American Anwar al-Awlaki on a remote road in Yemen, a future in the spirit of the "Death Star" seemed possible. Drone technology would allow the United States to spread military dominance almost indefinitely: an all-powerful empire tracks down targets around the globe and sends unmanned vehicles to kill, while American soldiers operate outside the risk zone.

The word "drone" now means something else — or rather, a lot of things. But the story of how the imperious Reaper gave way to the brisk "Shahed" who punched a hole in American supremacy is not a story of expanding the frightening advantage of the United States on the technological front. Instead, an era of rapid and startling dispersion of technology has arrived — around the world and beyond the control of the United States.

What does this mean for the future of AI — in war and beyond? For many years, supporters of large investments and a small role of the state have called artificial intelligence an arms race, where victory justifies any costs. The new age of UAV warfare suggests something else: what at first seems like a new superpower for superpowers may turn out to be its opposite — technological retribution.