Iran Is Ending the Dream of Remote-Controlled War

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Guest Essay

Iran Is Ending the Dream of Remote-Controlled War

April 5, 2026,

9:00 a.m. ET

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Jon Han

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By

Marc Gustafson

and

Justin Kosslyn

Mr. Gustafson, a former intelligence officer, and Mr. Kosslyn, a former director of product management at Google, work at Eurasia Group.

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In Washington, planning for a war with Iran always started with the same stubborn reality: It would be hard to fight and even harder to win. The country is vast and mountainous. Much of its military infrastructure is buried in caves and bunkers. Any serious plan to neutralize Iran’s nuclear ambitions or topple the regime quickly arrived at the same conclusion — that success required ground forces and would result in American casualties.

Then came machine learning and artificial intelligence, and with them, the seductive idea that America might finally be able to fight a major adversary indefinitely without sending its citizens into the line of fire.

The promise is not mere fantasy. A.I., fused with increasingly precise weapons and blanket surveillance, has transformed what the U.S. military can do from a distance. The accuracy and speed with which American forces can now find and destroy enemies with potentially fewer U.S. and civilian casualties are a major advance in the nuts and bolts of warfare. As Adm. Brad Cooper, the commander of U.S. Central Command who is leading the war with Iran, said on March 11, A.I. tools can turn targeting processes that “used to take hours and sometimes even days into seconds.”

Yet for all the increased speed and accuracy of A.I.-assisted targeting, the war is showing that the physical world still imposes major barriers to victory. The scale and dispersion of Iranian drones are more than A.I. alone can overcome. Short-range missiles, especially on mobile launchers, can survive even in a world of constant blanket surveillance. If planners had dreams of a final victory for remote-controlled warfare, in Iran they have awakened to a harder reality.

The changes technology

has brought to warfare in a single generation are genuinely striking. On one occasion several years before Sept. 11, 2001, for example, the United States used satellite-phone data to target Osama bin Laden at a camp he was expected to visit in eastern Afghanistan, as Lawrence Wright reported in his book “The Looming Tower.” By the time the Tomahawk missiles were fired, however, bin Laden had made new plans; in the end, he never appeared at the site the United States struck. Today, as missiles and drones take off toward Iran, real-time satellite and drone footage of their targets allows them to adjust course and speed based on live inputs.

A.I. is also delivering better battlefield intelligence from a distance than soldiers deployed in the field could have done just a few years ago. Right now, U.S. drones are blanketing Iran, collecting video and images and intercepting signals, transmitting all of them to warships in the Persian Gulf. That data can be cross-referenced with people via their phone numbers, the transcripts of their communications and the places they recently visited. All of this informs strike decisions.

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