Iran Is Teaching Us Something About the American War Machine

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David Wallace-Wells

Opinion

Iran Is Teaching Us Something About the American War Machine

April 15, 2026,

3:03 p.m. ET

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Ibrahim Rayintakath

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By

David Wallace-Wells

Opinion Writer

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“History is littered with great power militaries that looked in the mirror every day and told themselves that they were the best in the world — until they got popped,” the former Pentagon official Michael Horowitz told me. “This is the time where danger lights should be flashing for a great power like the United States, if we take history as a guide.”

As soon as the first day of the war, when Iran retaliated against unprovoked American and Israeli strikes by targeting civilian infrastructure around the Gulf, the battlefield of this conflict looked different. It didn’t take long for Iran to deploy its “Hormuz weapon,” attacking civilian energy infrastructure and attacking commercial oil tankers and mining the strait and taking the world’s fossil-fuel economy hostage.

But just as striking was the simple math of munitions. American and Israeli forces were destroying quite a lot of Iranian targets, both military and

civilian

. But they were doing so with extremely expensive weaponry and depleting fragile stockpiles. Perhaps the Iranians were doing less damage, but they were doing it much more cheaply, with what seemed like a bountiful supply of low-cost drones, missiles and mines.

How long had it taken Americans to realize they’d gotten stuck in quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan? In this war of choice, conducted largely by air, the fearsome U.S. military had gotten trapped in a war of attrition within the very first week.

In some ways, this is asymmetric warfare familiar from three-quarters of an imperial century, and an extension of the improvised explosive device counterinsurgencies of the war on terror. But it also marks what many defense analysts told me was a genuinely new era, brought about by new technology, which has rapidly undermined the military advantage of superpowers and their gold-plated weapons systems.

The obvious lessons are not only about Donald Trump and his impulsive warmongering, about Pete Hegseth and his lethality myopia, or even about the state of the American empire and its

particular military soft spots

. “We’re starting to see the contours of a new age of missile and drone warfare,” Paul Scharre of the Center for a New American Security says. “And one of the things that we’re seeing playing out in Iran is the limits of military force” — at least as conventionally defined. “We can no longer believe that the use of air power is going to be definitive and that the other side will not be able to respond,” says Carnegie Mellon’s Audrey Kurth Cronin. “Whether you’re a superpower doesn’t seem to be nearly as important as whether you’ve got the ability to fire drones or design your own weapons for relatively little money.”

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