The U.S. Military Was Losing Its Edge. After Iran, Everyone Knows It.

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The U.S. Military Was Losing Its Edge. After Iran, Everyone Knows It.

April 30, 2026,

5:04 a.m. ET

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Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times

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On paper, the war in Iran should not be much of a contest. The United States spends around $1 trillion a year on its military, more than 100 times as much as Iran. That money buys a vastly larger Air Force and Navy, as well as advanced weapons technologies that Iranian generals can only dream about.

In the war’s early days, the mismatch played out as one might expect. American forces destroyed much of the Iranian military. Now, however, the contest looks less one-sided. Iran

has taken control

of the Strait of Hormuz, and its missiles and drones still threaten America’s allies in the region. While President Trump seems eager for a negotiated truce, Iran’s leaders do not. Somehow, the weaker nation is in the stronger negotiating position.

That reality exposes the vulnerabilities in the American way of war. Tactical success has not yielded victory. Mr. Trump’s

recklessness in conducting the war

is one reason. But the problem is bigger than any single commander in chief. The United States has left itself unprepared for modern war.

America has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on ships and planes that are good at defeating competitors’ ships and planes but ineffective against cheaper, mass-produced weapons. The American economy

does not have the industrial capacity

to produce enough of the weapons and equipment it does need. And the country has struggled to fix these problems because of a

sclerotic government

and a

consolidated defense industry

that resists change.

Three months before Mr. Trump attacked Iran, we warned that the United States was at risk of

being overmatched in the wars of the future

. The last two months have shown that alarm was justified. The war in Iran, unwise as it is, should serve as a warning about the rising threats to American security and an incentive to fix them.

“Never in recorded history

has a nation’s military been so quickly and effectively neutralized,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth claimed on March 26. The next day, Iran l

aunched a drone

and missile attack on an American base in Saudi Arabia that wounded more than a dozen service members,

destroyed a radar surveillance plane

and damaged at least two refueling tankers.

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