The United States Is Rushing to Bring Cheaper Weapons Online Before Next Conflict

One of the key lessons of the Iran War, whatever your opinion about it, is that the United States has exquisite weapons that can dominate the battlefield and inflict enormous destruction on whatever target we choose to destroy. 

Most or all our weapons performed as advertised, and no sane person could deny that we achieved our military objectives with astonishing speed and extreme effectiveness. 

No sane country would choose to risk the kind of destruction we are capable of. With few exceptions—destroying Iran’s most deeply buried missile cities nothing we decided to destroy was outside our capabilities. 

We can quibble about whether the tactical success of our military operations will eventually lead to strategic victory—and there is a lot of quibbling by people like me—but President Trump is absolutely correct in his boasts that Iran’s conventional military capabilities have been utterly devastated, its best-protected leadership wiped off the map, and the only reason the country still functions is that the United States chose to restrain itself. 

But the war also exposed potential weaknesses in our current military capabilities, and I am not referring to the failure to permanently disable its missile and drone capabilities, as important as that is. Iran is uniquely placed to take advantage of missiles and drones due to its proximity to vital targets, such as oil and desalination plants, and it borders the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of oil supplies transit. Few adversaries enjoy such a strategic, asymmetrical advantage. 

Instead, let’s focus on three particular issues that need and are getting addressed: magazine depth, the cost of exquisite weapons, and defenses against low-cost, high-volume drone attacks. 

The drone issue first came to light in the Red Sea conflict with the Houthis, and was really exposed in the defense of Israel during the 12-day war. In both conflicts, the United States and our partners were largely and impressively successful in shooting down missiles and drones, with interception rates of about 95%. While that rate is impressive, it needs improvement, and it cost an enormous amount of resources to achieve. 

We were shooting down $60,000 drones (or less) with multimillion-dollar missiles, and while we can afford such exchange rates for a while because we are enormously wealthier than Iran or the Houthis, you can’t sustain that over the longer term. Both because there are cheaper and better ways to defend against drones, as Ukraine has shown, and because the missiles we were using take a long time to replace. 

After the experience in the Red Sea and the defense of Israel, the United States rapidly developed some new drone fighting technology such as the APKWS, which repurposed unguided rockets into laser-guided drone killers, vastly reducing the cost of taking down drones and increasing our magazine depth exponentially. 

It was a great start, and there is a lot more tech on the way to create ever-more-layered defenses against drone attacks. Microwave weapons that kill swarms of drones, reusable drone killers that can be recovered if they don’t intercept drones, and of course laser weapons, which show some promise, but may be overrated. 

We can also leverage the technology that Ukraine has developed, rapidly integrating them into our current inventory and tactics. We can criticize the Pentagon for not being fast enough to adopt and deploy this tech prior to Epic Fury (some of it was, of course), not only is that 20-20 hindsight, but also ignores that change in a bureaucracy like the Pentagon almost never happens except under extreme duress. 

Another issue with magazine depth—which just means how many weapons you can use before running out of what you need entirely, or what you need to maintain for contingencies such as a war in the South Pacific region—is the time and expense it takes to replenish your supplies to keep a large enough margin to fight foreseeable wars. 

We certainly have exquisite weapons, but do we have enough? 

Which gets me to the other big initiative that for many has gone almost unnoticed: the next generation of cheap but highly capable weapons that are “good enough” for the jobs but easy to manufacture in quantity, rapidly, and cheap enough to throw at the enemy in significant numbers. 

When you think of things that fit into this category, you likely think of drones. But these weapons are much more capable than drones, but not quite as capable as a LRASM or similarly expensive weapon. 

Weapons like the Tomahawk and LRASM are extremely good at what they do, but are expensive, have long lead times, and expensive. Anduril in particular has focuses on making highly capable, but short of exquisite, weapons that are relatively cheap, easy to manufacture at scale, and deployable in swarms that can defeat enemy defenses. 

Cheap is good, quantity and scalability is even better. 

So far, as far as I know, there is no equivalent missile defense platform on the horizon, but any and all of these weapons could address several of the most significant issues that have worried people about our war in Iran. Magazine depth is the most persistent of those issues, closely followed by inadequate drone defenses. 

If the conflict in the Gulf erupts again, I would be willing to bet that the Pentagon will be able to count on some of these weapons being in its arsenal. At least I hope so, because increasing the mass of strikes above the already impressive levels shown in Epic Fury would be great, and adding depth and layers to our drone defenses could be a game-changer. 

No doubt planners are working hard to come up with new solutions to the missile city problem to slow the rate of fire to something more manageable as well. These guys work well under pressure. 

There is a decent if incalculable change that things get kinetic again in the Gulf, and adding capabilities that can be rapidly deployed at scale will benefit the United States in any future war as well. 

With all the debate about the strategic ambiguity in our conflict in Iran, it’s important to remember that Operation Epic Fury has been an amazing tactical success. And with the lessons learned, the United States will be even more prepared for the next conflict. 

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