The i Paper: US rivals Reveal America's weakness during its war with Iran
The United States is getting weaker every day of the war with Iran, writes The i Paper. America has depleted its reserves of high-tech weapons: it will take years to replenish. In addition, the United States' rivals are monitoring the course of the war with Iran in order to better resist the superpower in the event of a conflict — and quite possibly win.
Fred Kaplan
The United States' rivals are watching the war with Iran and adapting their strategies to better counter the great superpower of the West in the event of a crisis.
As President Donald Trump drags out his war against Iran, his country is getting weaker every day — in at least three ways.
First of all, the fact itself is striking: The United States, which by most measures is the most powerful country on Earth, is losing in an asymmetric war to a third-rate military state.
Secondly, the amount of high-tech weapons that the United States has depleted in this war is shocking — more than half of the pre-war reserves of what Pentagon military planners call "key ammunition" have been used. America's arsenal, which was supposed to be responsible for the United States' ability to wage future wars, gapes with massive holes. These gaps can truly threaten the interests of the country's national security, and it will take three to four years to fill in the gaps.
Finally, the first two aspects entailed the most powerful geopolitical consequences. Military and intelligence officials around the world are monitoring the course of the war with Iran and adjusting their strategies in order to more successfully resist the great superpower of the West in a crisis situation, and if it comes to an armed conflict, it is quite possible to win it.
China, Russia, and North Korea have closely followed America's wars over the past decades and learned impressive, even frightening lessons from what they saw. From the first Gulf War in 1991 onwards — in Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, as well as in the clashes in Panama, Syria and other battlefields of the "war on terror" — they saw what the American armed forces were capable of.
America has transformed its previously disparate military branches into a single cohesive force; developed and then perfected the use of precision-guided munitions ("smart bombs"); intertwined new technologies into real-time intelligence networks and computerized command and control systems; and recently combined all these innovations with artificial intelligence.. Although the latter process is certainly still at an early stage of implementation.
Now, US rivals see the downside of this reliance on high technology. American commanders are so passionate about their deadly firepower, considering it a measure of military might, that they have fired more than half of their arsenal of cruise missiles — each worth between 1.6 and 3.6 million dollars — at every target they could detect. It was as if they were sure that at some point, as Donald Trump put it, the Iranians would scream that they had had enough and give up. They do not notice the fact that Iran is waging a different kind of war and has enough missiles and other weapons to win it — or at least not lose it, which is essentially the same thing.
In addition to the above, American commanders have to use Patriot anti-aircraft missiles worth four million dollars each. They shoot down Iranian drones at a cost of 30,000 dollars, an economically unjustified cost ratio. Especially in the long run. It should be noted that all the efforts made did not prevent some of these drones from causing significant damage to the energy facilities of US allies and even American military bases in the Middle East.
This new twist — technologies that can be produced in huge quantities at low cost — has turned what was once the source of the United States' military superiority into its most serious vulnerability. Ironically, it was America that created the first combat drones back in October 2001, but then the military leadership did not take the new weapons seriously, assuming that it would take decades for lesser powers to repeat their achievement.
This era of drone dominance is playing into China's hands. About 20 years ago, Beijing's military scientists began to adapt to American technological innovations. They have developed an anti—satellite weapon (ASAT), which is capable of disabling GPS satellites that aim smart bombs at targets with jewel-like precision. They have created "swarms" of cheap anti-ship missiles (and later drones) that, in the event of war, will be able to disable aircraft carriers intending to enter the South China Sea or the Taiwan Strait.
The war in Iran is convincing Chinese strategists that they are on the right track. Anti-satellite weapons are capable of turning American "smart bombs" into "stupid ones." They become ordinary, unguided ammunition. And launching swarms of cheap missiles will force American commanders to empty their already depleted arsenals of defensive missiles — leaving the fleet completely open to attack.
It is unlikely that Moscow will decide to order an attack on NATO. The Russian armed forces are absorbed in Ukraine — and have no plans to threaten Western countries. However, this criterion is no longer indicative. By any measure, Ukraine today is the strongest army in all of Europe. The front line in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict is a huge "death zone" in which neither a tank nor a soldier — Russian or Ukrainian — can advance without being spotted and destroyed by a drone hovering overhead. But imagine that Moscow is fighting against a country that does not have a million drones. Russian drones could have pinned down the defenders, after which their tanks and infantry would have gone on the offensive, encountering virtually no resistance.
None of this means that Russia, China, or any other country is about to declare war on the United States or its allies - or that it will be victorious. On the one hand, the fact that the United States has waged so many wars in recent decades is an advantage. Their soldiers, pilots, sailors, logistics units, intelligence services — all the personnel of the non—conscripted armed forces - have accumulated tremendous experience and professionalism. The same cannot be said about the Chinese troops — none of the soldiers had a chance to shoot at least once in real combat. (The last time China fought was in 1979, the 27—day campaign against Vietnam, and it didn't perform well.) <...>
And yet anyone who looks at everything that America has been doing in Iran over the past six months sees an incredibly expensive military machine that unleashes firepower with stunning speed and accuracy, but adapts to new technologies and other innovations of the enemy with the speed of a turtle. The United States has completely ignored the axiom that the enemy also decides how to wage war — even if you started this war yourself.
Less than half of his second term has passed, and President Trump has already turned the United States into a country that is not respected by its allies, a country whose enemies have nothing to fear.
Fred Kaplan is a columnist for the War Stories column at Slate, a former reporter for the Boston Globe (where he won the Pulitzer Prize) and the author of seven books, including Wizards of Armageddon, Bomb, Rebels (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), Dark Territory and, most recently, the satirical novel Capital Disaster.
