--- title: "Is the U.S. Military Losing Its Edge? What the War With Iran Exposed" description: "\"The U.S. military was losing its edge. After Iran, everyone knows it.\" That was the explosive headline of a recent opinion piece published by the New York Times Editorial Board, making precisely the sort of allegation that nobody in the U.S. government wants to hear. The Board argued that because Washington spends around $1 trillion a year on its military — more than 100 times as much as Iran — and fields advanced weapons technologies that Iranian generals can only dream about, the United States should have secured an overwhelming victory in the war.\n\nDuring the first week of the war, the United States seemed on track to do exactly that. America and Israel eliminated much of Iran's senior leadership and a great deal of its military infrastructure. The damage was not confined to the military: the combined forces also wreaked havoc on Iran's economy, targeting fuel storage centers, steel plants, and pharmaceutical facilities alike.\n\nYet Tehran managed to extract its pound of flesh. It attacked American allies, including the United Arab Emirates, in the middle of a ceasefire. It denied the world the use of the Strait of Hormuz and threatened to put tolls on one of the most critical waterways on the planet. Perhaps most importantly, Iran was able to strike multiple American bases across the Middle East. An analysis of satellite imagery by the Washington Post found that since the war began, Iranian airstrikes have damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment in the region — fuel depots, aircraft, and key radar, communications, and air defense gear — far more than Washington had publicly admitted or that had previously been reported.\n\nThat damage, together with the fact that Iran forced the United States into a position where it has to negotiate to achieve its war objectives, has led many — not just the Times Editorial Board — to ask whether America has lost its edge. This article examines the evidence and finds that the deepest threats to American military primacy are not Iranian missiles, but the structural rot in how the United States builds weapons, the asymmetric playbook its adversaries have mastered, and the erosion of the alliances that have always multiplied its power.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n\n- The war with Iran exposed a fundamental mismatch: America's most advanced and expensive systems are arguably better suited to yesterday's battlefield than to today's drone-saturated one.\n- The economics are brutal: a $10,000 to $50,000 Shahed-136 drone is intercepted by a $12.7 million THAAD or $4 million Patriot, meaning Iran can build roughly 80 drones for every Patriot the U.S. fires.\n- Interceptor stockpiles are being consumed faster than they can be replaced; in the first sixteen days of Operation Epic Fury the U.S. fired roughly 40% of its THAAD inventory, and restocking could take one to four years.\n- America's procurement system is broken: the cancelled Constellation-class program burned $3.5 billion to produce zero ships, and the E-3 Sentry AWACS fleet has shrunk from 32 aircraft in 2015 to 16, with Iran destroying one of them.\n- America's soft power is eroding alongside its hard power, as gutted foreign aid, the Greenland crisis, troop withdrawals, and faltering intelligence-sharing push allies to recalibrate around the assumption that U.S. commitments may not be worth the paper they are written on.\n\n## America's Unrivaled — but Aging — Arsenal\n\nThe American military is, without a doubt, the single most powerful on the planet. Much of that dominance comes from spending vast sums on advanced systems — jets, missiles, submarines, and other technologies that let Washington project power across much of the world in seconds.\n\nFifth-generation aircraft like the F-22 Raptor and the F-35 Lightning, or the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, are so advanced that very few countries field anything close to their equal. The nuclear-powered Virginia-class submarines are extremely stealthy, carrying out highly sensitive intelligence missions while equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles. And America boasts one of the most extensive missile arsenals on the planet, ranging from the Tomahawk — a long-range, all-weather, subsonic cruise missile used for precision strikes against high-value targets — to the Dark Eagle, a newly developed long-range hypersonic weapon.\n\nThe point of listing all of this is to underscore just how much advanced firepower the United States has at its disposal. But however impressive these systems are, a growing number of experts believe they are better suited for yesterday's battlefield than today's.\n\n## The Drone Revolution and the Ukraine Laboratory\n\nToday's battlefield is the domain of drones — a shift that began with Russia's war against Ukraine. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, most observers expected Ukraine's air defenses to collapse within days. Russia fielded one of the largest air forces on the planet, and the assumption was that it would simply grind down everything in its path.\n\nIt didn't happen. Ukrainian defenders inflicted such severe losses on Russian aircraft in the opening weeks that Moscow pulled its air fleet back from the front lines, relying instead on guided missiles launched from tens of kilometers away. Ukraine, for its part, could never realistically achieve aerial dominance over Russia. It had a small fleet of older jets, faced a shortage of qualified pilots that hobbled its modernization efforts, and ran critically short of artillery shells early in the war. An alternative was desperately needed.\n\nSo both sides turned to drones, with devastating consequences. Tsiporah Fried, a fellow at the Hudson Institute, estimated that drones are responsible for up to 75% of combat losses on both sides of the conflict. Western officials, speaking privately with WarFronts, put the figure even higher — between 87 and 95%.\n\n## How Iran Turned Lessons Into a Doctrine\n\nIran was watching all of this carefully. Tehran began developing its own drone industries in the 1980s as part of a broader plan to revive local military manufacturing and to hold its place in the regional hierarchy of power. By mid-2022, Iran was supplying drones to Moscow, along with trainers to teach the Russians how to use them correctly. That arrangement gave Iran something invaluable: real-time battlefield feedback on how its drones performed against actual air defense systems, how defenders adapted, and what modifications were needed.\n\nAs several Ukrainian soldiers told PBS, Russia's Iran-designed drones kept evolving. New models saw their warheads double in size and gained jet engines, pushing top speeds close to 500 kilometers per hour. Iran then applied those lessons in its war against Washington and Jerusalem.\n\nWhat makes drones so difficult to counter is the combination of their cost, their scalability, and how they are used. The Shahed-136, one of the main drones in Iran's arsenal, costs between $10,000 and $50,000 per unit, with an estimated range of up to 2,500 kilometers and a payload of about 50 kilograms. At that price point they can be stockpiled in the tens of thousands, and because they are often launched in massive swarms alongside ballistic missiles, they can quickly overwhelm any adversary — especially one that has invested billions in systems optimized for conventional missile threats.\n\n## The Economics of Asymmetry\n\nAmerica and Israel have built layered air defenses designed to detect and intercept incoming projectiles. These include Israel's Iron Dome, David's Sling, and the Arrow systems, alongside U.S. counterparts like Aegis, Patriot, and THAAD. Each has its own strengths, and deployed together they form one of the most powerful barriers on the planet. They are great at intercepting missiles — but, as Michael Armstrong, an associate professor of operations research at Brock University, told the Globe and Mail, they are inefficient at handling drones.\n\nPart of that inefficiency is the cost imbalance. A single Shahed-136 can cost as little as $10,000. The interceptors are not cheap: a report presented to Congress put the price of each THAAD interceptor at $12.7 million and each Patriot at $4 million per shot. Taking even the high end of the Shahed's cost, $50,000, Iran can build as many as 80 drones for every single Patriot interceptor the United States fires.\n\nAs Armstrong put it: \"A multimillion-dollar interceptor makes economic sense if you're trying to defend against one multimillion-dollar cruise missile or one multimillion-dollar ballistic missile. It doesn't make economic sense when you're trying to defend against 10 or 50 cheap drones.\"\n\nIran did not luck into this imbalance. Unable to match America's conventional weapons, it deliberately pursued systems designed to impose disproportionate costs on Washington should the United States ever choose to attack.\n\n## Proxies, Replication, and the China Problem\n\nDrones are only one part of Iran's asymmetric playbook. Another is its proxy network — Hezbollah in Lebanon, multiple Shia militias in Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza. These proxies have faced their own headwinds since the October 7th attacks, but they remain a formidable force. Since the most recent phase of the war began, Hezbollah has been fighting Israel on the ground in Lebanon, and the Houthis have leveraged their ability to threaten the Bab el-Mandeb strait in the Red Sea as a deterrent against greater attacks on Iran. If the war escalated into a ground invasion — which most observers believe is the only way the United States could fully achieve the regime change it still seems to privately favor — these proxies would open new fronts and force American forces to stretch thin.\n\nWorst of all, Iran is not unique. Any sufficiently motivated adversary with cheap manufacturing and a network of regional partners can replicate this model. Iran is simply one of the few that has already done the work, in advance, to fight this kind of war — but the lessons transfer to any nation that can fund a decent-sized military. Shooting down cheap drones with a limited stock of multimillion-dollar interceptors is unsustainable against a comparatively small adversary like Iran, and it becomes completely unthinkable against a much larger one.\n\nChina is the obvious case. Beijing already has a drone manufacturing industry that dwarfs Iran's, influences a network of regional partners and client states it has spent decades cultivating, and has been collecting battlefield data on U.S. and Israeli weapons systems throughout this war. That data will help China refine its own capabilities for future conflicts over Taiwan and the South China Sea. The war with Iran has, in effect, handed every future adversary a detailed operational manual on how to blunt the most expensive military in the world.\n\n## Empty Magazines: The Stockpile Crisis\n\nIt is not only the battlefield that has made America's military look less competitive — part of the problem comes from within. And the first internal symptom is that the supplies of those critical interceptors are running dangerously low.\n\nAccording to estimates from the Payne Institute, in the first sixteen days of Operation Epic Fury the United States fired 198 THAAD interceptors — roughly 40% of the nation's entire inventory — and 402 Patriots. It was not just interceptors: the U.S. also fired 320 Precision Strike Missiles and ATACMS missiles in that span, nearly half the combined inventory.\n\nThe deeper problem is not just how fast these stockpiles are being consumed, but how slowly they can be replaced. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated it would take the United States anywhere from one to four years to restock seven major munitions to prewar levels. And those prewar interceptor stockpiles had already been deemed insufficient to fight a peer like China.\n\nBefore the war, Lockheed Martin was producing roughly 96 THAAD interceptors a year. The Pentagon has since reached a framework agreement to quadruple that to 400 annually, but as Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, told the Military Times: \"You can't replace those kinds of missiles overnight. It would take years.\" Scaling production means every supplier in the chain must scale too, including makers of solid rocket fuel — already a bottleneck across multiple missile programs, according to Calibre Defense. Analysts have also cited scarcity of critical minerals such as gallium and germanium, which China largely controls, as a further constraint.\n\n## The AWACS Gap and an Eye in the Sky Lost\n\nThe war also shone a spotlight on a shortage of a special class of aircraft: the Airborne Warning and Control System, or AWACS. Washington's primary AWACS aircraft is the E-3 Sentry, a heavily modified Boeing 707 in service since the late 1970s. Its most recognizable feature is the large rotating radar dome above its fuselage, which provides a 360-degree view of the surrounding airspace. That radar has a range of more than 370 kilometers and, combined with an identification-friend-or-foe system, can track enemy and friendly aircraft even when they fly so low that ground-based radar loses them.\n\nAccording to Aircraft Insider, a flying E-3 could detect an incoming Iranian Shahed drone roughly 85 minutes earlier than ground-based radar — the difference between an organized defensive response and a reactive scramble. Beyond surveillance, the aircraft functions as an airborne command center, coordinating operations across an entire theater. Heather Penney, a former F-16 pilot now at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, compared the E-3's role to the master in a game of chess: \"They're the chessmaster, while [fighter pilots] are the bishops.\"\n\nGiven that importance, Iran's destruction of one E-3 in a targeted strike on Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia is a major blow. Andreas Krieg, a senior lecturer at King's College London, told NBC News the attack was part of a broader effort by Tehran to chip away at the network of early-warning systems the United States has built across the region over decades, with every destroyed platform further degrading American monitoring. The fleet has shrunk from 32 aircraft in 2015 to just 16, and in 2024 it managed a mission-capable rate of just 55.68% — meaning fewer than nine aircraft were operationally available on any given day. The nearest replacement, the E-2D Hawkeye, is smaller and offers far less comprehensive coverage. The intended long-term replacement, the Boeing E-7 Wedgetail, has been controversial — Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth cancelled the initial order before Congress intervened, and the Pentagon's newly released budget gave the program no new funding.\n\n## Misplaced Priorities and the Carrier Question\n\nBeyond shortages lies the question of priorities. Consider the USS Gerald R. Ford, America's latest aircraft carrier, which deployed for the first time in 2022 after more than a decade of construction and delays. The ship carries a host of advanced features — new nuclear reactors and electromagnetic catapults for launching aircraft — and according to the New York Times is more efficient than the Nimitz-class carriers it is meant to replace. All of this at the low, low cost of $13 billion per ship.\n\nThe Times argues that while such carriers are excellent if you want to fight a relatively weak country like Venezuela, they are highly vulnerable to new forms of attack. China has built an arsenal of around 600 hypersonic weapons, many of them specialized carrier-killers, while other countries possess quiet diesel-electric submarines capable of sinking American carriers. Washington, for its part, has yet to deploy a single hypersonic missile.\n\nIn multiple wargames, ships like the Ford are routinely destroyed — yet the Navy still plans to build at least nine additional Ford-class carriers in the coming decades. In an exclusive interview with the WarFronts team, Tyler Saltsman, a former Army officer and CEO of EdgeRunner AI, argued that such spending is essential to let the United States overwhelm and dominate adversaries using high-end platforms. Whether that line of thinking holds up, only time will tell.\n\n## A Procurement System That Builds Nothing\n\nThen there is the waste. In 2020 the Navy had a simple plan to build its next fleet of small warships, the Constellation class: take a European design and build it in America. But the Navy kept making changes, and shipbuilders and the supply chain couldn't keep up. By 2025 the Navy had overhauled 85% of the original design, then cancelled the project — having spent $3.5 billion with zero ships constructed. From 2020 to 2025, in other words, the Navy spent $3.5 billion to essentially look at ship designs and build nothing. Only two Constellation-class ships will ever enter service; they are currently under construction, and there is no point in scrapping them now.\n\nThis is not an isolated incident. Over the past 35 years the U.S. Navy has commissioned half a dozen new kinds of ships, and most have run billions over budget and years behind schedule while underperforming against their original specifications. It would be easy to frame this purely as the failure of a wasteful military guaranteed hundreds of billions of dollars each year. But part of the blame lies with the companies contracted to build these weapons.\n\nIn the early 1990s, the United States was home to 51 major defense contractors. Mergers and consolidations have whittled the field to five dominant players: Lockheed Martin, RTX, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing. According to the Times, consolidation has produced contractors highly skilled at navigating government procurement but poorly suited to manufacturing at speed — increasingly the defining requirement of modern conflict. Their business models are built around long-term contracts, small production runs, and premium pricing, which leaves them easily outmaneuvered by nimbler producers in places like Ukraine. The military's culture compounds the problem: senior officers tend to be protective of the tactics and technologies that helped them rise, making change extremely difficult to introduce.\n\nAll of these factors have created the perfect conditions for China to embark on one of the largest peacetime military expansions in history. Beijing now produces more than three warships for every one the United States makes, and operates the world's largest naval force — over 370 warships to America's 296. China's ships aren't as powerful or capable, but China is actually building new ships, and it is only a matter of time before it pulls ahead through sheer numbers.\n\n## The Soft-Power Retreat\n\nJoseph Nye, one of the foremost thinkers in international relations, defined soft power as a nation's ability to get others to do what it wants because it possesses qualities that make others want to copy it, be associated with it, or follow its lead. Hard power, by contrast, is a country's military might — its ability to impose its will through sheer force. America has traditionally been a master of both, wielding fighter jets and foreign aid with equal fluency. That is changing.\n\nIn a recent article in Foreign Policy, Stephen Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard University, wrote that one of the most striking features of the Trump administration's foreign policy is its absolute confidence in America's hard power and its near-total disdain for soft power. The administration gutted USAID, terminating around 86% of its foreign aid programs and cutting roughly $60 billion in funding that had been helping people in about 130 countries. A study published in The Lancet projected that, if the cuts are not reversed, global aid reductions could lead to at least 9.4 million excess deaths by 2030 — 9.4 million people who would otherwise be alive. Beyond the human cost, the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted the cuts have significantly weakened America's influence at the United Nations and stripped Washington of one of its most effective diplomatic tools.\n\nAnd then there is Greenland. Trump first floated buying the island during his first term, when it was dismissed as a flight of fancy. Returning to the White House in 2025, he proved far more serious. Washington has long viewed Greenland as strategically important given its Arctic position and proximity to key shipping and military corridors. Denmark refused to sell, and Trump's response brought Europe to the precipice of conflict. According to European sources, the crisis was so serious that Danish and allied European troops were prepared to die resisting a U.S. invasion, and Europe only got the United States to back down by presenting what amounted to a financial suicide pact designed to tank both the American and the European economies.\n\n## How Allies Are Recalibrating\n\nThe Greenland crisis was not the only rupture. Washington and Brussels clashed over everything from JD Vance's speech to European leaders, to a trade deal some observers called humiliating for Europe, to Europe's decision not to join the war on Iran. The feud culminated in an announcement that Washington would withdraw roughly 5,000 troops from Germany over six to twelve months — and Trump later signaled the cuts would go further, raising the prospect of pulling forces from Italy and Spain as well.\n\nTroop withdrawals are only part of the problem. The Pentagon has told NATO allies across Europe to expect weapons delays as the United States replenishes its own stockpiles, with the U.K., Poland, and Lithuania among those bracing for disruption. Patriot interceptor deliveries are also expected to be affected — a serious problem given that Ukraine was already running short of them before the war began.\n\nOther powers are moving to fill the gap. When the United States froze nearly all foreign aid in January 2025, more than 1,000 emergency food kitchens shut down in Sudan, where war has raged since 2023. Russia quickly sent grain ships to African ports, and China dispatched agricultural delegations to cement partnerships across the continent. According to War on the Rocks, for the first time since World War II the United States surrendered its role as the world's default first responder in hunger crises, allowing Russia and China to replace emergency aid with systems designed to create permanent dependencies.\n\nOn defense, Europe is mostly looking inward. The EU unveiled an $860 billion rearmament plan aiming for 55% of the continent's military purchases to come from European factories by 2030. Germany has already shifted 92% of its planned procurements to non-American suppliers, and Denmark went further, choosing the French-Italian SAMP/T interceptor over the Patriot — with the chair of its Parliamentary Defense Committee saying buying American weapons was a risk Copenhagen couldn't run. Even so, in many areas, like next-generation fighters, there is simply no viable alternative to buying American. That may change a decade from now, but it is an unavoidable reality today.\n\n## When Soft Power Holds Up the Hard Power\n\nStill, the fact that Europe is weighing other options is proof of how much soft power America has lost. And the deeper danger is how much of America's hard power is wrapped up inside its soft power. For decades, countries shared sensitive intelligence with America because aid, diplomacy, and alliance-building created enough trust to make it worthwhile. That arrangement seemed to work for everyone — but there is mounting evidence that allies are beginning to reassess the depth of their cooperation. According to the Atlantic Council, the U.K., Canada, and Colombia may have stopped or adjusted intelligence-sharing on suspected drug-trafficking vessels in the Caribbean over concerns about the legality of U.S. military strikes.\n\nIf more countries decide not to share intelligence with Washington, the United States could find itself going in blind more often than not — a particular problem in regions where its own agencies have not built up networks. America also needs physical access to bases around the world. It maintains over 128 bases across 49 countries, and that entire network exists only because host nations consent to it. A host nation can revoke access or limit the use of a base in a conflict at any time. Every ally that feels coerced or disrespected gains new incentives to shut down or constrain a U.S. presence — and right now Washington is running low on goodwill with the countries that hold the keys.\n\nEven if the United States fixed every military problem — the production bottlenecks, the procurement failures, the waste, and the redesign required to counter drone-capable adversaries like Iran — it would be doing so in a world that has spent several years recalibrating around the assumption that American commitments are not worth the paper they are written on. If that trend is allowed to crystallize, the United States might find itself fighting the next war without the tool that has underpinned so many of its successes: the support of the rest of the world. And that might spell doom for the post-World War II order.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### What sparked the debate over whether the U.S. military is losing its edge?\n\nA New York Times Editorial Board opinion piece argued that, given roughly $1 trillion in annual military spending — more than 100 times Iran's — and a vast technological advantage, the United States should have won decisively. Instead, Iran struck American bases and allies, denied use of the Strait of Hormuz, and forced Washington to negotiate, prompting widespread questions about American military readiness.\n\n### Why are cheap drones such a problem for advanced air defenses?\n\nThe cost imbalance is the core issue. A Shahed-136 drone costs $10,000 to $50,000, while a THAAD interceptor costs $12.7 million and a Patriot $4 million per shot. Iran can build as many as 80 drones for every Patriot the U.S. fires. As one expert noted, a multimillion-dollar interceptor makes sense against a single expensive missile, but not against 10 or 50 cheap drones launched in swarms.\n\n### How badly were U.S. munitions stockpiles depleted?\n\nAccording to the Payne Institute, in the first sixteen days of Operation Epic Fury the U.S. fired 198 THAAD interceptors — about 40% of its inventory — plus 402 Patriots and 320 Precision Strike and ATACMS missiles, nearly half that combined inventory. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated it could take one to four years to restock seven major munitions to prewar levels.\n\n### What happened to the AWACS fleet during the war?\n\nIran destroyed an E-3 Sentry in a strike on Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia — a serious blow because a flying E-3 can detect an incoming Shahed roughly 85 minutes earlier than ground-based radar and acts as an airborne command center. The fleet had already shrunk from 32 aircraft in 2015 to 16, with a 2024 mission-capable rate of just 55.68%, meaning fewer than nine were available on any given day.\n\n### How is America's loss of soft power tied to its military strength?\n\nMuch of America's hard power depends on soft power. Allies have shared intelligence and granted access to over 128 bases in 49 countries because aid, diplomacy, and trust made it worthwhile. As Washington gutted USAID, pursued Greenland, withdrew troops, and warned of weapons delays, allies began recalibrating — adjusting intelligence-sharing and shifting procurement toward European suppliers — raising the risk that the U.S. fights its next war without the world's support.\n\n## Sources\n\n1. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/30/opinion/iran-us-military-challenges.html\n2. https://archive.is/DDCMd\n3. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/12/08/opinion/us-china-taiwan-military.html\n4. https://www.leftvoice.org/with-dwindling-interceptors-and-degraded-radar-israel-and-the-u-s-enter-uncharted-territory/\n5. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12645\n6. https://en.defence-ua.com/weapon_and_tech/did_iran_destroy_two_antpy_radars_for_thaad_system_if_so_its_a_total_fiasco-17713.html\n7. https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/05/middleeast/radar-bases-us-missile-defense-iran-war-intl-invs\n8. https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2026/03/02/chinas-iran-strategy-a-proxy-laboratory-for-war-with-america/\n9. https://www.aircraftinsider.com/e-3g-sentry-awacs-destroyed-in-saudi-arabia-a-major-blow-to-u-s-airborne-early-warning-capability/\n10. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/why-northrop-grummans-e-2-hawkeye-still-matters-hk\n11. https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/30/middleeast/us-air-force-awacs-jet-destroyed-saudi-arabia-intl-hnk-ml\n12. https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/iran-war-attack-us-base-saudi-arabia-sentry-jet-destroyed-strike-rcna265764\n13. https://breakingdefense.com/2026/03/iran-shows-the-enduring-need-and-emerging-crisis-of-the-us-airborne-battle-management-fleet/\n14. https://www.cfr.org/articles/trump-is-pulling-troops-from-germany-the-missiles-are-a-bigger-problem\n\n" url: https://warfronts.pub/article/is-the-us-military-losing-its-edge.md canonical: https://warfronts.pub/article/is-the-us-military-losing-its-edge datePublished: 2026-06-02 dateModified: 2026-06-02 author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://warfronts.pub/author/simon-whistler publisher: Warfronts image: "https://media.warfronts.pub/cdn-cgi/image/width=1600,height=900,fit=cover,quality=80,format=auto/articles/vW359SP9-6A/hero.jpg" type: NewsArticle contentHash: 218b1d7a9089e47f608b532cea56e72f7ac600b4318000cd9c2c38175af7a240 tokens: 7279 summaryUrl: https://warfronts.pub/article/is-the-us-military-losing-its-edge.md.summary.md --- "The U.S. military was losing its edge. After Iran, everyone knows it." That was the explosive headline of a recent opinion piece published by the New York Times Editorial Board, making precisely the sort of allegation that nobody in the U.S. government wants to hear. The Board argued that because Washington spends around $1 trillion a year on its military — more than 100 times as much as Iran — and fields advanced weapons technologies that Iranian generals can only dream about, the United States should have secured an overwhelming victory in the war. During the first week of the war, the United States seemed on track to do exactly that. America and Israel eliminated much of Iran's senior leadership and a great deal of its military infrastructure. The damage was not confined to the military: the combined forces also wreaked havoc on Iran's economy, targeting fuel storage centers, steel plants, and pharmaceutical facilities alike. Yet Tehran managed to extract its pound of flesh. It attacked American allies, including the United Arab Emirates, in the middle of a ceasefire. It denied the world the use of the Strait of Hormuz and threatened to put tolls on one of the most critical waterways on the planet. Perhaps most importantly, Iran was able to strike multiple American bases across the Middle East. An analysis of satellite imagery by the Washington Post found that since the war began, Iranian airstrikes have damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment in the region — fuel depots, aircraft, and key radar, communications, and air defense gear — far more than Washington had publicly admitted or that had previously been reported. That damage, together with the fact that Iran forced the United States into a position where it has to negotiate to achieve its war objectives, has led many — not just the Times Editorial Board — to ask whether America has lost its edge. This article examines the evidence and finds that the deepest threats to American military primacy are not Iranian missiles, but the structural rot in how the United States builds weapons, the asymmetric playbook its adversaries have mastered, and the erosion of the alliances that have always multiplied its power. ## Key Takeaways - The war with Iran exposed a fundamental mismatch: America's most advanced and expensive systems are arguably better suited to yesterday's battlefield than to today's drone-saturated one. - The economics are brutal: a $10,000 to $50,000 Shahed-136 drone is intercepted by a $12.7 million THAAD or $4 million Patriot, meaning Iran can build roughly 80 drones for every Patriot the U.S. fires. - Interceptor stockpiles are being consumed faster than they can be replaced; in the first sixteen days of Operation Epic Fury the U.S. fired roughly 40% of its THAAD inventory, and restocking could take one to four years. - America's procurement system is broken: the cancelled Constellation-class program burned $3.5 billion to produce zero ships, and the E-3 Sentry AWACS fleet has shrunk from 32 aircraft in 2015 to 16, with Iran destroying one of them. - America's soft power is eroding alongside its hard power, as gutted foreign aid, the Greenland crisis, troop withdrawals, and faltering intelligence-sharing push allies to recalibrate around the assumption that U.S. commitments may not be worth the paper they are written on. ## America's Unrivaled — but Aging — Arsenal The American military is, without a doubt, the single most powerful on the planet. Much of that dominance comes from spending vast sums on advanced systems — jets, missiles, submarines, and other technologies that let Washington project power across much of the world in seconds. Fifth-generation aircraft like the F-22 Raptor and the F-35 Lightning, or the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, are so advanced that very few countries field anything close to their equal. The nuclear-powered Virginia-class submarines are extremely stealthy, carrying out highly sensitive intelligence missions while equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles. And America boasts one of the most extensive missile arsenals on the planet, ranging from the Tomahawk — a long-range, all-weather, subsonic cruise missile used for precision strikes against high-value targets — to the Dark Eagle, a newly developed long-range hypersonic weapon. The point of listing all of this is to underscore just how much advanced firepower the United States has at its disposal. But however impressive these systems are, a growing number of experts believe they are better suited for yesterday's battlefield than today's. ## The Drone Revolution and the Ukraine Laboratory Today's battlefield is the domain of drones — a shift that began with Russia's war against Ukraine. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, most observers expected Ukraine's air defenses to collapse within days. Russia fielded one of the largest air forces on the planet, and the assumption was that it would simply grind down everything in its path. It didn't happen. Ukrainian defenders inflicted such severe losses on Russian aircraft in the opening weeks that Moscow pulled its air fleet back from the front lines, relying instead on guided missiles launched from tens of kilometers away. Ukraine, for its part, could never realistically achieve aerial dominance over Russia. It had a small fleet of older jets, faced a shortage of qualified pilots that hobbled its modernization efforts, and ran critically short of artillery shells early in the war. An alternative was desperately needed. So both sides turned to drones, with devastating consequences. Tsiporah Fried, a fellow at the Hudson Institute, estimated that drones are responsible for up to 75% of combat losses on both sides of the conflict. Western officials, speaking privately with WarFronts, put the figure even higher — between 87 and 95%. ## How Iran Turned Lessons Into a Doctrine Iran was watching all of this carefully. Tehran began developing its own drone industries in the 1980s as part of a broader plan to revive local military manufacturing and to hold its place in the regional hierarchy of power. By mid-2022, Iran was supplying drones to Moscow, along with trainers to teach the Russians how to use them correctly. That arrangement gave Iran something invaluable: real-time battlefield feedback on how its drones performed against actual air defense systems, how defenders adapted, and what modifications were needed. As several Ukrainian soldiers told PBS, Russia's Iran-designed drones kept evolving. New models saw their warheads double in size and gained jet engines, pushing top speeds close to 500 kilometers per hour. Iran then applied those lessons in its war against Washington and Jerusalem. What makes drones so difficult to counter is the combination of their cost, their scalability, and how they are used. The Shahed-136, one of the main drones in Iran's arsenal, costs between $10,000 and $50,000 per unit, with an estimated range of up to 2,500 kilometers and a payload of about 50 kilograms. At that price point they can be stockpiled in the tens of thousands, and because they are often launched in massive swarms alongside ballistic missiles, they can quickly overwhelm any adversary — especially one that has invested billions in systems optimized for conventional missile threats. ## The Economics of Asymmetry America and Israel have built layered air defenses designed to detect and intercept incoming projectiles. These include Israel's Iron Dome, David's Sling, and the Arrow systems, alongside U.S. counterparts like Aegis, Patriot, and THAAD. Each has its own strengths, and deployed together they form one of the most powerful barriers on the planet. They are great at intercepting missiles — but, as Michael Armstrong, an associate professor of operations research at Brock University, told the Globe and Mail, they are inefficient at handling drones. Part of that inefficiency is the cost imbalance. A single Shahed-136 can cost as little as $10,000. The interceptors are not cheap: a report presented to Congress put the price of each THAAD interceptor at $12.7 million and each Patriot at $4 million per shot. Taking even the high end of the Shahed's cost, $50,000, Iran can build as many as 80 drones for every single Patriot interceptor the United States fires. As Armstrong put it: "A multimillion-dollar interceptor makes economic sense if you're trying to defend against one multimillion-dollar cruise missile or one multimillion-dollar ballistic missile. It doesn't make economic sense when you're trying to defend against 10 or 50 cheap drones." Iran did not luck into this imbalance. Unable to match America's conventional weapons, it deliberately pursued systems designed to impose disproportionate costs on Washington should the United States ever choose to attack. ## Proxies, Replication, and the China Problem Drones are only one part of Iran's asymmetric playbook. Another is its proxy network — Hezbollah in Lebanon, multiple Shia militias in Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza. These proxies have faced their own headwinds since the October 7th attacks, but they remain a formidable force. Since the most recent phase of the war began, Hezbollah has been fighting Israel on the ground in Lebanon, and the Houthis have leveraged their ability to threaten the Bab el-Mandeb strait in the Red Sea as a deterrent against greater attacks on Iran. If the war escalated into a ground invasion — which most observers believe is the only way the United States could fully achieve the regime change it still seems to privately favor — these proxies would open new fronts and force American forces to stretch thin. Worst of all, Iran is not unique. Any sufficiently motivated adversary with cheap manufacturing and a network of regional partners can replicate this model. Iran is simply one of the few that has already done the work, in advance, to fight this kind of war — but the lessons transfer to any nation that can fund a decent-sized military. Shooting down cheap drones with a limited stock of multimillion-dollar interceptors is unsustainable against a comparatively small adversary like Iran, and it becomes completely unthinkable against a much larger one. China is the obvious case. Beijing already has a drone manufacturing industry that dwarfs Iran's, influences a network of regional partners and client states it has spent decades cultivating, and has been collecting battlefield data on U.S. and Israeli weapons systems throughout this war. That data will help China refine its own capabilities for future conflicts over Taiwan and the South China Sea. The war with Iran has, in effect, handed every future adversary a detailed operational manual on how to blunt the most expensive military in the world. ## Empty Magazines: The Stockpile Crisis It is not only the battlefield that has made America's military look less competitive — part of the problem comes from within. And the first internal symptom is that the supplies of those critical interceptors are running dangerously low. According to estimates from the Payne Institute, in the first sixteen days of Operation Epic Fury the United States fired 198 THAAD interceptors — roughly 40% of the nation's entire inventory — and 402 Patriots. It was not just interceptors: the U.S. also fired 320 Precision Strike Missiles and ATACMS missiles in that span, nearly half the combined inventory. The deeper problem is not just how fast these stockpiles are being consumed, but how slowly they can be replaced. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated it would take the United States anywhere from one to four years to restock seven major munitions to prewar levels. And those prewar interceptor stockpiles had already been deemed insufficient to fight a peer like China. Before the war, Lockheed Martin was producing roughly 96 THAAD interceptors a year. The Pentagon has since reached a framework agreement to quadruple that to 400 annually, but as Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, told the Military Times: "You can't replace those kinds of missiles overnight. It would take years." Scaling production means every supplier in the chain must scale too, including makers of solid rocket fuel — already a bottleneck across multiple missile programs, according to Calibre Defense. Analysts have also cited scarcity of critical minerals such as gallium and germanium, which China largely controls, as a further constraint. ## The AWACS Gap and an Eye in the Sky Lost The war also shone a spotlight on a shortage of a special class of aircraft: the Airborne Warning and Control System, or AWACS. Washington's primary AWACS aircraft is the E-3 Sentry, a heavily modified Boeing 707 in service since the late 1970s. Its most recognizable feature is the large rotating radar dome above its fuselage, which provides a 360-degree view of the surrounding airspace. That radar has a range of more than 370 kilometers and, combined with an identification-friend-or-foe system, can track enemy and friendly aircraft even when they fly so low that ground-based radar loses them. According to Aircraft Insider, a flying E-3 could detect an incoming Iranian Shahed drone roughly 85 minutes earlier than ground-based radar — the difference between an organized defensive response and a reactive scramble. Beyond surveillance, the aircraft functions as an airborne command center, coordinating operations across an entire theater. Heather Penney, a former F-16 pilot now at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, compared the E-3's role to the master in a game of chess: "They're the chessmaster, while [fighter pilots] are the bishops." Given that importance, Iran's destruction of one E-3 in a targeted strike on Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia is a major blow. Andreas Krieg, a senior lecturer at King's College London, told NBC News the attack was part of a broader effort by Tehran to chip away at the network of early-warning systems the United States has built across the region over decades, with every destroyed platform further degrading American monitoring. The fleet has shrunk from 32 aircraft in 2015 to just 16, and in 2024 it managed a mission-capable rate of just 55.68% — meaning fewer than nine aircraft were operationally available on any given day. The nearest replacement, the E-2D Hawkeye, is smaller and offers far less comprehensive coverage. The intended long-term replacement, the Boeing E-7 Wedgetail, has been controversial — Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth cancelled the initial order before Congress intervened, and the Pentagon's newly released budget gave the program no new funding. ## Misplaced Priorities and the Carrier Question Beyond shortages lies the question of priorities. Consider the USS Gerald R. Ford, America's latest aircraft carrier, which deployed for the first time in 2022 after more than a decade of construction and delays. The ship carries a host of advanced features — new nuclear reactors and electromagnetic catapults for launching aircraft — and according to the New York Times is more efficient than the Nimitz-class carriers it is meant to replace. All of this at the low, low cost of $13 billion per ship. The Times argues that while such carriers are excellent if you want to fight a relatively weak country like Venezuela, they are highly vulnerable to new forms of attack. China has built an arsenal of around 600 hypersonic weapons, many of them specialized carrier-killers, while other countries possess quiet diesel-electric submarines capable of sinking American carriers. Washington, for its part, has yet to deploy a single hypersonic missile. In multiple wargames, ships like the Ford are routinely destroyed — yet the Navy still plans to build at least nine additional Ford-class carriers in the coming decades. In an exclusive interview with the WarFronts team, Tyler Saltsman, a former Army officer and CEO of EdgeRunner AI, argued that such spending is essential to let the United States overwhelm and dominate adversaries using high-end platforms. Whether that line of thinking holds up, only time will tell. ## A Procurement System That Builds Nothing Then there is the waste. In 2020 the Navy had a simple plan to build its next fleet of small warships, the Constellation class: take a European design and build it in America. But the Navy kept making changes, and shipbuilders and the supply chain couldn't keep up. By 2025 the Navy had overhauled 85% of the original design, then cancelled the project — having spent $3.5 billion with zero ships constructed. From 2020 to 2025, in other words, the Navy spent $3.5 billion to essentially look at ship designs and build nothing. Only two Constellation-class ships will ever enter service; they are currently under construction, and there is no point in scrapping them now. This is not an isolated incident. Over the past 35 years the U.S. Navy has commissioned half a dozen new kinds of ships, and most have run billions over budget and years behind schedule while underperforming against their original specifications. It would be easy to frame this purely as the failure of a wasteful military guaranteed hundreds of billions of dollars each year. But part of the blame lies with the companies contracted to build these weapons. In the early 1990s, the United States was home to 51 major defense contractors. Mergers and consolidations have whittled the field to five dominant players: Lockheed Martin, RTX, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing. According to the Times, consolidation has produced contractors highly skilled at navigating government procurement but poorly suited to manufacturing at speed — increasingly the defining requirement of modern conflict. Their business models are built around long-term contracts, small production runs, and premium pricing, which leaves them easily outmaneuvered by nimbler producers in places like Ukraine. The military's culture compounds the problem: senior officers tend to be protective of the tactics and technologies that helped them rise, making change extremely difficult to introduce. All of these factors have created the perfect conditions for China to embark on one of the largest peacetime military expansions in history. Beijing now produces more than three warships for every one the United States makes, and operates the world's largest naval force — over 370 warships to America's 296. China's ships aren't as powerful or capable, but China is actually building new ships, and it is only a matter of time before it pulls ahead through sheer numbers. ## The Soft-Power Retreat Joseph Nye, one of the foremost thinkers in international relations, defined soft power as a nation's ability to get others to do what it wants because it possesses qualities that make others want to copy it, be associated with it, or follow its lead. Hard power, by contrast, is a country's military might — its ability to impose its will through sheer force. America has traditionally been a master of both, wielding fighter jets and foreign aid with equal fluency. That is changing. In a recent article in Foreign Policy, Stephen Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard University, wrote that one of the most striking features of the Trump administration's foreign policy is its absolute confidence in America's hard power and its near-total disdain for soft power. The administration gutted USAID, terminating around 86% of its foreign aid programs and cutting roughly $60 billion in funding that had been helping people in about 130 countries. A study published in The Lancet projected that, if the cuts are not reversed, global aid reductions could lead to at least 9.4 million excess deaths by 2030 — 9.4 million people who would otherwise be alive. Beyond the human cost, the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted the cuts have significantly weakened America's influence at the United Nations and stripped Washington of one of its most effective diplomatic tools. And then there is Greenland. Trump first floated buying the island during his first term, when it was dismissed as a flight of fancy. Returning to the White House in 2025, he proved far more serious. Washington has long viewed Greenland as strategically important given its Arctic position and proximity to key shipping and military corridors. Denmark refused to sell, and Trump's response brought Europe to the precipice of conflict. According to European sources, the crisis was so serious that Danish and allied European troops were prepared to die resisting a U.S. invasion, and Europe only got the United States to back down by presenting what amounted to a financial suicide pact designed to tank both the American and the European economies. ## How Allies Are Recalibrating The Greenland crisis was not the only rupture. Washington and Brussels clashed over everything from JD Vance's speech to European leaders, to a trade deal some observers called humiliating for Europe, to Europe's decision not to join the war on Iran. The feud culminated in an announcement that Washington would withdraw roughly 5,000 troops from Germany over six to twelve months — and Trump later signaled the cuts would go further, raising the prospect of pulling forces from Italy and Spain as well. Troop withdrawals are only part of the problem. The Pentagon has told NATO allies across Europe to expect weapons delays as the United States replenishes its own stockpiles, with the U.K., Poland, and Lithuania among those bracing for disruption. Patriot interceptor deliveries are also expected to be affected — a serious problem given that Ukraine was already running short of them before the war began. Other powers are moving to fill the gap. When the United States froze nearly all foreign aid in January 2025, more than 1,000 emergency food kitchens shut down in Sudan, where war has raged since 2023. Russia quickly sent grain ships to African ports, and China dispatched agricultural delegations to cement partnerships across the continent. According to War on the Rocks, for the first time since World War II the United States surrendered its role as the world's default first responder in hunger crises, allowing Russia and China to replace emergency aid with systems designed to create permanent dependencies. On defense, Europe is mostly looking inward. The EU unveiled an $860 billion rearmament plan aiming for 55% of the continent's military purchases to come from European factories by 2030. Germany has already shifted 92% of its planned procurements to non-American suppliers, and Denmark went further, choosing the French-Italian SAMP/T interceptor over the Patriot — with the chair of its Parliamentary Defense Committee saying buying American weapons was a risk Copenhagen couldn't run. Even so, in many areas, like next-generation fighters, there is simply no viable alternative to buying American. That may change a decade from now, but it is an unavoidable reality today. ## When Soft Power Holds Up the Hard Power Still, the fact that Europe is weighing other options is proof of how much soft power America has lost. And the deeper danger is how much of America's hard power is wrapped up inside its soft power. For decades, countries shared sensitive intelligence with America because aid, diplomacy, and alliance-building created enough trust to make it worthwhile. That arrangement seemed to work for everyone — but there is mounting evidence that allies are beginning to reassess the depth of their cooperation. According to the Atlantic Council, the U.K., Canada, and Colombia may have stopped or adjusted intelligence-sharing on suspected drug-trafficking vessels in the Caribbean over concerns about the legality of U.S. military strikes. If more countries decide not to share intelligence with Washington, the United States could find itself going in blind more often than not — a particular problem in regions where its own agencies have not built up networks. America also needs physical access to bases around the world. It maintains over 128 bases across 49 countries, and that entire network exists only because host nations consent to it. A host nation can revoke access or limit the use of a base in a conflict at any time. Every ally that feels coerced or disrespected gains new incentives to shut down or constrain a U.S. presence — and right now Washington is running low on goodwill with the countries that hold the keys. Even if the United States fixed every military problem — the production bottlenecks, the procurement failures, the waste, and the redesign required to counter drone-capable adversaries like Iran — it would be doing so in a world that has spent several years recalibrating around the assumption that American commitments are not worth the paper they are written on. If that trend is allowed to crystallize, the United States might find itself fighting the next war without the tool that has underpinned so many of its successes: the support of the rest of the world. And that might spell doom for the post-World War II order. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What sparked the debate over whether the U.S. military is losing its edge? A New York Times Editorial Board opinion piece argued that, given roughly $1 trillion in annual military spending — more than 100 times Iran's — and a vast technological advantage, the United States should have won decisively. Instead, Iran struck American bases and allies, denied use of the Strait of Hormuz, and forced Washington to negotiate, prompting widespread questions about American military readiness. ### Why are cheap drones such a problem for advanced air defenses? The cost imbalance is the core issue. A Shahed-136 drone costs $10,000 to $50,000, while a THAAD interceptor costs $12.7 million and a Patriot $4 million per shot. Iran can build as many as 80 drones for every Patriot the U.S. fires. As one expert noted, a multimillion-dollar interceptor makes sense against a single expensive missile, but not against 10 or 50 cheap drones launched in swarms. ### How badly were U.S. munitions stockpiles depleted? According to the Payne Institute, in the first sixteen days of Operation Epic Fury the U.S. fired 198 THAAD interceptors — about 40% of its inventory — plus 402 Patriots and 320 Precision Strike and ATACMS missiles, nearly half that combined inventory. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated it could take one to four years to restock seven major munitions to prewar levels. ### What happened to the AWACS fleet during the war? Iran destroyed an E-3 Sentry in a strike on Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia — a serious blow because a flying E-3 can detect an incoming Shahed roughly 85 minutes earlier than ground-based radar and acts as an airborne command center. The fleet had already shrunk from 32 aircraft in 2015 to 16, with a 2024 mission-capable rate of just 55.68%, meaning fewer than nine were available on any given day. ### How is America's loss of soft power tied to its military strength? Much of America's hard power depends on soft power. Allies have shared intelligence and granted access to over 128 bases in 49 countries because aid, diplomacy, and trust made it worthwhile. As Washington gutted USAID, pursued Greenland, withdrew troops, and warned of weapons delays, allies began recalibrating — adjusting intelligence-sharing and shifting procurement toward European suppliers — raising the risk that the U.S. fights its next war without the world's support. ## Sources 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/30/opinion/iran-us-military-challenges.html 2. https://archive.is/DDCMd 3. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/12/08/opinion/us-china-taiwan-military.html 4. https://www.leftvoice.org/with-dwindling-interceptors-and-degraded-radar-israel-and-the-u-s-enter-uncharted-territory/ 5. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12645 6. https://en.defence-ua.com/weapon_and_tech/did_iran_destroy_two_antpy_radars_for_thaad_system_if_so_its_a_total_fiasco-17713.html 7. https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/05/middleeast/radar-bases-us-missile-defense-iran-war-intl-invs 8. https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2026/03/02/chinas-iran-strategy-a-proxy-laboratory-for-war-with-america/ 9. https://www.aircraftinsider.com/e-3g-sentry-awacs-destroyed-in-saudi-arabia-a-major-blow-to-u-s-airborne-early-warning-capability/ 10. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/why-northrop-grummans-e-2-hawkeye-still-matters-hk 11. https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/30/middleeast/us-air-force-awacs-jet-destroyed-saudi-arabia-intl-hnk-ml 12. https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/iran-war-attack-us-base-saudi-arabia-sentry-jet-destroyed-strike-rcna265764 13. https://breakingdefense.com/2026/03/iran-shows-the-enduring-need-and-emerging-crisis-of-the-us-airborne-battle-management-fleet/ 14. https://www.cfr.org/articles/trump-is-pulling-troops-from-germany-the-missiles-are-a-bigger-problem <!-- youtube:vW359SP9-6A -->