Welcome to Trump’s America, The i Paper’s World Insight series presenting the sharpest, deepest thinking on an era-defining shift in history and politics, investigating how Donald Trump and his administration have changed the US and the world – and where we go from here.
• America can’t afford to retire
• The White House I worked for would have condemned this image. Trump refuses
• Trump isn’t damaging America. He’s reinventing it
• The US is becoming impossible to live in
• The Golden State is being left to burn – because it voted Democrat
• I’m a White House reporter – this is what swing state voters think about Trump
• The rise of ‘Mar-a-Lago face’ – and what it says about sexism in America
With every day that President Donald Trump prolongs his war on Iran, his country becomes weaker, in at least three ways.
The first is the jarring fact that the United States, by most measures the most powerful nation on Earth, is losing a contest of asymmetrical warfare to a third-rate military power.
Second is the shocking number of high-tech weapons that it’s depleted in this war – more than half of its pre-war inventory of what Pentagon planners call “key munitions”. This leaves gaps, which will take three or four years to fill, in America’s ability to fight future wars that might truly threaten its security interests.
Finally, there is the geopolitical effect of those first two disasters. Military and intelligence officials worldwide are watching this war and adapting their strategies so they might better face down the West’s great superpower in a crisis and possibly, if it escalates to conflict, win a war.
Shorts
China, Russia, and North Korea have closely observed America’s wars over the past few decades and come away impressed, even daunted. Beginning with the first Gulf War in 1991 and accelerating with those in Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, as well as skirmishes in Panama, Syria, and various battlefields in the “War on Terror”, they’ve seen what the US military can do.
America had integrated its formerly disconnected branches into a seamless force; developed and then mastered the use of precision-guided munitions (“smart bombs”); woven the new technology into real-time intelligence networks and computerised command-control systems; and, more recently (though still at an early stage), fused all of these innovations with artificial intelligence.
Now, US rivals see the downside of that reliance on high tech. American commanders are so seized on lethal firepower as the measure of military might that they fired off more than half of their stockpile of cruise missiles – each costing between $1.6m and $3.6m – at as many targets as they can find, as if at some point, in Trump’s words, the Iranians would scream that they’d had enough and surrender. They are oblivious to the fact that Iran is fighting a different sort of war and has enough missiles and other weapons to win it – or at least, avoid losing, which amounts to the same thing.
US commanders have also found themselves firing $4m (£3m) Patriot air-defence missiles to shoot down $30,000 (£22,200) Iranian drones – a cost ratio that cannot be sustained. Even so, some of those drones have done considerable damage to energy facilities of US allies and even to US military bases in the Middle East.
This new twist – technology that can be built in great quantities for little money – has turned what was once the source of the US military’s edge into its gravest vulnerability. Ironically, the US invented the first armed drones back in October 2001, but its higher-ups didn’t take the new weapon seriously and assumed lesser powers would take decades to duplicate the feat.
This drone-dominant era plays to China’s strengths. About 20 years ago, Beijing’s military scientists started adapting to America’s technical innovations. They developed anti-satellite (Asat) weapons, which could disable the GPS satellites that guide smart bombs to their targets with pinpoint accuracy. They built “swarms” of cheap anti-ship missiles (and, later, drones) that, in a war, could disable aircraft carriers steaming into the South China Sea or the Taiwan Strait.
The war in Iran tells Chinese strategists that they’ve been on the right track. Asats can turn America’s smart bombs into dumb bombs. And launching swarms of cheap missiles will compel US commanders to empty their already-depleted arsenals of defensive missiles – leaving the fleet wide open to attack.
As for Russia, the idea of a Moscow-ordered assault against Nato seems remote. Vladimir Putin’s army can’t make much headway against Ukraine, much less pose a threat to nations farther west. But this is no longer a meaningful standard. By any measure, Ukraine is now the strongest army in all Europe. The front line in the Russia-Ukraine war is a massive “kill zone” in which no tank or soldier – Russian or Ukrainian – can advance without getting spotted and clobbered by a drone loitering overhead. But imagine Russia fighting a country that hasn’t built a million drones. Russian drones could pin the defenders in place, and then Russia’s tanks and infantry could mount an assault with little resistance.
None of this is to say that Russia, China or any other country is about to declare war on the United States or its allies – or that it would win if it did. For one thing, the fact that the US has fought so many wars in the past few decades is, itself, an advantage. Its soldiers, pilots, sailors, logistics units, intelligence adjuncts, etc – all personnel in a volunteer military – have amassed experience and expertise. This can’t be said of Chinese troops, none of whom have ever fired a shot in real battle. (China last fought a war in 1979 – a 27-day campaign against Vietnam – and didn’t do well.) Nor can it be said of the Russians, whose soldiers are mainly desperate draftees whose officers are discouraged from taking initiative, and whose supply lines can’t be held for more than a few miles.
Still, anyone looking at America’s performance in Iran these past six months sees a gold-plated military establishment unleashing firepower with stunning speed and accuracy but sluggish at adapting new technology or adjusting to an adversary’s innovations – thus ignoring the axiom that “the enemy gets a vote” in how to fight a war, even a war that you start.
Less than halfway into his second term, Trump has turned the United States into a country that its allies don’t respect and its enemies needn’t fear.
Fred Kaplan is Slate’s War Stories columnist, a former Boston Globe reporter (where he won a Pulitzer Prize) and the author of seven books, including The Wizards of Armageddon, The Bomb, The Insurgents (a Pulitzer finalist), Dark Territory, and, most recently, A Capital Calamity (a satirical novel)