David Wallace-Wells
“History is littered with great power militaries that looked in the mirror every day and told themselves that they were the best in the world — until they got popped,” the former Pentagon official Michael Horowitz told me. “This is the time where danger lights should be flashing for a great power like the United States, if we take history as a guide.”
As soon as the first day of the war, when Iran retaliated against unprovoked American and Israeli strikes by targeting civilian infrastructure around the Gulf, the battlefield of this conflict looked different. It didn’t take long for Iran to deploy its “Hormuz weapon,” attacking civilian energy infrastructure and attacking commercial oil tankers and mining the strait and taking the world’s fossil-fuel economy hostage.
But just as striking was the simple math of munitions. American and Israeli forces were destroying quite a lot of Iranian targets, both military and civilian. But they were doing so with extremely expensive weaponry and depleting fragile stockpiles. Perhaps the Iranians were doing less damage, but they were doing it much more cheaply, with what seemed like a bountiful supply of low-cost drones, missiles and mines.
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