Iran War?

[Legbiter]

What are you basing this on?

The current US performance.

[Jacob]

What are you basing this on?

The current US performance.

A bit of a general statement, but okay 

[Valmy]

It seems clear to me that someone is going to have to seriously evaluate the limits of American military power.

Either the people who say "the US has the most powerful military machine the world has ever seen, we should just use it to get whatever we want" are about to learn it's not as simple as that.

Alternately, those of us think it's "not as simple as that" are going to find out that it actually is.

Right now I expect that the first scenario is much more likely than the second, but we'll see.

I mean...just look at our entire history since the Korean War (which we didn't even win). Anytime any country actually bothers to resist us we lose.

[HVC]

But you claim technical victory, that's something at least


And you beat Granada for realsies right?

[Valmy]

But you claim technical victory, that's something at least


And you beat Granada for realsies right?

Again...countries that actually resisted us. I think the only real example to the contrary is the First Gulf War and we somehow still screwed up the peace.

[Zoupa]

Allies fear Iran war will leave them without US weapons they bought

European and Asian countries worry the Pentagon is burning through munitions so fast that it won't have enough to send the weapons they have purchased.

American allies are watching in disbelief as the Pentagon reroutes weapon shipments to aid the Iran war, angry and scared that arms the U.S. demanded they buy will never reach them.

European nations that have struggled to rebuild arsenals after sending weapons to Ukraine fear they won't be able to ward off a Russian attack. Asian allies, startled by America's rate of fire, question whether it could embolden China and North Korea. And even in the Middle East, countries aren't clear if they will get air defenses from the U.S. for future priorities.

Nearly a dozen officials in allied nations in Asia and Europe say they can't win. The Trump administration has put them under extreme political pressure to raise defense budgets and buy American weapons — from air defense interceptors to guided bombs — only to quickly burn through those munitions in a war of its own.

"It shouldn't be a secret to anyone that the munitions that have been and will be fired are the ones that everybody needs to acquire in large numbers," said one northern European official.

Weapons production is a complex process that takes years of planning and runs through a supply chain riddled with bottlenecks. Trump's reassurances that the U.S. has a "virtually unlimited supply" of munitions to fight Iran has done little to soothe allies' fears.

"It is very frustrating, the words are not matching the deeds," said an Eastern European official, who like others interviewed, was granted anonymity to speak candidly. "It is pretty clear to everyone that the U.S. will put their own, Taiwan's, Israel's, and hemisphere priorities before Europe."

The joint U.S.-Israel war, officials warn, could accelerate the distancing between America and its allies when it comes to defense. The European Union already has approved rules to favor its own arms-makers over American contractors — risking tens, if not hundreds of billions in future U.S. sales. Even major companies, such as the German drone-maker Helsing are touting "European sovereignty." Poland, a longtime American ally, has bought tanks and artillery from South Korea instead of U.S. contractors such as General Dynamics.

It's been a wake-up call for officials in Asia and Europe who once took Pentagon arms sales for granted.

"The Europeans still live in a dream world in which the U.S. is a gigantic Walmart, where you buy the stuff and you get it immediately, and that is simply not true," said Camille Grand, a former top NATO official who now heads the Brussels-based Aerospace, Security and Defence Industries Association of Europe.

Allies in the Pacific — where China has built the world's largest Navy and now has missiles that can attack American troops on Guam — are worried that the Pentagon will run out of ammunition in Iran and won't have any left to deter a war in Asia.

"It's natural that the longer the conflict, the more urgent the supply of munitions and its inevitable for the U.S. to mobilize its foreign assets to maintain the operation," said a Washington-based Asian diplomat, who warned it would affect "readiness" in the region.

The fears of depleted weapons stockpiles extend to the U.S., where some Pentagon officials are warning about the state of the military's munitions stockpiles, according to a congressional aide and two other people familiar with the dynamic.

Defense Department officials warned Congress this week that the U.S. military was expending "an enormous amount" of munitions in the conflict, according to two of the people familiar with the conversations.

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The congressional aide briefed by the Pentagon said the U.S. was using precision strike missiles and cutting-edge interceptors in "scary high" numbers despite the Iranian military's relative weakness. The weapons also include Tomahawk land-attack missiles, Patriot PAC-3 and ship-launched air defenses fired by the Navy.

"The idea of doing a larger campaign with Iran was not on anyone's mathematical bingo card as we were looking at munitions implications," said a former defense official. "I struggle to see a way that layering on the Iran element makes the math problem get any better."

The Pentagon referred questions to the White House.

Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, said Iran's retaliatory ballistic missile attacks had fallen by 90 percent because of U.S. strikes. "President Trump is in close contact with our partners in Europe and the Middle East, and the terrorist Iranian regime's attacks on its neighbors prove how imperative it was that President Trump eliminate this threat to our country and our allies," she said.

But some defense hawks in Congress are worried. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) warned Wednesday on the Senate floor that the military is "not prepared" to deter aggression from both Russia and China at once due to the munitions shortfall.

McConnell did not reply to a request for comment.

Trump said in a social media post that he met with defense executives on Friday, including Boeing, Northrop Grumman, RTX, and Lockheed, who agreed to quadruple their production of "Exquisite Class" weapons. He did not explain which systems that entailed or how the U.S. planned to rapidly build factories, hire workers and increase weapons production.

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Some allies worried about weapons are hoping that's more than an empty promise.

"It seems that U.S. defense primes are still challenged to produce at the speed of demand," said Giedrimas Jeglinskas, a Lithuanian member of Parliament who is also a former deputy Defense minister. "We welcome any effort by the administration to incentivize defense companies to get into war mode of production."

Others cautioned that the defense industrial base can't be turned on with a switch to start mass producing the sophisticated missiles and air defenses that the U.S. and its allies desperately need.

"There's always this idea that there is a world in which we just have to go World War II," said Grand, the former NATO official. "But [in] World War II, producing Sherman tanks was pretty close to producing tractor engines. Producing a Patriot is not pretty close to producing a Tesla."

[Norgy]

It's quite ironic if the West is running out of weaponry. I thought this was what we are good at making.

[Sheilbh]

It's quite ironic if the West is running out of weaponry. I thought this was what we are good at making.

And also that the US, the home of Fordism and mass industrial might developing a slightly artisanal weapons idustry. From the FP piece I linked to:

The purpose of this analysis is to translate the conflict's opening phase into an urgent signal of the need to ensure munitions availability—recognizing that this initial assessment cannot be immediately extrapolated for the future of this conflict. This raises a simple question that strategists and defense planners often forget: How quickly can the West refill its arsenals?

While emergency supplemental funding is required, it cannot instantly reverse decades of consolidated production lines and atrophied mineral processing capacity. It is constrained by time, chemistry, and industrial physics. The input of missiles is not just money; it's a supply chain that starts with minerals, processing, and sub-tier capacity that does not surge on command.

[...]

Every weapon fired needs replacement, and creating that replacement requires a chain running from raw material, through refining and processing, into specialized components, and finally into certified production lines. The bottlenecks are not always in the places politicians think. The narrowest points are often in obscure corners: a sub-tier supplier with a single furnace; a capacitor supply dependent on a narrow set of inputs; a rocket-motor ecosystem that cannot expand without years of plant construction.

Even supposedly simple munitions depend on complex chains. For example, modern guidance kits for munitions are dependent on high-performance components that can only be made from rare earths, a market that China dominates. The West's industrial base can surge some things such as raw material orders, contract awards, or funding authorizations quickly. It cannot conjure trained labor, qualified tooling, and certified production capacity overnight.

[...]

This is a polite way of saying the American military should be hoping the next salvo with Iran is smaller—and that China won't do the math to figure out what is left of American precision-guided munitions to defend Taiwan. This is highly problematic; a 2023 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies determined, based on a series of war game simulations, that the U.S. military would run out of key munitions within a week of trying to defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion.

That is why the first 36 hours of operations against Iran matter. They are a stress test of Western industrial endurance. A campaign that forces defenders to spend interceptors at a rate that outruns replenishment is not just tactically demanding; it is strategically corrosive.

[...]

Beyond the sheer volume of munitions, the loss of high-value assets introduces another layer of complexity. The destruction of two advanced U.S. radars, the AN/FPS-132 in Qatar and the AN/TPS-59 in Bahrain, highlights a problem where the total weight of the "mineral bill" is less of a concern than the extreme fragility of the supply chain and the extensive timelines for replacement.

Per our analysis, for the AN/FPS-132, it will take five to eight years for Raytheon to build a new radar at a cost of $1.1 billion. Meanwhile, Lockheed Martin will require at least 12 to 24 months and an estimated $50 million to $75 million to replace the AN/TPS-59, based on the original Bahrain Foreign Military Sales contract adjusted for inflation. The biggest issue for the defense industrial base will be sourcing the 77.3 kilograms of gallium needed for both systems, a material for which China controls 98 percent of the global supply. This is not to mention the 30,610 kilograms of copper that will also be needed, a commodity facing surging demand from the technology sector.

[...]

 Individual bottlenecks slow down this replenishing. The BGM-109 Tomahawk, for example, depends on the F107 turbofan, solely produced by Williams International. Patriot PAC-3 production is split between the United States, Gulf partners, and Poland, which began producing PAC-3 MSE launch tubes at the WZL-1 facility in 2024. Some systems, such as the Popeye Turbo (also known as Crystal Maze II in its extended-range variant), are legacy assets being drawn down from a finite stock. Others are critically strained: Only around 25 GBU-57 MOPs have been produced to date, with Boeing as their sole assembler. The weapon is currently certified for delivery only by the B-2 Spirit—a fleet of just 20 airframes. The B-21 Raider will provide an additional delivery platform but will not reach operational status until 2027. The THAAD system requires a bespoke kill vehicle, which has no commercial analogue. All of these convoluted production processes are dependent on critical minerals that cannot be surged.

Edit: And I think it's most visible in weapons but also present elsewhere. Until 2022 the UK had domestic fertiliser manufacturing, that shut down due to the cost pressures of industrial energy (we're about 4 times as high as the US or China, Europe's about twice as high) - there's going to be a massive spike in fertiliser costs globally. My understanding is exctracting gallium isn't a particularly toxic process it just wasn't economic to do it in the West any more - so now 98% of the supply chain is Chinese owned. The UK has stopped all new oil and gas exploration while importing gas from the Norwegian side of the exact same wells. There's a sort of end of history decadence to it all - we don't need to worry about where things come from or are made or anything so grubby as the material world, the market will provide.

[Neil]

We have our answer on how well the US would fight to defend Taiwan. All bases in the Western Pacific would get taken out on day 1-2. Taiwan is an inseparable part of China guys. 

The converse of that is that the entire Chinese invasion fleet would drown in the straits.  I don't think the lesson here is that the Americans uniquely can't deal with mass missile and drone warfare, but rather than nobody is ready for it. 

[mongers]

You guys are being too harsh on him, it's not as if Ridley Scott had to concern himself with who was supplying the pyrotechnics for his latest blockbuster epic?

[OttoVonBismarck]

A few things:

Drone Swarming - This is actually likely to not be a long-term intractable problem. It won't be solved during this war, but drones are very slow moving. This actually means systems could be developed that fire very cheap munitions (think approaching as cheap as small arms ammunition) to effectively destroy drones in flight.

Ukraine has basically cobbled together systems like this on the cheap that have about an 80% interception rate--I have little doubt a country not dealing with the pressures and constraints of Ukraine, and able to casually work on it back in R&D labs, can improve on that %.

The issue the U.S. and regional allies have is we just have no such systems. We have a bunch of systems designed to intercept very fast moving ballistic missiles. Those systems require very advanced and expensive radars, targeting systems, and munitions. Anytime they are used against a drone it's basically a "win" for Iran.

The big takeaway is the actual science and physics behind intercepting a drone are massively easier than intercepting a ballistic missile, but we've worked a ton on the latter, and haven't built much out for the former. The closest things I can immediately think of are some Navy close-in weapon systems for ship defense.

Industrial Production - So anyone paying attention has known this is a problem since the Ukraine war started. Even back when we had a President willing to meaningfully help Ukraine, we had supply chain issues.

The simple reality is the U.S. defense industrial base is working under the same lean manufacturing principles the regular U.S. industrial base uses, and we have eschewed anything like industrial policy as a "dirty word" in this country for ages. There's no easy fix here--if we even came to the political conclusion that a fix would needed, this is the kind of thing that takes a generation to fix. The fix would likely be more or less a complete rejection of lean manufacturing in the defense world and consequently "uneconomic" excess capacity. This btw, was bog standard the way defense manufacturing worked in the first half of the 20th century up through probably the 1970s. This isn't some arcane wizardry, it's just something we rejected due to a number of now-questionable opinions that were viewed as orthodox at the time.

We also should have learned from the Ukraine war we need to stand up more "dumb" manufacturing, meaning deeper manufacturing capacity of low technology defense items like artillery rounds, again, something that we did well in the past at huge scale and simply concluded "didn't matter" anymore.

Politics Trump's approval rating still sits in the 41-44% range, with disapproval in the 52-55% range. This is basically the story of Trump all the way back to his first term. He manages to be the most popular one election day--the day it matters most, both times he was able to get enough low propensity, independent and swing voters to tilt his way to win narrow but convincing victories.

Both times he immediately became much less popular with those groups mere weeks after entering office. (One should reflect the voters in this group are particularly stupid. Living out a live action version of Charlie Brown with the football.)

The reason Trump's approval rating has not, and probably will not, collapse is the people approving of him are die hard Republicans. The GOP has morphed into a party where absolute loyalty to Trump is a prerequisite to be in politics. Look at Dan Crenshaw--super orthodox conservative, voted with the GOP basically every meaningful vote in congress. But he said some unorthodox things, like he said that 2020 election denialism was something Trump knew was false and was just using to rile people up. That's all it took. He's now out of congress replaced by someone whose  Trump loyalty is not conditional but absolute.

No one will rein Trump in from the GOP as long as Trump commands near absolute loyalty from a huge swathe of GOP voters. Anyone expecting some sort of Republican congressional pressure to materialize to stop the war--don't. Trump alone will be the one to stop the war and only if he can do so in an ego-sparing way.

[DGuller]

Just a complete layman here, but I wonder if the countering the drone swarm is a matter of going back to WW2-era AA systems, with updated computers.  In modern warfare AA has evolved to shoot down fast high-flying missiles, but it seems like with drones we're back to saturating by quantity strategy.  I wonder if with modern technology you can even get high hit rates with non-exploding AA ammo, just by calculating where to aim.

[Sheilbh]

Interestingly UK and Ukraine jointly developed a drone interceptor in part to get around wasting expensive anti-air systems on drones. From my understanding it's drone-to-drone interception which I think properly entered production the autumn. I wonder if that could get licensed as a solution too?

Although I wonder if that would even work as I think part of that system basically needs space - so Ukraine is big and can use its territory to thin out attacks which maybe works better for an interception system (could work for Saudi, say). But you need something different for dense territories like Israel or the Gulf States.

[mongers]

Interestingly UK and Ukraine jointly developed a drone interceptor in part to get around wasting expensive anti-air systems on drones. From my understanding it's drone-to-drone interception which I think properly entered production the autumn. I wonder if that could get licensed as a solution too?

Although I wonder if that would even work as I think part of that system basically needs space - so Ukraine is big and can use its territory to thin out attacks which maybe works better for an interception system (could work for Saudi, say). But you need something different for dense territories like Israel or the Gulf States.

It depends,but some of the gulf states have plenty of room, the UAE has plenty of desert with a handful of urban concentrations, admittedly costal megacities.

And on option would be to have adhoc shipborn AA platforms moored in the gulf to starting thinning down the drone before they hit urban landscape clutter, as you suggest.

Also what would be wrong with dedicated killzone for the drones, where advanced training jets, like the BAE Hawks et al, are armed with 30mm cannons and the less skilled pilots are given free reign to shot the drones down within those defined areas?