When the United States and Israel initiated their large-scale bombing campaign against Iran, military planners expected to quickly overwhelm and cripple the country’s government and military infrastructure. In the war’s initial 24 hours, allied forces struck roughly 1,000 high-priority targets across the country. Over the following 37 days, they unleashed thousands of additional munitions, blowing up 12,000 more targets and laying waste to a vast majority of Iran’s conventional military infrastructure. The opening wave of precision strikes succeeded in eliminating high-ranking leadership, including Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the country’s minister of defense, and the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Yet, more than six months after the commencement of hostilities, the Iranian regime not only remains intact, but it has arguably emerged stronger and more defiant than before. Tehran swiftly replaced its fallen officials, launched immediate counterattacks against Washington and its regional partners, and effectively shuttered the vital Strait of Hormuz. By closing this crucial maritime chokepoint, Iran drove up global energy prices and secured newfound political leverage—leaving U.S. and allied officials grappling with deep frustration and strategic miscalculations.
The unexpected resilience of the Iranian regime stems from a combination of long-term preparation and a profound shift in modern military technology. For years, Tehran anticipated the likelihood of American and Israeli military strikes, developing robust contingency plans to quickly reconstitute its government and command structures in the event of decapitation strikes. Despite a stringent U.S. naval blockade, Iran managed to import enough essential goods to prevent its economy from experiencing a complete collapse. However, the single most decisive factor in Iran’s surprisingly effective performance was its massive domestic stockpile of low-cost, high-volume, precision-guided drones and missiles. These affordable munitions enabled devastating counterattacks, allowed the regime to successfully close the Strait of Hormuz, and ultimately acted as a powerful deterrent against further American military escalation.
This conflict has underscored a broader, transformative reality in global defense: the age of "precise mass"—characterized by high-volume, low-cost, precision-guided weaponry—is fully underway. It is no longer feasible for the U.S. military, or any other global superpower, to win a full-blown conventional war simply by relying on small numbers of exquisite, high-end weapons to dazzle adversaries. Today, weaker or less-resourced nations can effectively match stronger opponents through sustained offensive barrages. The fundamental economics of modern combat currently favor the offense, as the manufacturing price of effective defensive interceptors has yet to fall anywhere near the low cost of attack drones and ballistic missiles. Militaries simply cannot afford to endlessly exhaust multimillion-dollar defense systems, such as $4 million Patriot interceptors, to shoot down swarms of $35,000 Shahed-136 attack drones.
At the same time, the war in Iran demonstrates that advanced technology remains profoundly essential. The United States achieved remarkable success in striking deeply buried and heavily defended Iranian sites largely due to sophisticated artificial intelligence systems capable of identifying and recommending targets faster than ever before. American exquisite weapons remain considerably harder to intercept than their cheaper counterparts and possess a higher probability of completely destroying targets in a single strike. Nevertheless, the world is learning harsh lessons from Iran, building directly on realities that the war in Ukraine had already made glaringly clear: the future of armed conflict belongs, in large part, to precise mass. Militaries across the globe are now embracing the absolute imperative of producing and deploying vast fleets of cheap, disposable weapon systems, fundamentally rewriting the rules of warfare and shifting the global military balance.
Set in One’s Ways
In the study of warfare, conventional wisdom often suggests that wealthy, technologically dominant states are the primary beneficiaries of new military capabilities. Yet, the empirical reality is far more complex. When a newly introduced military system is excessively expensive, it naturally favors rich incumbents. However, when a capability is inexpensive yet demands radical organizational and structural changes to adopt effectively, smaller or less affluent nations can exploit it with remarkable speed. In practice, the world’s most powerful militaries frequently struggle when forced to implement disruptive organizational changes. Their past successes have calcified into entrenched bureaucracies and institutional biases that render adaptation painfully slow, making it exceedingly difficult to integrate new capabilities that cannot seamlessly plug into existing command-and-control structures.
Precise mass represents precisely this kind of disruptive capability. The conventionally most powerful militaries in the world are meticulously organized around small numbers of exquisite, expensive, and difficult-to-produce platforms, such as Tomahawk cruise missiles and F-35 fighter jets. Military units train, plan, and build their operational doctrines entirely around these premium systems. Consequently, they cannot easily pivot to incorporate precise mass capabilities, which demand entirely different tactical training and fundamentally new philosophies on how to fight. Exquisite systems are scarce and costly, requiring units to exercise extreme caution to prevent weapon wastage and minimize the risk of platform destruction. By contrast, precise mass relies on units moving swiftly, overwhelming adversaries, and refusing to let the pursuit of perfection stand in the way of operational effectiveness. This operational mismatch helps explain why the United States has struggled to adapt to the age of precise mass, despite having invented precision-guidance technology and boasting the most formidable military in the world.
Iran, conversely, has historically been locked out of acquiring many advanced military capabilities due to international sanctions and technological embargoes. As a result, the nation was forced to heavily invest in long-range, one-way attack systems and inexpensive ballistic missiles. The result is a war where Iran has dramatically outperformed historical expectations. Tehran could not hope to go blow-for-blow with the U.S. military’s inventory of exquisite weapons, but it did not need to. Instead, it relied on the rapid, volume-fire deployment of relatively accurate drones and cheap missiles directed at American bases and critical regional infrastructure. While the United States has inflicted billions of dollars in damage on Iran in response, it has done so by burning through finite stockpiles of Tomahawks, SM-6 missiles, and other premium systems. Washington now faces a grueling race to resupply its own depleted arsenals alongside those of crucial security partners in Taiwan and Ukraine.
Thanks to meticulous and rigorous preparations, Tehran has proven capable of withstanding intensive bombardment. In the years leading up to the conflict, Iran constructed an extensive, subterranean network of missile infrastructure spread across its rugged territory, which U.S. and Israeli forces have thus far found virtually impossible to eliminate. The United States encountered even greater difficulties attempting to destroy Iran’s heavily dispersed and hidden missile production facilities. This reality inverts long-standing assumptions that have guided American airpower campaigns ever since Operation Desert Storm against Iraq in 1991, where military doctrine heavily emphasized destroying fixed, existing weapons stockpiles at the outset of a campaign.
Iran’s performance has clearly demonstrated that weaker states are no longer priced out of the global military power game, just as the United States has discovered that traditional military supremacy no longer guarantees the upper hand in major conflicts. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that nations both rich and poor are rushing to invest in precise mass. North Korea has acquired Shahed drone technology and production equipment via Russia, utilizing it to manufacture its own inexpensive uncrewed vehicles. A private company in Nigeria has contracted with a Turkish defense manufacturer to construct 100,000 one-way attack drones at domestic assembly facilities. Poland has dramatically increased its defense spending on drones and counter-drone systems from roughly $27 million in late 2023 to approximately $6.9 billion, establishing dedicated domestic drone manufacturing plants. Six European nations—including France, Germany, and the United Kingdom—signed a letter of intent to jointly develop a long-range, one-way attack drone capable of traveling over 300 miles at a target cost of less than $100,000. Saudi Arabia has publicly unveiled its own domestic attack drone modeled directly on the Shahed design, boasting a reported range of more than 900 miles. Even Japan’s governing party has requested a record $55.6 billion defense budget, largely earmarked for the procurement of vast quantities of attack drones.
Offense Over Defense
The war in Iran starkly illustrates that nearly any military can acquire large quantities of precision-strike weapons costing tens of thousands of dollars apiece. Conversely, defensive measures remain profoundly expensive. Currently, there are very few reliable missile interceptors that cost less than $1 million to produce and deploy. To successfully repel Iran’s waves of precise mass, Washington was forced to expend roughly 65 percent of its entire Patriot interceptor inventory and 35 percent of its THAAD interceptor stockpile, leaving the U.S. military with approximately 1,000 and 250 units of each system remaining, respectively. American partners throughout the Middle East are similarly watching their regional air defense inventories rapidly deplete.
For the United States, this logistical vulnerability was largely predictable. The exclusive institutional focus on exquisite systems since the end of the Cold War heavily influenced its defensive strategy, prioritizing advanced anti-missile systems designed specifically to counter high-end ballistic and cruise missile attacks from peer competitors. Furthermore, defense policymakers historically assumed that modern wars would be short, eliminating the urgency to design defensive architectures capable of being rapidly scaled during protracted conflict.
In response to these sobering realities, Washington and other allied governments are scrambling to develop much cheaper defensive systems. Researchers are actively experimenting with directed-energy weapons and high-power microwave systems capable of neutralizing incoming drone swarms at a fraction of the cost. Defense innovators are also exploring interceptor concepts designed simply to detonate in the immediate vicinity of a drone rather than relying on direct physical impact. The international defense market has already begun shifting; Ukraine is currently fielding interceptor drones that cost a mere $1,400 each, while European and Gulf-based startups are rushing to develop similar low-cost interceptors. Nevertheless, none of these alternative defensive systems appear ready for immediate, large-scale deployment.
The conflict has also highlighted specific American military capabilities that will prove invaluable in this new era of warfare. Over the past few years, artificial intelligence systems capable of aggregating intelligence from diverse data sources and generating rapid targeting recommendations for commanders have become indispensable. This technological evolution has granted the United States—with its thriving AI sector and deep experience in building decision-support platforms—a distinct operational advantage. For instance, the U.S. military deployed the Maven Smart System, enabling a dramatic increase in the tempo of its military strikes.
This system has not been entirely flawless; technical limitations and faulty intelligence inputs that the system was not programmed to cross-check led to a mistaken strike on an Iranian school, resulting in the tragic deaths of over 100 children. The incredible speed of automated target selection also introduces a heightened risk of automation bias, where human operators may overly outsource critical cognitive decisions to imperfect algorithms, thereby increasing the potential for operational errors. Nevertheless, the system has measurably improved overall targeting accuracy, and the U.S. military retains the capacity to implement institutional reforms that can minimize such catastrophic mistakes. Consequently, the primary binding constraint on the speed and scale of an American military campaign is no longer intelligence processing capacity, but rather physical hardware inventory.
Crucially, Washington’s gains in military AI were achieved through superior data architecture and the organizational integration of machine learning models that were largely unveiled in 2025 or earlier, rather than cutting-edge frontier models. This indicates that the broader commercial race toward artificial general intelligence is not the primary driver of how AI is shaping modern warfare. In fact, as cheap open-source AI models inevitably achieve capabilities comparable to those currently utilized by Washington, adversary militaries will find it increasingly straightforward to develop their own similar decision-support tools. Notably, Iran previously attempted to utilize advanced language models to assist in targeting U.S. forces in the region, illustrating the democratization of military-applicable AI.
Cheap Shots
The U.S.-Israeli war against Iran confirms that the age of precise mass has definitively arrived. Tehran has successfully demonstrated how technologically outmatched nations can effectively stymie more powerful adversaries on the modern battlefield. At the same time, major military powers are increasingly compelled to embrace offensive strategies dependent on precise mass, driven by the stark reality that the financial cost of defending against inexpensive munitions vastly outweighs the cost of launching them.
As the global defense community absorbs these lessons, the United States must do the same. The nation’s historic reliance on exquisite, expensive, and difficult-to-produce weapon systems is no longer sufficient to guarantee victory in war or to adequately protect regional allies, particularly as the U.S. military steadily draws down critical missile stockpiles required to deter potential conflicts with China and other adversaries. Ideally, Washington would immediately begin scaling precise mass capabilities, investing heavily in low-cost defensive technologies, and, most importantly, adapting its internal organizational structures to deploy these new tools effectively. American defense officials, long accustomed to fighting exclusively with exquisite platforms, may struggle to embrace this necessary cultural shift, especially if defense budgets face contraction, which often tempts Washington to prioritize legacy capabilities regardless of their modern limitations. Furthermore, even if the Pentagon initiates structural reforms, the nation will require stable leadership from talented military commanders and senior civilian defense officials who remain in their posts long enough to drive these innovations through entrenched bureaucracies—a challenge compounded by the Pentagon’s rapid turnover of top leadership.
The United States must find a viable path forward in this shifting landscape. Recent technological innovations have effectively closed the historical military gap between wealthy states and less-resourced nations regarding offensive combat power. If the United States intends to preserve its enduring military edge, it has no choice but to embrace the reality of precise mass and adapt its strategic outlook to the demands of twenty-first-century warfare.
