Attrition has re-emerged as the defining and most alarming feature of contemporary military conflict. The ongoing wars in Ukraine and across the Middle East have evolved into relentless, grinding contests over which side possesses the endurance to exhaust the other’s military capacity, economic resources, and political will. While each of these modern conflicts possesses unique historical, geographical, and geopolitical characteristics, their strikingly similar trajectories point toward a much deeper, systemic shift in how modern wars unfold and how they eventually—or fail to—conclude.
Throughout the intense artillery duels in Ukraine, frontline guncrews have repeatedly found themselves in possession of heavy artillery pieces and the ability to locate high-priority targets, yet they have been forced to wait because they completely lacked the physical shells required to fire. At the same time, Ukrainian military engineers have watched as newly deployed tactical drones are met with rapid Russian electronic countermeasures and software adaptations within mere weeks, effectively neutralizing any tactical advantage they briefly held on the battlefield. Meanwhile, in the Middle East, the United States has successfully degraded adversary military capabilities and struck deeply buried nuclear infrastructure, yet it has consistently failed to resolve the fundamental political problems that made those weapons systems a threat to regional stability in the first place.
Each of these distinct dynamics illustrates a critical strategic gap that helps explain why modern states increasingly choose strategies of attrition—or find themselves hopelessly trapped within them. The first gap exists between the military capacity that nations possess on paper and the actual power they can deploy and sustain under combat conditions. The second gap is found between traditional principles of military warfare and a modern technological battlefield where rapid counter-adaptations make decisive operational breakthroughs extraordinarily difficult to achieve. The third and perhaps most profound gap lies between the military means being utilized and the political ends they are ultimately intended to achieve.
When combined, these structural mismatches inexorably push modern wars toward attrition. When countries cannot generate and regenerate sufficient military capacity to rapidly overwhelm an enemy, war inevitably deteriorates into a grueling test of sheer endurance. When decisive military breakthroughs remain frustratingly elusive, pursuing incremental territorial gains and the steady, systemic destruction of enemy capacity becomes the most attractive option. Furthermore, when the political end goals of the combatants are excessively muddy or maximalist, imposing costs indefinitely can tragically seem like the only alternative to absolute capitulation.
For the United States, this reality poses a profound and unique strategic challenge. As American political and military leaders increasingly seek short, decisive military operations to minimize risk and expenditure, the United States may increasingly confront adversarial nations that see clear strategic advantages in prolonging conflicts. Washington may not actively choose a war of attrition, but it must be fully prepared to fight and win wars in which its adversaries certainly do.
The Long and Grinding Road
Military power has traditionally been measured by what sovereign countries possess on paper—tangible assets such as active-duty troops, advanced weapons platforms, and expansive munitions inventories. However, recent high-intensity wars have brutally exposed the vast chasm that exists between nominal national power and usable military capability. In his influential 2015 book, How the War Was Won, historian Phillips O’Brien argued that even during the massive industrial conflicts of World War II, winning the major tactical battles that captured the popular imagination had actually become less important than dominating what he termed the "super-battlefield"—the vast, interconnected expanse of factories, supply chains, and logistics networks over which military power is continuously produced and transported.
In the decades since that global conflict, the sheer ability to generate and sustain military power has only grown more vital. Modern, high-technology militaries consume complex materiel at an incredible clip, and their sophisticated adversaries have become increasingly capable of disrupting the delicate production and supply networks required to replace expended resources.
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, it appeared to possess overwhelming military superiority across nearly every conventional metric. Just days before the invasion, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff warned lawmakers in Washington that the capital of Kyiv could fall within 72 hours of a full-scale assault. Speaking privately to The New York Times, Ukrainian commanders admitted they believed their forces had little realistic chance against the more than 100,000 battle-ready Russian troops massed menacingly on their borders. Yet because Moscow could not swiftly translate its vast nominal resources into sustained combat power at the front lines, it failed to employ its capabilities effectively and ultimately stalled before taking Kyiv.
Despite these catastrophic initial failures, Russia’s vast material and manpower reserves allowed it to absorb heavy losses and survive its early setbacks. Moscow was able to mobilize additional personnel, draw deeply upon massive Soviet-era ammunition stocks, rapidly increase domestic weapons manufacturing, and turn to external partners such as North Korea to sustain its frontline fight. Crucially, Russia developed a clear theory of victory: it concluded that it did not need to defeat Ukraine decisively if it could simply outlast it, wearing down Kyiv while waiting for the political commitment of European nations and the United States to fracture and weaken.
Attrition ultimately handed Russia a major military advantage. At the same time, it exposed a profoundly different problem among Ukraine’s powerful NATO backers: aggregate economic and industrial power does not automatically translate into the operational capacity to sustain a prolonged, high-consumption war.
The United States and the broader NATO alliance possess vastly greater economic and military power than Russia. Yet a war of attrition measures national power in entirely different ways. A nation’s Gross Domestic Product cannot be physically fired from artillery tubes, and total defense spending figures cannot, by themselves, intercept incoming ballistic missiles. The domestic defense industries of Ukraine’s international partners were simply not built to replace heavy artillery ammunition rapidly; instead, they had been carefully organized around lean, peacetime production schedules. Consequently, these nations struggled mightily to convert their latent industrial potential quickly enough into the shells, air defense interceptors, and other usable military capabilities demanded by the front lines.
Thus, Russia and the NATO-backed coalition encountered the capacity gap from nearly opposite directions. Russia initially possessed raw military capacity without commensurate operational effectiveness. Conversely, Ukraine’s international backers possessed technological effectiveness and advanced systems, but lacked the industrial depth required to sustain a prolonged war of attrition.
The ongoing conflict involving U.S. and Israeli forces on one side, and Iran and its regional network on the other, has presented yet another iteration of this dynamic. Iran’s conventional military power cannot possibly match the advanced capabilities of Israel or the United States. However, Tehran spent decades deliberately building the ability to compensate for its conventional inferiority by projecting military capacity far beyond its own borders. Iran’s extensive network of regional proxies and militias, often referred to as its "ring of fire," allowed Tehran to apply sustained pressure across multiple distinct fronts, forcing Israel and the United States to expend costly interceptors and maintain punishing operational tempos over extended periods.
Iran’s frequent tactical use of inexpensive, mass-produced drones and missiles exposed the severe economic limitations of relying exclusively on costly interceptors, expensive naval ships, and cutting-edge aircraft. Within this overarching strategy of attrition, Iran does not need to achieve total military victory; it simply needs to keep imposing high operational costs while regenerating whatever assets it loses.
Adapt and Die
On the very eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a prominent U.S. general openly admired Moscow’s reputation as a "learning and adaptive force." Yet Ukraine quickly proved capable of adapting at an even more ferocious pace. However, this rapid, reciprocal adaptation by both belligerent nations produced a profound strategic paradox: military advantages that might have once enabled a decisive breakthrough became fleeting and temporary, ensuring that neither side could sustain an advantage long enough to produce definitive results.
This reality highlights the second major strategic gap. As emerging technology fundamentally transforms the modern battlefield, traditional principles for creating military advantage—such as maneuvering large formations of forces and massing combat power—are becoming exponentially harder to apply, driving conflicts inexorably toward attrition. In an era dominated by ubiquitous reconnaissance drones, massed military forces are easily detected and swiftly destroyed. The heavy concentrations of personnel and logistical support required for large-scale military maneuvers can be spotted by aerial sensors and targeted with precision long before any strategic breakthrough can be achieved.
Furthermore, the vital element of tactical surprise has become nearly impossible to create when the modern battlefield is under constant, unblinking observation. Technological advancement continually creates innovative opportunities, but rapid counter-adaptation by the enemy erases those hard-won advantages almost overnight.
While rapid wartime adaptation is certainly not a historical novelty, what has changed dramatically is the sheer velocity at which innovative tactics and operations are rendered utterly ineffective. In Ukraine, the feedback loop for military learning runs directly from soldiers on the front lines to software engineers and hardware manufacturers, and back again in a matter of days. Special QR codes allow troops in the trenches to communicate immediate equipment problems, such as drone software malfunctions, directly to support teams at manufacturing plants, which can then alter production runs almost immediately.
Ukrainian drone developers have described research and development cycles now measured strictly in weeks: as Russian electronic jamming and faster interceptor drones defeat existing systems, manufacturers instantly change radio frequencies, airframes, and propulsion methods, quickly moving the modified systems back toward the front lines. As defense strategist Can Kasapoglu observed, unmanned systems, combat data, and human command have fused into accelerated kill chains, transforming the war in Ukraine from a narrow contest of traditional hardware platforms into a machine-speed battle dictated entirely by algorithms.
Technology is simultaneously altering how traditional principles of war are applied in the Middle East. Consider the principle of mass. Israel and the United States have routinely used advanced intelligence, precision-guided munitions, and long-range strikes to mass destructive military effects without ever having to mass literal ground forces in harm’s way. Conversely, Iran has applied this exact same principle through a different lens, utilizing large, saturated salvos of ballistic missiles and loitering drones to overwhelm sophisticated air defense shields. Because both sides can persistently generate concentrated strategic effects without concentrating vulnerable forces, destroying the enemy’s ability to keep fighting becomes immensely difficult. The contest inevitably shifts toward repeated cycles of exchanges, replenishment, and raw endurance, reinforcing the attritional nature of the conflict.
Moving the Goalposts
The third and perhaps most difficult strategic gap facing modern military planners is that the high-tech military means being deployed in current conflicts are frequently failing to produce the desired political outcomes. This critical disconnect is glaringly evident both in Russia’s war against Ukraine and in the broader Middle East confrontation involving the United States, Israel, Iran, and various regional actors. In these protracted conflicts, the combatants are not merely pursuing limited adjustments to territorial borders or modest, pragmatic changes in an adversary’s political behavior. Instead, these wars involve deeply ambitious objectives that are treated as completely nonnegotiable by all sides.
Russia steadfastly refuses to accept a sovereign Ukraine that sits outside its direct sphere of geopolitical control, while Ukraine is fighting an existential war for its very right to exist as an independent European state. Similarly, Israel faces regional adversaries that explicitly reject its right to exist, while the United States and Israel view the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran as a fundamental, intolerable threat to the regional security balance. Tehran, meanwhile, views its controversial nuclear program and its extensive regional network as central to its national security and sovereign power.
Such massive, existential stakes leave virtually no room for diplomatic compromise, making these conflicts deeply intractable. Attrition continues to inflict staggering costs in human blood and national treasure, seemingly without narrowing those wide political differences in the slightest.
As late 2021 approached, Ukraine was already deeply mired in the low-intensity conflict that had begun back in 2014, when Russia illegally annexed Crimea—a conflict that had largely stagnated diplomatically, as NATO never made a definitive decision to push Russia back to its pre-2014 borders. Following Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Western European powers and the United States still declined to make the complete expulsion of Russian forces from Ukrainian territory an explicit political objective, nor did they define a clear, alternative political settlement.
Instead, Western leaders frequently expressed their strategic objectives in broad principles, such as supporting Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity for "as long as it takes" and refusing to reward naked Russian aggression. Military strategy, however, must be rigorously organized around concrete, attainable political end states if it is to succeed.
This strategic ambiguity was understandable to a degree: defining a concrete, maximalist objective and committing the direct military means required to achieve it risked putting the United States and NATO on a direct, catastrophic collision course with a nuclear-armed Russia. However, the practical result has been a military strategy that remains dangerously detached from a coherent political strategy—reducing Western policy to a determination merely to prevent Ukraine’s immediate defeat and impose mounting costs on Russia indefinitely.
A strikingly similar problem has emerged in the Middle East. Massive military force has imposed enormous, devastating costs on both Hamas and Iran, severely damaging their military infrastructure and eliminating many of their top commanders. Yet this immense destruction has not compelled either adversary to capitulate. Early in Israel’s war against Hamas, prominent analysts Graham Allison and Amos Yadlin argued in Foreign Affairs that Israel had effectively defeated Hamas because it had killed most of its senior military leadership and more than half of its active fighters. However, physically destroying an enemy’s military capacity is fundamentally different from producing the stable political conditions required for a durable end to a conflict.
Iran has successfully weaponized international politics and global public opinion as a potent tool in its ongoing war of attrition. Tehran has actively sought to degrade international diplomatic support for Israel, effectively creating a political ring of fire around its adversary. Avril Haines, who served as the director of national intelligence under President Joe Biden, disclosed that government-linked actors from Iran had actively posed as online activists, encouraging Gaza protests and providing financial support to demonstrators within the United States.
International institutions, numerous European governments, and public opinion around the world have steadily increased political pressure on Israel, deepening its international isolation. This shift has had profound strategic consequences. Although Israel has decisively demonstrated that it can dominate militarily on the battlefield, it has struggled mightily to translate those military victories into a more favorable, secure regional political environment. Its diplomatic relationships with European and other foreign governments have visibly deteriorated, and those deepening international divisions now heavily complicate delicate postwar governance discussions regarding the future of Gaza.
Break the Mold
For the United States, these persistent wars of attrition create a profound and recurring strategic dilemma. The Pentagon has historically planned and optimized its forces for short, highly decisive military operations, and political leaders in Washington frequently promise swift victories to the public. Yet modern adversaries possess both the capability and the powerful incentives required to deny the United States that preferred style of warfare, deliberately prolonging conflicts in the hope that they can regenerate lost capacity, impose unbearable costs, and ultimately outlast American political will.
At the same time, the United States has built a military establishment that relies heavily on relatively small numbers of highly sophisticated, exceptionally expensive weapons systems. It maintains a domestic defense industrial base that cannot rapidly replace many of these critical systems during a prolonged conflict, and it pursues strategic doctrines that too often leave the underlying political conditions required for permanent victory entirely unresolved.
While U.S. defense planners are currently making notable efforts to adjust this rigid military posture, executing such a massive industrial and doctrinal pivot will inevitably take considerable time. The true danger facing Washington is not that the United States is fundamentally incapable of winning a war of attrition; rather, the danger is that the nation remains stubbornly organized around the comfortable expectation that it will never have to fight one.
Nearly four decades ago, military thinker Edward Luttwak proposed a sophisticated strategy known as "relational maneuver," which focused primarily on attacking an enemy’s internal systemic cohesion and functional integrity rather than simply grinding down its physical forces through brute force. Recently, U.S. officials have hinted at adopting similar comprehensive strategies to counter adversarial influence, such as targeting financial networks and economic connections around the globe. While broader economic and financial pressure can severely weaken hostile regimes or cause them to fracture over time, maintaining such pressure requires immense, sustained political will. Rising global energy prices, inflation, and other economic domestic costs routinely test Washington’s willingness to maintain high-pressure campaigns indefinitely, meaning the most realistic outcome in many of these protracted standoffs remains an unresolved, grinding stalemate.
Breaking this dangerous pattern will ultimately require a fundamental shift in strategic thinking in Washington. U.S. military leaders must deliberately build future force structures and operational concepts around the realistic assumption that upcoming wars are unlikely to be resolved quickly or cleanly. Simultaneously, political leaders must be far more rigorous and realistic about whether the ambitious objectives they set can realistically be achieved by military force alone within a short timeframe.
These necessary adjustments will not be easily achieved. The more dangerous possibility is that the United States will simply continue to drift into attritional conflicts because their initial price tag appears manageable, even as the catastrophic human and economic costs mount silently in the background. While American citizens understandably reject the notion of endless "forever wars," U.S. adversaries have every financial and tactical incentive to deny the United States the short, decisive conflicts it prefers. And as contemporary history continues to demonstrate, even wars that prove relatively easy to sustain can ultimately be extraordinarily difficult to end for good.
