Iran and the new arithmetic of war

Beneath the daily headlines of strikes and counterstrikes in the Middle East, war is being utterly transformed. In the first week of Tehran’s retaliation campaign, drones accounted for about 71 percent of recorded strikes on Gulf states. The United Arab Emirates alone reportedly faced 1,422 detected drones and 246 missiles in just eight days. We could already glimpse many of these trends in Ukraine. But in Iran, an outline of the future of war has definitively come into view.

Michael Horowitz of the Council on Foreign Relations says, “We are now in the era of precise mass in war.” That is the right phrase. For decades, precision warfare meant a handful of Tomahawk missiles, stealth bombers or fighter jets. Now it can mean a one-way drone built from commercial parts and launched in swarms. What used to require a great industrial nation’s capacity can increasingly be assembled, adapted and scaled by much smaller states.

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