The arsenal as the battlefield: The war on Iran and the return of counter-industrial targeting

America’s war against Iran has sparked heated debates over U.S. strategic priorities, military objectives, and defense industrial capacity. It has also fueled speculation about how a hypothetical clash between the United States and the People’s Republic of China might unfold. Tehran’s ability to launch salvo after salvo of simple attack drones reflects current thinking about how the proliferation of cheap, easily producible precision weapons is changing the character of war, and previews some of the challenges that Washington might confront in a fight with Beijing. Facing an even bigger and better-armed rival, the United States is likely to find that its exquisite approach to defending against lower-cost offensive systems is unsustainable, its munition stocks across the board are inadequate, and its munitions industrial base is unprepared for the demands of a great power war. Yet this early forecasting is missing another dimension of the current conflict that could be an even more important harbinger of any future Sino-U.S. war: the destruction of adversary defense production infrastructure.

From eastern Ukraine to the Middle East, the advent of “precise mass” appears to be changing modern battlefields. Strike systems that combine accuracy and range, and that can be produced at a very large volume for relatively low cost, are stressing defenses, inflicting losses, and driving adaptation. The obvious implication for the United States is to build more weapons and build them faster. That goes for the complex, expensive, high-performance munitions that the U.S. military often favors, as well as the smaller, cheaper, and more numerous systems that it is beginning to embrace. But increasing production is a one-sided solution to the problem of precise mass. The other side—which the United States has largely avoided over the past several decades but has embraced over the past several weeks—is decreasing adversary production capacity.

An unambiguous objective of Operation Epic Fury has been degrading not just Iran’s long-range weapons, but also its ability to replenish them. The United States, according to a recent update from Central Command, is “on a path to completely eliminate Iran’s wider military manufacturing apparatus.”

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