US loses one-fourth of drone fleet as Iran war drains its arsenal

snovymgodym•about 1 hour ago

The US military industrial complex has been a scheme to sell expensive weapon systems with exorbitant maintenance contracts to the government for decades now.

This works fine from 1980-2020ish when you're fighting limited intensity conflicts against countries you have uncontested air superiority over.

But with cheap drone technology and other innovations of the last decade it's never been easier to be a near-peer adversary. The incumbent powers of the world have vast expensive arsenals of weapons designed to fight the last war.

That being said, I know that the US Military internally has been very well informed of the realities of what a war against Iran would look like for decades. It's been well understood for a long time that decapitation strikes against Iran won't work because their military and paramilitary organizations are deliberately composed of highly autonomous units. You could have asked the janitor at the US Army War College in January 2025 how a war against Iran would go, and he would have told you it would be insanely costly, that Iran holds a indisputable advantage in a defensive conflict and that they have numerous strategic cards to play like blockading Hormuz, attacking the Gulf states, and drawing support from the US's larger geopolitical allies.

Ironically, the US had all of this intelligence within their institutions but ignored it. They ignored it precisely because the US is vulnerable to decapitation strikes.

nradov•about 1 hour ago

And because a decapitation strike worked in Venezuela, so they naively believed they could use a similar tactic against a much more resilient adversary.

_doctor_love•about 1 hour ago

Sadly, the war colleges in the US have all been aware that this kind of shift was coming, too. There are many examples from history of an incumbent superpower being dethroned because it failed to modernize and was overtaken by others with better technology (eg the Ottoman Empire).

Our current US administration is woefully incompetent.

oniony•about 1 hour ago

Is the word quarter now out of fashion?

bmitc•about 1 hour ago

It's amazing how incompetent the U.S. has become. Sure, let's telegraph to the entire world that the U.S. is entirely incapable of sustaining warfare, all as part of a meaningless war.

georgemcbay•about 1 hour ago

> It's amazing how incompetent the U.S. has become.

Amazing and yet not at all surprising... entirely predictable given what lead up to it.

If someone wrote a story 10+ years ago about how a draft-dodging nepo baby reality TV actor who had never successfully ran any organization himself that wasn't a complete grift improbably became a world leader and he hired another TV personality with no leadership experience to run the US military based entirely off of loyalty and the fact that he physically looks the part of someone who might play the role of SecDef in a Tom Clancy movie adaptation, you wouldn't accept the plot if the outcome wasn't a complete trainwreck.

achillesheels•about 1 hour ago

Wow lethargic.

No foresight this is the future? #piglets

josefritzishere•about 2 hours ago

The blazing executive incompetence is as obvious as a traffic flare.

guywithahat•about 2 hours ago

Somehow I imagined they meant kamikaze drones, however they're talking about 30 million dollar reaper drones which are mostly used for surveillance being shot down around Iran.

sampton•about 2 hours ago

Another empire bankrupting itself fighting pointless wars.

US loses one-fourth of drone fleet as Iran war drains its arsenal

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