Asymmetric War in Iran: How Trump and the U.S. Are Being Played

Perhaps the most important and overlooked geopolitical fact that can be derived from the U.S.-Israeli attack against Iran is that very soon in the conflict, Ukrainian advisors were on the ground at American bases to train troops to counter Iranian drone warfare. It is hard to overestimate its significance. 

For those of us of a certain age, the phrase “U.S. advisors” goes back to almost every large war and brushfire conflict since Vietnam. It signified that America had the ultimate in hardware, doctrine, and training, and the whole of the noncommunist world was our pupils. True or not, it was the conventional wisdom. 

That over 200 Ukrainian specialists are now advising the U.S. military on the best tactics and equipment to intercept Iran’s 20,000 Shadah drone, without having to expend Patriot anti-missile missiles costing 200 times as much, tells us that the era of drone warfare, foretold by their crude first use in combat during World War II, has arrived—and America is late to the party.  

We may hope that Kyiv, in exchange for transferring its most experienced drone-warfare technicians from its own battlefront, will receive a binding commitment for American assistance in its war with Russia. One may hope, but Trump’s dropping oil sanctions on Russia against the opposition of the G7 member states shows he has a peculiar idea of gratitude by giving Russia a revenue windfall to aid in its aggression against Ukraine. 

The presence of Ukrainian technicians in the Gulf has historic implications: first, that the battlefields of Ukraine could hold the future of land warfare, not the U.S. Army National Training Center at Fort Irwin or the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms. Second, the very need for Ukrainian advisors showed that the American doctrine of employing multi-million-dollar weapon systems against cheap drones is not only ruinously expensive, but reveals dangerously unimaginative thinking that calls into question much of American military doctrine. Third, expending these eye-wateringly expensive systems against Iran at such a brisk clip is tantamount to unilateral disarmament vis-à-vis China. 

The military should have foreseen Iran’s “cost-attrition strategy.” In 2023 and 2024, U.S. Navy ships in the Red Sea fired roughly 100 SM-2 and SM-6 Standard missiles to intercept drones launched by Houthi rebels, disrupting commercial shipping traffic. At roughly $2.4 million per missile, operational costs were high, and the conflict depleted the U.S. missile inventory. Production rates of the Standard are not disclosed for security reasons, but it is believed to be very low, in the neighborhood of only 100 annually. 

The story is the same with the Army’s land-based interceptors. The unit cost for a Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) MSE interceptor is approximately $3.9 million to $4.2 million, according to Army budget documents. A full Patriot battery costs over $1 billion; this includes not just the missiles and launchers but also the highly sophisticated, expensive warning-and-engagement radars that the missiles require. It is estimated that in the first two weeks of the current war, the U.S. and its partners have expended about 800 Patriots, more than were used in the four years (and counting) of the Ukrainian defense against Russia.  

The second Army land-based interceptor is the THAAD (Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense). It is a bigger missile intended for use against large, fast, high-altitude ballistic missiles. Its cost is commensurate with $12.6 million per copy. During Israel’s 12-day war against Iran in June 2025, roughly 150 THAADS were fired, about 25 percent of the estimated inventory. The production rate is around 50 per year. Numbers expended in the current war are unavailable, but likely higher. 

It is easy to see that employing expensive munitions against cheap drones (similar to commercial and hobbyist drones that have proliferated, with 855,000 registered drones in the U.S. alone) is unsustainable. These costly, manpower-intensive American anti-missile missiles are a 1950s legacy, when interceptors like the Nike series, designed to intercept Russian bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles carrying nuclear warheads, were deployed throughout the United States. Destroying an incoming nuclear warhead would have been cheap at any price. 

This mentality has carried over to today’s vastly different conditions. The original models of the Standard and Patriot missile series were designed decades ago, following the Nike philosophy, albeit for a non-nuclear scenario. As Cold War systems, they were intended to shoot down Soviet aircraft, at a cost as high as the missiles themselves, and they were products of an American defense industrial base far larger than today’s. Thanks to the hollowing out of manufacturing since 1980, these missiles can’t be produced in the numbers required, nor at a low enough price, to make them both mission-effective and cost-effective. 

This does not mean that the Iranian drones haven’t taken serious losses through attrition, either from being shot down or destroyed at their launch points by U.S. and Israeli air strikes. That said, the economics of their drones—easily built in small, primitive facilities using readily available commercial parts such as motorcycle engines for propulsion—means that Iran’s inventory can be rapidly rebuilt, even in wartime.  

The U.S. doesn’t just have a cost problem with missile systems like the Patriot. U.S. drones are typically large and expensive, with sophisticated sensors and multimission capability. The MQ-9 Reaper, for instance, has an average unit cost of $34 million, depending on the model and sensor payload. It has been extensively used in the Iran war, and about a dozen have been reported lost. One Air Force official admitted several years ago that “they are easily shot down.” 

The economic and practical mismatch between expensive U.S. aerial systems and cheap enemy drones is not the end of the story. As I have written before, U.S. Navy admirals generally remain wedded to large, expensive, and complex ships built around the carrier battle group, basically a doctrine of refighting major fleet engagements like World War II’s Battle of Midway. As if they were not costly enough, Donald Trump wants to saddle the Navy with a fleet of battleships (tastefully named after himself) that will be obsolete the minute they are launched. 

Until recently, such systems have crowded out funding for more innovative solutions, such as surface or underwater drones, whose funding was typically less than 1 percent of the service’s procurement budget. While the Navy has reacted in the past two years to the successes of the Ukrainians against the Russian Black Sea fleet and use of maritime drones by Houthi rebels against our own ships in the Red Sea with increased funding, it will be years before these platforms are produced in quantity. 

In the meantime, Iran has taken the low-tech route, employing drone vessels disguised as fishing boats. These drone boats have scored at least two hits on oil tankers so far. Between aerial and seaborne drones, at least 18 merchant ships have been struck during the war, and 110 tankers are now trapped in the Persian Gulf. 

Potentially more formidable than drone surface vessels is the Azhdar unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV), an autonomous torpedo whose quiet lithium-ion-electric propulsion makes it difficult to detect and which allegedly can patrol underwater for up to four days. Underwater warfare—by manned submarines—was the decisive naval instrument in both world wars, and systems like the Azhdar could be game-changers. 

Perhaps the U.S. Navy has developed the technology and doctrine to defeat systems like the Azhdar rapidly, and those who vaunt the capabilities of Iranian drones are like the people who saw the Soviets as 10-feet-tall. But so far, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed (or rather, selectively open: some ship traffic passes at Iran’s sufferance), and Brent crude closed on Wednesday at $108.66 a barrel. Given Trump’s frantic exhortations about reopening the strait—crassly threatening the allies he never bothered to consult if they don’t provide naval vessels, and even begging the Chinese to assist—it is likely that if the Navy had a relatively low-risk option to do so, they would have used it. 

Iran’s last card is the naval mine. Why? With controllable weapons like drones and submersibles, Tehran can tighten or relax its hold on the strait at will, allowing some ships to pass and halting others. But once it begins mass sowing of mines, the strait is closed until they are all swept. Iran will delay this as long as it can export its own oil through the strait; most of it goes to China, which now has an additional incentive not to help Trump because the current wartime crisis forces Iran to sell the oil at a discount. 

Naval mine warfare goes back hundreds of years. Although relatively primitive, it is effective. In the two world wars, it was a major factor, sinking hundreds of ships; just as important, waters that were believed to be mined all but precluded naval operations. The U.S. Navy has always regarded mine warfare as a stepchild; perhaps symbolically, Herman Wouk’s famous novel, The Caine Mutiny, places its unlucky crew aboard a hapless minesweeper.  

Since the Korean War, most U.S. Navy ship casualties in combat have been due to mines. During the 1980s Iran-Iraq “tanker war,” the U.S.S Samuel B. Roberts hit a mine that blew a 30-foot wide hole in her hull. In the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S.S. Tripoli and the U.S.S. Princeton were both heavily damaged by floating contact mines, a technology dating from World War I. But the Navy never got the message; for the last three decades, it has maintained only eight elderly Osprey-class minesweepers. In an act of unbelievable stupidity, the Navy decommissioned and withdrew four of the minesweepers from their base in Bahrain—in late January 2026, when planning for the Iran strike was already in progress.  

The Strait of Hormuz, whose closure Trump and his cabinet swore nobody anticipated, is the center of gravity of this war. It would have required a satirist with the ghoulish humor of an Ambrose Bierce to depict a fictional U.S. president begging his superpower rival to extricate him from a quagmire of his own making, even as the quagmire means that the president is gradually disarming his country against the superpower.  

We have already described the expenditure of American hi-tech weaponry against Iran and its slow rate of replenishment. Well before the conflict, Pentagon wargames have demonstrated that the U.S. would run out of critical munitions only eight days into a high-intensity conflict with China over Taiwan. That timeline will have shrunk because of Trump’s plunge into the Middle East. Whatever the nominal outcome of this war, the real winner will be Beijing. 

The post Asymmetric War in Iran: How Trump and the U.S. Are Being Played appeared first on Washington Monthly.