Standalone Essays · Triad of Stewardship

They Knew Better: Iran, Drones, and the American Habit of Ignoring Its Own History

The irony everyone gets backwards

There’s a premise that keeps circulating online: that Pete Hegseth and the Trump administration are dragging the U.S. military back to “traditional” combat and turning their backs on drone warfare. military back to “traditional” combat and turning their backs on drone warfare. military back to “traditional” combat and turning their backs on drone warfare. It’s a tidy story. It’s also wrong.

Yes, the rhetoric leans hard on warrior culture, physical standards, and conventional combat discipline. But the policy went the other way. In July 2025, Hegseth issued a directive titled “Unleashing U.S. Military Drone Dominance,” and it is one of the most aggressive small-drone pushes the Pentagon has ever attempted. Three changes stand out, and each is a direct lift from the Ukrainian battlefield:

Drones became consumables. Under the old rules, even a small quadcopter was “durable property” — crash one and you could trigger a formal investigation. The directive reclassifies Group 1 and 2 small drones as consumable commodities. In the memo’s own words, they “resemble munitions more than high-end airplanes” and should be “cheap, rapidly replaceable, and categorized as consumable.” Mortar rounds, not aircraft.

Procurement got pushed down the chain. O-6 commanders — colonels and Navy captains — now have direct authority to buy, test, and train with small drones, including commercial products and units fabricated in-house, without waiting on the multi-year acquisition bureaucracy that normally strangles this stuff.

Every squad gets drones. The directive orders that every squad be equipped with low-cost, expendable first-person-view and strike systems by the end of 2026, with Indo-Pacific units first in line.

And this isn’t a pilot program. The War Department has asked industry to build roughly 340,000 small one-way-attack drones over two years, funded by about $1 billion from the reconciliation bill, with the price per unit engineered to fall from around $5,000 in the first phase to $2,300 by the last. Tens of thousands to the force in 2026, hundreds of thousands by 2027. That is not the procurement profile of an institution that wants to go back to bayonets.

So before we go any further: the people supposedly nostalgic for bayonets are the same people trying to hand a strike drone to every infantry squad in the force. Hold that thought, because it makes what happened next stranger, not simpler.

And then they parked three carriers off Iran

Because in spite of all that — in spite of a doctrine that had officially declared cheap, attritable, decentralized drones the future of warfare — when the shooting actually started with Iran in 2026, the U.S. reached for the heaviest, most centralized, most expensive tools in the box.

Operation Epic Fury opened in late February 2026 and never really closed. The U.S. surged three carrier strike groups into the region — the largest American naval concentration since the 2003 invasion of Iraq — backed by B-1B and B-52 bombers staged in Europe and a Marine expeditionary unit. The opening salvos at sea were Navy Tomahawks. By April, Washington had layered a naval blockade on top of it. Huge ships, parked offshore, projecting power the old-fashioned way.

The strange part isn’t that they used heavy platforms. As I’ll get to, for some of these targets there was no other option. The strange part is what the fight turned into — and how completely predictable it was to anyone who’d read the history.

Why the cheap stuff couldn’t do the heavy job

Let me be fair to the planners first, because the case for the heavy platforms is real, and pretending otherwise would make this a weaker argument, not a stronger one.

It’s tempting to look at Ukraine and ask why the Pentagon didn’t just flood the Gulf with $500 drones. The honest answer is that the Ukrainian model doesn’t transfer, for two hard physical reasons.

Range. The FPV and quadcopter drones that define the Ukrainian front operate at 5 to 25 kilometers. The Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Oman, and the Red Sea span hundreds of thousands of square miles. Hitting a command bunker or a missile site hundreds of miles inside hostile territory requires long-range standoff weapons — Tomahawks, cruise missiles, strike aircraft — not a commercial drone with a two-mile leash.

Payload. A tactical FPV drone carries a two-to-five-pound warhead. That’s enough for an open trench, a light truck, or an exposed radar dish. It is nowhere near enough for a hardened underground enrichment hall. Those need thousand-to-two-thousand-pound penetrators that only heavy aircraft can deliver — which is exactly why, when the U.S. wanted Iran’s buried nuclear sites gone, it sent stealth bombers with bunker-busters, not swarms.

So the Ukrainian model is optimized for a static, contiguous land war of attrition. It does not solve the operational problem of the Gulf or the Indo-Pacific, where distance across open ocean demands long-range bombers, naval vessels, and carrier air. This is the genuinely hard doctrinal tension — not “drones versus tradition,” but how cheap attritable systems fit alongside heavy platforms in a high-end theater. On the deep-strike question, the Pentagon got it right.

Where they walked into the wall was the other end of the cost curve — and the other end of the history book.

Drones weren’t ignored — they were the problem

Here’s the thing people miss when they say the military “forgot about drones” against Iran: drones defined the entire tactical problem. They weren’t an oversight. They were the fight.

The 5th Fleet stood up Task Force 59 years ago specifically to patrol the waters around Iran with autonomous surface and underwater vessels — persistent, automated surveillance to track minelayers and missile boats and cue strikes. And once the 2026 war began, the primary job of American destroyers and carrier air wings became counter-drone and counter-missile defense: knocking down waves of Shahed drones, one-way attack boats, and ballistic missiles launched by Iran and its proxies at ships, at bases across the Gulf, and at allied cities.

The Navy is good at it. That’s not the problem. The problem is the bill.

The cost-exchange trap

This is the vulnerability every honest defense planner has been losing sleep over for years, and the wider region has been demonstrating it in miniature since the Red Sea fight against the Houthis: the cost-exchange curve is upside down.

Iranian-designed loitering munitions cost somewhere in the low tens of thousands of dollars; the cheaper ballistic and cruise missiles, more but still cheap by Pentagon standards. For long stretches, the U.S. had to knock them down with SM-2 and SM-6 interceptors running roughly $2 million to over $4 million apiece. Run that math across months of near-daily launches, now stretched over a Gulf-wide war and a blockade with no end date. The ships protect shipping and hit targets ashore, and the sailors do their jobs superbly — but you cannot run multi-billion-dollar warships firing multi-million-dollar interceptors to shoot down $30,000 drones and call it sustainable. In a long war, the cheap side wins on arithmetic alone.

That’s the real strategic reality, and it’s more interesting than “drones good, ships bad.” Small-drone swarms dominate tactical point defense and line-of-sight attrition along static borders. Projecting force thousands of miles across an ocean against an enemy with anti-ship ballistic missiles and buried infrastructure still requires heavy naval power and long-range aviation to punch through — even as those same ships now have to survive a swarm of cheap robots designed to bleed them dry. Both things are true, and the tension between them is the whole ballgame.

How the whole thing was sold

When the campaign kicked off, the administration framed it as a swift, surgical, preemptive strike to eliminate threats before they metastasized. The pitch rested on four pillars:

Ending the nuclear breakout. The headline justification: Iranian enrichment had climbed toward weapons-grade, diplomacy had stalled, and only overwhelming strikes on hardened enrichment sites could stop a nuclear-armed Iran.

Gutting the missile and drone arsenal. Officials promised to “raze Iran’s missile industry to the ground” — production plants, assembly sites, coastal radars, deep silos — to protect Israel, the Gulf states, and U.S. bases.

Reopening the shipping lanes. The campaign was cast as a definitive break of the asymmetric stranglehold on the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz: destroy the mine-layers, the fast-attack boats, the anti-ship missile sites, restore free transit.

Severing the “Axis of Resistance.” By decapitating command-and-control and IRGC leadership — up to and including strikes reported to have killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei himself — planners meant to paralyze the network arming regional proxies and re-establish deterrence across the theater.

Every one of those pillars rested on the same buried assumption: that Iran would fight the war America wanted to fight. It didn’t. It never does.

Where the assumption collapsed — in real time

This is the part that would be almost funny if it weren’t so grimly on schedule. You don’t have to speculate about how the American plan would fail against Iran’s doctrine. You can just read the news, month by month, and watch it fail exactly the way the history books said it would.

Decapitation didn’t paralyze anything. The theory was that hammering central command and senior leadership in the opening waves — even killing the Supreme Leader — would trigger collapse and quick concessions. Instead, the succession happened almost immediately, the state kept functioning, and lower units kept fighting on their own initiative. No mass defections, no regime implosion. Which is exactly what a deliberately decentralized system is built to do: survive its own head being cut off. If you designed your entire military tradition around not depending on a single command node, then decapitation is the one attack you’re immune to — and the Americans led with it anyway.

You can’t bomb a network that isn’t centralized. Fixed factories, bases, and radar sites took real damage. But loitering munitions, mobile launchers, small boats, and drifting sea mines don’t need monolithic infrastructure. They run out of rugged terrain, caves, small ports, and commercial trucks. Iran has kept the pressure on the Strait regardless of how many fixed targets came down. Airpower alone can’t neutralize a threat that was designed from the start not to present a target.

The nuclear program was set back, not ended — and the bomb-grade material is now off the books. This is the pillar the whole war was sold on, so it’s worth being scrupulous about. The strikes did real damage; I’m not going to pretend otherwise. By mid-2026 the IAEA assessed that Fordow had been wrecked, that Natanz’s enrichment halls were inoperable, and that something on the order of 22,000 centrifuges had been destroyed — for the first time in two decades, the agency said, Iran had no identifiable industrial route to weapons-grade uranium. That is not nothing, and the strong version of the administration’s case lives right there. But the thing that actually matters — Iran’s stockpile of roughly 440 kilograms of uranium already enriched to 60 percent, a short technical step from weapons-grade — was not destroyed. Most of it is believed buried in the tunnel complex at Isfahan, and no one outside Iran can confirm it, because Tehran threw the inspectors out and the IAEA stopped all verification inside the country in early 2026. The material didn’t vanish. It went dark. And as Rafael Grossi, the agency’s director general, has kept repeating, you cannot bomb away the knowledge of how to enrich — Iran could spin the cascades back up in a matter of months. “Obliterated,” the word from the podium, is doing work that the inspectors can’t verify and the physics doesn’t support. You can flatten the buildings. You can’t flatten the program; you can only scatter it somewhere you’re no longer allowed to look.

The escalation math favors the cheap side. The stated goal — reopen the waterways, restore deterrence, end it in weeks — depended on Iran accepting defeat under conventional air and naval dominance. But when the other side’s entire strategy is low-cost denial and coastal harassment, there’s no knockout to land. Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and choked global oil flow to a fraction of normal. Months in, the “swift, surgical” operation had become an open-ended blockade with a carrier rotation now scheduled into 2027, punctuated by on-again-off-again ceasefires that keep collapsing. A campaign pitched as a matter of weeks became a maritime and air commitment with no clean exit — which is the single most predictable outcome in the entire Iranian playbook.

And that’s the thing. None of this should have surprised anyone. It’s not that Iran outsmarted us. It’s that Iran did the same thing it has done to every bigger, more centralized enemy for two thousand years, and we walked in as if we’d never heard of it.

Iran didn’t “shift” strategy — they never had another one

The framing I keep hearing is that Iran changed its approach mid-fight, pivoting to attrition once conventional resistance failed. I’ve studied enough history to doubt that badly. Iran didn’t improvise asymmetric warfare under pressure. It’s the only game they’ve ever played against a bigger, more centralized enemy — and they’d have been fools not to plan for it from the first day.

Think about what they were watching. They fought Iraq nearly to the death in the 1980s, then watched the United States take that same Iraqi military apart twice with shock and awe. No one in Tehran looked at that and concluded, “let’s meet the Americans head-on.” They looked at it and built a force explicitly designed not to. And the striking thing is how old that instinct is. Persia and modern Iran have reached for the same playbook — strategic depth, decentralized forces, asymmetric attrition — against nearly every superior centralized power they’ve ever faced.

Carrhae, 53 BCE. Crassus invaded the Iranian plateau with seven legions, the most fearsome shock army of its age. The Parthian general Surena refused to fight it hand-to-hand. He sent mobile horse archers to circle the dense Roman formations and shoot from standoff range, with camel trains hauling fresh arrows so the barrage never stopped. Crassus’s legions were annihilated — roughly twenty thousand dead, ten thousand captured — without ever landing a decisive blow. Standoff fires against a heavy force that couldn’t close the distance. Sound familiar?

Antony, 36 BCE. Mark Antony came back with something like a hundred thousand men. The Parthians simply wouldn’t give him the big battle. They raided his supply trains, picked off his foraging parties, and forced a catastrophic retreat through the mountains that cost Rome roughly a third of its army.

The Persian Gate, 330 BCE. Even as the Achaemenid Empire collapsed, the commander Ariobarzanes showed what Iran’s terrain does to a superior army. At a narrow canyon, a small entrenched force held off Alexander the Great’s elite phalanx and cavalry for weeks with rolled boulders and missile fire from the heights. Choke points don’t care how good your army is. Neither, it turns out, does a 21-mile-wide strait.

The Safavids vs. the Ottomans, 16th century. After Shah Ismail I got wrecked by Ottoman gunpowder and janissary firearms at Chaldiran in 1514, his successor Shah Tahmasp absorbed the lesson: the Safavids couldn’t win a set-piece battle against the Ottomans. So he stopped trying. When Suleiman the Magnificent launched massive invasions in 1534, 1548, and 1553, the Safavids stripped the countryside bare, poisoned the wells, and melted into the Zagros. Independent cavalry harassed the baggage trains and garrisons. Suleiman took empty cities — Tabriz among them — but could never force a decision or feed his army through the winter. It ended at the Peace of Amasya in 1555, on terms Tahmasp could live with.

The Tanker War, 1980s. This is the direct ancestor of what we’re watching now. Facing an Iraqi military armed by both Cold War blocs, Iran built the IRGC as a force operating independently of the regular Artesh. In the Gulf, they pioneered swarms of cheap speedboats, RPGs, sea-skimming missiles, and drifting mines to harass oil tankers. When the U.S. stepped in with Operation Earnest Will, Iran didn’t fight the cruisers fleet-to-fleet. It laid mines — and one of them, reportedly a design worth about $1,500, nearly sank the guided-missile frigate USS Samuel B. Roberts. Swap the mine for a Shahed and you’ve described the front page.

Across two thousand years, the axioms never change:

1. Never fight on the enemy’s terms. Avoid the decisive set-piece battle where their shock power rules.
2. Trade space and time for attrition. Absorb the first blow, pull the enemy into brutal geography — mountains, deserts, narrow straits — and exhaust their logistics.
3. Weaponize cheap, mobile dispersion. Use decentralized units to hit the enemy’s vulnerable high-value targets: supply trains in antiquity, tankers and shipping lanes today.

This is not obscure knowledge. It’s in every war college syllabus. So the failure here was never ignorance of Iran’s doctrine. It was something worse.

The proof they knew: Millennium Challenge 2002

We don’t have to guess whether the Pentagon understood this. It proved it did, in the most expensive way possible, and then refused to believe itself.

In 2002 the U.S. ran the largest wargame in its history — Millennium Challenge 2002, a roughly $250 million exercise. Retired Marine Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper commanded the Red Team, standing in for exactly this kind of Persian Gulf adversary. He threw out the Western script. He used motorcycle couriers instead of radios to dodge signals intelligence, passed attack signals from mosque loudspeakers, and launched coordinated swarms of small boats, suicide craft, and low-flying cruise missiles.

Inside 24 hours, he sank sixteen major U.S. warships — a carrier, cruisers, amphibious assault ships — inflicting what would have been around twenty thousand casualties.

And here’s the tell, the thing that should be taught in every strategy course as a cautionary tale: the exercise directorate didn’t absorb the lesson. They stopped the game, refloated the sunken fleet, and forced Van Riper to follow a scripted, conventional plan so the Blue Team could win the way it was always going to win. They ran the experiment, got the answer, and edited the answer.

So when three carrier groups steamed into the Gulf in 2026 to fight a cheap, dispersed, drone-and-mine enemy, it wasn’t a leap into the unknown. It was a rerun of a movie the Pentagon had already screened for itself twenty-four years earlier — and walked out of before the ending.

Why they do it anyway

If they knew, why keep doing it? Three forces, and none of them is stupidity.

The precision-strike hangover. American procurement and careers are built around high-tech, high-dollar platforms — stealth bombers, Aegis, standoff missiles. That breeds a quiet conviction that enough sensors, satellites, and precision munitions can overcome geography and dispersion. It turns war into an engineering problem: destroy X radars and Y depots and the system collapses. It never quite reckons with the fact that a truck-mounted launcher and a drifting mine don’t need a system to close a strait.

The political straitjacket. Any serious planner knows that actually stopping coastal drone launches, rocket fire, and mine-laying in a narrow littoral means putting infantry ashore to clear and hold the coast. But no president or Congress wants to sell the public an amphibious invasion and open-ended occupation of a mountainous country of 85 million people. So the realistic option is politically dead on arrival, and everyone reaches for the “clean” alternative instead — a standoff air and naval campaign — and gambles that overwhelming firepower will force a psychological collapse before the enemy’s cheap, patient response drags it out. The blockade is that gamble. As of this writing, it’s losing.

The wish overriding the record. From the Peloponnesian War to Vietnam to Afghanistan, when strategy is built around what leaders want to hear instead of what the adversary has actually done for centuries, the ending is almost always the same: the promised weeks-long campaign curdles into an attritional stalemate.

So, an idiocracy?

“Idiocracy” implies these people are dumb. They’re not. That’s the maddening part. The Pentagon war-gamed this exact scenario, watched a retired Marine sink its fleet in an afternoon, and documented the whole thing. The planners can quote you Carrhae and the Tanker War in their sleep. The knowledge isn’t missing.

What’s missing is the institutional humility to act on what they already know. Bureaucratic incentives, domestic politics, and technological optimism keep conspiring to whisper that this time — with better sensors, better missiles, better resolve — the friction of war and geography and a stubborn enemy can be engineered away. It never can. It didn’t for Crassus, it didn’t for Suleiman, and it isn’t, right now, for us.

That’s not idiocy. It’s something more frustrating and more human: knowing the precedent and walking into it anyway. When you can see the whole thing coming — from Carrhae to the Persian Gate, from Vietnam to Millennium Challenge 2002 — watching leadership stroll into the trap their own predecessors mapped is like watching a car crash in slow motion, with a driver who read the accident report that very morning.

Maybe that deserves a worse word than idiocracy. I’m open to suggestions, because my imagination is not up to creating a strong enough word for what I’m watching, short of swearing.

See also: Essays · The Mandates of Conflict

Part of the Triad of Stewardship’s Standalone Essays. Companion pieces: Forgiveness and Its Limits (forthcoming) · The Mandates of Conflict · Criminal Justice.