How Iran flipped the economics of war against US | Fareed's Take

Here's my take. Beneath the daily headline of strikes and counter-strikes in the Middle East, we're witnessing something seismic. 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, according to a CSIS analysis. The UAE 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, 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. For decades, precise, 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. The economics of war are being turned upside down. A Shaheed-type drone often costs around $35,000. A Patriot interceptor costs about $4 million, which would buy over 100 drones.

This is the new arithmetic of conflict. The attacker spends thousands. The defender spends millions. But the revolution is bigger than drones. It's really about a new military architecture. Cheap autonomous systems, AI-assisted targeting,

commercial satellite imagery, resilient communications, integrated sensors, and cyber tools all operating together. The aim is not merely to strike. It is to compress time, to find, decide, and hit faster than the enemy can move, hide, or recover. In an experiment last year, the Air Force said that machines generated recommendations

in under 10 seconds and produced 30 times more options than human-only teams. The old model of military supremacy relied on exquisite systems, magnificent, costly, slow to produce, painful to lose, but they are no longer enough by themselves. The side that wins tomorrow's wars may not be the one with the single best platform, it may be the one that can field enough good platforms, cheaply enough, quickly enough,

and network them intelligently enough. Lots of good stuff will beat small numbers of great stuff. Ukraine remains the great laboratory of this new age. Out of necessity, it has built a model of adaptation at wartime speed. Ukraine's Sting interceptor drone costs about $2,000, flies up to 280 kilometers per hour, has downed more than 3,000 shahids since mid-2025, per its manufacturer, and is being produced

at more than 10,000 a month according to Reuters. One Ukrainian test pilot said that learning to fly it takes only three or four days for those who can already operate drones. And then there is the software side. Ukraine has opened access to its battlefield data so allies can train drone AI which will boost pattern recognition and target detection capabilities. Defense Minister Mikhailo Fedorov says the country now

possesses a unique array of battlefield data that is unmatched anywhere else in the world, including millions of annotated images gathered during tens of thousands of combat flights. In other words, the war's most valuable output may not just be hardware, it may be data. This is why the implications stretch far beyond Ukraine and the Gulf. Ukraine's top commander says Moscow is now producing 404 Shaheed type drones every day and

aims eventually for 1,000 drones a day. By contrast, Lockheed Martin produced about 600 Patriot interceptors in all of 2025 and hopes to scale that to 2,000 by 2027. Remember that's 1,000 drones a day versus 2,000 interceptors a year. The contrast tells the story. The problem is no longer simply technological sophistication.

It is industrial scale, software integration, and the speed with which lessons from the battlefield are turned into mass production. There are many deeper implications of this revolution in military affairs. With drones out there, the battle is everywhere and soldiers will not get a respite. With human beings far from the battlefront, war might become easier to contemplate but also easier to deadlock.

And with these deadly weapons easy to produce, terror groups, drug cartels, and criminal gangs can wage the kind of war that was once the domain of organized armies with arsenals. In 1991, the Gulf War taught the world that advanced technology could make war precise. In 2026, Iran is teaching the world something more consequential. Precision will now be mass-produced. The countries that prevail will not simply be those with the finest platforms. There will be those that can

combine small numbers of exquisite expensive weaponry with vast numbers of cheap drones. Human judgment will over over time, give way to computer algorithms. That is the future of war, and it's arriving faster than most of us imagined. I'm back with Danny Sentonowitz, who served as head of the Iran branch of Israel's military intelligence. He joins me from Tel Aviv.

Danny, you say that one of the possible probable outcomes of this conflict will be an Iran that decides to race toward building a nuclear weapon. It's never done that before. It's always stopped short. It's always stayed kind

of one or two feet before that red line. Why do you think they'll now make a dash for it? Yeah, in order to understand that, let's a little bit do a recap on the Iranian nuclear strategy. Until 2003, Iran wanted to build a nuclear bomb. 2003, Khamenei, the father, forgo that option, and actually tried to bring Iran to a threshold state on enrichment without crossing the Rubicon. He was very afraid of that.

That is why he issued a fatwa, a religious order, saying that you cannot develop a nuclear bomb. When he's dead, the fatwa is dead, meaning that what we have now is a young, radicalized leader, name of Mujtaba, the son, wants to avenge the death of his father, his mother, his wife, his mother, his wife, his daughter, and he has behind him, he's controlled by the RGC, the most extreme element in Iran.

And they see right now that they need something else in order to build the deterrence. Not missile, not everything related to Hezbollah or Shiite militias, no proxies, will defend Iran in the future. They need to have the ultimate card.

And with the 440 k kilos for 60 percent that is buried in Isfahan or elsewhere, they have the ability to do so, at least reaching the fissile material of 90 percent. So I'm saying that the war that actually meant to prevent Iran from crossing the threshold actually might be the war that actually will push Iran beyond the threshold towards a nuclear

bomb.

Danny, let me ask you this. There are reports that President Trump was given some briefings, for example, by the Defense Intelligence Agency that the Strait of Hormuz would be closed. And apparently he seems to have either not cared or not prepared adequately. But Israel has been preparing for this conflict for a long time. Israel knows specific tactical intelligence perfectly. But how is it that Israel seems to have misread the regime, misread the response?

If Bibi Netanyahu did tell Donald Trump that this regime will collapse, you know, that you will have people welcoming you on the streets. How did Israel, did Israel get this wrong? What explains Netanyahu's eagerness and his calculation that this regime would collapse within a day or two?

I think the problem wasn't operationally. I think the IDF and Central Command working amazing together have operation achievement that we shouldn't underestimate that. But the problem was strategically. I think Netanyahu and Trump really thought that if you decapitate Khamenei, the regime will collapse.

They didn't think what will happen next. So this is why we don't have off-ramps. We don't have a strategic way out of this escalation. So I think it goes back to the flawed understanding regarding Iran. And I want to add one other thing regarding that. Intelligence-wise, you can know where the leaders are.

You can know where their deputies are. But sometimes you can see the trees, but you cannot see the forest, meaning that even if Israel has an amazing operational intelligence on Iran, I don't think that strategically we understand how the Islamic Republic is actually working. And this has led to our problematic situation right now in the war itself.

And so what do you think is the most likely outcome, Danny, at this point? Is it an escalation or is it Trump taking an off ramp?

I think that we probably we know in the next 48 hours if President Trump will decide to attack the infrastructure in Iran, it's going to get ugly in a way things are going to get escalate. And I don't think I find it very hard to see the end of it, because things will be very bad in terms of the influence on the economical market, on the oil prices, and things like that, because once Trump will hit that, then gloves are off, no red lines, and everything will escalate.

If he'll decide to hold off and rethink about that, maybe there is a way for off-ramp, maybe through some Fed people or countries that actually will mediate between Iran and USA, for example, Oman or Qatar, maybe some sort of political off-ramp. I think we are getting close to this decision, but if President Trump will decide to hit

I think we are getting close to this decision, but if President Trump will decide to hit the infrastructure, there is no way back from this decision.