America and Iran have two very strategies for fighting this war.

The US is still using the old school approach of building extremely powerful and incredibly accurate flying bombs that will definitely destroy anything they hit and are hard to stop.

Iran is taking a completely different approach. It's building very cheap low-tech missiles and drones that are very easy to stop. But it is building so many of them they can overwhelm its opponents’ defences. Iran's drones still carrying explosives so if they hit something they will destroy it. It's not about preventing the drones from being shot down. Only one needs to get through.

This is now how modern war is fought. These are Ukrainian tactics. Russia continues to massively outgun Ukraine, but after more than four years the Kremlin has only captured 20% of the country and measures its advances in metres not kilometres.

How does Iran protect itself from the US super bombs? It doesn't. You hide. The US can't blow you up if it can't find you so the IRGC has dressed this up in the fancy name, “Decentralized Mosaic Defence Doctrine” (DMD). It’s just a modern version of guerilla warfare.

The US has already blown up a lot of Iranian equipment and killed its leadership. But that doesn’t matter. The principle is the same: you only need one to get through. Even if the US has destroyed 90% of Iran’s weapons, as Trump claims, it is still losing. It needs to destroy 100%.

Tehran’s grand strategy is clearly to spin this war out for as long as it can and inflict massive economic damage until Washington is forced to give up. The Strait of Hormuz is Iran’s big gun in the economic war and currently it has taken complete control of the Strait. Tehran can now arbitrarily decide on what the international oil price will be today by deciding which oil refinery or pipeline to blow up. Trump has painted himself into a corner as he has to end this war before the midterms. Tehran as an open-ended timetable.

The longer the war goes on the more it costs. The cost estimates for the first 96 hours is a whopping $20bn price tag. Now things have slowed down, the war is still costing the Pentagon a billion dollars a day. The cost for Iran is counted in the tens of millions. The US is rich, but it’s not so rich that it can keep this up forever.

I've been writing a lot recently about the asymmetrical war being fought in Iran. What's so stunning is how ill-prepared the US is.

Winston Churchill famously complained that generals are always fighting the last war. The US seems to have made exactly this mistake. It's learned absolutely nothing from the Ukrainian war which highlighted in bold letters that modern warfare not about hi-tech super-expensive munitions that the US has always relied on, but cheap and plentiful drones.

The nature of this asymmetry is becoming clearer and clearer. The US has been following a doctrine of “Command of the Commons” for decades-the deployment of powerful weapons in bases scattered around the world so it can respond to any crisis quickly with overwhelming force. That worked very well during the Iran-Iraq war in the 80s when the US Navy was able to escort Kuwaiti oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz when it was last closed.

Since then, the US has upgraded the technical power of its Navy many times over. And yet this super-fleet has already been defeated by Iran’s $20,000 drones built by a country that has been under the harshest sanctions for more than a decade.

The US Navy is refusing point blank to go into the narrow waterway in the knowledge that one of its multibillion-dollar warships will be sunk by a speedboat packed with explosives or a cheap drone fired from a mountain cave on the coastline.

Trump’s confidence in the overwhelming power of the US navy to defeat anything is a testament to the inertia of the “shock and awe” way of fighting wars. It speaks of an arrogance, or at least a blind confidence, in US propaganda that is simply not borne out by experience. He is making the Churchillian mistake with knobs on. And he is doubling down on this mistake: he has ordered the rest of the US navy to Hormuz – it will arrive in two weeks – on the assumption that the problem can be solved with even more raw power. At the same time he called on Nato allies to pitch (even China!), who all refused and now he is pissed off and said yesterday he will take the US out of Nato. (He can’t. He doesn’t have the authority.)

At the same time, there are 5,000 Marines on the USS Tripoli on its way from Okinawa to the Gulf. That suggests he is also intending to capture the Qeshm Island in the Strait and maybe the coastline. He has been watching too many US war movies. Iran has a population of 90mn people, more than Germany, and a standing army of 600,000 men, just under twice the size of Turkey’s army, by far the biggest in Europe, of which 190,000 are fanatical and very well trained IRGC troops. If the marines land, they will be massacred.

On top of that, is the stunning lack of investment into both US and European defence sectors. We have had the first large-scale war since WWII yet there has been almost no investment follow up.

Since 1991, the European armies have atrophied to the point where France and the UK would struggle to raise even the 10,000 men they propose for the Ukrainian peacekeeping force. The US has only one factory that produces rocket fuel and one that makes explosives – and even that used to have ten production lines during the Cold War. Now it has two. It can’t make enough explosives to continue this war if it goes on for more than a couple of months. We have been complaining about this lack of investment from the start of the second year of Ukraine’s war – for example here and here.

Why was nothing done? I believe the cause is that the West has never seen either the Ukraine war, and now the Iran war, as wars. They are “operations” designed to run down the military capabilities of Russia, and now Iran.

That is behind the “some, but not enough” strategy of supplying Ukraine with enough weapons so that it won’t lose, but not enough so it can win. If you fight a war, you fight to win. But there was never any intention of winning the war in Ukraine. The White House and Nato have always said the end would be a negotiated ceasefire.

The other half of this calculation is that the West wanted to spend nothing on upgrading its own military capability. It’s become addicted to the “peace dividend.” It was only when Trump took office and closed the security umbrella that that thinking changed and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen launched her €800bn ReArm programme last March. Horse. Barn door. Bolted.

The US is also guilty of the same crimes, but in the American case it is due to a persistent belief that its military is already invincible, when war after war shows this is not true – Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya are three examples.

Trump is clearly blinkered by this belief and is doubling down by throwing money at the military: the US defence budget has been increased to a record $962bn. Its more of the same old school thinking: boost the invincibility of an already invincible army and you can do anything you want. The Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) just did a very interesting report where it made the point: “You can’t ramp up military production by presidential executive order decree.”

To understand what's going on: it's not about research and development anymore; it's about raw military industrial capacity and the ability to reload.

We have gone from “Command of the Commons” to “Command of the Reload”. It's not enough to be able to fire the best and most effective missile in the world; it's about being able to reload your gun with another one after it's been fired. You also need to be able to afford to keep firing as many as you want.

Just how badly the US has miscalculated is highlighted by the fact that Israel and the Gulf allies have begun to run out of the PAC-3 interceptor missiles after only three days of fighting. In the US case, of the 35 types of munitions used, the stocks of 14 of them are already at critically low levels, according to FPRI.

Each PAC-3 costs $4mn. For the same money, Iran can build 200-400 drones. The initial volley of the first 96 hours didn’t need to kill anyone or destroy anything. It was simply to force the coalition to use up its best and most expensive air defence ammo to shoot down a lot of very cheap and ineffective missiles. (At the same time, Iran did use its quality missiles to take out the four key THAAD radar stations and a few other high-value targets.)

Now that phase is over, Iran has reduced the volume of missile strikes switching the selective use of its own sophisticated weapons. And they are a lot more sophisticated than the US was expecting. Our military analyst Patrica Marins reports Iran used a Fattah-2 missile yesterday, a hypersonic missile with a secondary engine that in effect allows it to jump sideways. The US doesn’t have anything like this – no hypersonic missiles nor the secondary motors. This is cutting edge military tech.

Where did Iran get technology like this? It has its own R&D and at the start of the Ukraine war was the world leader in drone tech. But it is also part of the informal CRINK alliance (China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea). Both Russia and China have cutting edge hypersonic missiles. It seems the US has been caught napping at the high end of weapons technology development as well.

If the CRINK countries really are cooperating on developing military tech then the US has a very serious problem indeed. And between them, the standing armies of the four countries account for half the number of men under arms in the world.

Another glaring mistake that's been exposed by both the Ukraine war and now Operation Epic FUBAR is the massive underinvestment that's going to Global North militaries over the last few decades. Trump is assuming his sea power will crush the Iranian desert power but it's DMD it's proving to be highly effective

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy must be totally frustrated as Ukraine has developed exactly the technology needed to fight this war. He was in London yesterday pitching his goods to Nato and Europe.

Ukraine has significant industrial production capacity that is sitting idle. It could easily triple its drone production right now with relatively little investment. Recently it's developed what appeared to be highly effective interceptor drones that can hit a variety of targets in a variety of ways. Zelenskiy was boasting in London that they have drones that can bring down missiles, one with a rotating turret that can shoot down jets and helicopters, another that springs out of the sea to hit naval targets, and so on. Ukraine is constantly developing frutti tutti variants of drones with more in the pipeline that are then tested on the battlefield and tweaked.

The US boffins sitting in front of white boards have none of this experience and have the propensity to always go for the expensive end of the spectrum. That is the wrong way to do it. Ukraine’s drones were born in Ukrainian kitchens using only a cheap 3D printer and low-grade electronics scavenged from electronic toys [sic], when the population pitched into the war effort.

Trump refused Zelenskiy’s offer to sell Ukraine tech to the US for $50bn drone deal last year, and rebuffed a more recent repeat offer, saying “We don’t need help” highlighting the inertia in the Western military thinking.

Instead, the US has developed the Lucas drone – a rip-off of the Iranian Shahed. The US has been reduced to copying Iranian technology?

The Polish drone incursion on September 10, when six Russian unarmed Styrofoam reconnaissance drones flew across the country, starkly demonstrated that the EU is also totally unprepared for war with Russian drones. The EU suffers from the same cost-to-kill disadvantage against Russia as the US does against Iran: Poland spent €1.4bn to eventually bring down the Russian drones that collectively cost $60,000 to make.

In response to the Polish incident, the EU is now talking about a “drone wall” but in reality little is happening. Now that Ukraine has lifted its arms export bans, European governments should be pouring billions into expanding Ukraine’s drone production factories to equip itself with this technology. Foreign investments are going in, but they are selective, small-scale and mainly for-profit, not the large-scale industrial investment  needed.

I can’t help concluding that both the US and EU leadership are clueless, whereas the CRINKs are deadly serious and making exactly those large-scale industrial investments into Command of the Reload the Global North need to do.

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