Military Arithmetic

A scrimmage in a Border Station
A canter down some dark defile—
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail

These words of Rudyard Kipling, from his 1886 poem “Arithmetic on the Frontier,” have come to my mind often in the past few weeks of war, and never more than at the end of March, when an Iranian Shahed drone costing perhaps $20,000 destroyed a $700 million American AWACS plane on the ground in Saudi Arabia.

Of course, this sort of dispiriting military arithmetic is nothing new to the United States. Since World War II, weaker opponents deploying cheap weapons against our far more expensively equipped armed forces have stymied us repeatedly. Sometimes, these opponents have been states with their own armies. Sometimes they have been irregular, guerrilla forces. Both have had remarkable success against us, despite the fact that our military budget has sometimes come close to equaling those of all other major powers combined. While the US has managed to impose its will in small, targeted operations, such as Grenada (1983), Panama (1989), and most recently Venezuela, in actual wars since 1945 we have had a humiliatingly bad record.

But the form of the equations has changed over the past few years, in ways that the United States has been very slow to acknowledge—the current administration in particular. And this failure is contributing directly to the current confusing stalemate in the war against Iran, while auguring badly for the future as well.

For much of the post-World War II period, our most frustrating experiences came with the irregular, guerrilla forces, from the Viet Cong to Al Qaida in Iraq and the Taliban. This sort of conflict fit into a pattern that extended back at least as far as the early nineteenth century, and Napoleon Bonaparte’s painful struggles against irregular opponents in Russia, in the Tyrol, in Calabria, and most famously in Spain (where the word guerrilla—Spanish for “little war,” was first popularized).

The US also incurred humiliation in wars against smaller states, notably North Korea and North Vietnam. In both these cases, the smaller opponents either prevailed or fought us to a draw in large part thanks to their toleration of sacrifice on a horrific scale. Estimates of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong dead against the US range from 440,000 to 670,000, with another 400,000 to 630,000 civilian dead, out of a total Vietnamese population of roughly 40,000,000. The US lost fewer than 60,000 soldiers out of a population five times as large.

More recently, however, the US had seemed to have done considerably better against smaller states. In 1990-91 we won perhaps the most clearcut American military victory since World War II over Iraq, in response to its invasion of Kuwait. In 2001 we invaded Afghanistan, quickly occupied its capital and overthrew its regime. We did the same in Iraq in 2003. We had far more trouble with the irregular resistance in both countries than with their organized armed forces.

Given this shift, it is no surprise that our current, hubris-choked administration believed that it could defeat Iran and force the collapse of its regime without even breaking a sweat. Indeed, there is little indication that President Trump and our grotesque “Secretary of War” have any real understanding of the military frustrations that the US has faced over the past generations. Pete Hegseth has repeatedly claimed that our defeats only came about because American forces had turned “woke,” or that cowardly civilians forced them to fight with one hand tied behind their back.

He should have been playing closer attention to the Soviet Union/Russia, and its own very mixed military record since World War II. Our superpower rival met with defeat at the hands of irregular forces in Afghanistan in the 1980’s. But the Russian military did manage to overcome a small state quite handily its brief war against Georgia in 2008. And in 2022, most observers predicted that its full-scale invasion of Ukraine would result in a similar, quick success.

If those predictions proved disastrously wrong, it was initially because of Russian incompetence, and the desperate patriotic zeal shown by the Ukrainians. Over the four years of the conflict (longer than the Soviet Union`s struggle against the Nazis), the Russians have lost staggering numbers of combatants. Best estimates suggest well over 300,000 killed, and three times that number wounded or missing. The front lines have barely shifted in years, in a pattern weirdly reminiscent of the trench warfare of World War I.

But more recently, the Ukrainians have owed their success above all to their mastery of unmanned mobile weapons systems of various sorts—in common parlance, drones. In March, Russian casualties reached a record level of over 35,000. Still more astonishing is a statistic to which the American media, distracted by Iran and President Trump’s shenanigans, has paid surprisingly little attention: fully 96% of Russian casualties are now being inflicted by these unmanned systems, both ground and aerial.

In one sense, the United States has long understood the increasing importance of these systems. No single individual has had a greater role in preparing the US for future warfare than General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2019 to 2023, and previously the chair of untold numbers of committees and task forces on American preparedness. An article in Foreign Affairs that he co-wrote with Eric Schmidt two years ago began this way: “On the battlefields of Ukraine, the future of war is quickly becoming its present. Thousands of drones fill the skies. These drones and their operators are using artificial intelligence systems to avoid obstacles and identify potential targets.” The article deplored America’s slowness to adapt to this new form of war, especially in development and procurement, but more recently we have stepped up efforts to streamline and accelerate these processes. Even senior Pentagon brass now realize that US military innovation has to look more like a Silicon Valley startup than like the Manhattan Project (my thanks to my friend David Rieff for these links).

The problem we face—and that even General Milley did not sufficiently acknowledge—is that small states can innovate in this way just as effectively as large ones—more effectively, perhaps, especially when their backs are to the wall. For all their industrial might and leadership in artificial intelligence, the US, Russia and China have arguably not led the way with unmanned weapons systems in the current decade. That honor goes to Ukraine and Iran. The Iranians have used unmanned systems in attacks that have forced the US and Israel to expend a huge number of expensive anti-drone and anti-missile systems, and that have also helped close the Strait of Hormuz.

This is the development that clearly failed to register with Trump and Hegseth. Fully believing their own blustery nonsense about their genius, American strength, and previous defeats owing entirely to wokeness and timorous civilians, they assumed they could charge into the Middle East guns blazing and win an easy victory. When that victory failed to materialize, they ranted, tried to negotiate, and have now fallen into a strange, confusing stalemate—a kind of Schrödinger’s War, there and not there at the same time.

Most immediately, their failure has been the result of their own folly and carelessness. But in the long run, it shows that the sort of military arithmetic that has so often worked to the disadvantage of the United States has shifted once more, and not to our advantage. Worth recalling some other famous lines of Rudyard Kipling, from his 1897 “Recessional”:

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!