Throughout my 41 years in the United States Army and my four years as the secretary of defense, I routinely held after-action reviews. Our military never stops learning and never stops asking: What worked, what didn’t, and how do we get better? That ensures America’s military remains the best and deadliest fighting force in the world.
The U.S. military must also learn from the war with Iran, which is already one of the most consequential conflicts in decades. Although the strategic outcome is still far from certain, our service members are performing with exceptional professionalism and skill. We can already start drawing some key lessons.
The Iran war is strikingly different from America’s other recent wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan. The Iran war looks far more like the Russia-Ukraine war, with its proliferation of inexpensive, one-way attack drones, rapid advancements in surveillance and targeting, huge use of munitions and the expansion of the battlefield well beyond traditional military targets.
During my time as the secretary of defense, our military and civilian leaders studied the lessons from Ukraine carefully — and began to prepare for this new kind of war. We bought thousands of expendable autonomous systems that U.S. forces are now employing, invested in counterdrone technology and artificial intelligence and expanded joint defense production with allies. We supplied air-defense systems to Ukraine and stress-tested the capabilities that are now defending our Gulf Arab partners’ airspace from Iranian missiles and drones. And we pushed hard to expand and accelerate our munitions production, something the Trump administration has rightly worked to continue.
These were deliberate investments to prepare for the kind of fight we are now in. In a few short weeks, the Iran war has already made clear that the United States needs to do much more.
First, we urgently need a more affordable, more comprehensive approach to countering the drone threat. Iran and its proxies have launched thousands of drones since this conflict began, targeting U.S. assets and bases and catching our Arab partners in the Gulf off guard. Despite the Pentagon’s best efforts, the cost exchange remains way out of whack: The advanced interceptors we use to fend off these drones cost vastly more than the weapons they defeat, and take far longer to produce, too.
Accelerating the development of less expensive interceptors is part of the solution, but it won’t be enough. We need a truly layered defense, one that begins with disrupting drone supply chains and factories, and then uses electronic warfare to stymie drones from afar, deploys interceptor drones and other solutions to defeat drones at a lower cost and reserves pricey advanced missiles for the threats that truly demand them. We must also change how we design, supply and position our forces, including dispersing them more widely and fortifying our bases and infrastructure — both at home and abroad.
We should learn from the Ukrainians, who have been fighting Shahed drones made in Iran for three years. Tehran’s support for Russia’s war has allowed it to test its own uncrewed weapons, which have proved effective at evading and overwhelming conventional air defenses. Ukraine has already deployed some 200 air-defense personnel to the Gulf to share hard-won tactics and technology, and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine pointedly showed up recently in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan. We should encourage more of this kind of battlefield cooperation among allies and partners.
We also need wider and deeper stockpiles of munitions and the industrial capacity to rapidly replenish them under pressure. The Ukraine war showed that missiles and interceptors can be burned through faster than anticipated. The Iran war has confirmed that. Boosting production takes more resources, but also deeper partnership with allies: co-producing weapons, sharing production lines and aligning procurement so that the free world’s collective arsenal can be sustained in a prolonged fight. No one country, not even America, can carry that burden alone.
Finally, the Iran war has quickly demonstrated that the economic dimension of modern conflict cannot be treated as secondary. Iran does not need to defeat our outstanding military to impose enormous costs; it only needs to make the Strait of Hormuz too dangerous for tankers to transit. My team saw a version of this challenge when Houthi attacks disrupted Red Sea shipping for months, forcing ships to be rerouted around Africa at great cost. The Strait of Hormuz shows that problem at a far greater scale.
We must think seriously about how to deepen our strategic resilience and keep the global economy functioning when an adversary’s strategy hinges on disrupting it. That question is even more urgent when one considers the possibility of a major conflict in the Indo-Pacific, where China’s capacity to impose economic pain far exceeds Iran’s. One key part of the answer is to ensure that the burden is shared through a broad allied coalition, as it was in past U.S.-led campaigns to defeat ISIS and help Ukraine defend itself against the imperial aggression of President Vladimir Putin of Russia.
The Iran war is a real-time case study in the changing character of modern warfare. It shows that the lessons of Ukraine were not an anomaly. Making the institutional changes to learn these lessons will be hard — but as the Iran war has already demonstrated, doing so is not optional.
Lloyd J. Austin III served as the secretary of defense from 2021 to 2025 and is the chief executive of Clarion Strategies. A retired four-star U.S. Army general, he led American forces in battle in Iraq and Afghanistan and served as the commander of U.S. Central Command.
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