During the 1979-1981 hostage crisis, a defiant Iran starkly demonstrated the limits of American power.
Forty-five years later, it is doing the same thing, although in vastly different circumstances.
Back then, a time when the post-Vietnam military was at a low ebb, we didn’t strike Iran and a long-shot rescue operation ended in abject failure.
Now, with the US military at its most proficient and professional in history, we have inflicted punishing blows against the regime but still haven’t been able to impose our will, in part because we are running low on the munitions necessary to prosecute the war.
Not only is this embarrassing; it is dangerous.
If Operation Midnight Hammer — last year’s lightning strike against Iranian nuclear facilities — demonstrated the prowess of the US military and sent a useful deterrent message to our enemies, the Iran War is now doing the opposite.
We’re running low on missiles and interceptors in a months-long conflict with a beleaguered second-rate power.
What would happen in drawn-out conflict with a major adversary?
President Donald Trump has posted a thunderous denunciation of leaks to the media about our low weapons stocks, and they are indeed irresponsible.
But this problem is a matter of public record and has been tracked by outside organizations.
At the end of July, the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated that out of an arsenal of 2,330 Patriot interceptors prior to the Iran war, we had roughly 800 remaining.
We were down to roughly 250 THAAD interceptors from 450 at the start of the war.
On top of this, news organizations are reporting that we are almost out of ATACMS — a ground-launched precision-strike missile — and Precision Strike Missiles, the newer, longer-range successor to ATACMS.
This isn’t comforting at a time when a war with China could be in the offing.
Even before Operation Epic Fury, a war game involving a conflict in the Taiwan Strait conducted by CSIS had the United States running out of key munitions in days or weeks.
What happened? This is a crisis a long time in the making.
As defense analyst Mackenzie Eaglen of the American Enterprise Institute has warned for years, skimping on the acquisition of munitions was an easy way to meet constrained Pentagon budgets, and we relied on optimistic scenarios about potential wars to justify chronically insufficient production.
For some understandable reasons, we also emphasized sophisticated missiles and interceptors over “good enough” systems.
This led to Iran, for instance, forcing us to use highly expensive, difficult-to-replace interceptors against cheap, bulk threats from drones.
All this means that we’ve shot off ordnance that it will take us years to build again.
According to media reports, we’ve used about half our supply of Tomahawk cruise missiles, when we’ve been manufacturing fewer than 100 a year.
We need to put missile production on a wartime footing, and leverage hungry new defense firms to produce cheaper precision missiles and interceptors at scale.
In World War II terms, it’s the difference between the easy-to-maintain and mass-produced Sherman tank and the exquisite and powerful, but ultimately impractical, German Tiger.
Whatever advantages the Tiger had in armor and punch, you’d still rather be the US with 50,000 Shermans than the Germans with 1,500 Tigers.
The Trump administration has been talking the right game, and there have been encouraging moves.
It has signed agreements to acquire 10,000 cruise missiles over three years at a cost of a few hundred thousand dollars each, far less than a Tomahawk at more than $2 million.
Wars always bring surprises. It should have been a shock to no one, though, that contemporary military conflict is largely missile warfare, or that we’d have trouble sustaining prolonged hostilities given that we started out with inadequate stocks.
The American way of warfare is often to mess it up before adjusting and getting it right.
The course correction here should be considered the most urgent priority of US national security.
X: @RichLowry
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