In its recent campaign against Iran, the United States dominated the skies using its traditional airpower. The U.S. military pounded Iranian targets, conducting over 13,000 strikes. That prowess and devastating firepower did not stop Iran from hitting back. Over the course of the 39-day conflict that began on February 28 and stopped on April 8, Iran launched over 2,200 missiles and 4,400 drones against countries in the region. At least eight U.S. aircraft were destroyed or damaged by Iranian attacks. Multiple U.S. radars were hit, and seven U.S. service members were killed. And at the time of this writing, the Iranian regime remains in place and maintains a stranglehold over the Strait of Hormuz. The United States has not achieved its objectives in the war, even though it is by every metric far more powerful than Iran.

The technological dominance that the U.S. military has long counted on to give it an advantage over competitors is waning. Unlike in past eras, when the United States maintained major leads in stealth and precision-guided weapons, the current age will not afford the United States an advantage in the technologies that are now transforming warfare: drones and artificial intelligence.

The conflict with Iran was the United States’ first taste of a new era of warfare. Emerging technologies are leveling the playing field between Washington and its adversaries. The diffusion of affordable drone technology and artificial intelligence capabilities is allowing smaller states and nonstate actors the chance to punch above their weight. Such adversaries can now hit U.S. rear bases, inflicting casualties and damaging expensive U.S. aircraft. Iranian missile attacks on U.S. bases in the Gulf destroyed one E-3 Sentry early warning aircraft. That loss is even greater than the airplane’s $300 million cost, since the U.S. fleet of E-3 aircraft is now down to only 15 and a replacement program is years away. Iranian missiles struck five KC-135 Stratotanker refueling aircraft, as well as multiple U.S. ground radars.

Drones have transformed not just the dynamics of warfare but also its economics. In the Gulf and elsewhere, low-cost air and naval drones and missiles can take out far more expensive assets. Ukraine used kamikaze drone boats and antiship missiles to eviscerate Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, sinking 13 ships after two years of war and damaging dozens more. A $300,000 drone boat can cripple a navy warship that costs hundreds of millions of dollars.

The United States still has the most powerful military in the world, but it is not yet prepared for a new age of warfare defined by these realities. It needs to produce more low-cost drones and interceptors, and it needs to better adapt to the imperatives of AI competition. Just as the military can’t amass airpower without building planes and can’t dominate the seas without floating ships, it can’t win in the AI age without harnessing data, buying computing power, and learning how best to use AI models. To maintain an edge on the battlefield, the U.S. military must find ways to efficiently assimilate these new technologies. That will require overcoming cultural and bureaucratic barriers within the armed services, forging closer relationships with the private sector, and finding new ways to assess military power. But if the U.S. military does not adapt in this way, it will increasingly find itself closely matched on the battlefield. After decades of dominance assured by its technological edge, the United States will be diminished because it has let its lead perilously slip.

The United States has long relied on technological innovation to gain an advantage over its adversaries. Early in the Cold War, U.S. defense planners counted on nuclear weapons to offset the Soviet military’s superior numbers in Europe. In the 1970s, the United States ushered in the information revolution in its military planning, and advances in semiconductors, computer networks, and satellites gave it a lead in stealth systems, precision-guided weapons, and GPS. These technologies proved invaluable in the 1990–91 Gulf War, when the United States systematically dismantled the Iraqi military. Their effect was even more impressive during the 2003 Iraq invasion, when U.S. forces seized Baghdad in just three weeks. In 2014, the Pentagon launched the “third offset” strategy, which sought to use robotics and AI to make up for the numerical superiority of Chinese and Russian forces. This strategy pushed the U.S. military to harness AI technology emerging from the commercial sector and persuaded U.S. officials that they could cement an enduring technological advantage over adversaries.

But this time, such a strategy will not work. The United States no longer has a discernible advantage in emerging technologies and will not be able to gain one.

Take, for instance, uncrewed vehicles. Cheap drones are widely available around the world, and the United States will not be able to prevent competitors from fielding them in large numbers. Iran has emerged in recent years as a major producer of cheap drones and has supplied thousands of drones to Russia for its war in Ukraine. Based on Iranian designs, Russia has produced tens of thousands more.

In theory, the United States should be able to produce a huge number of these weapons. Low-cost drones don’t rely on any special technology. But in practice, the U.S. military has struggled to field cheap drones in any significant numbers. Ukraine produces four million drones every year, while the U.S. Army is acquiring only 50,000.

Pentagon leaders in both the Biden and the Trump administrations have made the production of low-cost drones a priority, but structural problems have gotten in the way. Small military drones rely on technology originally developed for the commercial hobbyist market, which is dominated by the Chinese company DJI. The U.S. military rightly does not want to depend on military hardware from its chief competitor, so it ends up buying far more expensive U.S.-made drones (which still often use Chinese components).

Compute is analogous to manufacturing capacity in the industrial age.

More damning, the United States simply isn’t good at building anything cheaply, responding quickly, or scaling up rapidly. For decades, U.S. defense production has marched steadily up a cost curve toward ever more “exquisite” defense platforms—military parlance for advanced, expensive, and low-volume weapons. Drones, by contrast, have tilted the military landscape toward low-cost, attritable (or expendable) weapons that can be produced in great quantity.

The United States has been slow to adapt. The Defense Department’s 2023 Replicator initiative aimed to field thousands of low-cost autonomous systems quickly but yielded only hundreds. The current Pentagon leadership has announced plans to expand the production of low-cost drones, committing over $1 billion to produce 340,000 drones by 2027. The army has set an even more ambitious goal of producing at least a million drones by 2028. To achieve these goals, the military will need to deliver consistent and substantial funding to build an industrial base for small drones that does not yet exist at significant scale.

But drone technology is not standing still. Soon, these vehicles will be able to operate with greater autonomy and in closer coordination with other machines. Most drones today are remotely piloted or use simple automation, such as by following designated waypoints or returning to base if they lose the connection to a human pilot. Ukraine has become a testing ground for more sophisticated autonomous features. For instance, many Ukrainian drones have autonomous terminal guidance, allowing the uncrewed aircraft to navigate several hundred meters on its own to the target if enemy jamming breaks the communications link between the machine and the human pilot. Ukraine is also producing long-range strike drones that can travel up to 600 miles and autonomously navigate without GPS by matching images from onboard cameras to preloaded satellite imagery. These innovations will be adopted far beyond Ukraine. More countries and nonstate actors will soon possess similar drones that can hit targets even when adversaries can block communications and prevent the drone from accessing GPS. Drones will be equipped with ever more sophisticated autonomous guidance systems that will allow them to search wide areas and identify and attack targets all on their own.

These advances will change warfare in profound ways. What today are simple drones will become tomorrow’s intelligent swarms: thousands of drones reacting in real time to changing conditions on the........

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