Iran Is Teaching Us Something About the American War Machine

By David Wallace-Wells

“History is littered with great power militaries that looked in the mirror every day and told themselves that they were the best in the world — until they got popped,” the former Pentagon official Michael Horowitz told me. “This is the time where danger lights should be flashing for a great power like the United States, if we take history as a guide.”

As soon as the first day of the war, when Iran retaliated against unprovoked American and Israeli strikes by targeting civilian infrastructure around the Gulf, the battlefield of this conflict looked different. It didn’t take long for Iran to deploy its........

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