Why America is running out of missiles

It is a strange thing indeed that among the countless stories about America’s shortage of long-range weapons — a truly crippling scarcity that now both limits President Trump’s strike options against the Islamic Republic, and might weaken responses to other looming threats — I have not found one that raises the most elementary question of all: why?

Why was Iran attacked with scarce and expensive BGM-109 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles — costing around $3 million each — rather than ordinary gravity bombs dropped by fighter-bombers? Accuracy cannot be the answer: with so-called “JDAM” guidance kits, regular bombs become very accurate indeed, and they are still simple enough to be mass-produced cheaply.

Nevertheless, US forces had launched 850 Tomahawk missiles against Iran by 27 March this year, amounting to almost half the country’s global stockpile. Though the Pentagon has since announced a huge $22.9 billion contract for more Tomahawks, it also used a number of air-launched AGM-158 missiles, some of whose models can fly up to 1,000 miles, and which cost as much as $1.6 million apiece. The Army’s Precision Strike Missiles are yet more expensive.

What makes these missiles so costly is their great virtue: they are all so-called “stand-off” weapons, which can safely be launched hundreds of miles from their targets. This means an attacker’s aircraft can remain outside enemy air space, where they could be exposed to detection by radars, and then to interception by air-defense fighters and surface-to-air missiles. There is simply no way of producing such missiles cheaply. They need powerful rocket propulsion and complicated electronic guidance to fly such vast distances and hit their targets successfully.

All this is very straightforward, and hardly a novel development in the evolution of warfare. As early as 1940, Winston Churchill’s seemingly instinctive understanding of the technology meant that Britain famously had 22 “Chain Home” early-warning radars along its southern and eastern coasts. Without them, RAF fighter pilots would have had to rely on chance encounters with German aircraft, and could not possibly have resisted the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain.

From there, the bombing of Germany itself was soon enabled by the war’s greatest British invention: the “cavity magnetron” that made airborne radars effective. Herman GĂśring, the monstrous but highly intelligent head of the Luftwaffe, quickly recognized it as a decisive technological advance, one condemning German bombers to defeat. That is when he stopped opposing the very first “stand-off” weapons: the V1 and V2 missiles, launched from the Continent, the first fiendishly difficult to stop and the second unstoppable without surface-to-air missiles.

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Yet unlike Britain in the Forties, Iran today has no effective radar detection or tracking network. Its badly outdated radars are easily deceived by the advanced electronic countermeasures installed in every US combat aircraft. Otherwise, they are simply destroyed by anti-radiation missiles or blinded with barrage jamming.

Moreover, even if US aircraft arriving to bomb Iran were somehow detected and tracked, the Islamic Republic has no effective way of shooting them down. Its combat aircraft are badly outdated, encompassing, among other things, some ancient Chinese fighters; French Mirages flown from Iraq on the eve of the 1991 war; and a number of highly celebrated but in fact grotesque homemade modifications of the US F-5, which entered service half a century ago. Iran does, perhaps, still have a few once-powerful F-14 Tomcats — but none of these aircraft could survive an encounter with the US Air Force’s powerful F-15 fighter-bombers.

Nor can Iran’s forces shoot down US aircraft with surface-to-air missiles. Its few extremely old US-made Hawk anti-aircraft missiles are thoroughly outdated; their wiring is seemingly very palatable to rats. Iran also has some Russian anti-aircraft missiles, acquired recently but dating back to Soviet times. They were well-engineered during the Cold War and would potentially be very capable even now — if, that is, they had not long since been left behind by US and Israeli electronic countermeasures. This crippling shortcoming also applies to Iranian attempts to update Soviet-era anti-aircraft missiles, and to efforts to develop homegrown alternatives. That leaves so-called “MANPADS”: small, shoulder-launched missiles, and which can sometimes work at extremely short range.

Though they are greatly celebrated by the regime as colossal technological achievements, Iran’s anti-aircraft missiles, and the rest of its air defenses, are so ineffectual that despite flying several thousand sorties over the country, including right over Tehran, the US has lost only two aircraft, both to Russian-made MANPADS. The Israeli air force, for its part, has lost no manned aircraft whatsoever. It did admittedly lose a Hermes 900 unmanned reconnaissance drone — promptly recovered and publicly displayed in Tehran amid self-congratulatory festivities from the Revolutionary Guards, which only revealed their inability to defend the country against the attacks they had provoked.

The broad meaning of all these details is easily summarized: because of Iran’s backward air defenses, there was no real need to use scarce and expensive “stand-off” weapons to target the country. Normal gravity bombs with cheap guidance kits would have been sufficient to do the job — with the notable exception of Ayatollah Khamenei’s deep-underground command headquarters. For that, Israel relied on the world’s most advanced air-launched weapon, its own Blue Sparrow, which flies straight up through the atmosphere before descending to its target with extreme precision and tremendous kinetic force.

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Nor, of course, are the implications here limited to Iran and the Gulf. Having needlessly used so many stand-off missiles to target Iran, US inventories are worryingly low in the event of the “Chinese contingency”: the invasion of Taiwan that Xi Jinping, unlike his predecessors, refuses to rule out. Any Chinese assault might start with subversion, with the activation of Chinese agents in Taiwan’s armed forces, but amphibious landings would have to follow — against which Tomahawk missiles would be the prime US weapon, alongside local anti-ship missiles.

But having examined all these technical details, we nonetheless arrive at something else entirely, a much more intractable problem than any munitions shortage could ever be: a fundamental change in the entire American attitude to war, which I described as “post-heroic” as far back as the Nineties when its first signs emerged.

This amounts to a truly drastic shift. What started with a proper striving to limit the casualties of war by every means possible — starting with prudent statecraft to avoid war in the first place, and extending to prudent tactics — has now devolved into the current predicament: whereby the US must spend billions on extremely elaborate stand-off missiles so as to further reduce risks to its pilots, which were already very low to begin with, against a vainglorious and incompetent Iranian enemy.

The risks of flying over Iran are evidently so low that they are almost comparable to the everyday risks that ordinary passengers face on some lesser Third World airlines, some of which I could not avoid using on a regular basis to reach my Amazonian ranch (not without some trepidation, amid habitual delays, frequent cancellations, and several very hard landings, only one of which ended in a veritable crash).

Nor is the drastic decline in the tolerance of combat risks by the Pentagon chiefs — and even more by the White House — limited to the US Air Force. From the start of the current round of fighting, at least 4,000 82nd Airborne troops, and some 6,000 Marines, arrived at American bases in the Gulf. They could have physically secured the desert islands and islets in the Persian Gulf all the way through the Straits of Hormuz, preventing expedient mine-laying and rocket attacks by Revolutionary Guards. They represent the Islamic Republic’s only remaining threats to the traffic of oil tankers, liquified natural-gas vessels and fertilizer bulk-carriers that affect the world economy, because every one of Iran’s warships and submarines were sunk when the conflict began.

“The risks of flying over Iran are so low that they are almost comparable to the risks ordinary passengers face on some lesser Third World airlines”

In the event, the White House was so frightened by the possibility of even minimal combat casualties that it made no attempt to keep the Gulf secure and the Straits open, thus allowing Iran to claim victory even to this day. To an extent, then, we should be thankful for the Air Force’s reliance on expensive stand-off weapons: at least it prevented the White House from imposing some abrupt and unilateral ceasefire, merely because a handful of pilots were lost.

It might be tempting to attribute America’s drastic post-heroic turn, in which it was preceded long ago by almost all its Nato allies, to Donald Trump’s dismal performance as a war leader.

To begin with, he refused to explain why the war had to be fought, even in a few grammatical phrases read before the TV cameras. From there, he abruptly accepted a ceasefire justified by a very dubious “memorandum of understanding”, concocted by his war-averse and frankly isolationist vice president; his son-in-law; his favorite wheeler-dealer Steve Witkoff; and Pakistan’s practiced deceivers, who rightly view Americans as easy marks, having obtained billions in aid to allow US trucks to reach Afghanistan while at the same time supporting the Taliban.

Then Trump abruptly reverted to fighting, again without any explanation. Again, that would have required the immense sacrifice of reading four or five grammatical phases before the TV cameras. But, most unfortunately, America’s “post-heroic” turn cannot be blamed on the easiest target; if it were really all Trump’s fault, I could not have predicted that historic transformation in a series of lengthy Foreign Affairs articles decades ago.

After excluding any straightforward political explanations, and ruling out a sudden upsurge of pacifism — that perfectly coherent humanistic creed which has never prevented a single war — I was left with biology: specifically the fall in female fertility, which had already declined to 2.2 in 1994 and is now down to 1.57, well below the 2.1 replacement level.

That, in turn, means that very few families now have more than one boy, or girl for that matter, making each one too precious to sacrifice. In case anyone is in a hurry to move on to other things, viewing the refusal to fight wars as a solution rather than a problem, there is that other effect of the baby shortage: the biological decrepitude of the entire nation as it relentlessly ages. That, it goes without saying, is a challenge that no amount of Tomahawks can correct, and which our rulers absolutely refuse to address.