Does War With Iran Mean No War With China?
How the “munitions tradeoff” misleads us about strategy.
There’s an idea circulating that the US can’t fight a war with China because fighting a war with Iran is draining US capacity. As the US runs out of “standoff weapons” like Tomahawk cruise missiles and missile defense interceptors in the Middle East, it must borrow from its inventory in Asia and the Pacific—and that is eroding America’s ability to defend Taiwan.
Fallacious on so many levels. The US does have a serious munitions problem. It is militarily overstretched. And the US can’t win a war with China over Taiwan.
But 1) the “munitions tradeoff” is mostly overblown and 2) every step in the above line of reasoning is wrongheaded. This is not the way to think about war with Iran or China.
Hey, friend! You might have noticed that I’m offering more of Un-Diplomatic without the paywall; I’m trying to keep as much as possible public. But to do that requires your help because Un-Diplomatic is entirely reader-supported. As we experiment with keeping our content paywall-free, please consider the less than $2 per week it takes to keep this critical analysis going.
What is the Munitions Shortfall?
We can approach the question of a munitions shortfall in terms of offense and defense.
Offensively, the US had at most 3,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles at the start of the war. In the first 72 hours, it launched 400 of them, and by now it’s probably launched closer to 1,000. And that’s one of the reasons why military nerds are getting alarmed. An indicator of strain is that the US has switched to JDAMS, and they have many thousands of those, but JDAMS are not as good for a bunch of reasons.1
So technically, the US has the ability to continue bombing for a long time, but time is not on America’s side. Why? Because A) there are fewer good targets to hit after two weeks of war and a lot of Iranian military capacity is underground, B) the switch in type of munition is likely to lead to less accuracy, and C) the US campaign against Iran is not countering the Iranian strategy, it’s just destroying stuff. And you can’t win unless you defeat the strategy of the other side…the US is not doing that.
On the defensive side of the balance, the US way of war always has an unfavorable “cost-exchange ratio,” and time is never on the side of the military with an unfavorable ratio. One missile interceptor costs between $1-$3 million but an Iranian kamikaze drone costs between $30k-$100k. So the more the US exchanges blows, the more unfavorable the situation becomes.2 America’s Gulf oil monarch allies are running out of missile interceptors. And so is the US—more on that in a second. There is a question about “magazine depth” (how many munitions), and some of the hawk-ier analysts assume the US can outlast Iran because surely our magazines have greater depth. But they’re wrong.3
Iran’s Strategy
Iran’s goal is much clearer and more modest than America’s goal—regime survival, with three major lines of effort right now.
One is attacking US allies in the Gulf—they’re very vulnerable, they’re not used to being attacked, they have limited defensive inventories, and they depend on Western financial capital, which doesn’t want to be in a war zone. By squeezing the Gulf monarchies—which have become key to Trump’s various kleptocratic initiatives—the bet is that they will in turn persuade the White House to back down.
The second line of effort is attacking the energy market—make the world feel the pain of war so that Western governments stop fighting the war. Accordingly, Iran is attacking oil fields in Saudi Arabia and fuel depots across the region, but it’s also mining the Strait of Hormuz. And mine-clearing operations take a long, long time to complete.
The third line of effort is degrading US and Gulf ally defenses against missile attacks so that as we get deeper into the war Iran can dramatically escalate the costs it imposes. More than 90% of Iran’s offensive so far has been with drones, not missiles. Iran has somewhere between 80k-100k drones dispersed throughout the country. It’s using them to strike missile defense radars and deplete US/Gulf missile interceptors in an unfavorable cost exchange ($2m million interceptor v. $100k drone). Once US radar detection has weakened and interceptors have become preciously rare, then Iran can start using more of its ~2k missiles, which can cause much more destruction than the drones.
Iran is executing its strategy perfectly and the US has no strategy; it just has a goal of destroying the Iranian state itself. That means America can’t win without genocide or nuclear war—I worry a lot about both of those prospects. The scenario we’re currently in is the most likely scenario I can imagine for nuclear use in the real world—god help us if that happens.
The Fake Iran-China Tradeoff
So what about the tradeoff between Iran and Taiwan/China? It’s not what it seems.
US Patriot and THAAD missile defense systems in South Korea are being relocated to the Middle East right now. South Korea’s president protested having these missiles removed but he also said he can’t stop the US.4 The popular response to this among “strategists “is that America’s robbing Asia to pay the Middle East, fighting this illegal Iran war at the expense of war with China.
At best, that’s an overblown claim. Missile defenses in South Korea are primarily about North Korea, not China. The THAAD radar system could be useful for some incoming Chinese missiles in a war, but Korea has not authorized America’s military presence to be used for a war with China—this is a sticking point in the alliance that’s two decades old, still unresolved. But the point is that US military presence—including missiles defenses—in South Korea has marginal value in a war with China.
Another reason the tradeoff here is less than meets the eye is that most US missile defenses in Asia and the Pacific are not in Korea, they’re in Guam, Hawai’i, Japan, and at sea. Most US missile defense in the region is on dozens of Aegis destroyers, and moving those assets would take so long to get to the Middle East that it wouldn’t happen unless the Pentagon thinks it’s gonna be fighting a multi-year war against Iran and we truly don’t have the weapons for that.
So the deployment of Korean interceptors is the news headline, but the moves to watch for in Asia are moves of US ships at sea and moves of interceptors and radars from Guam. That’s not happening yet and if it did it would mean the end of the world anyway because we’d be liquidating everything to fight an apocalyptic forever-war with Iran.
But what about the claim that America’s Asia strategy is falling apart?
There is no Asia strategy, there are only preparations to fight World War III with China, and that’s an unwinnable war no matter how many interceptors and Tomahawks you have. The US has no commitment to defend Taiwan. It can’t win a war for Taiwan even if it wanted to, and China is inhibited from an invasion of Taiwan by the enormity of costs it would involve regardless of whether the US is a belligerent in it.
If You Build It, War Will Come
I mention the relative stability of Asia and the unwinnability of war with China because we’re thinking about all of this the wrong way. If you look at war with Iran and you think the problem is that we don’t have enough standoff weapons, then your “solution” is going to be to supercharge the defense industrial base and plow money into missile production.
But American aggression has only been restrained by its capacity limitations; growing US capacity grows US depravity. We have proof.5 And that’s as true for ICE raids as it is for foreign invasions and bombings. If the US had 10x the number of standoff weapons that it currently has, it would not be any closer to winning war with Iran but it would be much closer to genocide or civil war in Iran.
And not that anyone seems to care but you would be much poorer if the US had 10x the missiles it has now. The potential for economic security in America is being choked off by the permanent war economy, and as Trump pours $1.5 trillion into the national security state, it does so by sacrificing the working class and creating yet another financial crisis.6 More missiles and more funding for the defense industrial base worsens every problem plaguing modern society; it’s not a solution to anything. Oligarchy needs the permanent war economy, the permanent war economy needs permanent war.
So there is a munitions problem, but its solution isn’t more munitions; it’s changing foreign policy and converting the permanent war economy. And that’s a fight for democracy, not a fight against foreign bad guys.
Hey, friend! You might have noticed that I’m offering more of Un-Diplomatic without the paywall; I’m trying to keep as much as possible public. But to do that requires your help because Un-Diplomatic is entirely reader-supported. As we experiment with keeping our content paywall-free, please consider the less than $2 per week it takes to keep this critical analysis going.
JDAMs are dumb bombs that retrofit with a guidance system, it falls to the earth, and uses GPS to find its target. JADMs are easily stopped by electronic warfare; jam the signal and the bombs miss their target. You also can’t deliver a JDAM unless you’re pretty close to your target, so they’re not a “standoff munition.” Also, fwiw, if we’re using JDAMS at scale, we almost certainly have special forces boots on the ground deployed to direct lasers at targets that the JDAMS can then follow.
And that’s assuming we’re succeeding in intercepting Iranian drones. In the opening hours of the war Iran managed to blow up a missile defense radar that cost a billion dollars.
Iran has at least 88,000 combat drones scattered across the country, has some underground manufacturing capacity to keep producing more, and it might get still more reinforcement from Russia or China…and this is in addition to Iran’s missile stockpile. If we fight a war of attrition with a regime that has this much “magazine depth,” there will be nothing left of America or the world.
A possibly apocryphal quote attributed to Henry Kissinger: “It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal.”
25% of America’s nearly 400 wars since its founding have occurred after the Cold War, during its global primacy. There never was a Pax Americana.
Over the past 60 years, periods of military buildup in the US have always been followed by global financial crises because of the asset bubbles that resulted from slack capital in the global system being rerouted to and concentrated in the US. It’s one of the many hidden costs of US military primacy. See especially Thomas Oatley’s A Political Economy of American Hegemony.
As always, Van, very helpful comments. But I'm so sorry we have to talk about any of this! I fear the suffering will just increase.