The failure of the US to defeat Iran militarily is the latest proof that decades of industrial atrophy have unseated American military dominance. Unfortunately for the imperialists, they cannot bomb their way back to the top.
Trump and Hegseth insist that they have a “virtually unlimited supply” of munitions. In reality, since the war started, the US has burned through critical munition stockpiles that took years to produce—and the defense industry cannot resupply them any time soon.
Within the first three weeks of the war, the US fired 400 Tomahawk missiles at Iran, burning through 10% of the US Navy’s total inventory. That’s more than they ordered for the whole of 2026. As for defensive munitions, 150 THAAD rounds were used to intercept Iranian missiles and drones in the same period, along with an estimated 1,600 Patriot missiles.
Resupplying this lost stock will take years. Only 600 Patriot missiles are made each year. As for THAADs, only 11 were produced last year. The irony is that many of these multimillion-dollar weapons have been wasted on drones that cost $30,000—and they aren’t even intercepting them effectively.
Each month, thousands of Shahed-136 drones are churned out of Iranian and Russian assembly lines which have been perfected over the course of the Ukraine War. Behind closed doors, the Pentagon admitted to lawmakers that they are “struggling to stop the drones.” US officials have described the performance of their interceptors as “disappointing.”
New footage confirms daily that the Shaheds are often breaking through the interceptors, damaging US allies’ critical infrastructure, and even destroying CentCom’s THAAD radar equipment worth up to $500 million.
Meanwhile, US casualties have piled up. In the first three weeks, 232 US troops were injured, 13 were killed, and 16 aircraft were destroyed.
It’s clear that the US is ill-equipped for modern drone warfare. Its arms industry made billions developing a handful of exceedingly expensive weapon platforms (i.e. toys) that take years to build. Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, etc. now specialize in low-volume, “high-precision” weapons rather than those designed for sustained, high-intensity conflict—the latter of which Iran has feverishly stockpiled.
Recent attempts to kickstart a modern drone program have produced poorly-performing and expensive models. The best one the US has, the LUCAS drone, is actually a knockoff of the Shahed-136, reverse-engineered from drones captured in Ukraine. Once a pioneer in drone warfare, the US is reduced to scavenging battlefields to copy its adversaries’ technology.
Moreover, the US still hasn’t developed reliable anti-drone systems to deploy against the Shahed—something the Ukrainians have had for two years. Zelensky said on March 3 that to his surprise, no one from the White House had asked him for advice. Trump insisted, “We don’t need their help on drone defense. We have the best drones in the world actually.” Three days later, the US quietly accepted 10,000 Ukrainian drones to help intercept Shaheds.
Even if the US really did have “the best drones in the world,” it is incapable of producing them at the scale necessary to compete with Iran, Russia, and China. The biggest defense contractors in the US do have formidable productive capabilities, but they lack the production lines necessary to mass produce cheap drones.
The US does not have factories like Russia or China that push out units of tested, uniform models on an assembly line. For example, the best US-made alternative to the Chinese DJI drone is built by 15 workers in California—by hand. Further, the thousands of contractors that are hired to make US weapons are not organized under a rational plan by the Pentagon. In short, the US arms industry is undermined by the anarchy of the capitalist market and the profit motive of each firm in the supply chain.
China, Russia, and Iran, on the other hand, have each developed cohesive defense industries insulated from the market. China vertically integrates all of its military technology under one state-controlled plan. Russia has joint stock companies that operate under a state-guided plan. Because of the Iraq-Iran War and decades of sanctions, Iran developed its own homegrown weapons industry, going from major weapons purchaser in the 1980s to major weapons producer in the 1990s.
China has another major advantage over the West. For decades, the US outsourced its critical mineral processing to China. As a result, most US drone production is entirely reliant on Chinese produced magnets, batteries, and motors. A single Tomahawk missile requires 18 different critical minerals. If China decided to stop exporting rare earth minerals, the American defense industry would be asphyxiated—as would the rest of US industry. Already, the US is depleting its stock of raw materials to replace the spent munitions and equipment lost in this war.
The US ruling class was once confident it could bully the rest of the world forever. Instead its industrial base was consumed by monopoly profiteering, while its acts of imperialist aggression only strengthened its adversaries. Iran should be the least of their worries. US imperialism’s chief rivals, Russia and China, can see that the Americans are stretched thin.