The twilight of American power

The ongoing focus on the Strait of Hormuz and the way that Iran has so far successfully neutralized its power imbalance with the American and Israeli military juggernauts has obscured a much bigger potential problem for the United States. Not every country has a vast coastline along a narrow global shipping chokepoint. However, the events of the past nine weeks should prompt planners to ask an uncomfortable question: How long could the U.S. actually sustain a war against a similarly equipped adversary?

The high-tech weapons and defense systems that have rendered Iran virtually defenseless against U.S. and Israeli air power and which have mitigated the (apparently much more significant than was admitted at the time) regional damage from Tehran’s ballistic missiles and drones are fantastically expensive and highly vulnerable to supply chain shocks. As Alvin Camba notes in this insightful article for War on the Rocks, “The majority of guidance systems, radar modules, and electronic warfare packages fielded by the U.S. military run on DRAM and NAND flash chips” are produced with bromine, the overwhelming majority of which is supplied by a single Israeli facility well within range of Iranian missiles. A single direct hit on that facility could destroy the entire global supply chain and throw the tech sector into complete chaos.

This isn’t a post about bromine, something I had never heard of before yesterday, or logistics, something I cannot plausibly claim any expertise in. But it is worth thinking about the implications of the U.S. running short on very expensive munitions and supplies while attacking a comparatively weak adversary virtually at will. The technological marvels that constitute the qualitative edge possessed by the U.S. military have so far been deployed in short bursts against countries that lack the ability to wage war in kind. Their inherent limits as means of coercion even against such countries, on clear display over the past 9 weeks, should really be leading to more difficult conversations in the corridors of power, including what could happen during a longer war with a more technologically advanced country.

The trauma of the pandemic should have made all of this clear. The U.S. recognized that its reliance on a semiconductor industry over which it had very little control was a strategic vulnerability. Americans discovered that the nifty, high-tech systems in even base-model vehicles — tire pressure sensors, automatic braking systems, alerts that go ding-ding-ding if you leave your kid in the back seat, all run on semiconductors, as do components of many common household appliances and devices.

What happens when those supply chains go belly up is that everything gets extremely expensive, and you wait months for your car or your washing machine to be repaired. It might be worth wondering whether all of those sensors are strictly necessary (because it has driven up the cost of both cars and car insurance) in the same way it might be worth wondering whether it would be wiser to invest in $7,000 drones or “hypersonic” missiles that cost a staggering $15 million a pop. Even for a country as large and rich as the United States, resources are not unlimited. The president’s request for an obscene $1.5 trillion military budget is not just a signal of total contempt for the needs of ordinary Americans but a worrisome message about the new costs of war, if the U.S. chooses to wage it using nothing but costly munitions and luxury-model ships and planes.

This is not an argument for more or better or more efficient wars. The American war machine is already much too large, much too easy to use, and has been stripped of any constitutional guardrails for its deployment. But having a wildly expensive military that sucks up the lion’s share of our collective resources and can be deployed at the president’s whim but that also can’t actually win wars does seem like the worst of all possible worlds.’

News and notes

At The Nation, I made the case for why this war is likely to result in the United States taking a massive strategic L even while Trump enlists the right-wing propaganda apparatus to spin it otherwise. The most likely outcome at this point is Iran indefinitely extracting rents from the Strait of Hormuz while agreeing to some kind of short-term limits on enrichment. The only question is really how long we are going to endure an economic crisis before we get there, and how big it will ultimately be.

Also at The Nation, the great Dave Daley and I cautioned everyone not to assume that Virginia was the end of the gerrymandering wars, and then the Supreme Court dutifully eviscerated the Voting Rights Act two days later, opening up a whole new front in “mid-decade redistricting.”

If you’re casting about for great television (imho there’s been an extended lull since the fourth season of Industry concluded on March 1st), I highly recommend heading over to Apple and watching the first two episodes of the horror-comedy Widow’s Bay. Matthew Rhys does his best work since The Americans, and Parks and Recreation’s Katie Dippold delivers a show that is, so far, both laugh-out-loud hilarious and creepy enough to satisfy genre geeks.