Most people, especially in the West, still blindly believe the US has superior weapons against its adversaries. Iran is the most technically sophisticated adversary the US has fought directly since the Cold War, the country is a middling power suffocated by decades of sanctions. Iran doesn’t have a real air force or navy. It doesn’t have a modern integrated air defense network (IADN) or significant space assets - still, the US has taken the best weapons in its entire conventional arsenal to the Iran war.

But Iran War is showing that modern wars are moving away from technological superiority to industrial capacity. The high-cost low-density long-lead-time weapon platforms deployed by the US military, at great profit for Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and RTX, are fragile against saturation attacks such as drone swarms and missile salvos.

Facing with swarms of cheap weaponry, interception success rate is irrelevant. When a $4 mil Patriot PAC-3 interceptor is used to shoot down a $30,000 drone, the shooter loses regardless.
The US solution to this vulnerability is not to innovate and build low-cost and massed modern weaponry, but rather to double down on buying more of the same.

The $1.5 trillion war budget proposed by the Trump regime is an affirmation of that corrupt system. The US military has turned into a “glass cannon” power. And it is irreversible.

Meanwhile, 2026 ASPI report concludes that China now leads the research in 69 out of the 74 critical technologies tracked.

https://huabinoliver.substack.com/p/the-us-war-machine-underwhelms-part-abd