Challenges the U.S. military is facing in Iran

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Dave Davies** (0:14)
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. Throughout the war with Iran, President Donald Trump and his team have touted the success of their punishing airstrikes, asserting that Iran's missile capability has been functionally destroyed, that its munitions factories have been flattened. But there's plenty of recent reporting to suggest that five and a half months into the war, the US military's ability to dictate terms to Iran is increasingly limited. By the depletion of American weapons stockpiles, the threat Iran can still pose to US bases and allies in the region, and Iran's control of the state of Hormuz.
For some insight into the state of the conflict and prospects for the future, we turn to Stacie Pettyjohn, a widely quoted analyst on US defense strategy, military planning, air power, and war gaming. Pettyjohn is a senior fellow and director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security. Much of her current work focuses on the impact of emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, and drones. Before joining the Center for a New American Security, she spent more than a decade as a political scientist at the RAND Corporation. We recorded our interview yesterday.
Stacie Pettyjohn, welcome to Fresh Air.

**Stacie Pettyjohn** (1:32)
It's great to be here.

**Dave Davies** (1:34)
You know, I'm interested in how you thought this war might unfold when it began. You know, February 28th of this year. You know, it seems at this point that President Trump is clearly frustrated. He wants to bring the war to a conclusion in which his goals are met. It is not happening.
When this war began, you know, certain things were apparent. I mean, the United States and Israel had enormous will and capability to inflict enormous damage and death with airstrikes, but were very unlikely to commit ground troops, which would be costly and politically risky. I'm just wondering when this started, what did your own knowledge and intuition tell you about how it might go?

**Stacie Pettyjohn** (2:13)
Well, when you look historically at operations that have focused on using air power, whether that's aircraft or missiles, to try to change the behavior of another state, that there's a lot of debate and little evidence that air power alone normally produces a durable political outcome, and the one that the attacking state is looking to achieve.
In part, because a lot of nations have a deeper interest in the situation than the US does. This is something that is existential to them, whether it would be Milosevic in Kosovo in 1999, or the Iranian regime today. So in these situations, the asymmetry of interest, the fact that the country is only willing to use air power, is normally an indication that they aren't willing to go all in and pay the terrible costs that sometimes might be associated with using pure brute force and deploying ground forces to achieve a goal.

**Dave Davies** (3:19)
There's been a lot of reporting that this conflict has depleted supplies of critical munitions among US arsenals. That's been disputed by the administration. There was a Washington Post report that a couple of weeks ago, Trump confronted Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at the cabinet retreat at Camp David, saying he thought this issue had been addressed, and Hegseth blamed one of his deputies for the problem. The White House press secretary called this 100% fake news.
Do you find these reports credible?

**Stacie Pettyjohn** (3:49)
Yes, they are absolutely credible for particular types of weapons. I think you can holistically say that the US military still has deep stockpiles of even precision-guided weapons, but they tend to be short-range ones that you have to get close to the target to attack it and drop a bomb. Something like the JDAM, we've heard a lot about that. It is a dumb bomb that has a tail kit attached that allows it to be guided by GPS and to precisely hit targets. But you need to be nearby. The US has lots of those. They have lots of glide bombs. They have lots of shorter-range missiles and rockets. Where they have short falls are in some of the more exquisite systems that are longer range, which tends to drive up the cost of the weapon because going farther requires a bigger airframe and there's just sort of compounding costs that occur.
So they're more expensive. We buy fewer of them typically.
And then also on the defensive side, the surface-to-air missiles or the defensive interceptors, such as the Patriot missile or the THAAD interceptors, these are very expensive, sophisticated weapons that are basically able to hit an incoming ballistic missile that's moving incredibly quickly, sometimes maneuvering, and protect whatever it is stationed by. And we definitely don't have enough of those.