America can’t do plumbing right
America’s confrontation with Iran has demonstrated something that military balance sheets tend to conceal: superpower status does not make war easy, cheap, or necessarily decisive.
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America’s confrontation with Iran has demonstrated something that military balance sheets tend to conceal: superpower status does not make war easy, cheap, or necessarily decisive.
The USS Abraham Lincoln is an aircraft carrier, not a floating condominium. But after more than 250 days deployed in support of America’s war against Iran — including an extraordinary stretch without a port call — reports of plumbing problems, supply difficulties and mounting strain among its roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines have produced an inadvertently revealing image of American power.
Abraham Lincoln must be turning in his grave. The world’s most powerful navy now under Donald Trump apparently can’t always get a toilet to flush. That would be merely amusing were it not for the larger lesson.
There’s no debate that the United States remains a military superpower by any conventional measure. It possesses global bases, nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers and the world’s most sophisticated air force.
But America’s confrontation with Iran has demonstrated something that military balance sheets tend to conceal: superpower status does not make war easy, cheap, or necessarily decisive. Washington can destroy targets, yet that is not the same as compelling an adversary to surrender.
The same lesson has been written, in blood and wreckage, across Ukraine.
Russia launched a full-blown invasion in February 2022, expecting, by any reasonable reading of its initial campaign, to overwhelm Ukraine rapidly. Instead, more than four years later, Russia still has not conquered the country.
Ukraine remains sovereign, armed and capable of striking deep inside Russia. Its forces have turned drones into cheap, ubiquitous instruments of surveillance, artillery spotting, and attack.
In July alone, Ukrainian counterattacks and drone operations helped constrain Russian advances. The battlefield itself has evolved into a vast “kill zone,” where even a soldier on foot can be detected and attacked from the air.
Consider this Ukraine’s most important military lesson, and perhaps its most important warning for China.
The old image of war was built around mass: tanks, ships, aircraft, artillery, industrial capacity and manpower. Those things still matter. But relatively inexpensive drones can now find a multimillion-dollar tank, guide a strike against it, and make the battlefield prohibitively dangerous for large formations.
Ukraine has ably demonstrated that a smaller country does not necessarily have to defeat a larger power outright. It can deny victory, impose costs and sustain an extended war of attrition. That ought to give China’s leaders pause.
Beijing’s ambition to bring Taiwan back under its control does not repeal the lessons of modern warfare. An invasion across the Taiwan Strait would be an extraordinarily complicated undertaking against an opponent already studying Ukraine and the Middle East while investing heavily in drones, missiles and asymmetric weapons.
Taiwan’s proposed 2027 defense budget, for instance, puts greater emphasis on self-defense and military modernization. That said, China’s expansionist intent cannot be viewed only through Taiwan.
In the South China Sea, Beijing continues to assert its expansive claims and exert pressure on the Philippines and other neighbors. Recent confrontations around Scarborough Shoal have included Chinese water-cannon use against Philippine vessels.
Then there is the final irony. The three countries most often described as today’s superpowers — America, Russia and China — possess nuclear arsenals capable of ending mankind.
The United States and Russia alone account for nearly 86 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads, according to the Federation of American Scientists, while China is rapidly expanding its arsenal.
Yet the civilization-ending nature of those weapons precisely makes their use so unlikely. The logic of mutually assured destruction, or MAD, developed during the Cold War and reinforced through successive US administrations has — believe it or not — transformed nuclear weapons from instruments of conquest into instruments of deterrence.
So the superpowers are left to fight underneath the nuclear ceiling, where wars are no longer necessarily decided by who has the biggest bomb. A superpower can destroy a country; it is much harder to make that country submit.
The superpower myth is so busted.
