The real fragility of the United States in n this war does not lie in an absolute lack of means, but in the widening gap between strategic ambition, available material resources, and the ability to sustain a long conflict. The problem appears first on the logistical and economic level: American interceptors and defense systems cost ten, one hundred, and in some cases up to one thousand times more than the drones and missiles used by Iran. This means that the ratio between expenditure and effectiveness is being reversed. Washington may still preserve technical superiority, but it pays for it at such a price that long-term sustainability becomes increasingly difficult. When the response costs infinitely more than the attack, superiority itself risks becoming a trap.
The military-industrial complex no longer produces only power: it mainly reproduces itself
To understand this crisis, one must go back to the origins of the American system. The military-industrial complex took shape between 1939 and 1940, when the United States realized that its traditional peacetime military structure was far too small to confront a world war. Its original function was simple and formidable: to transform a great economic power into a war machine capable of mobilizing immense resources in a very short time. This had already happened during the American Civil War, when a tiny army was expanded into a mass force, and it happened again during the Second World War against Germany and Japan. But over the decades the mechanism changed its nature. Eisenhower’s warning in 1960 was not only about the danger to public liberties. It was also about the possibility that the military-industrial complex would stop working primarily for battlefield effectiveness and begin working for its own reproduction. That is exactly what now seems to have happened.
In this interpretation, the Vietnam War marked a turning point. From that moment onward, a growing part of the defense apparatus no longer aimed first at producing truly decisive systems, but at generating profit, prolonging programs, expanding funding, and creating new rents. The most obvious examples are the F-35 fighter and the stealth destroyer Zumwalt, initially imagined in large numbers and ultimately reduced to a token force. They became symbols of an industry that no longer builds primarily to win wars, but to keep financing itself. This is not a technical detail. It is the sign that the logic of rent has overtaken the logic of effectiveness.
Industrial rent is devouring strategy
The political mechanism supporting this drift is just as important. Senior officials and decision-makers move constantly between the Pentagon, government departments, and major defense companies. When administrations change, they return to private industry, then re-enter public institutions to shape laws and procurement once again. In such a circuit, the effectiveness of the weapons being purchased becomes secondary to the preservation of the system’s interests. The problem is therefore not only military. It is institutional. War becomes subordinated to an architecture of rent, where the imperative of performance comes after the need to protect industrial, political, and electoral balances.
At this point the industrial problem becomes a strategic one. How can a real war strategy be devised if the material means are insufficient not because they are bad, but because they are too scarce, too expensive, and too slow to produce? American systems may be excellent, but if they are not available in sufficient numbers and if they absorb disproportionate resources, they end up weakening the capacity to endure. Modern war no longer rewards only absolute sophistication. It also rewards sustainability.
The American illusion of the short campaign
From this comes the illusion that the confrontation with Iran can be resolved through a relatively short bombing campaign, as if striking hard for long enough would be sufficient to break the enemy’s political will. The implicit model is Serbia in 1999: bomb, wear down, compel surrender. But the comparison is deeply flawed. Serbia was emerging from ten years of war, had limited capabilities, and above all was not able to strike deeply into the territory of the attacking powers. Iran, by contrast, has the means to attack hostile infrastructure, possesses immense territorial depth, a population of around ninety million people, and has prepared for this kind of pressure for years.
To believe that seventy days of raids, or even one hundred, would be enough to bring about Tehran’s collapse is to misunderstand both the scale and the nature of the conflict. This is the decisive point: Belgrade could defend itself, but it had almost no capacity to bring the war into the territory of its aggressors. Iran does. It can strike infrastructure, raise the costs for its adversaries, and impose a war of attrition. That is why the promise of a quick war looks increasingly like fantasy. The timelines keep changing: four days, then a week, then ten days, then two months, then one hundred days. But when the timetable constantly expands, the real message is simple: there is no coherent plan, only improvisation corrected step by step.
The regionalization of the conflict and Hezbollah’s return
The crisis, moreover, does not remain confined to the Washington-Tehran axis. The war has already become regional in practice. Hezbollah has returned to direct confrontation with the Israeli army, and that alone is enough to shatter the illusion of a limited and rapid operation. What we are facing is no longer a simple bilateral duel, but a crisis capable of involving Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and the entire space of Shiite and anti-Israeli regional projection at the same time. In such a scenario every linear calculation collapses, because the actor under attack does not respond only with its own means, but through a strategic depth patiently built over many years.
The false shortcut of internal civil war
A second illusion is added to this deadlock: the illusion of political decapitation and internal destabilization. The idea is simple enough: strike the top leadership, encourage civil war, and use minorities and peripheral groups as leverage to break the Islamic Republic from within. But here too the analysis is severe. Decapitation is not enough, because in a country of ninety million people leadership can always be replaced. Killing leaders does not destroy the structure. A state of that scale does not dissolve automatically under aerial pressure alone.
Even more fragile is the assumption that the Kurds can be used as an instrument of fracture. The historical warning is precise. In 1991, Iraqi Kurds were encouraged to rise against Saddam, only to be left exposed to repression. The message is obvious: to repeat a similar strategy on the Iranian side would be to sell the Kurds a promise that could end in disaster. The context is even harsher today, because the Iranian army still appears intact in manpower and perhaps more determined than ever. If Kurdish groups were to escalate the conflict, they would find themselves confronting not a collapsing state, but a military apparatus hardened and radicalized by external aggression.
The Baluch factor and the opposite effect of external aggression
The same logic applies to Iranian Baluchistan. Even where tensions and open conflict with the central state exist, there remains the possibility that, in the face of foreign aggression, even hostile elements may choose national solidarity. This is a classic mechanism, often underestimated in the West. External pressure, rather than disintegrating a complex state, often compels its fragments to close ranks. War does not automatically weaken a regime. Sometimes it gives that regime the legitimacy of survival. In this sense, American strategy risks producing the exact opposite of its declared aim: instead of opening internal fractures, it seals them.
Turkey: the silent pivot that can change everything
This is where Turkey enters the picture, not as a marginal detail but as one of the hidden pivots of the entire crisis. Any attempt to use Iranian Kurds as a destabilizing lever would sooner or later collide with Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The reason is clear. Ankara cannot accept that the Kurdish question be turned into a geopolitical instrument capable of setting the region even more on fire, because such a development would have direct consequences for Turkish security. In that sense, the Turkish factor is not just a diplomatic variable. It is a strategic limit imposed on Washington and Tel Aviv.
Turkey may remain a rival of Iran on many fronts, but that does not mean it is willing to accept others redrawing the Anatolian and Mesopotamian space by instrumentalizing the Kurdish issue. Ankara can therefore converge tactically with Tehran whenever the goal is to prevent an explosive file from becoming the detonator of an uncontrollable regional transformation. This is a major point. The conflict with Iran is not defined only by declared allies and enemies, but also by the calculations of regional powers that refuse to let dangerous precedents take root.
Why Erdogan would not remain neutral
There is an even deeper strategic calculation. Erdogan may well understand a broader message: after Iran, the next potential target could be Turkey, then Egypt, then Algeria. Whether this hierarchy is perceived as real or simply as an implicit threat, the political effect is the same. Ankara cannot look at Iran’s destruction as an automatic advantage, because it may see in it the precedent for a future coercive reshaping of the entire region. At that point Turkish calculations change. If the conflict against Tehran is interpreted as the first act of a broader offensive aimed at reorganizing the Middle East by force, then Turkey is pushed to restrain escalation rather than support it.
Moreover, Erdogan maintains a working relationship with Vladimir Putin. This adds another geopolitical layer. To irritate Ankara is to risk strengthening tactical coordination between Turkey and Russia on an issue directly affecting the stability of the Middle East and the Caucasus. A war designed to isolate Tehran could thus produce the opposite effect, drawing closer actors who do not want to be next on the list and who see Iran’s survival either as a barrier or at least as a precedent that should not be allowed to collapse too easily.
The final conclusion: there is no strategy, only forward escape
The conclusion is stark. What emerges is not a grand American strategy, but a sequence of improvised adjustments. Timelines shift, objectives expand, the promise of a short war recedes, while the industrial system supposed to sustain the war appears consumed by costs, inertia, and rent-seeking. Militarily, Iran is not a target comparable to Serbia. Politically, decapitation and internal destabilization guarantee nothing. Regionally, Hezbollah and allied networks turn the confrontation into an expanded crisis. Geopolitically, Turkey can become a decisive blocking factor against any destabilizing use of the Kurdish issue.
What remains, then, is the final paradox. American rhetoric continues to present war as a mission of liberation, as though bombing, striking, destroying, and destabilizing were the inevitable price of saving others. But when a power begins to justify devastation as the condition of freedom, it means it has already lost contact with the political reality of the conflict. That is why the American problem today is not a lack of force. It is something far more serious: the disconnection between the force it possesses, the strategy it claims to have, and the real world in which it seeks to impose it.
Washington strategy, Iran war, US military industrial complex, Middle East geopolitics, Turkey role, Erdogan strategy, Hezbollah conflict, war of attrition, defense industry crisis, American power, regional escalation, Kurdish question, Baluchistan, Israel Iran conflict, US foreign policy, strategic failure, military logistics, geopolitical analysis, war sustainability, Pentagon, defense procurement, industrial rent, regime change, regional security, Russia Turkey relations, coercive diplomacy, aerial warfare, strategic depth, Tehran, Middle East crisis
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