Why does the U.S. military seem stymied in the war with Iran?

AUGUST 19, 202612:18 PM ET

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Dave Davies

44-Minute Listen

TRANSCRIPT

Defense analyst Stacie Pettyjohn says while the U.S. military is facing long-range missile shortages, prolonged deployments and vacated regional bases, Iran is building cheaper weapons quickly.

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DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

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 5 1/2 months into the war, the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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: It's great to be here.

DAVIES: You know, I'm interested in how you thought this war might unfold when it began, you know, February 28 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?

PETTYJOHN: Well, when you look historically at operations that have focused on using airpower - 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 airpower 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 U.S. 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 airpower - 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.

DAVIES: There's been a lot of reporting that this conflict has depleted supplies of critical munitions among U.S. 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 Hagseth at a 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?

PETTYJOHN: Yes, they are absolutely credible for particular types of weapons. I think you can holistically say that the U.S. 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 U.S. has lots of those. They have lots of glide bombs. They have lots of shorter-range missiles and rockets.

Where they have shortfalls 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.

DAVIES: Yeah. Patriot missiles cost about 4 million each - that right?

PETTYJOHN: Yeah. I think something like 3.9 is around for the newest variant of the missile, which is quite capable and has proven itself to be very good on the battlefields in both Ukraine and actually the Middle East, just expensive and difficult to make.

DAVIES: Is the concern that the U.S. won't be able to defend its Gulf allies and U.S. bases, or that it'll be less able to launch offensive strikes against Iran, or both?

PETTYJOHN: It's both. They're intertwined. And this is one of the interesting tensions with the situation that the U.S. finds itself in. You know, you can sit back and wait and use either your ground base like the Patriot or the THAAD, or sea-based air defenses - which means they're on one of the destroyers or cruisers in the region - to protect your allies or U.S. bases in the region where U.S. forces are stationed, but those stockpiles are running low, they're finite and they're not going to be replenished in the next two to three years.

The other option is to go on the offensive and begin to pressure Iran again by hunting for its missile and drone launchers. That's been a stated objective of this campaign since the beginning. And it seems like the U.S. has actually had pretty notable success in some ways at this, but nowhere near to the extent to which the administration has claimed. So part of this is a problem that it's just incredibly difficult to find what are often small trucks or sometimes bigger trucks for the larger ballistic missiles that can blend in, that hide. Iran has underground shelters, so they pull them out, shoot, and then move again and go somewhere else to hide, which means you have to be looking constantly at them to actually track their movement and find them and then get a weapon on them that can destroy them. And a lot of the standoff weapons the U.S. uses, like the Tomahawk cruise missile or JASSM, fly slowly, so they're not particularly well-suited for these quick targets.

So going on the offensive and suppressing Iranian missiles and drones or destroying them would require restarting the air campaign at a new level, but the bases in the region have proven to be incredibly vulnerable, and those are bases that U.S. forces and aircraft would have to use because the United States Air Force mostly has short-range fighter aircraft, so they have to be based nearby. They're going to need tankers. And you would have to assume that Iran would be attacking the bases more regularly to prevent the U.S. from resuming this air campaign.

DAVIES: Are there cases where you can see the shortages having an effect on battlefield strategy and tactics - specific cases where the effect is clear?

PETTYJOHN: Well, it seems - and this is just my supposition, but it's clear that the administration is frustrated with this situation and really wants to get out of it. And the president is prone to bluster and making threats, but, you know, past behavior suggests he will follow through on them if it seems like it's going to be at a reasonable cost. And I think right now, the real issue is the costs are too high, so seizing any of the islands, trying to seize any of the territory in Iran, would be prohibitively costly because those pieces of territory are very close to Iran, and there could be missile and drone launchers all over that could easily range them. So U.S. forces would be sitting ducks and would have to be prepared to endure and survive through sustained attacks.

Similarly if you were to think about trying to escort ships through the strait, right? Opening the strait seems to be at the heart of the conflict right now, and Iran is reveling in its newfound power - the fact that it has closed the strait and it has the upper hand. And I think every time the U.S. goes on the offensive, they've realized that Iran has shown that it will retaliate, and so they have to be prepared to defend not only their bases but their allies and partners in the region as well.

DAVIES: We need to take a break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Stacie Pettyjohn. She's a senior fellow and the director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security. We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF TED NASH'S "THE FOUR FREEDOMS (FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT)")

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're talking about some of the challenges the U.S. military faces in the war with Iran with Stacie Pettyjohn. She's a senior fellow and director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security.

Has the United States rotated some of its forces out of the region - some of those that had been used in the initial attacks on Iran?

PETTYJOHN: I don't think it has actually taken any forces out yet. It has been announced that they're going to be moving - one of their aircraft carriers that's been on an incredibly prolonged deployment and a part of the operations against Iran is supposed to leave soon. But they're waiting for its replacement to get on station, since it is sailing from East Asia into the Middle East.

DAVIES: Right. That's the USS Abraham Lincoln. I mean, that's become quite a public controversy, as, you know, there have been reporting of food shortages, broken toilets, moldy showers. And have you heard of issues like that in other parts of the military?

PETTYJOHN: I have. I think this is an incredibly disruptive deployment for many forces, including those on the ground, because the U.S. has essentially vacated the large bases that it would typically, and has in the past, operated from in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, the UAE, because those bases have been attacked so many times. So it's not clear to me exactly where they're operating from. But I know they don't have the usual support and amenities that are provided at these locations and that they're instead working from, living in and moving around in distributed locations to reduce their vulnerability to attack.

DAVIES: That's interesting. So it's not just the length of the deployment. It's the fact that support bases have been damaged, attacked and, in some cases, abandoned.

PETTYJOHN: Basically, yeah. It will be very interesting to see what the U.S. does when this - if this war ever ends in terms of its peacetime presence in the region, because it was heavily concentrated around the Gulf and in those very vulnerable big bases. And it seems like it would be unwise to begin to, you know, bring in large warships to Bahrain to go to port or park big aircraft or even little aircraft - F-35s, tankers, AWACS - at any of these locations because they could easily be attacked at any point. We've already seen that there have been tankers that were hit on the ground, I think, in Saudi Arabia, along with the airborne battle management aircraft, the AWACS. And those are pretty difficult losses to replace in any near term.

DAVIES: Yeah. And I read that there was an early Iranian attack on the U.S. Navy base in Bahrain, which was the headquarters of the U.S. Navy Fifth Fleet in the region. And, you know, that - I guess that's directly contributed to these problems with supporting ships like the USS Abraham Lincoln.

PETTYJOHN: It definitely has. And I think you've seen the Navy has been diverted to other locations that are farther away and harder for Iran to hit. Eventually, they received permission to go to Diego Garcia, the British territory in the Chagos Islands where the U.S. flies bomber aircraft, but there's also a naval base there. But these aren't places that are typical port calls and not where the U.S. typically operates from. So I assume they don't have the stores of supplies that would be needed for the people, let alone the equipment and munitions and different other materials that are needed for replenishment.

DAVIES: Yeah. That's, like, 2,200 miles from the Gulf, right? It's a long way.

PETTYJOHN: It is.

DAVIES: Yeah.

PETTYJOHN: And it looks like Iran fired at it at one point, probably because the U.S. was using it. They previously would send sometimes ships - if not to Bahrain, they would port in Oman. But, you know, the relationship with Oman is a bit fraught right now, and it's - clearly, those locations are also vulnerable.

DAVIES: Yeah. I want to just talk a moment about that relationship with Oman. They were, I believe, according to the ceasefire announced in June, to work with Iran on managing the Strait of Hormuz. The ceasefire, of course, fell apart - officially terminated on Monday. And in a -in an interview on Fox News, President Trump said something to the effect that Oman was a problem that - or that if they get in the way, we'll bomb the expletive out of them. What on Earth is going on here?

PETTYJOHN: Oman is an interesting country that has quietly had a reasonably close relationship with the U.S. and allowed the U.S. military to operate from some bases on its territory since the 1970s. But it also has maintained good relations with Iran. And Oman has been trying to play that sort of mediating role between Tehran and Washington and find some sort of solution that would allow the strait to be reopened because the region's economy is so dependent on it. And that has angered the president because it goes against his claims that the U.S. does control the strait and that it already is open, and he sees it as, I guess, some form of betrayal.

DAVIES: Let's talk about the shortages of these weapons, particularly, you know, the Patriot missiles and the THAAD interceptors. That's an acronym for defense against long-term ballistic missiles, right? Is this a failure of planning by the Pentagon? I mean, why are these shortages occur?

PETTYJOHN: Yes, partially, it is a failure of planning, but that's not the entire reason that they're running short. The Pentagon has a tendency to shortchange munitions buys every year. They're one of the smaller things that is purchased in large quantities, so you can cut and them with intention to buy more next year. And if you go back and look through budget documents, you could see the planned ramp-up after cutting it one year.

But the problem is that happens again and again. So in the budget deals, the services tend to prioritize their big weapons. That is their ships, their aircraft, their tanks, and they would rather buy them, and they'll figure out the ammo later. Well, now we find ourselves in the situation where we don't have enough of these missiles - the air defense ones or the offensive ones - that are incredibly important. And that help protect American service members' lives because they can conduct offensive strikes from far away or defend their bases in the region.

DAVIES: And it's not easy to ramp up production quickly.

PETTYJOHN: No, it's not. And industry is hesitant to do so for good reasons - because year to year, the buys have been incredibly volatile. You find that one year we'll buy zero Tomahawks. The next year we buy a hundred. And if you think about how any business runs and makes a profit, they can't have these big gaps in terms of their ability to sell their product.

And since the defense companies have one major purchaser - that is the Department of Defense - they're beholden to its buys. And that volatility means that they have, you know, production lines that are lying there fallow, which is not profitable and is something that's difficult for them to carry as publicly traded companies - many of them - are. And they'll lose people, the skilled people who work there. So when there's a decision to expand, it tends to take 12 months to two years to actually begin to see an increase in output.

DAVIES: So what is the Defense Department doing about these shortages?

PETTYJOHN: So they are doing a lot. The deputy secretary of defense has made munitions a priority, as it was in the last administration, but clearly enough wasn't achieved in that term. And the main initiative has been identifying about a dozen critical munitions that the Pentagon has issued multiyear procurement frameworks for. That's a really jargony term to mean that they're trying to lay out instead of annually, which is typically they say, we're going to buy 50 Tomahawks this year, and we plan to buy these others this other year, but it's not binding - say, we're going to buy X many for five or seven years, which I think helps to signal to industry that there is going to be sustained investment. The problem is they still have to issue the contracts and actually pass the money for these ramp-ups to begin. And for the most part, that has been taking longer to follow.

So the Pentagon announced Monday that it had reached new contracts with RTX to expand Tomahawk production. So this is the next step that needs to happen. But if you look at the president's budget request this year, the ramp-ups in all of these munitions, how many they're asking to buy, and for how many years are in many instances, six, eight, 14, 20 times what we have bought, typically, in the recent past. And that's going to be a pretty extraordinary ask of industry to expand its production that much.

DAVIES: Right. And even in the best case for the Defense Department, it's not going to get any of these weapons in the next few months, right?

PETTYJOHN: No. The lead time, the amount of time it'll take until a weapon is delivered, is in many instances 2 1/2 to four years. So these aren't going to appear and begin to refill stockpiles for some time, which is why you also see there is increasingly a push for the Pentagon to buy new weapons that it currently doesn't have that are simpler and cheaper.

So the idea is you can buy more of them. They hopefully are easier to produce. So you can sort of tap into that idea of, you know, World War II mobilization. You don't need as skilled of labor. You don't need as bespoke of machine tools to produce these. But this is something that they're just beginning to do. They're looking at having cheap cruise missiles, perhaps a cheap Patriot interceptor that won't be as good as the MSE missile that is sort of the gold standard right now but can provide some of the air and missile defense capability.

DAVIES: We need to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Stacie Pettyjohn. She is a senior fellow and director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security. She'll be back to talk more about the military situation in Iran after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies. We're talking about the military challenges the United States faces 5 1/2 months into the war with Iran. There's been considerable reporting in the American media about the depletion of U.S. weapons stockpiles and the continuing threat Iran can pose to American bases and allies in the Persian Gulf region. Our guest is Stacie Pettyjohn. Pettyjohn is a senior fellow and director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security. We recorded our conversation yesterday.

I want to talk a bit about drones. You know, one of the issues the United States faces is that they have a lot of really expensive weapons that cost a lot and take a long time to produce and are very effective. But as warfare has developed recently, particularly in the Ukraine conflict, people are using smaller, lighter drones to considerable effect. So I wanted to talk about that. You know, we talk about drones. There are all kinds of drones. I mean, some are as big as airplanes and look like airplanes and can be in the air for a long time and go great distances. Some of them are almost as small as the ones we see buzzing around parks and beaches. The United States has kind of focused so far on the higher-end stuff, the expensive stuff, right?

PETTYJOHN: Yes. The Pentagon likes its gold-plated, you know, sort of weapons. And typically, with new weapons programs, it looks to make an improved model of something it already has. So something that's better, that goes faster, that is hard to see on a radar, that has a bigger warhead, goes farther, whatever it may be.

And what you've seen globally is that because of the development and improvements to widely available commercial technologies - things like GPS, things like batteries, cameras - that there are these largely commercially derived drones or one-way attack weapons - they're essentially sort of not-very-good cruise missiles - that have proliferated and that are allowing a lot of actors, a lot of different countries but even some nonstate actors like the Houthis and Hezbollah and some of the Iraqi militias, to launch standoff attacks. And that has been a real shift. And they're doing so at a fraction of the price of any of the U.S. missiles that cost multimillion dollars.

DAVIES: You said standoff attacks. What do you mean?

PETTYJOHN: So they don't have to be very close by the target that they're hitting. I'm excluding the smallest drones right here, which have been incredibly important in Ukraine and in other wars in, like, Nagorno-Karabakh and Libya. But when we talk about the longer-range drones that Iran is using right now to attack U.S. forces in different countries in the Gulf, these go hundreds or a thousand, almost 2,000 miles. And they're basically cheap cruise missiles that, previously, Iran didn't have. Russia didn't have them. They're using them against Ukraine. So if you look at this larger drone and this bigger class, it has provided a new sort of weapon that used to only be available to the United States and really advanced militaries.

DAVIES: And Iran has developed this since the war, or leading up to the war?

PETTYJOHN: Well before the war. It - it's - the drone that gets the most attention is called the Shahed 136. It's a delta-wing drone. It looks like a triangle, can carry about a 100-pound warhead and go over 1,500 miles. And it essentially flies into its target and explodes. And Iran has several different variants of this. It has a slightly smaller one, the Shahed 131. Has the Shahed 101 that goes about 400 miles - only a 20-pound warhead - that a lot of its proxies in Yemen and Iraq have used. And these have provided it with a lot of depth in terms of its ability to reach out and strike U.S. bases and different countries in the region.

DAVIES: And how much do those cost to build - those - the Shahed drones?

PETTYJOHN: The estimates vary. You go from, like, 20- to 50-, maybe $70,000 for a more exquisite variant. The interesting fact is that Iran's now in a position - it gave these Shahed 136 drones to Russia in 2022 when Russia had used up a lot of its more sophisticated cruise and ballistic missiles in the opening months of the war against Ukraine. And Russia learned how to produce these drones. Iran taught it. And it has since improved them. They're called Gerans there. And it has these dramatically improved variants that are still quite cheap and that continue to form the core of the airstrikes that Russia launches against Ukraine every day. They're firing hundreds of them in at a time right now.

DAVIES: So is the United States military moving towards more nimble and inexpensive tactics or - and weapons?

PETTYJOHN: For counter-drone defenses, it definitely is. In 2023, 2024, you'll remember there were a lot of attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq by Iraqi Shia militias using Iranian-built drones. And then there was the attacks on shipping in the Red Sea by the Houthis. And the U.S. military learned through those operations and sort of adapted in real time, where destroyers - the big Navy warships that are out there - instead of firing a Standard Missile-2, which is an expensive interceptor, or a Standard Missile-6, started using its five-inch cannon. And they've begun to acquire specialized munition that's better at getting the drones. The Army, similarly, has started using Coyote interceptors and different types of defenses.

They still don't have enough of these cheaper, more cost-effective systems. One of the most, I think, useful ones that the U.S. forces have found in the Middle East has been using fighter aircraft that are in the sky and armed with relatively cheap guided rockets to shoot down the drones. And the interceptor's cheap, but actually having the aircraft up there flying around is not as cheap, and those aircraft are reliant on those vulnerable forward bases. But they have learned a lot. There's still more to go and a lot more equipment to be procured and training to happen.

DAVIES: You know, there was a story - I think it was in The Wall Street Journal - about some war games in Europe, which - the United States, as I believe, was on one side and Ukrainians were on another side. And the Ukrainians got the better of them because they had gotten so effective and sophisticated at using drones in battlefield situations. You saw this, I assume. What does that tell us?

PETTYJOHN: It tells us that the U.S. military and its NATO allies have a long way to go in terms of adaptation. These are the smaller drones we're talking about here - more like quadcopters and smaller fixed-wing ones that maybe go 20 to 50, maybe 60 miles. And I've heard for years from Ukrainians that when they have left Ukraine to go and be trained by NATO elsewhere that they found the training to be incredibly unrealistic and not reflecting the realities of the battlefield that they'd been on every day. And in part, that's due to restrictions that the U.S. and many Western European countries have about using jamming and electronic warfare in their territories and in their airspace 'cause it can interfere with, you know, civilian air traffic and, you know, your ability to use GPS on your phone - things that make people upset.

But it's also, I think, the scale and the number of drones that are up in the air at any given time in Ukraine on the front lines - these smaller tactical drones. The battlefield's just really saturated with them, and it is very hard to operate as a cohesive unit and to come together. You know, mass forces where you're collectively in the same place to take some sort of offensive action and not be seen. And that's something that I don't think the U.S. military has fully internalized and figured out how to adapt to.

DAVIES: We need to take a break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Stacie Pettyjohn. She's a senior fellow and the director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security. We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're talking about some of the challenges the U.S. military faces in the war with Iran with Stacie Pettyjohn. She's a senior fellow and director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security.

If drone warfare represents, you know, a new way to fight, who is getting it right? Who's best at producing and using drones? Is it Ukraine?

PETTYJOHN: Ukraine is definitely one of the best at producing and using drones and at innovating in terms of how they employ them. In the war against Russia that began in 2022, repeatedly, Ukraine has been the first mover and come up with a new way to use a drone. Like the first-person-view drones, which are the small, really fast quadcopters that are racing drones that have become ubiquitous on the battlefield now. They're one of the most common weapons that causes the most damage on the front lines. And Ukraine innovated the tactic. You've seen them in the Black Sea using drone boats to attack the Russian Black Sea fleet and essentially opening up the waterway so that they can export grain from Odesa. So that has had strategic significance.

And then more recently, Ukraine has built up these longer-range drones that have reached deep into Russia and been attacking oil infrastructure, causing fuel shortages throughout the country and also increasingly isolating Crimea, which has sort of been Russia's crown jewel - what it annexed in 2014 and a key base for its military. But now it's having trouble resupplying it there, and its forces are constantly under attack from long-range air and sea drones from Ukraine.

Russia's also really good, and they have emulated Ukraine in a way and more quickly than I would have anticipated. And what Russia's advantage is is scaling production. And, you know, they're producing more than 6,000 of the Geran, their version of the Shahed, the long-range drones, now a month. And they just have that scale advantage that Ukraine hasn't quite achieved.

DAVIES: You know, it's pretty remarkable that Ukraine could build this new industry while they're under this existential threat and their very capital is being bombed. How did they put this together so quickly?

PETTYJOHN: It was very diffuse, and it still is pretty diffuse. And that's one of the challenges. You have all these innovative people who have gotten into this because it's existential for them. They're under attack. There is an immediate need. So they're willing to try things that might be risky and to explore options that a much more conservative state in peacetime, like the U.S. military, wouldn't do.

But it has meant that there are lots of small, sort of artisanal drone shops. Almost every unit on the front lines has its own drone sort of detachment that manufactures them behind the front lines but that they rely on. So that means that it's just really distributed, and it makes it harder to achieve the economies of scale that, like, the Russians do and to produce as many of the same systems and have everyone trained on the same systems. There's value in it, right? They're probably harder to counter because everybody's not using the same type of drones. They're not using the same type of tactics. But not being standardized also has its downsides.

DAVIES: Is the United States simply too big to produce drones like Ukraine?

PETTYJOHN: Well, in the exact same way that Ukraine produces them, yes. One of the biggest challenges that the U.S. faces in producing small drones is that the U.S. military's required to not use Chinese parts. So they need a friendly nation or non-Chinese subcomponents, and Chinese companies like DJI dominate the commercial small-drone market. They have some enormous share - something like 70% or 80% worldwide. And that means that they have a lot of efficiencies in the way that they produce it and can drive costs down.

And it has dominated the market for so long, and it's so far ahead, and its economies of scale are huge that finding components that are not made in China is really difficult, and they tend to be a lot more expensive. So what happens is that U.S. companies end up making inferior drones because they don't have all the expertise that these Chinese companies have that cost more because they're trying not to rely on Chinese components.

DAVIES: I'll talk about a couple of other issues in the defense world. You know, the depletion of U.S. defensive munitions has raised concerns about its ability to defend Taiwan or deter a military assault on Taiwan from China. How much of a problem do you think this poses for the defense of Taiwan?

PETTYJOHN: It's a huge problem. The U.S.' stated strategy right now is one of deterrence by denial, meaning that it wants to be able to defeat an invasion should China decide to attack Taiwan. And there are real questions whether it could do so, given the munitions stockpiles that it has right now. Before Operation Epic Fury - before we began this war against Iran - the U.S. didn't have enough of critical munitions for that war. When we would run war games, U.S. forces would typically run out within seven to 10 days of long-range maritime strike weapons - so missiles that can sink boats - of air defense weapons, of long-range surface attack weapons - would be running short.

So now that we're facing the situation that the U.S. finds itself in now in 2026, where many of the same weapons that would be needed in a conflict in Asia have been further depleted, it is a bit of a conundrum and, I think, does push the United States to see what it can do more with cheaper variants, whether they're cruise missiles or cheap drones. The problem is still that because of the geography of the Pacific and the distances there, they have to be pretty long-range, so they're not going to be super cheap.

DAVIES: So that's assuming the United States doesn't have these weapons embedded in the island of Taiwan...

PETTYJOHN: Correct.

DAVIES: ...Right?

PETTYJOHN: And that could change. When the U.S. military thinks about defending Taiwan, they plan to fight from bases in Japan, maybe the Philippines, Guam, the Northern Marianas, Alaska, Australia, not on Taiwan proper. I do think Taiwan could make use of a lot of very small, cheap drones to bolster its defenses and its asymmetric strategy.

DAVIES: Have the needs of the United States to move military capability into the Persian Gulf region diminished its presence in Asia and encouraged - I don't know - a different approach from China?

PETTYJOHN: I don't know if we've seen China really respond to the reduced U.S. presence in East Asia, but it definitely has been drawn down. You know, early in the war, I think there were parts of a THAAD system that were deployed to the Middle East. I think some of their weapons stockpiles have been diverted. Now you have the aircraft carrier, and recently, this weekend, President Trump decided to reduce the size of long-planned U.S. exercises with its ally South Korea. I think there have been aircraft deployed to the Middle East as well. So all of that does sort of leave some openings and create a weakness there, but I don't think China's just going to attack Taiwan because the United States is distracted and in another region.

DAVIES: All right. We're going to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Stacie Pettyjohn. She is a senior fellow and director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security. We'll be back after this short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF TERRY SLINGBAUM'S "WATER GAMES - RAVEL RE-IMAGINED")

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're talking about some of the challenges the United States military faces in its war with Iran with Stacie Pettyjohn. She's a senior fellow and director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security.

Another development in Asia. You know, in recent days, President Trump on Truth Social has been saying nice things about North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. On Saturday, he had a post on his Truth Social platform saying, Kim Jong Un and I get along great - exclamation point - with a photo of them from their past meeting. On Sunday, he posted a comment that said, based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un in North Korea, I'm not happy with the fact that the United States has long ago agreed to participate in joint military exercises with South Korea.

And then on Monday, he posted a photo of Kim Jong Un in military garb making a phone call. And then over that we see the headline, in quotes, "Hey, Donald. We cool, right?" What do you make of this sudden embrace of Kim Jong Un?

PETTYJOHN: Going back to Trump's first term, he made a big overture to Kim Jong Un and tried to reach an agreement with him that failed miserably. But I think that the president is so desperate to have a win and to reach some sort of agreement with someone that he sometimes makes these sort of openings. And North Korea seems to be a potential place where he could actually score a victory, I guess, in his view, though it is quite inconsistent because there, the president has also praised South Korea for being a country that's doing more for its own defenses. It's building more, it's expanding its industry and looking to cooperate with the U.S. defense industry.

So there isn't a lot of coherence to the - this administration's overall policy, I think, towards the region. And it vacillates between this personal diplomacy and reaching an agreement with another head of state and sort of what actually is happening day to day and behind the scenes at a lot of more working levels.

DAVIES: Is there any evidence that diplomacy with North Korea has convinced them to curb their nuclear ambitions?

PETTYJOHN: There was an agreement in the '90s that at least temporarily worked, though that's hotly debated, in terms of stopping the North Koreans as they sought to develop a nuclear weapon. But now North Korea has a nuclear weapon. It's a very different situation and one that is much harder to reverse. They - their stockpile has - is projected to have grown fairly significantly. You're not even talking about a handful of weapons - dozens at this point. You don't know where they are, so coercive options or forcible removal would be incredibly risky and difficult.

DAVIES: And of course...

PETTYJOHN: And...

DAVIES: This is all after Trump's two face-to-face meetings during the first term, right? I mean, they made a real effort at this.

PETTYJOHN: He did. And, I mean, I think that you've seen that lesson that if you don't have a nuclear weapon, you get attacked, and if you do, you're safer. The - it has been ingrained in many different states that are observing what's happening and could actually lead to more proliferation. The other thing is North Korea has really advanced its missile arsenal. So it's been providing short-range ballistic missiles to Russia, and they've been improving significantly. They're not great, but they're becoming more and more accurate. Its advancements in its medium- and its, you know, intercontinental-range missiles have also advanced. So that makes it a very different threat than it was previously.

DAVIES: You know, we've talked a lot about the war in Iran. We began by me asking you - when this war broke out, did you have an intuition about what might happen? You know, as things stand now in this war, how might this unfold as we go forward?

PETTYJOHN: I'm not sure. I think that, I mean, eventually, at some point, the United States is going to accept that they're going to have to take a deal that gives Iran at least de facto control over the strait so that it's open, which is a worse position than the United States and the world was in before the war began. But there has to be some sort of face-saving measure in there right now.

And it seems like, if you believe reports that are out there - I think it was in The Wall Street Journal the other day - talking about the Iranian regime's position as hardened, and they see themselves in perpetual war. And the Trump administration, you know, desperately seems to want to get out, but also needs something that the president can call a victory. It's in a really tough place. And relying right now on this blockade of Iran is causing more harm to the Iranian economy and to the Iranian people and regime, but they've also suffered a tremendous amount and shown an ability to endure that.

So I don't know if that will work or when it would work, but I tend to find that punishment strategies, if they do have an effect, it's over a long period of time. And it's not clear that the U.S. can win this war of endurance because Iran is likely to be able to rearm faster. It's getting drones from Russia. There have been reports of key precursor materials for rocket fuel that have been delivered from China. And it's in a position where it's building cheaper weapons. And it can do so more quickly than the United States, where we're hearing about the strain on the U.S. force more generally, not just its stockpiles, with the Navy. But I think the other deployed forces are on long tours that are a hardship tour and fairly stressful, and things are going to begin to break.

DAVIES: Well, Stacie Pettyjohn, thank you so much for speaking with us.

PETTYJOHN: It's been a pleasure to be here.

DAVIES: Stacie Pettyjohn is a senior fellow and director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security. We recorded our interview yesterday. On tomorrow's show, we hear from actor Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. Up for an Emmy for his role in Marvel's "Wonder Man," he tells us about playing a struggling actor with a secret, losing the role of a lifetime when Disney canceled the show and his unlikely path to an acting career. He was a city planner until a layoff changed everything. I hope you can join us.

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DAVIES: To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram - @nprfreshair. FRESH AIR's executive producer is Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our engineers today are Adam Staniszewski and Diana Martinez. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show.

For Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.

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https://www.npr.org/2026/08/19/nx-s1-5937516/why-does-the-u-s-military-seem-stymied-in-the-war-with-iran