June 9, 2026:
The Iran war has demonstrated the advantages and disadvantages of the American way of war. This led to suggestions about how the American military and weapons production can be modified to avoid the problems encounters in the Iran war. The biggest problem was that the American military nearly exhausted their supplies of missiles and bombs during the brief war that shut down the Iranian military and most of the government.
The war with Iran has revealed the strengths and weaknesses of the American military and proposes how the American military can be modified to more effective deal with future conflicts. The Iran conflict unequivocally revealed the problems with inadequate supplies of missiles to fight a modern war. There were also problems dealing with cheap enemy drones. Chief among these is the Iranian designed Shahed-136 drone. These delta wing airborne cruise missiles weigh 200 kg and are armed with a warhead weighing 30 to 50 kg, most of which is explosives. That’s not a lot because most cruise missiles carry warheads weighing half a ton or more. The Shahed-136 warhead will damage, not destroy, most structures it hits. Shahed-136 is launched using a rocket motor that gets it into the air and then detaches and falls away. To be effective Shahed-136 is launched in swarms, which was the case with this attack. Shahed-136 is propeller driven using a noisy gasoline engine. Aptly described as low, slow and loud, Shahed-136 is easy to detect and shoot down. Over 200 of these drones, as well as nearly 140 missiles were used by Iran during retaliation attacks against American allies in the Persian Gulf.
The recent brief Iran war, which is not completely over, featured the American use of nearly 900 Tomahawk cruise missiles and over a thousand JASSM missiles, JSOW guided bombs, JDAM guided bombs, 70 PrSM/Precision Strike missiles, about 1,400 Patriot air defense missiles, over 250 THAAD ballistic missile interceptors, over 200 SM-3 Navy ship based missile interceptors, and over 300 navy SM-6 missiles that can be used against aircraft and ground targets. All of the missiles cost over two million dollars each. The air defense missiles were much more expensive. American forces used up from half to nearly all of some missile types. It will take a year or two to rebuild stockpiles and the government wants to spend over $70 billion to pay for all this.
These high expenditures of expensive missiles have led to calls for less expensive missiles and drones. One existing example of this is the
GMLRS rockets Ukraine has used so heavily in its war with Russian. Previously American forces had used GMLRS in Iraq and Afghanistan. GMLRS entered service in 2004 and the smaller, truck-based HIMARS launcher became available in 2005. The combination of GMLRS and HIMARS proved very popular with a growing number of export customers.
The 227mm GMLRS is a guided version of the original 1983 unguided MLRS rocket. After the guided GMLRS version came along, Russia and China were quick to adopt the concept of guided rockets. South Korea also developed its version; the 239mm Chunmoo guided rockets that are similar to GMLRS with a range of 80 kilometers. There is a 400mm version with a range of over 200 kilometers. These entered service in 2017 using a launcher similar to HIMARS. South Korea has received orders for Chunmoo from some NATO countries.