Trump is setting US up for a national security disaster: intel officials

After five and one-half months, the United States is still at war with Iran — a war that, U.S. President Donald Trump insists, is necessary to prevent Iran's Islamist regime from developing a nuclear weapon. But Trump's critics are countering that the war is making the regime even more radical. And journalist Fred Kaplan, in the UK-based i Paper, argues that the Iran war is hurting the United States considerably from a national security/military standpoint.

"With every day that President Donald Trump prolongs his war on Iran," Kaplan warns in an i Paper piece, "his country becomes weaker, in at least three ways."

Kaplan goes on to lay out three reasons why the Iran war is so harmful to the U.S. militarily.

"The first is the jarring fact that the United States, by most measures the most powerful nation on Earth, is losing a contest of asymmetrical warfare to a third-rate military power," the journalist warns. "Second is the shocking number of high-tech weapons that it's depleted in this war — more than half of its pre-war inventory of what Pentagon planners call 'key munitions.' This leaves gaps, which will take three or four years to fill, in America's ability to fight future wars that might truly threaten its security interests. Finally, there is the geopolitical effect of those first two disasters."

Kaplan adds, "Military and intelligence officials worldwide are watching this war and adapting their strategies so they might better face down the West's great superpower in a crisis and possibly, if it escalates to conflict, win a war."

The Iran war, Kaplan emphasizes, is depleting the United States' weapons supplies more and more.

"American commanders are so seized on lethal firepower as the measure of military might that they fired off more than half of their stockpile of cruise missiles — each costing between $1.6m and $3.6m — at as many targets as they can find, as if at some point, in Trump's words, the Iranians would scream that they’d had enough and surrender," Kaplan notes. "They are oblivious to the fact that Iran is fighting a different sort of war and has enough missiles and other weapons to win it — or at least, avoid losing, which amounts to the same thing. U.S. commanders have also found themselves firing $4m (£3m) Patriot air-defense missiles to shoot down $30,000 (£22,200) Iranian drones — a cost ratio that cannot be sustained."

Kaplan continues, "Even so, some of those drones have done considerable damage to energy facilities of U.S./allies and even to U.S. military bases in the Middle East. This new twist — technology that can be built in great quantities for little money — has turned what was once the source of the U.S. military's edge into its gravest vulnerability."