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Original article published by Michael Brown from FORBES on 30 March, 2026.
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In late February 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated military operations—code named Epic Fury and Roaring Lion—against Iran, marking the largest U.S. military operation since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Over the course of the conflict so far, U.S. Central Command struck more than 11,000 targets, while Iran responded with over 500 ballistic missiles and 2,000 drones. Supreme Leader Khamenei was killed in the opening strikes. But the statistics alone do not capture what made this conflict historic: this was the first U.S. war in which artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, and commercial technology were not supporting actors—they were the main event.
AI At The Center Of The Kill Chain
When I became the Director of the Defense Innovation Unit at the Pentagon in 2018, Project Maven was already underway. Long before LLMs, DIU was supporting Project Maven with several vendors to improve computer vision, an AI capability to distinguish among objects in satellite imagery to save analysts studying pixels. Project Maven, formally the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team, was established by Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work in 2017 to accelerate the adoption of machine learning in ISR and geospatial intelligence. Air Force Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan and Marine Corps Col. Drew Cukor initially led Maven describing it as a pathfinder to “kindle the flame” of AI across the Department of Defense.
That legacy led to Palantir’s Maven Smart System, today’s cornerstone of the U.S. military’s AI-powered operation. Maven fuses satellite imagery, drone video feeds, radar data, and signals intelligence into a single interface, allowing operators to classify targets, recommend weapons, and generate strike packages in near real time. The results have been staggering: more than 1,000 targets were struck in the first 24 hours of the campaign, a tempo that would have been unthinkable with purely human targeting processes. That tempo has been maintained with only 10% of the human analysts that would have previously been required to strike 1,000 targets daily.
Yet the system’s limitations are equally revealing. Maven’s overall accuracy hovers around 60 percent, compared to 84 percent for human analysts. Palantir’s CTO nonetheless declared it “the first large-scale combat operation driven by AI,” a characterization that raises questions about the ethics of AI-driven targeting and the adequacy of civilian protection safeguards. The controversy around safeguards led to the recent fight between Anthropic and the Department of War. Anthropic today supplies the only LLM certified to run on classified systems and the Department’s decision to replace it is a loss for national security.
The Rise Of Precise Mass
The Iran conflict also validates several other key concepts that will shape the future of warfare, notably, precise mass on target—the idea that high-volume, low-cost weapons systems will become a permanent fixture of modern warfare. Both sides demonstrated this principle. Iran deployed its Shahed drone families, along with unmanned surface vessels against commercial shipping in the Gulf of Oman. The U.S. countered with LUCAS (Low-cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System), a drone reverse-engineered from Iran’s Shahed-136 and produced for roughly $35,000 per unit which is 1/50th of the cost of a $2.5M Tomahawk cruise missile.
The appetite for autonomous systems is now insatiable and the Pentagon is moving quickly to incorporate not just aerial drones but maritime drones—both USVs and Unmanned Underwater Vessels. The Pentagon is moving forward with its Drone Dominance Program to rapidly field 300,000 small, low‑cost one‑way attack drones for as little as $2,000 per unit, expand the U.S. drone industrial base, and change how the department buys and tests unmanned systems. Soon, the USAF’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft will be flying unmanned wingmen to accompany our best fighter jets like the F-22 and F-35. The message is clear: the era of relying solely on small numbers of exquisite, expensive platforms is over.
Solving The Cost Asymmetry Conundrum
Perhaps no lesson from the conflict has been more urgent than the cost asymmetry problem. The U.S. spent an estimated $1.8–2.1 billion on roughly 150 THAAD interceptors during the 12-Day War with Iran a year ago, with only 12 replacement interceptors scheduled for delivery that year and 37 more this year. Meanwhile, Iran’s Shahed-136 drones cost only $20,000 each—a fraction of the $100,000-plus price tag for a single Iron Dome interceptor. The U.S. Navy faced this same conundrum in battling the Houthis in 2024 and 2025 when it fired Tomahawks and other expensive missiles to shoot down low-cost drones. Defenders through multiple conflicts have now faced a fundamentally unfavorable exchange ratio: expensive missiles against cheap, mass-produced threats.
Directed energy weapons emerged as a promising answer. Israel’s Iron Beam laser system—the world’s first operational laser defense platform, delivered to the IDF in late 2025—saw its first reported combat use in March 2026 against Hezbollah rockets. At $2.50 per shot, compared to $50,000 or more for an Iron Dome interceptor missile, directed energy represents a potential paradigm shift. The 100-kilowatt solid-state laser on a mobile trailer proved effective against short-range rockets, drones, and mortars. On the counter-drone side, AeroVironment’s Locust X3 laser system could destroy incoming drones for under $5 per shot. But limitations remain: Iron Beam can engage only one target at a time and cannot solely address saturation attacks. A multi-layered approach will be required that combines the best of low-cost interceptors like LUCAS and directed energy systems. The budget for counter-drone technology (just $4.7 billion in the FY2026 budget despite its critical battlefield role) will surely be rising sharply in the next few years.
Multi-Domain Integration
Both Operation Absolute Resolve in January to capture Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro and the current Iran War demonstrate that modern warfare demands seamless integration across every domain: space and cyber as well as the traditional domains of land, sea and air. The U.S. Space Force provided real-time missile warning data via orbital infrared sensors, detecting Iranian ballistic missile launches within milliseconds. SpaceX’s Starlink and Starshield networks delivered unjammable and resilient low-earth-orbit communications that enabled drone control. Commercial satellite networks became critical military infrastructure, blurring the civil-military divide and establishing what some analysts called the first full-scale “commercial space war.”
In cyberspace, U.S. Cyber Command and the IDF disrupted Iranian military telecommunications in the opening hours of the war disabling Iranian command, control, communications, and sensor networks to ease the initial air campaign. Iran retaliated by striking AWS data centers in the UAE to “blind” U.S. AI-dependent systems—exposing a key vulnerability in the military’s dependence on commercial cloud infrastructure. U.S. and Israeli operators also targeted Iranian state media, mobile apps, and data infrastructure, with U.S. officials stating that combined space and cyber operations were used to leave Iranian leadership “disrupted, disoriented and confused” during the opening wave of strikes.
Israel in particular has run large-scale information operations, including compromising popular Iranian apps and intermittently hijacking state broadcasting channels to push anti-regime messaging and amplify the shock of leadership decapitation strikes. Through wide-ranging attacks and methods, cyber operations is no longer a parallel arena but a force multiplier integrated directly with kinetic operations.
The Hedge Imperative
Retired Rear Admiral Lorin Selby and I wrote about the need to change our force posture in 2023 adopting a hedge strategy that complements “exquisite” systems—the B-2s, F-35s, and aircraft carriers that are costly, complex, and few—with small, low-cost, unmanned, and smarter weapons that can be fielded rapidly using commercial technology. Most major U.S. weapon systems are 30-plus years old, and new systems will not be operational until the 2030s. The Iran war validated this thesis: low-cost drones and AI proved decisive alongside traditional platforms, and commercial technologies like Starlink, AI models, and commercial off-the-shelf drones.
The implications extend beyond the Middle East. Deterring China in the Indo-Pacific requires the same shift—mass over exquisite. Allies also benefit from cost-effective systems not dependent on years-long defense contractor backlogs. The lessons from the Iran War are already clear. Without a faster and broader shift to low-cost weapons that can be produced at scale, the United States risks a “Pearl Harbor-style” capability gap with adversaries. The first AI war has provided further proof of this concept. There’s no time to lose since this new era of multi-domain and AI-based orchestration of precise mass on target is here today.
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Posted by: Nayara Güércio (Trilateral Research)