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America’s war against Iran has sparked heated debates over U.S. strategic priorities, military objectives, and defense industrial capacity. It has also fueled speculation about how a hypothetical clash between the United States and the People’s Republic of China might unfold. Tehran’s ability to launch salvo after salvo of simple attack drones reflects current thinking about how the proliferation of cheap, easily producible precision weapons is changing the character of war, and previews some of the challenges that Washington might confront in a fight with Beijing. Facing an even bigger and better-armed rival, the United States is likely to find that its exquisite approach to defending against lower-cost offensive systems is unsustainable, its munition stocks across the board are inadequate, and its munitions industrial base is unprepared for the demands of a great power war. Yet this early forecasting is missing another dimension of the current conflict that could be an even more important harbinger of any future Sino-U.S. war: the destruction of adversary defense production infrastructure.
From eastern Ukraine to the Middle East, the advent of “precise mass” appears to be changing modern battlefields. Strike systems that combine accuracy and range, and that can be produced at a very large volume for relatively low cost, are stressing defenses, inflicting losses, and driving adaptation. The obvious implication for the United States is to build more weapons and build them faster. That goes for the complex, expensive, high-performance munitions that the U.S. military often favors, as well as the smaller, cheaper, and more numerous systems that it is beginning to embrace. But increasing production is a one-sided solution to the problem of precise mass. The other side—which the United States has largely avoided over the past several decades but has embraced over the past several weeks—is decreasing adversary production capacity.
An unambiguous objective of Operation Epic Fury has been degrading not just Iran’s long-range weapons, but also its ability to replenish them. The United States, according to a recent update from Central Command, is “on a path to completely eliminate Iran’s wider military manufacturing apparatus.”
Still, a future war between the United States and China would be different from the current conflict. China’s large and growing magazine depth, along with its massive defense industrial capacity, would put enormous pressure on the United States during any initial clash and especially over the course of a protracted war. This situation could create similar incentives for Washington to attack and degrade Beijing’s capacity to supply and restock its arsenal, with major implications for escalation and alliance dynamics, force allocation, force design, and intelligence collection.
The targeting of Iran’s military-industrial complex may be a departure from contemporary operations, but the United States is no stranger to counter-industrial warfare. The U.S. military’s historic preference for annihilation peaked during World War II’s strategic bombing campaign, when U.S. forces employed air power to degrade the defense production of its industrialized rivals, Germany and Japan. Since then, however, large-scale attacks against industrial targets have been a declining feature of the American way of war.
Beginning with the air campaign that opened the 1991 Persian Gulf War, modern U.S. strike operations have instead increasingly employed precision-guided conventional munitions, delivered from multiple domains, to rapidly destroy adversary forces, their command-and-control systems, and other infrastructure that could directly support military operations. These conventional counterforce campaigns applied American advantages in training and technology against adversaries such as Iraq that, even if numerically superior, lacked the skill to effectively operate their more numerous forces. Furthermore, because U.S. adversaries generally imported rather than domestically produced their weapons, they lacked significant production capacity to attack.
Leveraging air superiority, undersea dominance, and long-range strikes to decisively attrite adversary combat power remains a key feature of the American way of war, at least aspirationally. Continued investments to maintain a military-technological edge over opponents, political preferences for brief and limited conflicts, and a desire to avoid collateral damage all reinforce this approach. According to many prominent voices, for example, the path to victory in the “pacing scenario” that drives U.S. force planning—a Chinese invasion of Taiwan—would involve swiftly inflicting considerable damage on the People’s Liberation Army in the Taiwan Strait. The aim, therefore, is to achieve a rapid, decisive operational success before a conflict could escalate vertically or horizontally—and before any military capacity limitations or defense production shortcomings on the U.S. side could become serious concerns.
As many analysts have noted, however, precise mass poses challenges to this way of war. From Russia to Iran, small, cheap, and numerous attack drones, rockets, and missiles mitigate the U.S. military’s qualitative advantages by creating unfavorable—and potentially unsustainable—exchange ratios.
For instance, using large quantities of simple attack drones enables adversaries to suffer considerable attrition in key offensive systems yet still retain significant combat power. That makes any U.S. strike campaign far more difficult, not just in terms of the magazine depth required to inflict meaningful losses, but also in the magnitude of time and effort required to achieve decisive effects. Adversaries that rely on easy-to-produce munitions like one-way attack drones can also repopulate the battlefield quicky, creating more targets that U.S. forces must find, track, and destroy. Similarly, these weapons and their missile cousins stress U.S. air and missile defense concepts, which still rely heavily on active defenses employing exquisite interceptors. That imposes considerable force protection burdens and makes generating and sustaining fighter-based air power much more challenging. Emerging counter-drone technologies and low-cost interceptors may ease this imbalance, but countering massed salvos remains technically and quantitatively demanding, particularly if multiple interceptors are needed to defeat continuous waves of attacks during protracted conflicts.
Foreshadowed in Ukraine and the Red Sea, these quantitative disparities and shifting cost-exchange ratios have led to a consistent prescription for the United States: significantly increasing production of offensive munitions and defensive interceptors, as well as building its own arsenal of smaller, cheaper, mass producible systems.
The first approach has long been advocated by American defense analysts and has manifested in President Trump’s recent announcement that U.S. weapons manufacturers will quadruple production of “Exquisite Class Weaponry.” In other words, this approach would double down on current operational concepts and attempt to mitigate U.S. inadequacies in mass by producing more of the munitions that have repeatedly proven their worth. The second approach entails adopting less expensive, easily manufactured, and increasingly autonomous systems to meet affordable mass with affordable mass. These efforts would mainly use new tools (e.g., LUCAS) to carry out traditional missions: precision counterforce and active defense.
These arguments assume that increased production, in one form or another, is the way to compete with adversaries that possess advantages in mass. That is, they focus on just one side of the equation: the U.S. military’s own production and expenditure rates. One notable aspect of Operation Epic Fury, however, is that despite widespread concerns about U.S. weapons stockpiles, U.S. forces appear just as focused on the other side of the equation: degrading an enemy’s ability to produce weapons and generate mass.
From the very start, senior U.S. officials have highlighted the destruction of Iran’s defense industrial capacity—and preventing Iran from either replenishing or reconstituting critical elements of its military power—as a central aim of Operation Epic Fury. Undoubtedly, there are broader political and strategic rationales for attempting to destroy Iran’s ability to produce missiles and drones. That includes reducing long-term threats to U.S. partners in the region as well as decreasing the burdens of U.S.-led containment. Even still, the U.S. military’s destruction of Iran’s missile and drone industrial base also can be viewed as a response to Iranian precise mass and the unfavorable exchange ratios it creates, which incentivize a shift away from targeting deployed forces almost exclusively and toward attacking production facilities extensively.
Finding and destroying hundreds or even thousands of small and cheap systems like Shahed drones or even ballistic missiles, many of which can be concealed or stored in hardened locations, is increasingly impractical. While the U.S. and Israeli militaries are demonstrating an impressive ability to destroy large numbers of Iranian offensive systems, even with control of local airspace and a greater ability to employ low-cost direct attack munitions, an air campaign against such an expansive target set is a resource-intensive proposition. Moreover, the scale and speed with which Iran manufactures weapons like the Shahed only magnifies the underlying problem. That creates an imperative not only to find and destroy launchers and weapon storage facilities, but also to attack the installations making these weapons. In other words, Iran’s employment of large numbers of affordable precision weapons is exposing the inadequacy of precision counterforce alone, even against an adversary that cannot effectively contest a U.S. strike campaign.
The urgency to go after precise mass at the source is arguably even more pronounced when it comes to reducing the burdens of defensive engagements. The more strike systems that Iran can produce, the more interceptors may be needed to stop them, further exposing and exacerbating capacity limitations on the U.S. side. Cutting off the supply of Iranian weapons — especially the ballistic missiles that can only be defeated by low-density exquisite systems like THAAD and SM-3 — is one way to mitigate this problem and guard limited stocks of critical defensive assets. These exchange ratio dynamics have led to similar moves by Ukraine and Russia, which have both increasingly attacked industrial targets in attempts to slow the production of drones and cruise missiles and gain an advantage in a protracted war of attrition.
In sum, Operation Epic Fury shows that to address an enemy’s mass advantage, more offensive and defensive munitions are not always enough. As the rapid destruction of enemy combat forces becomes more difficult, it also becomes less decisive, and therefore less likely to quickly end a conflict. These factors amplify the imperative to also choke force generation at its source. Countering precise mass and an adversary that outnumbers or outproduces the United States might require not only bolstering production of exquisite and affordable weapons, but also favors campaigns that reduce the adversary’s side of the production equation, something the U.S. military has not pursued at scale since World War II. Against Iran, this has proven a relatively low-threat operation. This development, however, has serious implications for military competition with China, which outnumbers and outproduces the United States and its allies in several critical areas.
If the problem of precise mass has led the United States to target Iran’s defense industrial base, a similar dynamic could play out in a future conflict with China. The People’s Liberation Army possesses quantitative advantages in both less and more complex weapons, which would heighten the challenges described above. Moreover, China has significantly expanded missile and aircraft production in recent years. Simply increasing U.S. stockpiles of high-performance offensive weapons might not be sufficient to hold at risk a rapidly expanding target set, while producing lower-cost defenses might not be adequate to protect U.S. and allied forces and facilities from large inventories of fast and maneuverable missiles. In short, the near-term limitations of the U.S. defense industrial base could create pressure to find alternative means of degrading Chinese combat power and force regeneration. That pressure would only increase in the case of a protracted war, as the United States and its allies look to compensate for their limited magazine depth, gain bargaining leverage, and try to avoid being left at a long-term disadvantage against a rival with enormous military-industrial capacity.
Targeting an adversary’s manufacturing base is a recurring feature of great power wars, and the scale of an effective counter-industrial campaign against China would depend on its purpose. A campaign could support either near-term, limited objectives, such as interrupting the manufacture and distribution of supplies vital to ongoing Chinese military operations in a specific region, or longer-term aims such as disrupting China’s wider ability to refuel its jets, refill its missile magazines, or reseed its satellite architecture. Although China’s pursuit of military-civil fusion creates overlap between defense and civilian manufacturing, many facilities in the aerospace and defense sector remain distinct, known, fixed sites that would be more difficult to repair or replace than runways or other static military targets. Given their vulnerabilities, holding these facilities at risk could also have cost-imposing benefits by compelling the People’s Liberation Army to expend additional resources bolstering the passive and active defenses of these locations, much as Russian attacks have led Ukraine’s energy industry to invest in counter-drone systems and harden critical infrastructure.
The extent to which Operation Epic Fury successfully degrades Iranian defense production infrastructure remains uncertain. What is certain is that decreasing Chinese defense production would be a much more dangerous and difficult task. First and foremost, attacking industrial sites on the territory of a nuclear-armed adversary could be highly escalatory, especially if the United States and its allies were not already conducting mainland strikes in support of, for example, a counter-invasion campaign. Even if nuclear escalation is avoided, however, targeting China’s industry would also elevate the need to defend the U.S. military-industrial complex against retaliatory attacks. Repeated drone incursions around strategic installations are a reminder that defending critical infrastructure and supply chain bottlenecks will require layered, multi-faceted defense concepts that address the full range of threats, from sabotage to conventional strikes. That could apply to U.S. allies and partners as well, whose support would be critical for any type of military campaign against China — and who could also be in the crosshairs of any Chinese retaliation. Protection of production infrastructure, therefore, is unlikely to be a U.S.-only problem.
Second, it appears the U.S. military has rapidly gained sufficient air superiority over Iran to attack industrial targets freely. Striking Chinese military-industrial targets (or any other mainland targets, to include purely military targets) would require U.S. forces to penetrate multiple layers of anti-access and area denial systems, potentially starting at or before their entrance into the Indo-Pacific theater. Deep strikes against industrial facilities would necessitate very long-range weapons, which are limited, and penetrating strike platforms employing standoff weapons and supported by intensive blinding, suppression, and tunneling operations. The military services may need to consider future munition-platform combinations to efficiently deliver sustained destructive effects against large, hardened area targets like factories from standoff ranges. This mission shifts the longstanding emphasis from munitions with precision, datalinks, and sensors for attacking moving targets to larger quantities of weapons that maximize range and explosive power.
Degrading China’s defenses to enable counter-industrial attacks hints at a third major departure from Epic Fury: the need to conduct multiple simultaneous or sequenced campaigns with limited forces. The U.S. military is destroying Iranian forces and industry simultaneously as two pieces of one air campaign, but a war between the United States and China would likely involve multiple efforts and potentially several allies, particularly if the conflict is initiated by Chinese military aggression against Taiwan. A Chinese air and missile campaign or attempted invasion of Taiwan could demand a counterforce campaign as an immediate response, leaving efforts to degrade Chinese defense production a secondary requirement on forces already stretched thin. Rather than dividing capacities between campaigns and running the risk of neither having sufficient forces to be successful, decisionmakers could attempt to sequence operations, shift some burdens to allies and partners, or focus new affordable mass capabilities on either the counterforce or counter-industrial role to alleviate demands on the rest of the force.
Fourth, it is unclear from the outset how allies and partners would react to a campaign of counter-industrial targeting. On the one hand, the fear of retaliation could make them reluctant to condone or enable this type of campaign. If so, the United States would need to determine whether and to what extent it could execute these operations largely independently, with long-range strikes, non-kinetic options, or both. On the other hand, however, allies and partners might come to similar conclusions about the need to degrade Chinese industrial capacity in the near-term or over the long-term. If so, they might protest outwardly to minimize blowback but quietly turn a blind eye. Or they might actively support a counter-industrial campaign, at least with intelligence, access, and overflight. Notably, during Operation Epic Fury, Gulf Arab partners on the receiving end of Iranian retaliation — including strikes on economic targets — have actually been pushing the United States to complete its military campaign against Iran rather than scale back its strikes. In either case, Washington would need to start socializing allies and partners to the prospect of a military campaign against China that extended beyond rapid denial against frontline forces.
Finally, although Iran’s defense industrial capacity is focused on drone and missile production, China’s vast military-industrial complex presents a massive target set of facilities and supply chains that vary in type, size, and location. Identifying and prioritizing critical industrial targets and vulnerabilities shifts the intelligence burden from finding and tracking mobile forces to gaining an in-depth familiarity with the web of suppliers, facilities, and transportation systems that produce the Chinese military’s weapons, a task that may require intelligence agencies, industrialists, and economists as much as it requires military reconnaissance platforms. Campaign planners would have to decide how far upstream to target defense production and whether to expend limited resources on attacking final assembly facilities or identifying and destroying supply chain links that may have cascading effects — the modern equivalent of ball bearings during World War II.
There is little doubt that the United States needs more munitions, of more types, to compete with rivals that can build deep magazines and mass accurate fires. But a focus on relative arsenal sizes, cost-exchange ratios, and production rates overlooks another emerging feature of contemporary warfare; namely, the growing incentive to target adversary defense production capacity. Operation Epic Fury may preview a new era of counter-industrial targeting brought on by the emergence of affordable, scalable precision weapons and the challenges posed by adversaries who outgun or outproduce the United States, including China. Before embracing a counter-industrial strategy against a major power rival, however, Washington needs to consider how to mitigate the escalation risks that could result, reconcile the demands of simultaneous campaigns against a single opponent, identify the types of targets that would most seriously impact Chinese defense production, and determine whether it has or can develop the right set of tools to hold those targets at risk.
Tyler Hacker is a fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
Greg Malandrino is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
Evan Braden Montgomery is vice president for research and studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
Image: Mohammad Agah via Wikimedia Commons
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