| You missed the biggest one Us military has had active demonstrations of the importance of advanced drone munitions FOR TEN YEARS NOW and completely dropped the ball. It is clear that an organizational level the US military does not have infantry level short and medium-range drone capability like Ukraine does, and more importantly, like all of our enemies do. It's not just a matter of the US military needing to do a bunch a weapons designs. Procurement politics can't close the drone capability gap. Because the fundamental capability is cheap and flexible, whereas the entire Pentagon weapons procurement is big, expensive and inflexible The US Marines are now functionally ineffective. The US cannot execute a marine invasion in the current military capabilities, not without taking publicly untenable losses The US Navy still has deep water capability and can still exert strategic influence, but at a tactical level, which is in near shore/littoral arenas, they are now useless, and the political procurement process to make weapons to make them relevant again is the same problem. The infantry level one does, but it's even bigger and has even more organizational resistance |
For all of Iran's supposed mastery of drone warfare, do note that the damage those drones have done to the US military is... essentially nil. No ships have been sunk; no aircraft have been lost. There have been some lives lost due to a drone attack on a facility troops were staying area, but at first read, I'm going to chalk that up more to the US military generally not planning for Iran to respond at all to a bombing raid rather than drones per se being particularly effective. Where the drones have been effective have been as a form of precision bombing--exactly the same kind of missions the US military has achieved with its regular air forces, albeit at a considerably greater distance from its homeland than any drone-based force has been able to achieve.
I think many people are way too quick to point to drone warfare as the obvious future of warfare, without considering the environment in which wars operate and how it might play out differently for different combatants. The US has a general assumption of complete and total air superiority in its conflicts--and the last time it didn't have that was over 70 years ago--and the number of countries that can meaningfully contest US air superiority is unknown but very few. The lessons of the Russo-Ukrainian War--a conflict where neither side has air superiority--are thus somewhat limited for a US conflict against most of its enemies. (Although I do agree that the US military is too sanguine about not learning from the Russo-Ukrainian War).