Thomas L. Friedman
Credit...Gregory Halpern for The New York Times If I were writing a book about the U.S. war with Iran, I know exactly what the title would be. It would be President Trump’s social media post of April 5, 2026, directed at the leaders of Iran: “Open the [expletive] Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH!”
Wars are a crucible that very often exposes changes in the physics of the world around us — who has power, who doesn’t have power and how power is being wielded. Nothing better captures the new power equation produced by this war than Trump’s unhinged and obscene rant at the Iranian leadership for not bending to his bombs.
This new physics of war is equally present in the conflicts between Ukraine and Russia, Hezbollah and Israel, Hamas and Israel and the Houthis and everyone else. My summary of this new dynamic is that the small can now act really big, really accurately and really inexpensively. And while the big can also act really small, really accurately, it is far more expensive for them to do that while bearing the burden of vast legacy arms systems.
The net advantage, for the moment, seems to be to the small. That should keep you up at night, when you think how the emerging revolution in artificial intelligence will surely supercharge this trend, enabling the small to act even bigger, mightier and less expensively.
It’s not surprising that Trump is frustrated. After all, on March 11, less than two weeks after he and Israel started this latest bout of war with Iran with a large-scale bombing campaign, Trump declared: “We’ve won. Let me tell you, we’ve won. You know, you never like to say too early you won. We won. In the first hour it was over. But we won.”
He was right about one thing: Never say you won too early.
Trump didn’t realize that the Iranian government also has a say in when this war is won and lost. More important, and unlike Trump, Tehran had a Plan B for the morning after: use its newfound ability to act big, accurately and cheaply to seize control of the Strait of Hormuz — even though its military was a small fraction of the size of America’s and had been badly hammered.
I wish I could take delight in seeing our pompous, narcissistic, constantly bloviating president humbled by reality. But I truly do not — because this is getting scary. And it is going to get worse. The Iranians have inflicted real harm on America — on the battlefield and on our economy — the scale of which Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have been hiding.
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Iran has been under economic sanctions, on and off, since 1979. Yet it has managed to develop an arsenal of sophisticated but relatively inexpensive missiles and drones that has enabled it to fight both Israel and the United States to something of a draw — and do some significant damage to American military assets in the region along the way. Consider just a few stories that you may not have noticed.
The reason the main U.S. aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, has sometimes run low on supplies to sustain its almost 5,700-person complement is that after the first day of the war, Iranian missiles and attack drones destroyed much of the U.S. supply base in Bahrain. “As it went up in smoke, so did a major logistics hub that the Navy has relied on for decades,” The Times reported. This forced Trump and the even more smug Hegseth to increase reliance on a base under British command on the island of Diego Garcia as its supply hub, which is roughly 2,700 miles from Bahrain. How was the Bahrain base so unprotected against Iranian missiles on the first day of the war? If that is not worth hauling Hegseth before Congress, I don’t know what is.
Or maybe you missed this story in the journal Defence Security Asia commenting on a CNN report that sometime in the early days of March, an Iranian missile destroyed a $500 million radar vital to running a THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) advanced missile defense system at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan. The attack signaled “a potentially transformative moment” in the “strategic contest” between Iran and the United States and Israel, the journal said.
A senior Jordanian official told me he was stunned to learn that the Iranians somehow managed to send their missile at the THAAD’s radar system by maneuvering it — in flight — to make a flanking attack on the radar and evade detection and interception. This was against the most sophisticated antimissile system in the U.S. arsenal!
John Arquilla, professor emeritus of defense analysis at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, explained to me that missile warfare is no longer just a matter of firing off a warhead on a predictable trajectory and then letting inertia and GPS smart guidance systems lead it to the target. The Russians have focused enormous resources on building missiles with midflight maneuverability, guided by better real-time information, increasingly propelled at hypersonic speeds, and capable of arriving from an angle a defender has not anticipated. Iran’s Fattah missiles reportedly have such capabilities, although it is still not clear whether they or drones took out the THAAD 500 miles from Iran.
“This is making the missile the pre-eminent weapon of the 21st century, with the potential to undermine deterrence and stability” in many different kinds of battles, said Arquilla, the author of the new book “The Troubled American Way of War: From Hiroshima to the Age of Algorithms.”
China has been deploying maneuverable hypersonic DF-17 missiles for several years now in its live-fire exercises in Chinese waters near Taiwan.
On March 3, two one-way attack drones struck the U.S. Embassy compound in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, at about 1:30 a.m. The first drone flew straight into the floor housing the C.I.A. station at the Riyadh embassy; the second drone flew directly into the entry hole created by the first, causing an extensive blast and a fire that burned for hours. Later reports suggested this Iranian attack may have been aided by Russian satellite intelligence provided by Vladimir Putin. Trump has seemingly done nothing about that.
For generations, Arquilla noted, wars were “won by mass and energy.” Warfare followed a simple physical law: The more distance you fired your projectile, the less accurate it was. So, distance had to be overcome “with mass and energy.” Not today. “Now wars are won by information,” said Arquilla.
And even the little guys now have access to it. You just have to look at how Hezbollah has inflicted significant harm on Israeli communities and the Israeli Army, with its huge U.S.-made military platforms; how badly Ukraine has bloodied a big bad Russia; and how Iran is fighting the United States and Israel to a stalemate to see how inexpensive, precision weapons buildable in a basement workshop with components that can be found on Amazon have severed the old link between range and accuracy.
Ukraine, Arquilla added, “has become a sea power without a traditional navy. It has used drone boats and armed Jet Skis” to push Russia’s conventional Black Sea fleet far enough away from Ukraine’s coastline so it can keep exporting its grain and fertilizer to world markets.
These new technologies allow “the many and the small” — Iranians, Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas — “to slip the heavy punches of their opponents, because they are well hidden and can strike back with accurate blows of their own,” Arquilla said. The U.S. military, meanwhile, has just 11 big lumbering divisions and 11 carrier groups.
That is why defenders now have a real advantage over attackers, Arquilla concluded. Trump and Hegseth kept focusing on “scaling up the war” — adding more tempo and more tonnage — and the Iranians focused on “scaling out the war,” hiding small units with precision missiles in more places and attacking U.S. bases and Arab oil facilities all over the Gulf.
“Their job is to survive long enough to shoot and scoot. On land, a few big formations of Abrams tanks matter less than the many and the small with cheap weapons they can build and modify in a week,” Arquilla said.
These new weapons amplify another advantage the small have over the big: They don’t have to win. They just have to avoid losing. We have to win, end the war, go home and never look back. Good luck with that now.
Before the Iranians and Hezbollah get too smug, though, they should remember the other half of my equation: While the small can now act really big, the big can now act really small. On the first day of the war, Israeli airstrikes with precision weapons — aided by U.S. intelligence — killed over 40 senior Iranian leaders gathered in a high-level leadership meeting in a single compound in Tehran. In other words, with precise information, Israel wiped out much of Iran’s national security elite with one shot.
And then there was the Israeli pager attack on Hezbollah. On Sept. 17 and 18, 2024, Israel detonated the pagers and other hand-held electronic devices used by Hezbollah members, fighters, officers, medics and civilian supporters, killing dozens of people and wounding some 3,000 others. An estimated 1,500 Hezbollah fighters were reportedly put out of action because of injuries, mostly affecting their hands, faces and hips. Using a relatively small quantity of explosives and a huge dollop of information, Israel killed and wounded a significant number of Hezbollah fighters in a few hours.
The U.S.-Israel Stuxnet attack on Iran’s Natanz enrichment facility that began in 2009 was another version of this. Instead of bombing the facility, the United States and Israel inserted a small computer worm — a few lines of code — to disable a big number of Iran’s IR-1 centrifuges, though the centrifuges were quickly replaced and the disruption was ultimately minimal. (The United States and Israel have never acknowledged responsibility for the virus.) That was the big acting small, using just malware, but you can bet that the development of that code, and the whole joint operation, cost a lot of money.
What is truly alarming today is how easy it is becoming for the small to act big — and by “small,” I don’t just mean in size, but also in age. A teenager with a laptop, a Starlink connection and an open-weight A.I. model can now disrupt a municipal water or power system by identifying and exploiting old software vulnerabilities.
So don’t be surprised if one day soon you hear your mayor sounding like Trump: “Turn my water back on, you crazy …”
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Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion columnist. He joined the paper in 1981 and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman • Facebook
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