DAVE DAVIES, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies. Throughout the war with Iran, President Donald Trump and his team have touted the success of their punishing airstrikes, asserting that Iran's missile capability has been functionally destroyed, that its munitions factories have been flattened. But there's plenty of recent reporting to suggest that 5 1/2 months into the war, the U.S. military's ability to dictate terms to Iran is increasingly limited by the depletion of American weapons stockpiles, the threat Iran can still pose to U.S. bases and allies in the region and Iran's control of the state of Hormuz. For some insight into the state of the conflict and prospects for the future, we turn to Stacie Pettyjohn, a widely quoted analyst on U.S. defense strategy, military planning, air power and war gaming. Pettyjohn is a senior fellow and director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security. Much of her current work focuses on the impact of emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, autonomous systems and drones. Before joining the Center for a New American Security, she spent more than a decade as a political scientist at the RAND Corporation. We recorded our interview yesterday.
Stacie Pettyjohn, welcome to FRESH AIR.
STACIE PETTYJOHN: It's great to be here.
DAVIES: You know, I'm interested in how you thought this war might unfold when it began, you know, February 28 of this year. You know, it seems at this point that President Trump is clearly frustrated. He wants to bring the war to a conclusion in which his goals are met. It is not happening. When this war began, you know, certain things were apparent. I mean, the United States and Israel had enormous will and capability to inflict enormous damage and death with airstrikes but were very unlikely to commit ground troops, which would be costly and politically risky. I'm just wondering, when this started, what did your own knowledge and intuition tell you about how it might go?
PETTYJOHN: Well, when you look historically at operations that have focused on using airpower - whether that's aircraft or missiles - to try to change the behavior of another state, that there's a lot of debate and little evidence that airpower alone normally produces a durable political outcome and the one that the attacking state is looking to achieve in part because a lot of nations have a deeper interest in the situation than the U.S. does. This is something that is existential to them, whether it would be Milosevic in Kosovo in 1999 or the Iranian regime today. So in these situations, the asymmetry of interest - the fact that the country is only willing to use airpower - is normally an indication that they aren't willing to go all-in and pay the terrible costs that sometimes might be associated with using pure brute force and deploying ground forces to achieve a goal.
DAVIES: There's been a lot of reporting that this conflict has depleted supplies of critical munitions among U.S. arsenals. That's been disputed by the administration. There was a Washington Post report that a couple of weeks ago, Trump confronted Defense Secretary Pete Hagseth at a cabinet retreat at Camp David, saying he thought this issue had been addressed and Hegseth blamed one of his deputies for the problem. The White House press secretary called this 100% fake news. Do you find these reports credible?
PETTYJOHN: Yes, they are absolutely credible for particular types of weapons. I think you can holistically say that the U.S. military still has deep stockpiles of even precision-guided weapons, but they tend to be short-range ones that you have to get close to the target to attack it and drop a bomb. Something like the JDAM. We've heard a lot about that. It is a dumb bomb that has a tail kit attached that allows it to be guided by GPS and to precisely hit targets, but you need to be nearby. The U.S. has lots of those. They have lots of glide bombs. They have lots of shorter-range missiles and rockets.
Where they have shortfalls are in some of the more exquisite systems that are longer-range, which tends to drive up the cost of the weapon because going farther requires a bigger airframe and there's just sort of compounding costs that occur. So they're more expensive, we buy fewer of them, typically. And then also, on the defensive side, the surface-to-air missiles or the defensive interceptors, such as the Patriot missile or the THAAD interceptors, these are very expensive, sophisticated weapons that are basically able to hit an incoming ballistic missile that's moving incredibly quickly, sometimes maneuvering, and protect whatever it is stationed by. And we definitely don't have enough of those.
DAVIES: Yeah. Patriot missiles cost about 4 million each - that right?
PETTYJOHN: Yeah. I think something like 3.9 is around for the newest variant of the missile, which is quite capable and has proven itself to be very good on the battlefields in both Ukraine and actually the Middle East, just expensive and difficult to make.
DAVIES: Is the concern that the U.S. won't be able to defend its Gulf allies and U.S. bases, or that it'll be less able to launch offensive strikes against Iran, or both?
PETTYJOHN: It's both. They're intertwined. And this is one of the interesting tensions with the situation that the U.S. finds itself in. You know, you can sit back and wait and use either your ground base like the Patriot or the THAAD, or sea-based air defenses - which means they're on one of the destroyers or cruisers in the region - to protect your allies or U.S. bases in the region where U.S. forces are stationed, but those stockpiles are running low, they're finite and they're not going to be replenished in the next two to three years.
The other option is to go on the offensive and begin to pressure Iran again by hunting for its missile and drone launchers. That's been a stated objective of this campaign since the beginning. And it seems like the U.S. has actually had pretty notable success in some ways at this, but nowhere near to the extent to which the administration has claimed. So part of this is a problem that it's just incredibly difficult to find what are often small trucks or sometimes bigger trucks for the larger ballistic missiles that can blend in, that hide. Iran has underground shelters, so they pull them out, shoot, and then move again and go somewhere else to hide, which means you have to be looking constantly at them to actually track their movement and find them and then get a weapon on them that can destroy them. And a lot of the standoff weapons the U.S. uses, like the Tomahawk cruise missile or JASSM, fly slowly, so they're not particularly well-suited for these quick targets.
So going on the offensive and suppressing Iranian missiles and drones or destroying them would require restarting the air campaign at a new level, but the bases in the region have proven to be incredibly vulnerable, and those are bases that U.S. forces and aircraft would have to use because the United States Air Force mostly has short-range fighter aircraft, so they have to be based nearby. They're going to need tankers. And you would have to assume that Iran would be attacking the bases more regularly to prevent the U.S. from resuming this air campaign.
DAVIES: Are there cases where you can see the shortages having an effect on battlefield strategy and tactics - specific cases where the effect is clear?
PETTYJOHN: Well, it seems - and this is just my supposition, but it's clear that the administration is frustrated with this situation and really wants to get out of it. And the president is prone to bluster and making threats, but, you know, past behavior suggests he will follow through on them if it seems like it's going to be at a reasonable cost. And I think right now, the real issue is the costs are too high, so seizing any of the islands, trying to seize any of the territory in Iran, would be prohibitively costly because those pieces of territory are very close to Iran, and there could be missile and drone launchers all over that could easily range them. So U.S. forces would be sitting ducks and would have to be prepared to endure and survive through sustained attacks.
Similarly if you were to think about trying to escort ships through the strait, right? Opening the strait seems to be at the heart of the conflict right now, and Iran is reveling in its newfound power - the fact that it has closed the strait and it has the upper hand. And I think every time the U.S. goes on the offensive, they've realized that Iran has shown that it will retaliate, and so they have to be prepared to defend not only their bases but their allies and partners in the region as well.
DAVIES: We need to take a break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Stacie Pettyjohn. She's a senior fellow and the director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security. We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF TED NASH'S "THE FOUR FREEDOMS (FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT)")
DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're talking about some of the challenges the U.S. military faces in the war with Iran with Stacie Pettyjohn. She's a senior fellow and director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security.
Has the United States rotated some of its forces out of the region - some of those that had been used in the initial attacks on Iran?
PETTYJOHN: I don't think it has actually taken any forces out yet. It has been announced that they're going to be moving - one of their aircraft carriers that's been on an incredibly prolonged deployment and a part of the operations against Iran is supposed to leave soon. But they're waiting for its replacement to get on station, since it is sailing from East Asia into the Middle East.
DAVIES: Right. That's the USS Abraham Lincoln. I mean, that's become quite a public controversy, as, you know, there have been reporting of food shortages, broken toilets, moldy showers. And have you heard of issues like that in other parts of the military?
PETTYJOHN: I have. I think this is an incredibly disruptive deployment for many forces, including those on the ground, because the U.S. has essentially vacated the large bases that it would typically, and has in the past, operated from in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, the UAE, because those bases have been attacked so many times. So it's not clear to me exactly where they're operating from. But I know they don't have the usual support and amenities that are provided at these locations and that they're instead working from, living in and moving around in distributed locations to reduce their vulnerability to attack.
DAVIES: That's interesting. So it's not just the length of the deployment. It's the fact that support bases have been damaged, attacked and, in some cases, abandoned.
PETTYJOHN: Basically, yeah. It will be very interesting to see what the U.S. does when this - if this war ever ends in terms of its peacetime presence in the region, because it was heavily concentrated around the Gulf and in those very vulnerable big bases. And it seems like it would be unwise to begin to, you, know, bring in large warships to Bahrain to go to port or park big aircraft or even little aircraft - F-35s, tankers, AWACS - at any of these locations because they could easily be attacked at any point. We've already seen that there have been tankers that were hit on the ground, I think, in Saudi Arabia, along with the airborne battle management aircraft, the AWACS. And those are pretty difficult losses to replace in any near term.
DAVIES: Yeah. And I read that there was an early Iranian attack on the U.S. Navy base in Bahrain, which was the headquarters of the U.S. Navy Fifth Fleet in the region. And, you know, that - I guess that's directly contributed to these problems with supporting ships like the USS Abraham Lincoln.
PETTYJOHN: It definitely has. And I think you've seen the Navy has been diverted to other locations that are farther away and harder for Iran to hit. Eventually, they received permission to go to Diego Garcia, the British territory in the Chagos Islands where the U.S. flies bomber aircraft, but there's also a naval base there. But these aren't places that are typical port calls and not where the U.S. typically operates from. So I assume they don't have the stores of supplies that would be needed for the people, let alone the equipment and munitions and different other materials that are needed for replenishment.
DAVIES: Yeah. That's, like, 2,200 miles from the Gulf, right? It's a long way.
PETTYJOHN: It is.
DAVIES: Yeah.
PETTYJOHN: And it looks like Iran fired at it at one point, probably because the U.S. was using it. They previously would send sometimes ships - if not to Bahrain, they would port in Oman. But, you know, the relationship with Oman is a bit fraught right now, and it's - clearly, those locations are also vulnerable.
DAVIES: Yeah. I want to just talk a moment about that relationship with Oman. They were, I believe, according to the ceasefire announced in June, to work with Iran on managing the Strait of Hormuz. The ceasefire, of course, fell apart - officially terminated on Monday. And in a - in an interview on Fox News, President Trump said something to the effect that Oman was a problem that - or that if they get in the way, we'll bomb the expletive out of them. What on Earth is going on here?
PETTYJOHN: Oman is an interesting country that has quietly had a reasonably close relationship with the U.S. and allowed the U.S. military to operate from some bases on its territory since the 1970s. But it also has maintained good relations with Iran. And Oman has been trying to play that sort of mediating role between Tehran and Washington and find some sort of solution that would allow the strait to be reopened because the region's economy is so dependent on it. And that has angered the president because it goes against his claims that the U.S. does control the strait and that it already is open, and he sees it as, I guess, some form of betrayal.
DAVIES: Let's talk about the shortages of these weapons, particularly, you know, the Patriot missiles and the THAAD interceptors. That's an acronym for defense against long-term ballistic missiles, right? Is this a failure of planning by the Pentagon? I mean, why are these shortages occur?
PETTYJOHN: Yes, partially, it is a failure of planning, but that's not the entire reason that they're running short. The Pentagon has a tendency to shortchange munitions buys every year. They're one of the smaller things that is purchased in large quantities, so you can cut and them with intention to buy more next year. And if you go back and look through budget documents, you could see the planned ramp-up after cutting it one year.
But the problem is that happens again and again. So in the budget deals, the servi
