The Arsenal as the Battlefield: The War on Iran and the Return of Counter-Industrial Targeting

Modern warfare is increasingly defined by "precise mass," where adversaries use large quantities of cheap, easily produced drones and missiles to overwhelm more advanced, expensive defense systems. This strategy creates an unsustainable cost imbalance for the United States, whose high-tech interceptors are too costly to use against swarms of low-cost threats. A re-emerging strategy to counter this is "counter-industrial targeting," which involves directly attacking and destroying an adversary's defense factories and production infrastructure. This approach of targeting the enemy's arsenal at its source could become a crucial, though escalatory, element in any future great power conflict with an industrial giant like China.