Law, Power, and Justice

www.nytimes.com/2026/05/04/opinion/iran-us-israel-war-drones-strait-of-hormuz.html

if only the president and his administration had bothered to take note of a new feature of modern warfare, a feature that can be boiled down to a single word: drones.

The weaponized drone has utterly transformed today’s battlefield. It is the modern-day equivalent of the machine gun of World War I. Because of the drone, the vastly outnumbered Ukrainian military has been able to withstand the Russian Army of Vladimir Putin for the past four years, not only inflicting far greater casualties on the invaders than expected, but doing so at a cost of pennies to the dollar. As the Ukrainians have shown time and again, a $1,000 drone can destroy a roughly $4.5 million T-90 tank. While the Russians have recently made significant strides in drone warfare, this simple weapon has ensured that they’ve grievously paid for their war both on the battlefield and in the pocketbook.

Much of this same dynamic has played out in Iran for the past two months, although without the staggering cost in human lives. Certainly, American and Israeli warplanes can bomb Iran’s military infrastructure at will — and they have, tens of thousands of times — but no amount of bombing can remove the primary retaliatory weapon at its disposal.