Attrition is the defining feature of today’s conflicts. The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have become grinding contests over which side can exhaust the other’s military capacity, economic resources, and political will. They all, of course, have unique characteristics, but their similar trajectories reflect a deeper change in how wars now unfold. Throughout the war in Ukraine, artillery crews have repeatedly had guns and could locate their targets but have lacked the shells to fire. Ukrainian engineers have found that new kinds of drones are met with Russian countermeasures within weeks, undercutting any advantage they briefly had. And in Iran, the United States degraded its adversary’s military and destroyed deeply buried nuclear facilities but failed to resolve the political problem that made the weapons a threat in the first place.
Each dynamic illustrates a different gap that helps explain why states increasingly choose strategies of attrition—or find themselves trapped in them. The first is between the military capacity that countries possess on paper and the power that they can actually deploy and sustain. The second is between traditional principles of warfare and a modern battlefield on which technology makes decisive breakthroughs increasingly difficult. The third is between military means and the political ends they are intended to achieve.
In combination, these mismatches push wars toward attrition. When countries cannot generate and regenerate enough military capacity to overwhelm an enemy, war becomes a test of endurance. When breakthroughs are elusive, pursuing incremental gains and the steady destruction of enemy capacity becomes attractive. And when the combatants’ political end goals are too muddy or maximalist, imposing costs indefinitely can seem like the only alternative to capitulation.
For the United States, this poses a particular challenge. As American leaders increasingly seek short, decisive military operations, the United States may increasingly confront adversaries that see advantages in prolonging conflicts. The United States may not choose attrition, but it must be prepared to fight and win wars in which its adversaries do.
The Long and Grinding Road
Military power is traditionally measured by what countries possess—assets such as troops, weapons platforms, and munitions inventories. But recent wars have exposed the gap between nominal power and usable military capability. In his 2015 book, How the War Was Won, the historian Phillips O’Brien argued that even during World War II, winning the major battles that captured the popular imagination had actually become less important than dominating what he called the “super-battlefield,” the vast expanse of factories and supply lines over which military power is produced and transported. Since that war, the ability to generate and sustain military power has only become more important. Modern militaries consume materiel at an incredible clip, and their adversaries have become increasingly capable of disrupting the production and supply networks needed to replace it.
When Russia invaded Ukraine again in early 2022, it appeared to possess overwhelming military superiority. Days before the invasion, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff told lawmakers that Kyiv could fall within 72 hours of a full-scale assault; speaking to The New York Times, Ukrainian commanders said that they believed that their forces had little chance against the more than 100,000 Russian troops that had massed on their border. Yet because it could not swiftly translate its vast resources into sustained combat power at the front, Russia failed to employ its capabilities effectively and take Kyiv.
But its material and manpower reserves allowed Russia to survive its early setbacks. Russia could mobilize more personnel, draw on large ammunition stocks, increase weapons production, and turn to partners such as North Korea to sustain its fight. Russia developed a theory of victory that proposed that it did not need to defeat Ukraine decisively if it could outlast it, wearing it down while waiting for Europe’s and the United States’ political commitment to weaken. Attrition gave Russia a military advantage. It also exposed a different problem among Ukraine’s powerful NATO backers: aggregate power does not necessarily translate into the capacity to sustain a prolonged, high-consumption war.
The United States and NATO have far greater economic and military power than Russia does. Yet a war of attrition measures power differently. GDP cannot be fired from artillery tubes. Total defense spending cannot, itself, intercept missiles. The defense industries of Ukraine’s partners were not built to replace ammunition rapidly; they were organized around peacetime production. They thus struggled to convert their latent potential quickly enough into shells, interceptors, and other usable military capabilities.
Russia and NATO thus encountered the capacity gap in almost opposite ways. Russia initially had capacity without commensurate effectiveness. Ukraine’s backers had effectiveness without sufficient depth to sustain a prolonged war.
The conflict between U.S. and Israeli forces and Iran has presented a different iteration of this dynamic. Iran’s conventional military power could not match that of Israel or the United States, but Tehran had spent decades building the ability to compensate for its conventional inferiority by creating military capacity outside its territory. Iran’s network of proxies, sometimes called its “ring of fire,” allowed Tehran to apply pressure across multiple fronts, forcing Israel and the United States to expend interceptors and sustain high operational tempos. Iran’s use of inexpensive drones and missiles exposed the limitations of costly interceptors, expensive ships, and cutting-edge aircraft. In this strategy of attrition, Iran just needs to keep imposing costs and regenerating what is lost.
Adapt and Die
On the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, one U.S. general admired Moscow’s “learning and adaptive force.” Ukraine proved able to adapt even more quickly. But fast adaptation by both countries produced a paradox. Advantages that might have once enabled a breakthrough became temporary; neither side could sustain an advantage long enough to produce decisive results.
This is the second gap. As technology changes battlefields, traditional principles for creating a military advantage—such as maneuvering forces and massing combat power—are becoming harder to apply, driving wars toward attrition. In an era of drones, massed forces can make them easier to detect and destroy; the concentrations of forces and logistics required for large-scale maneuver can be detected and targeted before a breakthrough can be achieved. The element of surprise is harder to create when the battlefield is under constant observation. Technological advancement constantly creates new opportunities, but counter-adaptation erases the advantages quickly.
Quick adaptation during war is, of course, not new. But what is changing is the speed at which innovative tactics and operations can be rendered ineffective. In Ukraine, the feedback loop for learning runs directly from the battlefield to engineers and manufacturers and back again. QR codes allow troops on the ground to communicate problems such as drone malfunctions directly with support teams at the drone manufacturer, which can then alter production runs quickly. Ukrainian drone makers have described R & D cycles measured in weeks: as Russian jamming and faster drones defeat existing systems, manufacturers change frequencies, airframes, and propulsion and move the modified systems toward production. As the defense strategist Can Kasapoglu observed in July, “Unmanned systems, combat data, and human command have fused into kill chains that operate at unprecedented speed,” meaning that the war in Ukraine “has evolved from a narrow contest of platforms to a battle fought at machine speed and dictated by algorithms.”
Technology is also changing how traditional principles of war are applied in the Middle East. Consider mass. Israel and the United States have used intelligence, precision weapons, and long-range strikes to mass effects without having to mass literal forces. Iran has applied the same principle differently, using large salvos of missiles and drones to overwhelm sophisticated defenses. Because both sides can persistently generate concentrated effects without concentrating forces, destroying the enemy’s ability to keep fighting becomes harder. The contest shifts toward repeated exchanges, replenishment, and endurance. In this sense, rapid adaptation can reinforce attrition.
Moving the Goalposts
The third and perhaps most difficult strategic gap is that the military means being deployed in the current wars are not producing the desired political outcomes. This is true in both Russia’s war against Ukraine and in the broader Middle East confrontation involving the United States, Israel, Iran, and Iran’s regional allies and proxies. In these wars, the combatants are not pursuing limited adjustments to territorial borders or modest changes in an adversary’s behavior. The wars, instead, involve ambitious objectives that are nonnegotiable. Russia refuses to accept a Ukraine that is not in its sphere of control, and Ukraine is fighting for its right to exist as an independent state. Israel faces adversaries that reject its right to exist. The United States and Israel view an Iranian nuclear weapon as a fundamental threat to the regional security balance, while Iran sees its nuclear program and regional role as central to its security and power.
Such huge stakes leave little room for compromise, making the wars deeply intractable. Attrition is inflicting high costs in blood and treasure, apparently without narrowing those political differences As 2022 approached, Ukraine was already mired in the long-running conflict that had begun in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, and had largely stagnated; NATO had never made a decision to push Russia back to its pre-2014 borders. Following Russia’s invasion in 2022, Europe and the United States still did not make the expulsion of Russia from Ukrainian territory the explicit political objective, nor did they define an alternative political settlement. Instead, they often expressed their objectives as principles, such as supporting Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity for “as long as it takes” and refusing to reward Russian aggression. Military strategy, however, needs to be organized around a concrete, attainable political end state to be effective.
This ambiguity was understandable: defining a concrete objective and committing the military means to achieve that objective risked putting the United States and NATO on a direct collision course with Russia. But the result has been a military strategy detached from a political strategy—a determination merely to prevent Ukraine’s defeat and impose costs on Russia indefinitely.
In the Middle East, a similar problem has emerged. Military force has imposed enormous costs on both Hamas and Iran, devastating their military facilities and killing their commanders. But it has not led either to capitulate. Early in Israel’s war against Hamas, Graham Allison and Amos Yadlin argued in Foreign Affairs that Israel had defeated Hamas because it had killed most of its military leaders and more than half of its fighters. But destroying an enemy’s military capacity is not the same as producing the political conditions required for a durable end to the conflict.
Iran has used politics—in this case, international pressure—as a tool in its war of attrition. It has sought to degrade international support for Israel, creating a political ring of fire around its adversary. Avril Haines, the United States’s director of national intelligence under President Joe Biden, disclosed in July 2024 that Iranian government-linked actors were posing as activists online, encouraging Gaza protests, and providing financial support to protesters in the United States. International institutions, many European governments, and public opinion around the world have increased pressure on Israel, and its isolation has deepened. This has had strategic consequences. Although Israel has demonstrated that it can dominate militarily, it has struggled to translate those victories into a more favorable regional political environment. Its relationships with European and other foreign governments have deteriorated, and those divisions now complicate the international discussions over postwar arrangements in Gaza.
Break the Mold
For the United States, wars of attrition create a particular strategic dilemma. The Pentagon has planned for short, decisive military operations, and political leaders in Washington often promise them. Yet adversaries today have the means and incentives to deny the United States that kind of war and prolong conflicts in the hope that they can regenerate capacity, impose costs, and outlast American political will.
At the same time, the United States has built a military that relies heavily on relatively small numbers of sophisticated and expensive weapons systems, an industrial base that cannot rapidly replace many of these systems, and strategies that too often leave the political conditions required for victory unresolved. U.S. defense planners are making some efforts to change this military posture, but it will take time. The danger is not that the United States cannot win a war of attrition. It is that it remains organized around the expectation that it will not have to fight one.
Nearly four decades ago, the military thinker Edward Luttwak proposed a strategy of “relational maneuver,” which would focus on attacking the enemy’s internal cohesion and functioning rather than simply grinding down its forces. Recently, the Trump administration has hinted that it may be trying to adopt such a strategy in Iran. The newly launched Operation Economic Outcast aims, as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put it, to create an “economic onslaught against Iran’s financial connections around the globe.” This broader pressure may weaken the regime or eventually cause it to collapse—if the United States finds the political will to sustain such pressure. That it will, however, cannot be assumed: rising energy prices and other economic costs will test Washington’s willingness to maintain pressure over time. The most realistic outcome in Iran may be an unresolved stalemate.
Breaking this pattern will require a change in thinking in Washington. U.S. military leaders must build forces and concepts around the assumption that future wars are unlikely to be resolved quickly, while political leaders must be more realistic about whether the objectives they set can be achieved by military force alone and in a short time frame. Such adjustments will not be easy. The more dangerous possibility is that the United States will continue to drift into attritional conflicts because their price initially appears manageable, even as the human and economic costs mount. Americans may reject the notion of “forever wars.” But U.S. adversaries have every incentive to deny the United States the short, decisive conflicts it prefers. And even wars that prove relatively easy to sustain can be very difficult to end for good.