The war between the United States and Iran has exposed a profound shift in the nature of military power, with smaller states and nonstate actors increasingly able to inflict significant damage on far more powerful adversaries through precision missiles, drones, intelligence, and relatively inexpensive technology, American writer Thomas L. Friedman argues in an opinion article published by The New York Times.
Friedman argues that this transformation is not unique to Iran. It is also evident in the wars involving Russia and Ukraine, as well as in the Israeli occupation’s conflicts with Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Ansarullah Movement.
He describes the shift as the “new physics of war,” arguing that smaller actors can now operate like major military powers, combining high precision with relatively low costs. At the same time, major powers can also deliver highly precise, limited strikes, but often at far greater expense because they rely on vast, sophisticated military systems built up over decades.
A Growing Threat
In Friedman’s view, the balance of military advantage is currently tilting towards the smaller side—a development made potentially more dangerous by the rapid advance of artificial intelligence. He cites the war with Iran as an illustration.
After the US air campaign against Iran began, President Donald Trump declared that the war was over and that the United States had won. But Tehran, Friedman argues, had a plan for the day after. It was able to use relatively cheap, precision weapons to exert pressure on Washington and place the Strait of Hormuz high on the negotiating agenda, despite Iran’s military being vastly smaller than the US armed forces and having suffered heavy strikes.
Friedman notes that decades of economic sanctions against Iran did not prevent it from developing a relatively low-cost arsenal of missiles and drones capable of inflicting damage on US and Israeli occupation forces.
Key Examples
Among the most prominent examples cited by Friedman is the claim that Iranian missiles and drones destroyed a substantial portion of a US logistics base in Bahrain during the first days of the war, forcing Washington to rely more heavily on Diego Garcia, thousands of kilometers away.
Friedman also points to the destruction of an advanced US THAAD radar at a base in Jordan. Citing military experts, he notes that modern missiles He cites military experts who explain that modern missiles no longer follow predictable flight paths. to predictable flight paths. Some can maneuver in flight and alter their trajectory, making them considerably harder to intercept.
The world is entering a new era in which power is measured not only by the number of soldiers, aircraft, and aircraft carriers a country possesses but also by its ability to acquire information and rapidly turn it into precise, low-cost effects.
Information versus mass
Friedman quotes John Arquilla, professor emeritus at the US Naval Postgraduate School, as saying that wars in the past were decided by “mass and energy.” Distance reduced the accuracy of weapons, requiring armies to deploy greater quantities of force and energy. Today, Arquilla argues that information increasingly decides wars.
The transformation is particularly evident in Ukraine, where relatively inexpensive weapons and unmanned boats have helped push Russia’s conventional fleet away from Ukrainian shores. A similar dynamic can be seen in the experience of Hezbollah, the Ansarullah, and Iran, in which smaller forces have managed to inflict substantial damage on militaries that surpass them in size and conventional firepower.
Friedman argues that another advantage enjoyed by smaller actors is that they do not necessarily need to achieve total victory; they may only need to avoid defeat. A major power, by contrast, must win, end the war, and bring its forces home—making a prolonged conflict significantly more costly for it.
A warning for major powers
However, Friedman also cautions that major powers can now “act like a small power” by leveraging highly precise information.
He points to Israeli strikes that killed dozens of Iranian commanders in a single operation, the detonation of communications devices used by Hezbollah members, and the Stuxnet cyberattack, which disrupted Iranian centrifuges.
Friedman then broadens his warning beyond states and conventional militaries. As artificial intelligence becomes more widely accessible, he argues, a relatively insignificant individual—potentially even a teenager with a computer, an internet connection, and access to an AI model—could exploit vulnerabilities in aging systems and disrupt critical infrastructure such as water and electricity networks.
The result, Friedman concludes, is a new era in which military power can no longer be measured simply by the number of soldiers, aircraft, or aircraft carriers a country commands. Increasingly, the decisive advantage lies in the ability to gather information and rapidly convert it into precise, inexpensive effects.
This “new physics of power,” he argues, could make traditional military superiority far less reliable than it once was.
Source: Al-Jazeera Net (Edited and translated by Al-Manar English)