00:00Hello and welcome to One India Explainer. Wars do not end when the guns fall silent.
00:06They become lessons for the next war. Every missile intercepted, every drone that gets through,
00:12every air defense system destroyed, and every military mistake becomes data.
00:18And increasingly, modern militaries are studying wars they are not even fighting.
00:24That is exactly what's happening with the Russia-Ukraine war.
00:28Ukraine has become a giant laboratory for modern warfare, and countries across the world are watching.
00:35Iran is one of them.
00:38And as the Iran-U.S. war continues, Tehran appears to be applying some of the lessons that Russia learned
00:45and refined in Ukraine.
00:47The result? Iran may not have military superiority over the United States.
00:52But, it is making the American military spend more, defend more targets, and use up more expensive interceptors to stop
01:02cheaper Iranian weapons.
01:04Drones, mostly.
01:06That is where the battlefield equation begins to change.
01:16First, understand how military learning works.
01:19An army does not necessarily need to participate in a war to learn from it.
01:24Military intelligence studies satellite images.
01:27Defense ministries study weapons performance.
01:30Generals analyze battlefield videos.
01:32Engineers examine wreckage.
01:34And military planners ask one basic question.
01:38What worked and what failed?
01:40Ukraine has provided unprecedented amounts of such information.
01:44The board has shown what drones can do.
01:47How electronic warfare can disrupt sophisticated weapons.
01:51How mobile air defense systems can survive against a much larger air force.
01:56And perhaps, most importantly, how cheap weapons can force an enemy to use extremely expensive weapons to destroy them.
02:04That idea has become one of the biggest lessons of the Ukraine war.
02:09The CSIS describes this emerging concept as an age of precise mass.
02:15Large numbers of relatively inexpensive precision weapons and sensors being used to create effects one reserved for much more expensive
02:25military systems.
02:26Iran has clearly understood that logic.
02:29Now look at Russia's campaign in Ukraine.
02:31Russia increasingly combines drones plus cruise missiles plus ballistic missiles.
02:36Why?
02:37Because different weapons create different problems for the defender.
02:41A slow drone may force a radar to reveal itself.
02:44A cruise missile may approach from another direction.
02:48A ballistic missile arrives much faster.
02:51Put all three together and the defender has a much harder problem.
02:56CSIS describes Russia's modern campaign as massive mixed drone missile salvos with average attack waves growing dramatically in size.
03:06Iran appears to be using the same broad principle.
03:09Instead of asking, can one Iranian missile defeat a patriot, Tehran's more important question is,
03:16can we create more targets than the American air defense network can economically and operationally handle?
03:24That is a completely different way of thinking about warfare.
03:27And this is where the Iran strategy becomes particularly interesting.
03:32The United States has some of the world's most sophisticated air defense technology.
03:37But sophisticated does not mean unlimited.
03:40A patriot interceptor is enormously more expensive and technologically complex than many of the drones and missiles it is designed
03:49to destroy.
03:49So imagine, Iran launches a large number of drones and missiles, America intercepts them successfully.
03:57That sounds like an Iranian failure and victory for the US.
04:01But if Washington has to fire a very expensive interceptor to destroy a relatively inexpensive attacking drone or missile,
04:09Iran may still be achieving something.
04:11It is creating attrition in the defenders' ammunition stockpile.
04:16That is exactly the problem Ukraine itself is now facing.
04:21Ukraine has repeatedly warned about shortages of patriot interceptors as Russia intensifies its missile campaign.
04:28So Iran has watched Ukraine learn the painful lesson.
04:32Air defense is not just about whether you can shoot something down.
04:36It is also about how many times you can afford to do it.
04:40Now, there is another layer.
04:43Iran supplied Shahed drones to Russia.
04:46Russia then used them extensively against Ukraine.
04:49But Russia did not simply use the Iranian drones exactly as Iran designed them.
04:54It modified them, produced them domestically, integrated them into larger attack packages, and used them alongside missiles.
05:03Russia's Shahed campaign eventually became a major component of its strategy to saturate Ukrainian air defenses.
05:10So the learning process has actually gone both ways.
05:14Iran supplied the weapon.
05:15Russia demonstrated how mass employment could work at scale.
05:20And Iran can now watch how Russia is using those lessons against a Western-supported military.
05:26That is an extraordinary feedback loop.
05:30Ukraine also taught another brutal lesson.
05:33If the enemy knows where your air defense system is, it will try to destroy it.
05:38Ukraine survived the opening Russian air campaign partly because it moved and dispersed many of its mobile air defense systems.
05:46The CSIS assessment found that Ukrainian mobility and dispersion helped preserve much of its air defense force.
05:54Iran has similar incentives.
05:57Instead of keeping missile launchers, command centers, and strategic assets in obvious fixed locations, Tehran has increasingly relied on mobility,
06:07concealment, underground facilities, and deception.
06:11That makes the United States' targeting problem much harder.
06:15America may have the world's most powerful aircraft, but an aircraft cannot destroy what it cannot reliably locate.
06:27Iran has been building deeply buried facilities near Nathan's satellite imagery and expert assessments indicate that parts of the complex
06:36could be roughly 80 to 100 meters underground,
06:39potentially making it extremely difficult to destroy from the air.
06:43This is another lesson of modern warfare.
06:46If you cannot beat precision weapons in the open, move underground.
06:50It is not entirely Ukraine lesson.
06:53Iran has now been developing underground infrastructure for years.
06:57But the Ukraine war has reinforced just how valuable survivability, concealment, and redundancy have become.
07:06This is where we can see the immediate battlefield impact.
07:10On July 17th, Iranian missiles and drones targeted U.S. and allied positions.
07:15At Muwafiq, Saudi Air Base in Jordan, one Iranian missile penetrated the defense and hit accommodation used by American personnel.
07:25Secretary of State Marco Rubio put it very simply, one lead through.
07:29The attack killed U.S. personnel and wounded many others.
07:33U.S. officials have said American and partner forces intercepted most of the incoming weapons.
07:39But here is the most important point.
07:41Iran does not need to defeat the Patriot system every time.
07:45It needs to make the defense system work harder, longer, and more expensively.
07:51And occasionally, one weapon getting through can have a disproportionate effect.
07:56This is not new though.
07:58The United States learned enormous lessons from Vietnam.
08:01The experience of Vietnam contributed to the development of new approaches to electronic warfare, precision strike, air combat training, and
08:09suppression of enemy air defenses.
08:11Those lessons were visible in the 1991 Gulf War.
08:15Israel learned from the 1973 Yom Kippur War and transformed aspects of its air defense, intelligence, and armored warfare doctrine.
08:25And today, Israelis itself studying Ukraine.
08:28Recent research shows that the IDF examined Ukrainian battlefield experience and adopted or accelerated measures such as anti-drone protection
08:38for tanks before entering Gaza.
08:40Russia itself has changed its military practices because of Ukraine.
08:44Its forces have increasingly moved away from the large concentrations and towards smaller, dispersed assault groups because massing troops in
08:53a drone-saturated battlefield makes them easier to detect and attack.
08:58Just like sitting ducks.
09:00So this is a continuous cycle.
09:03One warp produces a lesson.
09:05Another army studies it.
09:07The lesson becomes doctrine.
09:09The doctrine meets a new enemy.
09:11And then the cycle begins once again.
09:14Here, we need to be precise.
09:16Iran has not achieved military superiority over the United States.
09:20The United States still possesses overwhelming advantages in aircraft, intelligence, surveillance, logistics, naval power, and precision strike capability.
09:30But Iran appears to have achieved something very different.
09:33It has complicated America's ability to translate technological superiority into cheap and decisive victory.
09:41Iran's strategy is essentially survive the initial strikes, disperse, hide underground, keep launching, mix drones and missiles, force the enemy
09:51to intercept, force the enemy to spend, and wait for occasional penetrations.
09:56That is not conventional victory.
09:58It is asymmetric warfare based on attrition and endurance.
10:03And that may explain why the war has been harder for Washington than a simple comparison of American and Iranian
10:11military power would suggest.
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