Challenges the U.S. military is facing in Iran

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Listen on Charlotte Wave, the science podcast from NPR. This is Fresh Air, I'm Dave Davies. Throughout the war with Iran, President Donald Trump and his team have touted the success of their punishing air strikes, asserting that Iran's missile capability has been functionally destroyed, that its munitions factories have been flattened. But there's plenty of recent reporting to suggest that five and a half months into the war,

the U.S. military's ability to dictate terms to Iran is increasingly limited.

By the depletion of American weapons stockpiles, the threat Iran can still pose to U.S. bases and allies in the region, and Iran's control of the state of horror movies. For some insight into the state of the conflict and prospects for the future, we turn to Stacey Petty-John, a widely quoted analyst on U.S. defense strategy, military planning, air power, and war gaming. Petty-John is a senior fellow and director of the defense program at the center for a new American security.

Much of her current work focuses on the impact of emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, and drones. Before joining the center for a new American security, she spent more than a decade as a political scientist at the Rand Corporation. We recorded our interview yesterday. Stacey Petty-John, welcome to fresh air. It's great to be here.

I'm interested in how you thought this war might unfold when it began. February 28th of this year, it seems at this point that President Trump is clearly frustrated. He wants to bring the word to a conclusion in which his goals are met. It is not happening. When this war began, certain things were apparent.

The United States and Israel had enormous will and capability to inflict enormous damage in death with air strikes. But we're very unlikely to commit ground troops, which would be costly and politically risky.

“I'm just wondering, when this started, what did your own knowledge and intuition tell you about how it might go?”

Well, when you look historically at operations that have focused on using air power, whether that's aircraft or missiles to try to change the behavior of another state, that there's a lot of debate and little evidence that air power alone normally produces a durable political outcome. And the one that the attacking state is looking to achieve in part because a lot of nations have a deeper interest in the situation than the U.S. does. This is something that is existential to them, whether it would be Melissa Vitch and Kosovo in 1999 or the Iranian regime today.

So in these situations, the asymmetry of interest, the fact that the country is only willing to use air power, is normally an indication that they aren't willing to go all in and pay the terrible costs that sometimes might be associated with using pure brute force and deploying ground forces to achieve a goal.

There's been a lot of reporting that this conflict has depleted supplies of critical munitions among U.S. or our sonels.

That's been disputed by the administration. There was a Washington Post report that a couple of weeks ago Trump confronted a defense secretary Pete Heggseth at a cabinet retreat at Kim. David, saying he thought this issue had been addressed in Heggseth, blamed one of his deputies for the problem. The White House press secretary called this 100% fake news. Do you find these reports credible? Yes, they are absolutely credible for particular types of weapons. I think you can holistically say that the U.S. military still has deep stockpiles of even precision guided weapons.

“But they tend to be short range ones that you have to get close to the target to attack it and drop a bomb. Something like the J.M. we've heard a lot about that.”

It is a dumb bomb that has a tail kit attached that allows it to be guided by GPS and to precisely hit targets. But you need to be nearby. The U.S. has lots of those. They have lots of glide bombs. They have lots of shorter range missiles and rockets. Where they have shortfalls are in some of the more exquisite systems that are longer range, which tends to drive up the cost of the weapon. Because going farther requires a bigger airframe and there's just sort of compounding costs that occur. So they're more expensive. We buy fewer of them typically. And then also on the defensive side, the surface stair missiles or the defensive interceptors such as the Patriot missile or the that interceptors.

Yeah, Patriot missiles cost about 4 million each. That's right. Yeah, I think something like 3.9 is around for the newest variant of the missile, which is quite capable.

And has proven itself to be very good on the battlefields in both Ukraine and actually the Middle East just expensive and difficult to make.

“Is the concern that the US won't be able to defend its Gulf Allies and US bases or that it'll be less able to launch offensive strikes against Iran or both?”

It's both. They're intertwined. And this is one of the interesting tensions with the situation that the US finds itself in.

You can sit back and wait and use either your ground base like the Patriot or the that or C-based air defenses, which means they're on one of the destroyers or cruisers in the region to protect your allies or US bases in the region where US forces are stationed. But those stockpiles are running low, they're finite and they're not going to be replenished in the next two to three years. The other option is to go on the offensive and begin to pressure Iran again by hunting for its missile and drone launchers.

That's been a state of objective of this campaign since the beginning. And it seems like the US has actually had pretty notable success in some ways that this but nowhere near to the extent to which the administration has claimed. So part of this is a problem that it's just incredibly difficult to find what are often small trucks or sometimes bigger trucks for the larger ballistic missiles that can blend in that hide Iran has underground shelters.

“So they pull them out, shoot and then move again and go somewhere else to hide, which means you have to be looking constantly at them to actually track their movement and find them and then get a weapon on them that can destroy them.”

And a lot of the standoff weapons the US uses like the Tomahawk cruise missile or jasm fly slowly so they're not particularly well suited for these quick targets. So going on the offensive and suppressing Iranian missiles and drones or destroying them would require restarting the air campaign at a new level. But the bases in the region have proven to be incredibly vulnerable and those are bases that US forces an aircraft would have to use because the United States Air Force mostly has short range fighter aircraft.

So they have to be base nearby, they're going to need tankers and you would have to assume that Iran would be attacking the bases more regularly to prevent the US from resuming this air campaign.

“Are there cases where you can see these shortages having an effect on battlefield strategy and tactics specific cases where the effect is clear?”

Well it seems and this is just my supposition but it's clear that the administration is frustrated with this situation and really wants to get out of it and the president is prone to bluster and making threats, but you know past behavior suggests he will follow through on and them if it seems like it's going to be at a reasonable cost. And I think right now the real issue is the costs are too high. So seizing any of the islands trying to seize any of the territory in Iran would be prohibitively costly because those pieces of territory are very close to Iran and there could be missile and drone launchers all over that could easily range them.

So US forces would be sitting ducks and would have to be prepared to endure and survive through sustained attacks. Similarly, if you were to think about trying to escort ships through the straight, right, opening the straight seems to be at the heart of the conflict right now. And Iran is reveling in its newfound power. The fact that it has closed the straight and it has the upper hand. And I think every time the US goes on the offensive, they've realized that Iran has shown that it will retaliate and so they have to be prepared to defend not only their bases but their allies and partners in the region as well.

Has the United States rotated some of its forces out of the region some of those that had been used in the initial attacks on Iran? I don't think it has actually taken any forces out yet. It has been announced that they're going to be moving one of the aircraft carriers that's been on an incredibly prolonged deployment and a part of the operations against Iran is supposed to leave soon.

That's the USS Abraham Lincoln. I mean, that's become quite a public controversy. As you know, there've been reporting a food shortage, broken toilets, moldy showers and have you heard of issues like that in other parts of the military? I have. I think this is an incredibly disruptive deployment for many forces, including those on the ground because the US has essentially vacated the large bases that it would typically and has in the past operated from in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, the UAE because those bases have been attacked so many times.

So it's not clear to me exactly where they're operating from, but I know they don't have the usual support and amenities that are provided at these locations and that they're instead working from living in and moving around and distributed locations to reduce their vulnerability to attack.

That's interesting. So it's not just the length of the deployment. It's the fact that support bases have been damaged attack and in some cases abandoned.

Basically, yeah, it will be very interesting to see what the US does when this, if this were ever ends, and in terms of its peacetime presence in the region because it was heavily concentrated around the Gulf, and in those very vulnerable big bases. It seems like it would be unwise to begin to bring in large warships to Bahrain, to go to port, or park big aircraft, even little aircraft, F-35s, tankers, AWACs at any of these locations because they could easily be attacked at any point.

“I've already seen that there have been tankers that were hit on the ground, I think in Saudi Arabia, along with the airborne battle management aircraft, AWACs, and those are pretty difficult losses to replace in any near term.”

I remember that there was an early Iranian attack on the US Navy Base in Bahrain, which was the headquarters of the US Navy Fifth Fleet in the region, and I guess that's directly contributed to these problems with supporting ships like the US as Abraham Lincoln. It definitely has, and I think you've seen the Navy has been diverted to other locations that are farther away and harder for Iran to hit, eventually they received permission to go to Diego Garcia, the British territory in the Chago Islands, where the US flies a bomber aircraft, but there's also an evil base there, but these aren't places that are typical port calls and not where the US typically operates from.

So I assume they don't have the stores of supplies that would be needed for the people, let alone the equipment and munitions and different other materials that are needed for replenishment.

“Yeah, that's like 22 hundred miles from the Gulf, right?”

It is, and it looks like Iran fired at it at one point, probably because the US was using it. They previously would send sometimes ships, if not to Bahrain, they would port in Oman, but, you know, the relationship with Oman is a bit fraught right now, and it's clearly those locations are also vulnerable.

Yeah, I want to just talk a moment about that relationship with Oman, they were, I believe, according to the ceasefire announced in June to work with Iran on managing the straight of horror moves.

The ceasefire, of course, fell apart officially terminated on Monday, and in an interview on Fox News, President Trump said something to the effect that Oman was a problem that, or that if they get in the way, we'll bomb the exploitive out of them. What on earth is going on here?

“Oman is an interesting country that has quietly had a reasonably close relationship with the US and allowed the US military to operate from some bases on its territory since the 1970s, but it also has maintained good relations with Iran.”

And Oman has been trying to play that sort of mediating role between Tehran and Washington and find some sort of solution that would allow the straight to be reopened because the region's economy is so dependent on it. And that has angered the president because it goes against his claims that the US does control the straight and that it already is open, and he sees it as, I guess, some form of betrayal. Let's talk about the shortages of these weapons particularly in the Patriot missiles and the the Fed interceptors. That's an acronym for defense against long term ballistic missiles, right? Is this a failure of planning by the Pentagon? I mean, why are these shortages occurring?

They're one of the smaller things that is purchased in large quantities, so you can cut them and with intention to buy more next year.

And if you go back and look through budget documents, you could see the planned ramp up after cutting it one year. But the problem is that happens again and again. So in the budget deals, the services tend to prioritize their big weapons that is their ships, their aircraft, their tanks, and they would rather buy them and they'll figure out the ammo later. So now we find ourselves in the situation where we don't have enough of these missiles, they are defense ones or the offensive ones that are incredibly important and that help protect American service members lives, because they can conduct offensive strikes from far away or defend their bases in the region.

“And it's not easy to ramp up production quickly? No, it's not, and industry is hesitant to do so for good reasons because year to year the buys have been incredibly volatile.”

You find that one year will buy zero tomahawks, the next year will buy a hundred. And if you think about how any business runs and makes a profit, they can't have these big gaps in terms of their ability to sell their product. And since the defense companies have one major purchaser, that is the Department of Defense, they're beholden to its buys. And that volatility means that they have production lines that are lying their fellow, which is not profitable and is something that's difficult for them to carry as publicly traded companies, many of them are.

And they'll lose people, the skilled people who work there. So when there's a decision to expand, it tends to take 12 months to two years to actually begin to see and increase an output.

“So what is the defense department doing about the shortages?”

So they are doing a lot. The Deputy Secretary of Defense has made munitions a priority as it was in the last administration, but clearly enough was an achieved in that term. And the main initiative has been identifying about a dozen critical munitions that the Pentagon has issued multi-year procurement frameworks for, that's a really jargony term to mean that they're trying to lay out instead of annually, which is typically, they say we're going to buy 50 tomahawks this year, and we plan to buy these others this other year, but it's not binding.

Say we're going to buy X money for five or seven years, which I think helps to signal to industry that there is going to be sustained investment.

The problem is they still have to issue the contracts and actually pass the money for these ramp ups to begin. And for the most part that has been taking longer to follow. So the Pentagon announced Monday that it had reached new contracts with RTX to expand tomahawk production. So this is the next step that needs to happen. But if you look at the president's budget request this year, the ramp ups and all of these munitions, how many they're asking to buy, and for how many years are in many instances.

6, 8, 14, 20 times what we have bought typically in the recent past, and that's going to be a pretty extraordinary ask of industry to expand its production that much.

“Right. And even in the best case for the defense department, it's not going to get any of these weapons in the next few months, right?”

No, the lead time, the amount of time it will take until a weapon is delivered is in many instances two and a half to four years. So these aren't going to appear and begin to refill stockpiles for some time, which is why you also see there is an increasingly a push for the Pentagon to buy new weapons that it currently doesn't have that are simpler and cheaper. So the ideas you can buy more of them, they hopefully are easier to produce. So you can sort of tap into that idea of, you know, World War II mobilization. You don't need a skill to flavor. You don't need as bespoke of machine tools to produce these.

There's something that they're just beginning to do. They're looking at having cheap cruise missiles, perhaps a cheap patriot interceptor that won't be as good as the MSE missile that is sort of the gold standard right now, but can provide some of the air missile defense capability.

She'll be back to talk more about the military situation in Iran after this short break. I'm Dave Davies and this is fresh air.

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Stay caught up on the latest news with Trump's term, the podcast where we curate NPR's coverage of president Trump and short episodes focused on a single story. Follow Trump's terms on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is fresh air. I'm Dave Davies. We're talking about the military challenges the United States faces five and a half months into the war with Iran. There's been considerable reporting in the American media about the depletion of U.S. weapon stockpiles and the continuing threat Iran can pose to American bases and allies in the Persian Gulf region.

Our guest is Stacy Petty John. Petty John is the senior fellow and director of the defense program at the Center for a new American security. We recorded our conversation yesterday. I want to talk a bit about drones. You know, one of the issues the United States faces is that they have a lot of really expensive weapons that cost a lot and take a long time to produce Center very effective. But as warfare has developed recently, particularly in the Ukraine conflict, people are using smaller, lighter drones to considerable effects. I wanted to talk about that. You know, we talk about drones. There are all kinds of drones. I mean, some are as big as airplanes and look like airplanes and can be in the air for a long time and go great distances. Some of them are almost as small as the ones we see buzzing around parks and beaches.

“The United States has kind of focused so far on the higher end stuff, the expensive stuff, right?”

Yes. The Patagon likes its gold plated, you know, sort of weapons. And typically with new weapons programs, it looks to make an improved model of something that already has. So something that's better that goes faster that is hard to see on a radar that has a bigger war ahead goes farther, whatever it may be. And what you've seen globally is that because of the development and improvements to widely available commercial technologies, things like GPS, things like batteries, cameras that there are these largely commercially derived drones or one-way attack weapons.

They're essentially sort of not very good cruise missiles that have proliferated and that are allowing a lot of actors, a lot of different countries. But even some non-state actors like the Houthis and his Bala and some of the Iraqi militias to launch standoff attacks. And that has been a real shift and they're doing so at a fraction of the price of any of the U.S. missiles that cost multimillion dollars. You said standoff attacks, what do you mean? So they don't have to be very close by the target that they're hitting. I'm excluding the smallest drones right here, which have been incredibly important in Ukraine and in other wars in Lake Nagorno-Korabakh and Libya.

But when we talk about the longer range drones that Iran is using right now to attack U.S. forces and different countries in the Gulf, these go hundreds or a thousand, almost two thousand miles.

And they're basically cheap cruise missiles that previously Iran didn't have.

Russia didn't have them, they're using them against Ukraine. So if you look at this larger drone and this bigger class, it has provided a new sort of weapon that used to only be available to the United States and really advanced militaries.

“And Iran has developed the sense of the war or leading up to the war?”

Well before the war, the drone that gets the most attention is called the Shahhead 136.

And it essentially flies into its target and explodes.

And Iran has several different variants of this. It has a slightly smaller one. The Shahhead 131 has the Shahhead 101 that goes about 400 miles. Only a 20 pound warhead that a lot of its proxies and Yemen and Iraq have used. And these have provided it with a lot of depth in terms of its ability to reach out and strike U.S. bases and different countries in the region.

“And how much of those cost to build those, the Shahhead drones?”

The estimates vary. You go from like 20 to 50, maybe 70,000 dollars for more exquisite variant. The interesting fact is that Iran's now in a position, it gave these Shahhead 136 drones to Russia in 2022.

When Russia had used up a lot of its more sophisticated cruise and ballistic missiles in the opening months of the war against Ukraine.

And Russia learned how to produce these drones around Taudet. And it has since improved them. They're called barons there. And it has these dramatically improved variants that are still quite cheap. And that continue to form the core of the airstrikes that Russia launches against Ukraine every day. They're firing hundreds of them in at a time right now.

So is the United States military moving towards more nimble and inexpensive tactics or weapons?

For counter-drone defenses it definitely is.

“In 2023, 2024, you'll remember that there were a lot of attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq by Iraqi Shia militias using Iranian belt drones.”

And then there was the attacks on shipping in the Red Sea by the Houthis. And the U.S. military learned through those operations and sort of adapted in real time, where destroyers the big navy warships that are out there instead of firing in a standard missile too, which is an expensive interceptor or standard missile six, started using its five-inch cannon. And they've begun to acquire specialized munition that's better at getting the drones.

The army similarly started using coyote interceptors and different types of defenses. They still don't have enough of these cheaper, more cost-effective systems. One of the most, I think, useful ones that the U.S. forces have found in the Middle East has been using fighter aircraft that are in the sky and armed with relatively cheap guided rockets to shoot down the drones. And the interceptors cheap, but actually having the aircraft up there flying around is not as cheap,

and those aircraft are relying on those vulnerable forward bases. But they have learned a lot. They're still more to go and a lot more equipment to be procured and training to happen.

“You know, there was a story, I think was in the Wall Street Journal about some war games in Europe,”

which the United States, as I believe, was on one side. And Ukrainians were on another side, and the Ukrainians got the better them, because they had gotten so effective and sophisticated at using drones in battlefield situations. You saw this, I assume. What does that tell us? It tells us that the U.S. military and its NATO allies have a long way to go in terms of adaptation.

These are the smaller drones we're talking about here, more like quadcopters and smaller fixed wing ones that maybe go 20 to 50, maybe 60 miles, and I've heard for years from Ukrainians that when they have left Ukraine to go and be trained by NATO elsewhere, that they found the training to be incredibly unrealistic and not reflecting the realities of the battlefield, that they'd been on every day. And in part, that's due to restrictions that the U.S. and many Western European countries have about using jamming

and electronic warfare in their territories and in their airspace, because it can interfere with civilian air traffic, and your ability to use GPS on your phone, things that make people upset. But it's also, I think, the scale and the number of drones that are up in the air at any given time in Ukraine on the front lines, these smaller tactical drones, the battlefields just really saturated with them, and it is very hard to operate as a cohesive unit and to come together, you know, mass forces where you're collectively in the same place to take some sort of offensive action and not be seen.

And that's something that I don't think the U.S. military has fully internalized and figured out how to adapt to.

Let me reintroduce you.

We are speaking with Stacey Petty John.

She's a senior fellow and the director of the Defense Program at the Center for a new American security. We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is fresh air. Okay, so you're driving to work or you're on a walk or you're at the gym or whatever, and you just need to clear your head.

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We unpack the three big stories every morning so you can stay informed and get on with your day in less than 15 minutes. Follow or subscribe to up first today wherever you get your podcasts. This is fresh air, and we're talking about some of the challenges the US military faces in the war with Iran with Stacey Petty John. She's a senior fellow and director of the Defense Program at the Center for a new American security.

“If drone warfare represents a new way to fight, who is getting it right, who's best at producing and using drones?”

Is it Ukraine? Ukraine is definitely one of the best at producing and using drones and at innovating in terms of how they employ them.

In the war against Russia, that began in 2022, repeatedly Ukraine has been the first mover and come up with a new way to use a drone.

Like the first person view drones, which are the small really fast quadcopters that are racing drones, that have become ubiquitous on the battlefield. Now, they're one of the most common weapons that causes the most damage on the front lines. And Ukraine innovated that tactic. You've seen them in the black sea using drone boats to attack the Russian black sea fleet, and essentially opening up the waterways so that they can export grain from Odessa. So that has had strategic significance.

And then more recently, Ukraine has built up these longer-range drones that have reached deep into Russia and been attacking oil infrastructure, causing fuel storage shortages throughout the country, and also increasingly isolating Crimea, which has sort of been Russia's crown jewel,

“what it annexed in 2014, and a key base for its military, but now it's having trouble resupplying it there, and its forces are constantly under attack from long-range air and sea drones from Ukraine.”

Russia's also really good, and they have emulated Ukraine in a way, and more quickly than I would have anticipated, and what Russia's advantages is scaling production. And you know, they're producing more than 6,000 of the Iran, their version of the Shah had the long-range drones now a month. And they just have that scaled vantage that Ukraine hasn't quite achieved. You know, it's pretty remarkable that Ukraine could build this new industry while they're under this existential threat, and they're very capital as being bombed.

How did they put this together so quickly? It was very diffuse, and it still is pretty diffuse, and that's one of the challenges. You have all these innovative people who have gotten into this because it's existential for them. They're under attack. There is an immediate need, so they're willing to try things that might be risky, and to explore options that a much more conservative state and peacetime like the US military wouldn't do. But it has meant that there are lots of small sort of artisanal drone shops, almost every unit on the front lines has its own drone sort of detachment that manufactures them behind the front lines, but that they rely on.

So that means that it's just really distributed, and it makes it harder to achieve the economies of scale that the Russians do and to produce as many of the same systems and have everyone trained on the same systems. There's value in it, right, they're probably harder to counter because everybody's not using the same type of drones, they're not using the same type of tactics, but not being standardized also has its downsides.

“Is the United States simply too big to produce drones like Ukraine?”

In the exact same way that Ukraine produces them, yes, one of the biggest challenges that the US faces in producing small drones is that the US military is required to not use Chinese parts.

And it is dominated the market for so long, and it's so far ahead, and it's economies of scale are huge, that finding components that are not made in China is really difficult, and they tend to be a lot more expensive.

“So what happens is that US companies end up making inferior drones because they don't have all the expertise that these Chinese companies have that costs more, because they're trying that to rely on Chinese components.”

I don't talk about a couple of other issues in the defense world, you know, the depletion of US defensive munitions has raised concerns about its ability to defend Taiwan or deter a military assault on Taiwan from China. How much of a problem do you think this poses for the defense of Taiwan? It's a huge problem. The US's stated strategy right now is one of deterrence by denial, meaning that it wants to be able to defeat an invasion, should China decide to attack Taiwan, and there are real questions whether it could do so, given the munitions stockpiles that it has right now.

For Operation Epic Ferry, before we begin this war against Iran, the US didn't have enough of critical munitions for that war. When we would run war games, US forces would typically run out within seven to ten days of long-range maritime strike weapons, so missiles that can sink boats of air defense weapons of long-range surface attack weapons would be running short. So now that we're facing the situation that the US finds itself in now in 2026, where many of the same weapons that would be needed in a conflict in Asia have been further depleted, it is a bit of a conundrum, and I think does push the United States to see what it can do more with cheaper variants, whether their cruise missiles or cheap drones.

“The problem is still that because of the geography of the Pacific and the distances there, they have to be pretty long-range so they're not going to be super cheap.”

That's assuming the United States doesn't have these weapons embedded in the island of Taiwan. Correct, and that could change when the US military thinks about defending Taiwan, they plan to fight from bases in Japan, maybe the Philippines, Guam, the Northern Marianas, Alaska, Australia, not on Taiwan proper.

I do think Taiwan could make use of a lot of very small cheap drones to bolster its defenses and its asymmetric strategy.

“Have the needs of the United States to move military capability into the Persian Gulf region, diminished its presence in Asia and encouraged a different approach from China?”

I don't know if we've seen China really respond to the reduced US presence in East Asia, but it definitely has been drawn down. Early in the war, there were parts of a sad system that were deployed to the Middle East. I think some of their weapons stockpiles have been diverted. Now you have the aircraft carrier and recently this weekend, President Trump decided to reduce the size of long-planned US exercises with its allies, South Korea. I think there have been aircraft deployed to the Middle East as well, so all of that does sort of leave some openings and create a weakness there, but I don't think China's just going to attack Taiwan because the United States is distracted and another region.

We're going to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Stacey Petty John. She is a senior fellow and director of the defense program at the Center for a new American security. We'll be back after this short break. This is fresh air. Hey, it's Mike Danforth, executive producer of Weight Weight Don't Tell Me. Here's a great way to get the perks of being an NPR producer without doing any of the work. Join NPR Plus.

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This is fresh air and we're talking about some of the challenges the United States military faces in its war with Iran with Stacey Petty John. She's a senior fellow and director of the defense program at the Center for a new American security.

“Another development in Asia. In recent days, President Trump on truth social has been saying nice things about North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.”

On Saturday he had a post on his truth social platform saying Kim Jong-un and I get along great exclamation point with a photo of them from their past meeting.

On Sunday, he posted a comment that said based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong-un, North Korea, I'm not happy with the fact that the United States has long agreed to participate in joint military exercises with South Korea. And then on Monday, he posted a photo of Kim Jong-un and military guard making a phone call and then over that we see the headline in quote, "Hey Donald, we cool, right? What do you make of this sudden embrace of Kim Jong-un?" Going back to Trump's first term, he made a big overture to Kim Jong-un and tried to reach an agreement with him that failed miserably, but I think that the president is so desperate to have a win and to reach some sort of agreement with someone that he sometimes makes these sort of openings.

And North Korea seems to be a potential place where he could actually score a victory, I guess, in his view, though it is quite inconsistent because the president has also praised South Korea for being a country that's doing more for its own defenses.

“I think it's interesting more, it's expanding its industry and looking to cooperate with U.S. defense industry. So there isn't a lot of coherence to this administration's overall policy, I think, towards the region.”

And it vassulates between this personal diplomacy and reaching an agreement with another head of state and sort of what actually is happening day to day and behind the scenes at a lot of more working levels.

Is there any evidence that diplomacy with North Korea has convinced them to curb their nuclear ambitions?

There wasn't a agreement in the 90s that at least temporarily worked though that's hardly debated in terms of stopping the North Koreans as they sought to develop a nuclear weapon, but now North Korea has a nuclear weapon. It's a very different situation and one that is much harder to reverse.

Their stockpile is projected to have grown fairly significantly, you're not even talking about a handful of weapons.

But at this point, you don't know where they are, so coercive options or forceful removal would be incredibly risky and difficult. If you don't have a nuclear weapon you get attacked and if you do your safer has been ingrained in many different states that are observing what's happening and could actually lead to more proliferation. The other thing is North Korea has really advanced its missile arsenal. So it's been providing sharp range ballistic missiles to Russia and they've been improving significantly, they're not great, but they're becoming more and more accurate.

It's advancements in its medium and it's intercontinental range missiles have also advanced, so that makes it a very different threat than it was previously.

“We've talked a lot about the war in Iran, we began by asking you when this war broke out, did you have an intuition about what might happen?”

As things stand now in this war, how might this unfold as we go forward? I'm not sure, I think that eventually, at some point the United States is going to accept that they're going to have to take a deal that gives Iran at least diffracted control over the straight, so that it's open, which is a worse position than the United States in the world was in before the war began, but there has to be some sort of face saving measure in there right now.

And the Trump administration desperately seems to want to get out, but also need something that the President can call a victory.

It's in a really tough place and relying right now on this blockade of Iran is causing more harm to the Iranian economy and to the Iranian people in regime, but they've also suffered a tremendous amount and shown an ability to endure that. So I don't know if that will work or when it would work, but I tend to find that punishment strategies, if they do have an effect, it's over a long period of time and it's not clear that the U.S. can win this war of endurance.

“Because Iran is likely to be able to rearm faster, it's getting drones from Russia, there have been reports of key precursor materials for rocket fuel that have been delivered from China.”

And it's in a position where it's building cheaper weapons, and it can do so more quickly than the United States, where we're hearing about the strain on the U.S. force more generally, not just its stockpiles, with the Navy, but I think the other deployed forces are on long tours that are a hardship tour and fairly stressful, and things are going to begin to break.

Well, Stacey Petty, John, thank you so much for speaking with us.

It's been a pleasure to be here. Stacey Petty, John, is a senior fellow and director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security.

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