The Drone Wars and the Impact Force: What Michael O’Hanlon’s Ukraine-Iran Lessons Mean for Force Design
A recent Defense & Aerospace Report Land Warfare podcast, in which Vago Muradian sat down with Brookings’ Michael O’Hanlon to discuss the lessons of the Ukraine and Iran wars, offers a useful occasion to test a framework I have been developing across several books and articles: the shift from a crisis-management force structured around episodic, high-intensity events to an impact force built to operate continuously inside sustained chaos.
O’Hanlon’s analysis of the “close fight revolution,” the U.S. Army’s institutional churn, and the limits of drone substitution for maneuver warfare tracks closely with arguments I have made about kill webs, intelligent mass, and the co-evolution of allied forces.
But it also sharpens a distinction that deserves more attention than it is currently getting in the Pentagon: the difference between a revolution in the close fight and a revolution in force design.
The Close Fight Is Not the Whole Fight
O’Hanlon’s central claim is that the Ukraine war has “revolutionized the close fight” or the replacement of artillery by mass-produced drones, the near-elimination of unobserved movement along a 600-mile static front, and the erosion of the tank’s role as the default kill vehicle in that specific geography. This is a sound and by now widely shared observation.
What is more interesting, and what does not get nearly enough attention in the breathless “tanks are dead” commentary that follows every war, is his caveat: this transformation is a function of the static nature of the Ukrainian front, not of an inherent supremacy of drones over combined-arms maneuver as such.
Where lines are fixed for years, drone density becomes total, and anything larger than a dismounted soldier becomes hard to move without being killed. Where lines are not fixed or where an enemy has genuine freedom of maneuver and the defender cannot pre-position tens of thousands of first-person-view systems along every possible axis of advance, the calculus changes considerably.
This distinction matters enormously for how militaries should read the Ukraine experience into their own force design choices, and it maps directly onto an argument I have made in Building the Impact Force: the danger of over-learning the lessons of the last engagement and mis-applying them to force structures meant to operate across a much wider spectrum of contingencies.
The Marine Corps’ own transformation from a crisis-response “inside force” oriented toward episodic contingencies to an impact force generating disproportionate effects for the joint and allied force through persistent sensing, deciding, and enabling was built on the premise that the future operating environment is chaotic and continuous rather than punctuated by discrete crises with tidy beginnings and endings. O’Hanlon’s framing of the Ukraine-Iran wars supports exactly that premise, but from the other direction: it shows how quickly a single class of technology can dominate a narrowly bounded tactical problem (the static close fight) while remaining only additive, not transformative, in a different but equally plausible contingency (a fluid maneuver fight in an undefined location).
The Korea case O’Hanlon raises is instructive precisely because it is the exception that proves this rule. He is right to flag Korea as the most Ukraine-like scenario the U.S. and its allies could face, a predictable, heavily fortified, largely static front where both sides have had decades to dig in and where the drone-saturated close fight logic of the Donbas front line could reasonably be expected to reproduce itself.
That is a genuinely useful transfer of lessons. But it is a transfer that works because the geography and posture match, not because drones have somehow rewritten the laws of land warfare universally.
The Baltic scenario he sketches, a flanking, indirect-approach counterattack through NATO or even Ukrainian territory, degraded by heavy Russian electronic warfare on one side and by NATO jamming on the other, is a maneuver problem dressed in some of the same technology, and it requires a very different kind of force than the one currently absorbing all the “drone revolution” enthusiasm inside the Pentagon.
Kill Web Logic, Not Drone Fetishism
This is where the kill web versus kill chain distinction that Ed Timperlake and I have developed becomes directly relevant to O’Hanlon’s discussion, even though he does not use that vocabulary himself. A kill chain is a fixed, sequential relationship between a specific sensor, a specific shooter, and a specific target — the logic that made the Joint Stars-cued sensor-fused-weapon strikes of the Gulf Wars so devastatingly effective, and that O’Hanlon rightly cites as the high-water mark of a transparency advantage the United States once enjoyed almost uncontested. A kill web, by contrast, is a reconfigurable mesh of distributed sensors, shooters, and decision nodes that can route around degradation, denial, or the loss of any single node, and that draws its combat power from the platform-agnostic ability to close a targeting solution through whichever path remains available rather than through one that was pre-planned.
O’Hanlon’s discussion of Iran turning the tables on U.S. and allied transparency by using Russian-assisted surveillance to strike Gulf partners with precision is, in effect, a description of what happens when an adversary starts building rudimentary kill webs of its own against forces that had grown comfortable assuming they alone possessed a reconnaissance-strike complex. His answer for the Taiwan scenario, jam the downlink from Chinese satellites, confuse Chinese ISR with decoys and false emissions, push assets far enough offshore that short-range drones cannot substitute for long-range reconnaissance aircraft, and rely on submarines operating in an ocean that is not becoming transparent is precisely a kill web counter-strategy: deny the adversary’s meshed sensor-shooter architecture rather than accept that transparency is now simply symmetric and unavoidable. His formulation deserves to be read alongside the maritime kill web work Timperlake and I have done on distributed, resilient sensor-shooter meshes for exactly this reason. It is an implicit argument that the architecture of sensing and targeting, not the raw proliferation of drones, is what determines whether a transparent battlefield favors you or your adversary.
This also connects to a theme central to the shipbuilding and maritime autonomous systems work I have been doing: the submarine force as what O’Hanlon rightly calls “one of our great aces in the hole,” precisely because it sits outside the reach of the drone-and-satellite kill web logic that dominates the land and littoral fight. The open ocean’s resistance to transparency is not an accident of physics that will simply erode with quantum computing on some near horizon, as he correctly notes. It is a structural feature that argues for continued, even accelerated, investment in undersea capability as a hedge against the increasingly contested surface and air domains where drone saturation and satellite ISR are steadily narrowing the space in which large, exposed platforms can operate undetected.
Intelligent Mass, Exquisite Scarcity, and the Munitions Debate
O’Hanlon’s treatment of the munitions depletion question is, in effect, a case study in the distinction I have drawn between intelligent mass and exquisite scarcity. His argument is more nuanced than the “we’re out of everything” narrative that dominates budget testimony season: he separates the genuinely acute problem — Ukraine’s dwindling interceptor stocks, which are directly costing lives as Russian ballistic missile barrages intensify — from the largely overstated problem of U.S. long-range anti-ship missile inventories being insufficient to deter a Taiwan invasion. On the latter, he is characteristically direct: the United States retains enough anti-ship capability to “sink every ship in the Chinese amphibious fleet several times over,” and Xi Jinping’s decision calculus on Taiwan is not going to turn on whether U.S. Patriot inventories are down by half, because the stakes of a war between nuclear superpowers dwarf any single munitions category.
This is precisely the wrong metric to obsess over if the concept of intelligent mass has any purchase, and O’Hanlon’s analysis implicitly supports it. Exquisite scarcity or the accumulated legacy of decades of procuring small numbers of extraordinarily capable, extraordinarily expensive munitions and platforms leaves a force brittle in exactly the scenario where mass matters most: a protracted, multi-year conflict of the kind he argues the Pentagon’s war games systematically underprepare for by fixating on the first few days or weeks of a hypothetical China fight. Intelligent mass, in contrast, is not simply about buying more of everything; it is about building the kind of distributed, networked force structure, cheaper attritable systems knitted into a kill web architecture, that can sustain a long war without being reduced, magazine by magazine, to the exquisite scarcity trap that has already hollowed out Ukraine’s air defense.
O’Hanlon’s point about the coming winter and Russia’s exploitation of Ukraine’s depleted air defenses is a sobering illustration of what happens when an intelligent-mass architecture is never built in the first place, and a force is left dependent on a small number of exquisite, irreplaceable interceptor types. His call to dramatically expand the surge production capacity the Pentagon has begun tentatively building — the “small and medium-sized steps” he references — is, in essence, a call to convert the American industrial base from an exquisite-scarcity production model to an intelligent-mass one before the next long war, not during it. This is a theme I have pressed in the shipbuilding chapter of the Maritime Kill Web Force work as well: the capital ship reimagining that treats autonomous and attritable systems as force multipliers rather than boutique add-ons is the naval analogue of exactly the industrial transformation O’Hanlon is calling for on the munitions side.
The Army’s Institutional Chaos Management Problem
Perhaps the most pointed moment in the podcast, and the one most directly relevant to the chaos management versus crisis management distinction, is O’Hanlon’s discussion of acting Army Chief Gen. Chris LaNeve’s decision to disband the drone battalion established by his predecessor, Gen. Randy George, and convert it into an airborne infantry unit. O’Hanlon, who was quoted expressing concern about this decision in a Wall Street Journal article by Michael Gordon, is careful not to overreach. He does not claim certainty about LaNeve’s reasoning but he flags a pattern that will be familiar to anyone who has studied organizational behavior under conditions of institutional churn: the temptation for new leadership to redirect or dismantle a predecessor’s signature initiative not because the initiative was wrong, but because it was not theirs.
This is a textbook crisis-management failure mode masquerading as routine reorganization. A force genuinely oriented toward operating continuously inside chaos rather than lurching from one leadership priority to the next as if each transition were itself the crisis to be managed would treat institutional learning about the drone-saturated close fight as a standing, cumulative capability to be built upon rather than a discretionary program vulnerable to the next four-star’s preferences.
O’Hanlon’s anecdote about Generals Pace and Keane, drawn from Bob Woodward’s account of the Iraq surge years, makes the point with unusual candor for a podcast interview: busyness, fitness standards, and an inspirational command presence are not substitutes for getting the big strategic calls right, and an institution can be extraordinarily active, redesigning Ranger squad structures, reinstating tape tests, spending four hours on second-order personnel issues, while quietly failing to build the one capability its own recent combat-relevant evidence says it most needs.
This is not a minor point. It goes to the heart of why chaos management, as I have argued it, requires different institutional habits than crisis management. Crisis management rewards decisive, visible action in response to an acute event — precisely the kind of decisive reorganization LaNeve is reportedly pursuing. Chaos management requires the discipline to sustain unglamorous, cumulative capability-building, a drone battalion’s slow, iterative work of learning how the U.S. Army actually fights with these systems, through multiple leadership transitions, because the underlying conditions that made the capability necessary (a contested, drone-saturated close fight in Korea or the Baltics) have not gone away simply because command has changed hands. O’Hanlon’s worry that the decision may be partly a function of Pentagon-wide “vendettas” percolating down from civilian into uniformed leadership is, in this framing, a symptom of an institution still organized around crisis-management reflexes even as it tries to talk the language of continuous transformation.
Co-Invention, Not Command Fiat
O’Hanlon’s broader assessment of Army programs, comfortable with the M1 upgrade path and the XM30 competition, supportive of retaining the tiltrotor for troop transport in the MV-75 Cheyenne program while shifting to unmanned systems for reconnaissance, skeptical of the fourth Ranger battalion’s squad-size tradeoffs, reads, in aggregate, as an endorsement of evolutionary rather than revolutionary force design outside the narrow domain of the close fight. This is consistent with the argument I have made about the ADF and USMC essentially co-inventing themselves alongside one another rather than one dictating terms to the other: capability evolution that works is rarely imposed top-down by a single service chief’s reorganization decision. It emerges from sustained interaction between operational experimentation (the kind the drone battalion was presumably meant to generate), industrial partners iterating on platforms like the Cheyenne, and allied forces working through parallel problems in their own theaters.
O’Hanlon’s approving mention of the tiltrotor decision, preserve it for moving people at survivable speed and range, shed the manned reconnaissance variant in favor of unmanned systems, is a small but telling data point in this respect. It reflects exactly the kind of platform role clarification that a maturing kill web architecture requires: manned systems retained where they generate irreplaceable mass-movement or sustainment value, unmanned systems substituted where their expendability and distributed character generate more resilient sensing. This is the same logic underlying the V-22 Osprey’s evolution from assault transport into what I have called a kill web enabler or a mobility and sustainment platform whose value increases, rather than decreases, as the surrounding sensor-shooter mesh becomes more distributed and autonomous.
The Oversight Argument as a Chaos Management Test
O’Hanlon’s closing point about the defense budget — his objection not to the dollar figures but to the process, the “ill-defined general money buckets” that would have been unimaginable even during World War II’s far larger mobilization — deserves to be read as a final, institutional-level instance of the same chaos-versus-crisis distinction running through the entire conversation.
His proposed compromise, loosening detailed congressional oversight specifically for fast-moving categories like munitions and drones while insisting on full congressional involvement for consequential, slow-moving programs like Golden Dome, is itself a chaos-management prescription: differentiate governance mechanisms by the actual tempo and stakes of the underlying activity, rather than applying either blanket speed or blanket bureaucracy uniformly across categories that behave completely differently.
A defense enterprise trying to sustain intelligent mass and kill web resilience through a long war, as he argues the Ukraine-Iran experience suggests is now the realistic planning assumption, needs exactly this kind of differentiated institutional design, fast, flexible authorities where technology and battlefield conditions are genuinely changing every few years, and rigorous, transparent oversight where they are not.
Conclusion
Taken together, O’Hanlon’s assessment of the Ukraine and Iran wars offers a data-rich but appropriately cautious brief against both extremes of the current force-design debate: the claim that drones have rendered traditional combined-arms maneuver forces obsolete, and the complacent assumption that institutional business-as-usual can simply absorb the close-fight revolution as one more line item in a modernization plan.
Read through the lens of the impact force, kill web, and intelligent-mass frameworks, his analysis reinforces a conclusion I have reached from a different direction across several books and articles: the forces that will succeed in the next decade are not the ones that either over-learn or under-learn the narrow tactical lessons of Ukraine’s static front, but the ones that build the institutional habits, differentiated governance, sustained cross-service and allied co-invention, distributed and resilient sensor-shooter architectures, and industrial capacity built for intelligent mass rather than exquisite scarcity, capable of operating continuously inside a chaotic and unpredictable strategic environment, rather than lurching from crisis to crisis and leadership transition to leadership transition as though each were a discrete event to be managed and then set aside.
Note: Defense & Aerospace Daily Podcast [Aug 26, ’26] Brooking’s Michael O’Hanlon on Lessons from the Ukraine and Iran Wars for Ground Forces Worldwide
“On this Land Warfare episode, sponsored by American Rheinmetall, Dr. Michael O’Hanlon, the Philip H. Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy as well as the director research for the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution and author of the new book — “To Dare Mighty Things: U.S. Defense Strategy Since the Revolution” — joins Defense & Aerospace Report Editor Vago Muradian to discuss lessons from the Ukraine and Iran wars for ground forces worldwide; the role of drones in the close fight and future of land vehicles; magazine depth and deterrence; recent moves by the acting Army Chief Gen. Chris LaNeve including his decision to convert a new drone battalion to an airborne infantry unit; deterring Russia as its provocations against NATO increase; and the US defense budget outlook and importance of oversight.”