Military Realism Report

Modern myths about asymmetric war

Unravelling the hype and misconceptions about modern military technology and tactics.

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Hi there. The US-Iran deal-or-no-deal intrigue goes on. There are many aspects of this I could write about, but, like most of us, I’m on tenterhooks seeing what happens (or doesn’t happen) next. Also, if I’m being honest, I don’t want to write something that becomes overtaken by events a few hours or days later.

One thing which does deserve a bit more commentary is a quote I heard from one of my favourite podcasters a few days ago. Scott Galloway, speaking on the Pivot podcast with co-host Kara Swisher, was talking about the aforementioned. He made lots of great points (e.g. a memorandum of understanding is not the same as a deal, even if it was a “deal”, it would be an awful one, etc.). One howler, however, came when he turned his focus to the US military and said this:

Our military budget should be cut in half, and it should be focused on one word: asymmetric warfare

Let’s break this down:

Right, let’s break this down with another lesson in Asymmetric War 101. I’ll start with the obscene military spending of the USA, and why it is that way. Then I’ll go on to talk about why “asymmetry” isn’t a doctrine which the US (or any superior power) can just drop into their military system. Finally, I’ll talk about Ukraine, which is what inspired the above quote, but which isn’t an example of asymmetric war1.

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1. The USA does not get enough bang for its trillion bucks…

When I last wrote about the US’s military spending way way back in March 2026, the official budget was between the high $800 and low $900 billion dollars per annum. That’s pretty hefty: nearly one Elon. Since then, President Trump has announced a budget increase for FY2027 to $1.5 trillion (1.25 Elons2).

Let’s take a beat to reflect on the magnitude of that figure. That is:

  • A whopping 42% increase on FY26 funding levels, even when adjusted upward to take account of additional spending in-year
  • About $4,400 for every man, woman, and child in the USA
  • About $1.5 million for every uniformed service member in the US military

It’s a good thing the US is in such a strong fiscal position with control over its deficit, stable and predictable interest rates, and a manageable debt the magical money merry-go-round is still spinning.

Seriously, though, this level of spending is obviously a problem. It’s a problem of success, to quote Scott back to Scott, but a problem nonetheless.

And yes, part of the reason for this spending is because powerful military capabilities aren’t cheap. The ability to drop bombs into a mountain halfway around the world and then pluck an enemy’s leader right from his presidential palace and then mount a daring rescue of a downed helicopter crew in enemy territory… these things don’t come cheap. That’s before we get to the nuclear arsenal, a.k.a. the ability to burn hundreds of cities around the world at ~30 minutes’ notice.

Great and all as these capabilities are, you’d be right to question whether they’re worth spending 14% of each US household’s annual income3 on, especially when it still doesn’t enable you to win a war of choice against a country that spends $8 billion on its military, or less than 1% of what you spend4.

Infographic comparing military spending of the USA and Iran, featuring a scale with a large red block representing approximately $960 billion for the USA and a smaller representation for Iran at $8 billion.

There are clear laws of diminishing returns here and any sensible person would ask where the money is going, but for the fact that it would provoke howls of anguish among the hawks. Coming from the (Irish) military myself, there’s a part of me that envies that unquestioning devotion to funding one’s military. To put it delicately, over-investment in Irish defence capabilities isn’t something I’ve ever experienced.

What’s obvious to the outsider is the misaligned incentives of the US military spending system. Pork barrel politics5 means that lawmakers have an interest in spending by military contractors in their districts, a long-running trend which has shifted into overdrive under President Trump.

With inflation only going up and full employment, the arms factories can name their price to the Department of Defense War, thus contributing to even greater price inflation and the accelerated burning of public money.

Regardless of your views on military spending (I lean toward thinking it’s a good thing, at least when my own or friendly countries are doing it), it’s hard to argue with the assertion that the US military is a financial black hole with not enough bang coming out to justify the many, many bucks going in.

So, what’s the answer? Should the US embrace this hot new crazy thing called asymmetric war? Well, it’s not so simple. Let’s talk about this next.

2. …but “going asymmetric” isn’t a viable option

Asymmetric warfare is a struggle between belligerents whose military power varies significantly. In other words, the weaker party is the one who “does” asymmetric warfare. If a bloated defense budget is a problem of success, then asymmetric warfare is a reaction to weakness.

I showed how this relates to the US-Iran conflict in a recent post, but here it is again in case you missed it:

Infographic illustrating asymmetric warfare dynamics, highlighting military power and constraints. Features US and Iranian military capabilities, with emphasis on power balance and limitations on use.

Why can’t the USA save a bunch of money by “doing” asymmetric war? Sure, you can tilt the scale on the power/supply side (the top seesaw) by cutting federal funding in half. But you can’t do anything on the bottom seesaw, the constraints one. Messing about with this side would involve tarnishing one’s international reputation, ignoring the rule of law, and potentially even democracy at home.

Hmm, on reflection, let me rephrase that. You shouldn’t want to mess with the constraints side of the ledger, even though the current US administration seems hell-bent on doing just that. Even if you ignore laws, however, you can’t get around the fact that your public might not have the stomach for the fight.

I’m getting a bit technical here, so let’s step back and put it in really simple terms. If you want to US to do asymmetric warfare, then whom should you target with it? Who has a much more powerful military than the US while being constrained by rules, laws, and public opinion? I can only think of a few examples, none of them real:

So, unless you’re planning to take on one or all of the above, making the USA pivot into “asymmetric warfare” is practically impossible by definition.

If the US military really wanted to become an asymmetric warfighting force, here are some of the things it should consider:

  • Training its soldiers in improvised explosive devices and homemade explosives, then sending them undercover to attack targets in the enemy’s turf
  • As above, but targeting civilians for mass casualties
  • As above, but using suicide bombing as a tactic
  • Transforming its military hierarchy into an Iran-style mosaic defence with decentralised command authority
  • Ending the flag ceremonies for fallen servicemen and women: you’re going to have a lot more casualties, and you don’t have time or emotional bandwidth for this
  • Hardening the civilian population and bringing it in line with purges and reprisals where necessary

Is the US prepared to do any of these? I expect (and hope) not. Asymmetric warfare isn’t an option.

What about Ukraine, I hear you ask? Didn’t it work for them? They didn’t have to go down the pathways I’ve outlined above, right? Let’s talk about the Russo-Ukraine War next.

3. What we’re seeing in Ukraine isn’t really asymmetric warfare

As I mentioned above, I don’t hold that the war in Ukraine is a good example of asymmetric warfare. At least not at the tactical or operational levels:

A table comparing symmetrical and asymmetrical aspects of the Russo-Ukrainian War at strategic, operational, and tactical levels.

By contrast, the Third Gulf War shows how this model works in practice, with asymmetric warfare at the Strategic, Operational, and Tactical level:

Table comparing symmetrical and asymmetrical aspects of the US-Iran conflict across strategic, operational, and tactical levels.

The bigger story in Ukraine right now is technology rather than asymmetry. Cheap drones and ground-based robots have transformed the battlespace, rendering certain assets like tanks less relevant.

Although Ukraine is ahead on this metric, Russia is also innovating with new technology. The important thing to remember is that Ukraine asked for heavy matériel like Patriot missile batteries or main battle tanks, and it hasn’t struck these off the wish-list.

That’s the thing about asymmetry: it’s rarely a deliberate choice, but rather something which is imposed due to a lack of “normal” options. This further demonstrates why it should not be seen as a goal in and of itself.

There is one big element of asymmetry in the Russo-Ukrainian War, however, and it would be remiss of me to not point it out. That’s the nukes. Nuclear weapons are the ultimate backstop of Russia’s power. Whatever might happen on the (as we said above) symmetrical battlespace in Ukraine itself, the latter country can only do so much and go so far in its violence on Russia without suffering a catastrophic nuclear counterstrike.

It’s not a simple answer: there are aspects of symmetrical and asymmetrical warfare with this conflict, but I’d be wary of taking it as an example of asymmetric warfare in its own right. Especially considering that we did a whole Global War on Terror in living memory: use that as your example of successful asymmetric warfare (successful from the enemy’s point of view, of course).

Conclusion: The answer isn’t easy

When people throw out glib statements like “we should go asymmetric,” what they’re really saying is: “Look at Ukraine and Iran, they’re both successful against much bigger powers, let’s be more like them.”

This is an understandable ambition, but it utterly fails to account for the fact that:

  1. Ukraine and Iran are two very different situations
  2. No country in its right mind would choose to be either Ukraine or Iran right now

If you want your military budget to stretch further and achieve more with less, then I’m right there with you. I’ve worked in defence procurement. I’ve seen how a coating of olive-green paint can add a zero to the end of a pricetag.

You can make savings, but beware of the temptation to throw everything out the window:

A caricature of a man holding a chainsaw, with a dramatic expression, against a blue background. Bold text above reads 'wE’rE fEeDiNg ThE DoD InTo tHe WoOdChIpPeR!!!'.
Original picture from here.

The uncomfortable truth is that being the world’s pre-eminent military superpower costs a lot, as it always has, but still doesn’t guarantee that you can win wars of choice.

Is some of that money wasted? Undoubtedly. Is half of it wasted? Possibly. But, to paraphrase the old adage about advertising: which half? That’s the hard part, I’m afraid.

That’s all for this week, but what do you think? Please let me know in the comments below. Also remember to subscribe if you haven’t already. Thanks again for reading and see you next week.

Cover picture: Vietnam, 5 April, 1968. A Viet Cong base camp being burned down. National Archives at College Park, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

  1. This might be controversial, but I’ll stand by it. Two forces locked in a stalemate along a wide frontier and fighting a brutal war of attrition does not look like asymmetry to me. Sure, on side is making better use of modern technology to change the way the war is being fought and offset some of the material advantage of the other. This isn’t asymmetry, this is evolving tactics. If you want a different view, however, there are plenty of folks who call this an asymmetric war. This article from September 2023 talks about symmetric and asymmetric aspects of the in the Russo-Ukrainian War, although it seems to conflate “symmetric” with “battlefield tactics” and “asymmetric” with “hitting enemy population centres.” By that logic, the strategic bombing campaigns of WWII were asymmetric. ↩︎
  2. The “Elon” is not a great unit of account, owing to its volatile nature and wildly speculative value. It makes Bitcoin look stable. ↩︎
  3. Assumptions based on some quick Googling: US population is 346 million, household average size is 2.53 people, average household income is $80,700. Do the math, as the Yanks would say. ↩︎
  4. You might complain that I’m not comparing like with like here. The US didn’t, after all, devote all its military resources against Iran. The estimate is that it spent $132 billion as of the 19th June ceasefire announcement, so only 16x Iran’s entire annual budget. ↩︎
  5. A.k.a. parish pump politics, a.k.a. the patronage system. ↩︎
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13 responses to “Modern myths about asymmetric war”

  1. tankfanboy Avatar
    tankfanboy

    Excellent article, very simply explained!
    Keep up the good work 👍

    Reply
  2. Loren Pechtel Avatar
    Loren Pechtel

    While the word “asymmetric” is not technically the right term there is a disparity that could reasonably be described as asymmetric and which we are way, way behind: In many cases our weapons are too good. We are wasting weapons designed for tough opponents on trivial opponents. Israel learned this lesson and deployed Iron Dome. The interceptors are only good enough to hit something on an entirely predictable trajectory, but they aren’t shooting at stuff that can see an incoming SAM and evade. What’s got a higher kill probability on an incoming drone, a SM-2 or 42 Tamir missiles??

    Reply
    1. The Director Avatar
      The Director

      That’s a great point and the old anecdote about the US forces in Afghanistan using Javelins to take out lone insurgent riflemen is instructive. How were they ever going to win when they spent $100k on a single trivial target? But it still comes back to your values. Sure, a fighting patrol is a better way to take out that lone target. But that’s difficult and, worse, brings risk. From a force protection point of view, it’s perfectly rational to expend a guided missile on a single enemy target. From an economic point of view, it’s madness.

      Reply
      1. anonymous_bystander Avatar
        anonymous_bystander

        Great article! Following the news out of the War in Afghanistan from start to end, the Coalition / ISF’s inability to sustain casualties – “Can’t send a patrol into those hills, someone might die and that makes the public upset! Toss a Javelin at ’em instead” – seemed like the single greatest factor in the ISF’s strategic defeat.

        The asymmetry in ‘pain tolerance’ between modern Western militaries and their most recent series of opponents is astonishing and seems consistently misunderstood, perhaps from WWII on – it seems like you simply CANNOT bomb a hardened, resolved, motivated population into surrender. It didn’t work during the Blitz, during the Allied combined bombing offensive, Korea, Vietnam, and now Ukraine and Iran? I suppose Bosnia and others demonstrated that bombing could work as LEVERAGE against particularly fragile regimes, but I honestly think that gives ‘Team Trump’ too much credit – I do think they thought Iran would ‘lose’ and give up.

        Iran does seem like YET ANOTHER example of the US starting a ‘war of choice’ with a gross underestimation of their opponent (with the ‘Trump Twist!’ that the entire operation is epically, furiously idiotic from start to finish, of course).

      2. The Director Avatar
        The Director

        Thanks! Yeah it calls into question the utility of maintaining a military for power projection, as opposed to national defence. However, you could argue that the Venezuela operation to capture Maduro or (arguably) last year’s bombing campaign against Iran were examples of how to achieve a limited but still strategic goal.

      3. anonymous_bystander Avatar
        anonymous_bystander

        True; the Maduro Operation was a tactically brilliant and well-executed operation… that seemed to induce Hegseth and Trump to think they could ‘do it again’ in Iran.

        When all you have is a hammer, as they say.

      4. Basil Marte Avatar
        Basil Marte

        The force protection point of view is an economic one, even if this isn’t admitted in polite society. It is possible to put a price on human life (beyond just life insurance, e.g. a government thinking about installing a roundabout needs to plug the value of lives saved into the cost-benefit calculation, so they have a figure for it). Wikipedia has a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_a_statistical_life For the US, ~$10M. (As a very rough sketch: evidently, for the median yearly income average people are willing to work for 8 hours per day plus commute. So throw in a generous multiplier for asking for 24 hours per day with no vacations, and just multiply with all 40+ years of career and some retirement — eh, close enough for a horseshoe.)

        Then you can multiply the cost of the item with the risk to arrive at an “expected value”. Or you can work the same math backwards: for risking troops to be “cheaper” than the missile, the risk of taking a casualty has to be less than 1% per mission. That’s a small fraction and thus difficult to think about, so normally it might be helpful to turn it on its head, which would sound like: you need to be able to run 100+ successful fighting patrols (ones where the target gets away don’t count!) without taking a casualty. I suppose this would be fine for an exam question in school, but as I understand it, in reality much of the danger came from the possibility of the patrol running into an ambush/IED/etc., and adjusting for this works out in a very awkward way, where the threshold in the question changes depending on which scenario you’re looking at. (I.e. 100+ for “he shoots back and hits one”, but 1000+ for “he’s bait and they get the whole section/squad”.)

        Of course, the problem is still there, inasmuch as the insurgents valued their own lives for less than the cost of a missile. On the other hand, precisely because the problem is caused by the extreme disparity in the nations’ wealth levels (prevailing wages, whatever), the Coalition absolutely had the budget to spend like this anyway and potentially win. Forget about money: the Coalition built more guided missiles (plus bombs etc. put together) per year than the insurgents recruited fresh recruits per year. The Coalition outright had the ability to bomb the country into depopulation — but why on Earth would it have done so? Indeed, if someone else had tried that, the Coalition governments/populations would have at least condemned it in diplomacy/protests (respectively) and may well have militarily intervened against (as happened with Serbia). In other words, the Coalition publics had not only a low pain tolerance, they also had a low tolerance for pain being inflicted on target-area civilians.

        As I understand, the strategic defeat was: the governments/populations in the Coalition were willing to spend real money on an attempt to create a free/prosperous/Westernized country. They built schools, roads, etc., and used the military partly to remove the previous regime (as much as there was one) (this is the “will be greeted as liberators” part) and as ~police (yes, yes, counterinsurgency). Then it turned out that …in a way loosely corresponding to a popular vote, at least a large minority of the locals had a very different idea of what they wanted to do with their freedom; and a substantial middle who, while not necessarily opposed, did not much care for our option. Since “coercing them to be free our way” was a bit too self-contradictory and definitely not to public taste — and expensive, though I’m not sure it would have lasted much longer even if it were free — there was no further reason for a Coalition military presence there. To the extent the military failed, it was that it was bad at being a paramilitary force; but even if it were better at that, it would have merely suppressed resentment, not solved it, and probably the outcome would have eventually been the same. (Compare Egypt. Despite hopes, the Arab Spring didn’t produce a Westernized liberal democracy. But it was much closer to possible than in Afghanistan.)

        But to end on a different note: the “shot exchange” and magazine depth problem(s) have been noted, and nowadays there are proposals and procurements for cheaper weapons in various categories. (Also many are in daily use in Ukraine.) Even with a zero added to its price tag, an FPV drone is a much more economical solution to the insurgent.

      5. The Director Avatar
        The Director

        I think you’re absolutely right, but even articulating the strategic “win” is difficult and complex–it’s no wonder the Coalition governments were unable to do so with their publics, therefore never getting the support they needed to effect said “win.”

      6. Basil Marte Avatar
        Basil Marte

        Mm, I don’t think it was complex (I might be sanewashing my memories, but they are less chaotic than the American position in the Third Gulf War), but it wasn’t quite explained either.
        Draft mission statement:

        1) Find and capture/eliminate all AQ leadership.
        Whose job: mostly the special/secret squirrels. Army helps them with security and logistics, given that they will be there anyway due to goal 2).
        Justification: we can’t let them get away with it, for domestic political reasons, and because we want to deter copycats (even if these particular folks aren’t deterred by death), and because even ordinary rivals would get ideas if we didn’t do it.

        2) Turn Afghanistan into a place more like, say, India.
        Whose job: mostly the professional hug dispensers (e.g. NGOs). Army sets conditions for them (provides security until new local army&police can take over).
        Justification A: cut off AQ’s and their copycats’ recruiting pool by making all those wretched poor people less poor.
        Justification B: we put a man on the Moon and stuff. Now we want to try and see if we can do this. Bet?/How hard can it be?
        Justification C: surely they (the local population) want to be just like us. They are just bad at it because they lack some material things (a.k.a. are poor) and lack some knowledge of how to do it (a.k.a. are uninformed/deluded; some of this is intentional from the Bad Guys telling them bunkum). But as soon as we give them the tools, and as soon as we teach them how to be like us — just like how one teaches children — surely they will enthusiastically do that. (To subvert the ACOUP quote: surely they don’t believe their culture/religion. At least not the important parts, the ones about how society should work. The unimportant parts, like cuisine and funny hats, are probably fine.)

        Task 1) was firmly committed to in public. My memory is that at least the American government certainly was criticized for being so slow to accomplish it. But eventually they did it, with some fanfare (albeit well after most people stopped caring). But on its own, this mission would not have justified a conventional military invasion.

        Task 2) was not really communicated to the public, partly because it would not have been popular. (They were unwilling, not unable, to say it out loud.) But more important than that is that the Coalition governments lost the implicit bet about what-the-world-is-like. The facts on the ground turned out to be such that the task as set was impossible, no matter how much domestic support they had for it. One of the *symptoms* of this being the case was that no reliable local army/police were forthcoming, and Coalition militaries had to keep doing the job. Then …for a long time the governments didn’t react to this information and kept pouring money into it for no reason. (The third sin in https://acoup.blog/2020/06/19/collections-the-battle-of-helms-deep-part-viii-the-mind-of-saruman/) Until eventually they did admit that a strategic win on this item was not achievable and stopped trying.

      7. The Director Avatar
        The Director

        I completely agree, I guess my cynical take would be that two strategic objectives is probably at least one too many for the public to absorb, let alone get behind. Not because they’re idiots, but because they have other priorities and don’t see the value of an interventionist foreign policy.

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