2026-07-16
56 分钟I'm Dan Kurtz-Falen, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview.
Building U.S. Military dominance based on the idea that there is some special technology that the U.S.
Has that adversaries do not have, that era is over.
That is a huge paradigm shift from how the military has thought about military advantage for the last 40 years or so.
The war in Iran pitted two of the world's mightiest militaries against one weakened by years of strikes, sanctions,
and sabotage.
And yet it was the smaller country that appears to have emerged with the advantage.
In Ukraine, similarly, Russia expected an easy victory,
only to be repeatedly thwarted by apparently outmatched Ukrainian forces.
These outcomes may seem surprising, but Paul Shari argues that they should not be.
The innovations that have in recent years transformed battlefields
have also leveled the playing field between powers great and small.
And as Shari wrote in a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, the U.S.
Military is unprepared for this new age of warfare in which drones, AI,
and other emerging technologies undercut the dominance it has become used to.
Shari, the executive vice president of the Center for New American Security,
served as an army ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan,
and then went on to craft Pentagon policy on drones and autonomous weapons systems.
I spoke with him about what the wars in Iran and Ukraine should tell us about the future of warfare more generally,
about what China is learning from those wars, and about what the United States must do to adapt.