Linda Bilmes

So this is highly asymmetric and really...

just kind of shows why the Iranians have been able to severely damage us, if not so much in terms of the human loss, but economically.

We've taken a major hit because so much of our inventory has been used up on this.

And there are many people within the military in particular who are concerned about the fact that this means our overall inventory of all of these weapons, many of which are defensive, intercepting weapons, are therefore depleted.

So we already depleted about 20% of our weapons.

high-altitude interceptor drones last summer in the 12-day operation Midnight Hammer with Iran.

So now we further depleted them.

So there was a huge rush to, we've got to spend the money, we've got to get these big contracts out so that we can replenish the inventory and more.

I think that

We have seen now in Ukraine, Russia, and now again that the nature of warfare has changed somewhat.

So even at the beginning and midway through the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, we were...

not in the era yet of these sort of advanced, hypersonic, AI-driven weaponry that we are now.

And we see now a war going on between largely unmanned weapons that are attacking targets.

Very complex, high-performing, precision-driven weaponry.

In this case, we've seen with Iran that they can produce large, large numbers of

relatively cheap weapons and they can just send tons of them out.

And we were not really prepared for that.

We have expensive weapons that are really, really good at precision and are wildly expensive to produce.

And we're sending them for every one of these very cheap weapons.

I mean, like we have a kind of a one size fits all response.