Some of you are long enough in the tooth to recall the “surge” in Iraq. With it came subsequent failures of the Pentagon bureaucracy to properly equip our soldiers in that fight. For many Americans, the failure still stings. I lost a good friend to a buried IED north of Baghdad. He was rolling over dangerous streets in an unarmored Humvee with a flat undercarriage, rather than an armored mine-resistant, ambush-protected (MRAP) vehicle with a V-shaped hull that deflects buried explosions. It took Defense Secretary Robert Gates, one of the finest civil servants of the modern era, and his sheer force of will to force the services to buy the equipment our soldiers needed — UAVs and new sensors and armored vehicles, rather than the fighter jets and cruisers and cargo planes. Thanks to that uncompromising focus, the MRAPs came. Had it not been for Gates, they may have come a decade late.

Fast forward to yesterday’s tragic attack in Jordan. Three soldiers were killed and more than 30 injured by an Iranian IED attack. The attack was preventable along many fronts. Tehran let loose its proxies after the 10/7 massacre in Israel, with drone and missile and UAV attacks against coalition ships and targets across the region. The Biden administration has been reluctant to retaliate against those responsible, including launch sites and involved terror leadership. In the absence of decisive action to restore a credible deterrence framework against the regime, it was only a matter of time before something got through. It is sad that this inevitability was realized yesterday.

Also frustrating is that there has been an explosion of new innovation in the counter-UAV space, intercept options that could have saved life and limb yesterday. Many of them are right out of Star Trek — microwave shields around U.S. positions, lasers, expendable counter-drones guided by artificial intelligence. And most come at a low cost-per-engagement compared to the existing arsenal. Direct energy systems, for example, cost pennies to knock down a drone or drone swarm. A missile or even the radar-guided chain guns that buzz down air threats price at orders of magnitude higher and can be overwhelmed by swarms. We are paying more for less effect, which one may generously describe as in keeping with the finest American military traditions.

Despite the urgent need for new UAV defenses, the Pentagon is too bottlenecked, too paralyzed by its own internal dynamics, to get these new systems into the field. Dozens of new administration offices and joint cells and bureaucratic edifices have been erected to get at the problem, but despite the best-laid plans of mice and men, the problem persists. It is another MRAP moment for the Defense Department. Troops are in contact, dying and suffering terrible injury, but the Pentagon has struggled to expedite the solution. Many of our allies crave what our defense-tech sector can offer here and are all but waving handfuls of cash in our face. They want to buy American, but have been stymied by another D.C. bureaucracy. The legal arms-export labyrinth that the State Department has erected rivals that in the Pentagon in administrative inertia. The haft of this arrow has been feathered with our own plumage. Everyone is frustrated.

Russia can produce up to 100,000 militarized drones per month, and China could, if given the incentive, turn that production rate exponential. The drone threat is now a permanent fixture of the battlefield. The armies that are slowest to adapt are the armies that suffer the harshest lessons. And when those lessons come, it will be someone’s son or daughter, neighbor or colleague, who pays the price.