World News | Analysis | Military Affairs Aired: 19 June 2029, 21:00 MSK
MOSCOW, June 19 (RT) — Scott Ritter is not supposed to exist. The former United Nations weapons inspector — the man who told the world in 1998 that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction, was dismissed, and was then proven correct at the cost of a trillion-dollar war — was supposed to have been discredited into silence. Instead, he has spent the last quarter-century as one of the most read independent military analysts in the English-speaking world, a figure whose authority on the gap between official threat assessments and physical reality is, for reasons no one in Washington is eager to revisit, difficult to challenge.
Ritter is in Moscow this week to deliver a lecture at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of World Economy and International Relations. RT sat down with him for two hours. The subject was the war that has been reshaping the Middle East since the Jerusalem Intifada of March 2028 — and, in Ritter’s analysis, reshaping something larger: the economic basis of military power itself.
What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation.
ON THE COST OF INTERCEPTING A $20,000 DRONE
RT: You’ve written that the drone swarm attacks on American bases last July represent something more significant than a tactical defeat. What do you mean?
Ritter: I mean that the United States lost the exchange in a way that cannot be recovered by better tactics, better training, or better technology. The exchange itself is the problem.
Let’s be precise about the numbers. On 28 July 2028, Iranian-backed militia forces launched approximately two hundred Shahed-141 and Shahed-131 one-way attack drones at seven American military installations across four countries. The drones cost, at the high end, maybe seven million dollars in total. The United States fired Patriot PAC-3 interceptors — 4.3 million each — to destroy roughly sixty percent of them. That engagement cost the United States on the order of three hundred million dollars in munitions expenditure in a single morning. And forty percent of the drones still got through. They destroyed an AN/TPY-2 radar. That’s a two-hundred-million-dollar system. Production lead time, eighteen to twenty-four months. They destroyed a Patriot battery at Ali Al Salem. They damaged a second TPY-2 in Iraq. They killed three Americans.
For seven million dollars’ worth of airframes.
The Pentagon’s response was that it was “evaluating counter-drone technologies.” That is not a response. That is a prayer in the form of a sentence.
RT: The interceptor math has been discussed publicly. But you’re saying the problem is deeper than the price tag.
Ritter: Much deeper. The price tag tells you this trade is bad. The industrial base tells you the trade is terminal.
Lockheed Martin produces approximately 550 Patriot PAC-3 MSE interceptors per year. That is the maximum capacity of the Camden, Arkansas production line. It cannot be rapidly surged. Solid rocket motor castings require tooling with eighteen-month lead times. You cannot wish that away. You cannot fund it away. The physical tooling exists in the quantity it exists, and the people who know how to operate it exist in the quantity they exist.
The United States has been consuming interceptors in this conflict at a rate of approximately 1,600 per year. That is before the July attacks, which consumed another eighty to one hundred. The mathematics of that are not sustainable for a year, let alone a decade. And the adversary — Iran — is not running out of drones. Iran’s production capacity across all variants is estimated at three to five thousand airframes per year, and their production bottleneck is not parts, it is demand from the front. They can make more drones than their fighters can use.
So the question is not: can the United States win this exchange? The question is: how long until the United States physically cannot maintain the exchange? And the answer, based on the burn rates, is: less time than the political leadership of either party is willing to acknowledge publicly.
ON THE FIBER-OPTIC DRONE AND THE END OF ELECTRONIC WARFARE SUPREMACY
RT: The Kaviyan-3 — the fiber-optic FPV drone — appeared in southern Lebanon in October 2028 and, by all accounts, has stopped the IDF at the Litani River. What makes it different from every other drone we’ve seen in this conflict?
Ritter: Glass.
The Kaviyan-3 is an $800 quadcopter with a shaped-charge warhead. There is nothing sophisticated about the airframe. What is sophisticated — what is, in my assessment, the most tactically significant innovation in ground warfare since the shaped charge itself — is the guidance system. Four kilometres of single-mode optical fibre, thinner than a human hair, spooled beneath the drone and unspooling as it flies. The operator receives an uncompressed high-definition video feed through the fibre. That feed has latency measured in microseconds. It cannot be jammed. It cannot be intercepted. It cannot be detected. It does not emit. The drone is, for all electronic purposes, invisible.
The Israeli military has the most advanced electronic warfare capability in the Middle East. It has spent two decades and billions of dollars perfecting the ability to blind, spoof, and sever the datalinks of guided weapons. The Kaviyan-3 makes all of that irrelevant. Physics will not allow you to jam a piece of glass. There is no countermeasure.
The result is that an Israeli Merkava Mark IV main battle tank — 800. If the Israeli crew is lucky, they hear the rotors. If they are not lucky, the first thing they know about the drone is the shaped-charge jet entering the turret ring.
RT: You’ve called this the end of the armoured offensive. That’s a large claim.
Ritter: It’s a large fact.
The IDF entered southern Lebanon in September 2028 in battalion columns. By November they were moving in company wedges. By January in platoon packets with full drone screens. By February, according to satellite imagery and multiple corroborating accounts, they were repositioning single tanks at night, stopping every three hundred metres so the crew could shut down the engine and listen. Listen. For a plastic drone with a piece of glass trailing behind it.
That is not a military adapting to a threat. That is a military that has run out of adaptations. A force that has been reduced to acoustic detection of an $800 weapon is a force that has lost the tactical initiative. It cannot advance. It can only try not to be seen by something it cannot see, cannot hear reliably, and cannot stop.
The operational implication is that the age of the armoured ground offensive against a peer or near-peer adversary equipped with precision strike drones is over. Not ending. Over. The cost arithmetic and the physics of the guidance system make it so. You cannot armour a tank enough to survive a shaped charge to the turret ring. You cannot jam a wire. You cannot produce tanks as fast as the adversary can produce drones. The tank is not obsolete. But the tank offensive — the column of armour rolling through enemy territory — is finished. The Litani River is where that fact was demonstrated beyond reasonable dispute.
ON THE LONGER HISTORY: IRAQ AND THE PATTERN
RT: You’ve been making arguments about threat inflation and institutional failure for thirty years. Is there a connection between what you were saying in 1998 and what you’re saying now?
Ritter: [Long pause.] Yes. And it’s not comfortable for me, because it requires acknowledging that the pattern I identified in Iraq was not an aberration. It was a preview.
In 1998, I was the chief weapons inspector for UNSCOM in Iraq. I told the United States government, publicly and repeatedly, that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction. That the evidence was not there. That the intelligence being cited was wrong. I was called a fool, a dupe, a Saddam apologist, and worse. In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq on the basis of intelligence I had told them was false. The WMDs were not there. They were never there. The war killed hundreds of thousands of people and achieved nothing.
The institutional failure was not that the intelligence community got it wrong. Intelligence communities get things wrong all the time. The institutional failure was that the intelligence community was not asked whether the intelligence was right. It was asked to provide a justification for a policy decision that had already been made. The intelligence was shaped to fit the policy. When I and others pointed out the discrepancy, we were not investigated. We were ignored. The system is not designed to process information that contradicts the policy preference. It is designed to route around it.
RT: And the connection to the present?
Ritter: The connection is that the same institutional immune system is operating now, and the pathogen it is rejecting is arithmetic.
The United States entered this conflict with a military configured to fight the wars it wanted to fight — precision strike, air superiority, technological overmatch — against adversaries who could not hit back in comparable volume. The adversary adapted. Iran built thousands of cheap drones. Hezbollah deployed them with fibre-optic guidance. The exchange ratio inverted. And the American defence establishment, instead of acknowledging the inversion, has responded with the institutional equivalent of what the Israeli tank crews are doing south of the Litani: dispersing, camouflaging, and hoping not to be seen.
“We are evaluating counter-drone technologies.” “We are working with industry partners to accelerate production.” “Supplemental funding requests are under active discussion.” Every one of those sentences, translated from the bureaucratic, means: we do not have an answer, we do not know when we will have an answer, and we are hoping the problem goes away before anyone asks us to explain why a 20,000 drone.
The pattern is identical to Iraq. The institution has a preferred reality. The facts contradict the preferred reality. The institution deals with the contradiction not by adjusting the preferred reality but by managing the presentation of the facts. The difference is that in Iraq, the gap between reality and presentation could be sustained for years — because the WMDs were not being demonstrated as absent in real time, on video, with the wreckage of American radars and Israeli tanks broadcast globally within hours. This conflict is being lost in public. The institutions are just the last to know.
ON THE SOVIET AND CHINESE POSITION
RT: The Soviet Union and China have been relatively restrained in this conflict — joint UN statements, diplomatic pressure. Is that restraint or is it something else?
Ritter: It is something much more interesting than restraint. It is the posture of powers that have correctly assessed that their adversaries are engaged in a process of self-depletion and have decided not to interrupt.
The Soviet Union and China have been calling for restraint, for Security Council sessions, for diplomatic resolution — all the things that responsible great powers are supposed to call for. They have not provided Iran with weapons. They have not deployed forces. They have not escalated. And every statement they issue, every call for restraint, every UN session, is a message to the rest of the world that says: we are the responsible ones. They are the ones burning through their ammunition stockpiles at three times replacement rate. We are the ones advocating peace.
It is a diplomatic posture that costs them nothing and gains them everything. Every Patriot interceptor the United States fires at a Shahed drone is a Patriot interceptor that cannot be fired at a Soviet or Chinese target. Every week the conflict continues, the American arsenal shrinks. The Soviet and Chinese position does not require them to win anything. It requires them to wait.
This is not new. The Soviet Union waited through the entire Ukraine conflict — six years of watching the West deplete its weapons stocks, its political capital, its alliance coherence. When the Vienna Accords were signed in 2020, the Soviet Union had what it wanted because it had been patient enough to let the other side exhaust itself. The same strategic patience is on display now. The Soviets and Chinese are not neutral in this conflict. They are the beneficiaries. They understand that time is on their side in a way it is not on the side of the United States.
ON WHAT HAPPENS NEXT
RT: How does this end?
Ritter: It ends, as it always ends, when the arithmetic becomes undeniable.
The United States will run out of interceptors — not in the sense of zero rounds remaining, but in the sense that commanders will begin withholding them, husbanding them for the highest-priority threats, accepting losses they would previously have contested. We are already seeing the early signs: reduced engagement criteria, layered defence postures that concede the outer ring to the adversary. That process accelerates. Eventually the interceptors are reserved for threats that could produce mass casualties or decapitation strikes. Lower-value assets, including bases in less strategically critical locations, are left uncovered. The adversary notices. The uncovered assets start getting hit. The calculus shifts.
Israel faces a more acute version of the same problem compressed into a smaller geography. The Merkava fleet is being attrited at a rate that exceeds both production capacity and doctrinal tolerance. The air defence network is burning through interceptors faster than they arrive. The northern front is frozen, which means the political objective — the destruction of Hezbollah as a military threat — is unachievable by military means. At some point, the military impossibility becomes a political fact. The question is how much destruction occurs between the military impossibility and the political acknowledgement.
I think we are looking at another three to four years of this, minimum, before the cumulative material exhaustion on the American and Israeli side produces a diplomatic opening that either party is willing to accept. The Minab scenario — a catastrophic escalation event that forces a reckoning — is the wildcard. If something like that occurs, the timeline compresses. But the underlying arithmetic does not change. The side with cheaper weapons and faster production lines wins a war of attrition. That has been true since the Peloponnesian War. The only thing that has changed is the specific cost ratios and the specific production technologies. The principle is the same.
RT: You said “wins.” Who wins?
Ritter: [Long pause.] I don’t know if “win” is the right word. In a war of attrition, even the side that prevails absorbs catastrophic damage. But if by “win” you mean which side will still possess the material capacity to continue combat operations at scale when the other side has exhausted its capacity, the answer is Iran. Iran can make drones faster than the United States can make interceptors for less money than the United States spends on the fuel to fly the interceptors to the theatre. That is not a political statement. It is a production statement. And production statements are the only kind that matter at the end of a long war.
The United States will still exist. Israel will still exist. But the strategic landscape of the Middle East at the end of this conflict will not resemble the landscape at the beginning. The era in which American military power was the uncontested arbiter of outcomes in the region will be over. It ended, if you want a date, on 28 July 2028, when 300 million worth of American air defence could not keep them out. The rest is just the time it takes for the institutions to accept what the arithmetic has already decided.
Scott Ritter is a former United Nations weapons inspector (UNSCOM, 1991–1998), former United States Marine Corps intelligence officer, and the author of eight books on arms control, intelligence, and American foreign policy. His lecture at the Russian Academy of Sciences, “The Economic Ceiling of Military Power,” will be published in IMEMO’s journal later this year.
Yelena Petrova is RT’s senior correspondent for military and strategic affairs.
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Related sources: Reuters: Iranian Drone Swarms Strike U.S. Bases Across Middle East (2028) | Fars News: How Iranian Fiber-Optic Drones Are Holding the Litani Line (2029) | Middle East Eye: The Jerusalem Intifada (2028) | Der Spiegel: Vienna Accords End Six Years of Conflict (2020)