"[T]he United States sought above all to deter Iran from doing two things: striking American partners in the region and disrupting maritime traffic. Is Iran now more deterred from taking these actions"or less so?" the author asks.

The answer is clearly the latter. The administration needs either to reach an accord with the Iranians or to establish a credible new deterrent, and fast. The promoters of this war - including

Sorry, quote cut off, picks up here: "- including The Wall Street Journal's editorial board and the hawks at various Washington think tanks - have gotten everything they asked for. And it has been a disaster. So now what?"

"The Iran war has brought a few things into focus"among them, that the United States needs to rethink its approach to warfare in the region and beyond. For all of the time that the U.S. Central Command undoubtedly spent planning and rehearsing for a confrontation with Iran, the conduct of this war betrays a certain failure of imagination that has cost the U.S. military a great deal. The United States appears to have assumed that its abundance of precision weaponry would give it a huge advantage over the Iranians - which it did, for at least a few weeks. But precision weaponry was not decisive."

Relatively low-cost Iranian missiles and drones have wrought havoc upon U.S. bases and other targets in the Middle East. American planners should have anticipated as much: Ukrainian drones have been inflicting devastating damage on Russian military assets for several years now, demonstrating just how quickly the nature of warfare has changed. Yet American troops are getting killed in their barracks by cheap Iranian missiles and drones, and their leaders haven't thought through adequate countermeasures.

This failure belongs not only to the Trump administration but also to the military services and their leaders. The Iran war is almost certainly the easiest drone war that America will ever fight. Countering this cheap and widely accessible technology will only get harder. The United States has to dramatically rethink its posture in the Middle East and around the globe until it figures out how to contend with that.