The Social Security trust fund will run dry in 2032 – what that means for retirees and workers who hope to retire by John W. Diamond

 

Every year, the panel overseeing the trust fund for Social Security and Medicare publishes its annual financial report. And every year, its members make clear that the programs’ reserves will be exhausted by the time Gen X retires – meaning they will no longer be able to pay full scheduled benefits by the mid-2030s.

While many media outlets cover this news as a one-day story, this year’s report should be seen as a much more ominous warning. The latest projection, released on June 9, 2026, is that the Social Security trust fund will be depleted by 2032, at which point incoming revenue can pay only about 78% of scheduled benefits. For the 1 in 5 Americans who receive Social Security, that means a potential across-the-board benefit cut of roughly 22% unless Congress acts.

What makes this year’s warning especially troubling is that the deterioration isn’t driven by a temporary downturn but by deeper demographic and policy changes: Fewer expected births, lower immigration, slower growth in the workforce and reduced future revenue from the taxation of Social Security benefits.

The fundamental challenge, though, has been obvious for years. There are too few current and future workers to support the growing number of retirees. And now, there are fresh headwinds that make the math even more daunting. Record debt levels and elevated interest rates are reducing the fiscal resources available for lawmakers to implement solutions, while declining immigration and birth rates mean that the supply of current and future workers is even smaller than previously projected.

These pressures don’t mean Social Security will disappear. It will always exist as long as workers and employers pay into the program. But for anyone who expects to retire starting in the early 2030s, the potential for a cut to benefits is real.

As a scholar of public finance, I argue that this looming deadline recalls the crisis policymakers faced in the early 1980s. Once again, the issue of reform is about to move from a distant worry to an immediate political problem. And failure to reach a bipartisan compromise will bring both economic pain and political damage. 

 

Fresh pressures

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan and House Speaker Tip O’Neill struck their historic bipartisan compromise to extend the life of the program by raising taxes and the eligibility age. This time, the challenge will be far harder.

To start with, the federal government now carries a much higher debt burden, topping 100% of annual GDP, compared to about 35% in the early 1980s. And the Congressional Budget Office projects large deficits adding to that debt in the coming decades, with the annual budget shortfall rising from US$1.9 trillion in 2026 to $3.1 trillion in 2036 under current tax and spending laws. Public debt is projected to rise to 120% of GDP by 2036, leaving less and less fiscal room to patch Social Security.

Servicing that debt is also becoming more expensive. Although the Federal Reserve trimmed interest rates in 2024 and 2025, the cost of borrowing remains elevated as concerns over inflation grow, exacerbated by oil price spikes and the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz. Markets now expect the Fed to hold rates steady for a while, and some investors are betting it may even raise them later this year.

 

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Every year, the panel overseeing the trust fund for Social Security and Medicare publishes its annual financial report. And every year, its members make clear that the programs’ reserves will be exhausted by the time Gen X retires – meaning they will no longer be able to pay full scheduled benefits by the mid-2030s.

While many media outlets cover this news as a one-day story, this year’s report should be seen as a much more ominous warning. The latest projection, released on June 9, 2026, is that the Social Security trust fund will be depleted by 2032, at which point incoming revenue can pay only about 78% of scheduled benefits. For the 1 in 5 Americans who receive Social Security, that means a potential across-the-board benefit cut of roughly 22% unless Congress acts.

What makes this year’s warning especially troubling is that the deterioration isn’t driven by a temporary downturn but by deeper demographic and policy changes: Fewer expected births, lower immigration, slower growth in the workforce and reduced future revenue from the taxation of Social Security benefits.

The fundamental challenge, though, has been obvious for years. There are too few current and future workers to support the growing number of retirees. And now, there are fresh headwinds that make the math even more daunting. Record debt levels and elevated interest rates are reducing the fiscal resources available for lawmakers to implement solutions, while declining immigration and birth rates mean that the supply of current and future workers is even smaller than previously projected.

These pressures don’t mean Social Security will disappear. It will always exist as long as workers and employers pay into the program. But for anyone who expects to retire starting in the early 2030s, the potential for a cut to benefits is real.

As a scholar of public finance, I argue that this looming deadline recalls the crisis policymakers faced in the early 1980s. Once again, the issue of reform is about to move from a distant worry to an immediate political problem. And failure to reach a bipartisan compromise will bring both economic pain and political damage.

Fresh pressures

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan and House Speaker Tip O’Neill struck their historic bipartisan compromise to extend the life of the program by raising taxes and the eligibility age. This time, the challenge will be far harder.

To start with, the federal government now carries a much higher debt burden, topping 100% of annual GDP, compared to about 35% in the early 1980s. And the Congressional Budget Office projects large deficits adding to that debt in the coming decades, with the annual budget shortfall rising from US$1.9 trillion in 2026 to $3.1 trillion in 2036 under current tax and spending laws. Public debt is projected to rise to 120% of GDP by 2036, leaving less and less fiscal room to patch Social Security.

Servicing that debt is also becoming more expensive. Although the Federal Reserve trimmed interest rates in 2024 and 2025, the cost of borrowing remains elevated as concerns over inflation grow, exacerbated by oil price spikes and the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz. Markets now expect the Fed to hold rates steady for a while, and some investors are betting it may even raise them later this year.

The demographic picture is also unforgiving. Baby boomers continue to retire, Americans are living longer, and birth rates have fallen sharply. Since 2007, the U.S. birth rate has fallen by 23% and has remained below replacement level for years. The result is fewer future workers paying payroll taxes, even as the number of retirees grows.

A final factor is immigration.

While other aging countries have turned to immigration to shore up public finances and revitalize their labor force, the U.S. has taken the opposite approach. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, net migration to the U.S. is estimated to have fallen by 2.4 million between 2024 and 2026, amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on unauthorized migrants and its efforts to discourage green card applications.

The new report referenced these challenges, noting that lower immigration and fertility estimates will have “a negative projected effect on Social Security’s financial status.” It also addressed the effects of the massive policy bill that President Donald Trump and the Republican Congress pushed through in 2025, which among other things cut the income tax that retirees pay on Social Security benefits.

The near-term economic changes of that legislation will “have a positive effect,” the report said, but in the longer run it will also weaken the program’s finances.

A slow-motion crisis

It’s important to remember that before the 1983 deal was sealed, Social Security was far closer to insolvency than it is today. The program was nearing the point where it could no longer pay full benefits on time.

The problem was caused by a mix of high inflation, weak wage growth, the recessions of the 1970s and early 1980s, and mounting demographic pressure. Americans were living longer, birth rates were falling, and the number of workers supporting each beneficiary was declining.

The 1983 reform was negotiated under Reagan, a Democratic-controlled House and a Republican-controlled Senate, with help from a bipartisan commission led by future Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan. It addressed the program’s immediate financing crisis by accelerating scheduled increases in the payroll tax and phasing in a higher full retirement age, from 65 to 67. It also anticipated the retirement of the baby boomers and the growing burden they would place on future workers.

The historic overhaul, which came only after months of wrangling, bought the country time. Just as important, it showed that with bipartisan support, a Social Security deal is possible. But it also underscored the danger of waiting too long. When policymakers delay, the menu of options gets smaller, the required changes get larger, and the economic and political pain increases.

Social Security’s next crisis won’t arrive suddenly. It’s arriving in slow motion. The question isn’t whether the program can be fixed, but whether elected officials will act while they still have room to choose among less costly options. I believe the real lesson of 1983 is that waiting until the last minute will turn a chance for reform into a political emergency, and little good comes from governing by crisis

The end of the American way of war? Caitlin Talmadge and Mara Karlin

 

The Iran war has called into question the feasibility of the American way of war. For decades, the United States has premised its national strategy on the ability to fight using forces forward deployed close to enemy territory. But this war has profoundly undermined the notion that the bases and surface ships needed to project such power will continue to enjoy sanctuary from adversary attack. This reality has major implications for U.S. policy toward and campaign planning against more powerful adversaries such as Russia and China, who will also surely seek to deny the United States the ability to fight in the manner it prefers. 

How did we get here?

America has largely embraced a forward defense approach since World War II. Insulated by its fortunate geography, the United States has honed a model of warfare that emphasizes projecting power to counter and defeat threats at a distance rather than on its shores. This approach is predicated on U.S. naval power at sea combined with an unparalleled network of allies and partners on land that grants a combination of access, basing, and overflight permissions.

The United States’ forward military posture varies by region and is ideally tied to the capabilities required to deter and, if necessary, defeat threats in line with U.S. national security interests. For that reason, the United States did not always keep large standing forces in the Middle East or have the ability to rapidly deploy such forces in the event of conflict. Those capabilities emerged only in the early 1980s in response to the 1979 Iranian Revolution and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, eventually leading to the formation of U.S. Central Command.

These investments largely delivered on their promise in the 1991 Gulf War. The United States was able to amass over half a million troops in the region within a few months of Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. It then pummeled Iraq in a six-week campaign of land- and sea-based air strikes followed by a victorious 100-hour ground war, all with very low casualties or equipment losses. In 2003, the United States again relied on these assets plus its foothold in Afghanistan to easily overthrow the regime in Baghdad (notwithstanding the insurgency and civil war that followed).

Throughout this period, U.S. bases and carriers had virtual sanctuary from Iraqi attacks despite being located relatively close to Iraqi territory. Carriers regularly operated in and near the Persian Gulf, while the United States maintained large bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia. In 1991, Iraq did launch one devastating ballistic missile attack against a U.S. base in Saudi Arabia, killing 28 service members. But despite that harrowing episode, most Iraqi Scuds were intercepted or inaccurate, doing little damage to U.S. bases.

After 1991, Iraq’s ability to attack U.S. bases or ships was minimal, given the military damage it had suffered, in addition to general Iraqi tactical incompetence and economic ruin. During the insurgency and civil war in Iraq, U.S. bases located within the country did come under repeated attack, but bases outside the country and carriers in the Gulf remained largely safe. Overall, the United States was effectively able to deploy and employ forces in the region at will.

 

The end of an era

Fast forward to 2026, and it is clear that Iran went to school on the U.S. way of war and understands how to leverage its limited assets to strike at the heart of U.S. power projection capabilities both on land and at sea. Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, has said as much, explicitly threatening that the United States will no longer have “a safe haven for its mischief and for establishing military bases” and that the region will “no longer serve as shields for American bases.” He has also openly warned that “history will record that the Iranian nation sank the superpower of America in the Persian Gulf.”

It is true that the United States has enjoyed tactical and operational successes in the war. It has degraded Iran’s conventional military and damaged its nuclear program. The United States’ integrated air and missile defense regional architecture, developed over nearly 20 years, has also performed well, albeit at a high cost. No one can say that Iran has outright prevented the United States from projecting power into the region—the U.S. military has done so, though how long it can sustain the high tempo of current operations remains to be seen.

Yet despite these achievements, the Iran war has also demonstrated that U.S. forward-deployed forces in the Middle East no longer enjoy sanctuary from attack. Devastating Iranian and Iranian-sponsored attacks have struck hundreds of sites used by the U.S. military and dramatically curtailed U.S. freedom of navigation. The United States has been reluctant to regularly send destroyers into the confined waters of the Gulf due to the persistent threat of Iranian mines, cruise and ballistic missiles, and drones. Although it continues to safely and effectively operate outside the Gulf in the Sea of Oman, the decision not to militarily reopen the Strait of Hormuz reflects the fact that operating there is more costly than it once was.

Meanwhile, Iran has also fired thousands of missiles and drones at land targets in the region, hitting U.S. bases and tragically killing seven U.S. service personnel while injuring over 400. Iran has successfully struck over 200 targets in Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Kuwait, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. It achieved most of these hits with projectiles, whose accuracy, resilience, and numbers U.S. political leaders clearly underrated prior to the war. But Iran also apparently conducted at least one effective fighter jet strike on a U.S. base in Kuwait—a rather astonishing feat, if true.

Moreover, Iran’s strikes have not been random or haphazard. Despite the loss of almost all senior Iranian leaders in the war’s opening days, Iran was still able to execute a well-coordinated campaign that clearly reflected extensive prewar intelligence gathering on targets relevant to U.S. power projection. These included aircraft hangars, munitions storage, fuel storage, command facilities, and airports. Attacks on these sites had disruptive effects beyond the physical damage they caused, because they forced U.S. personnel to evacuate many additional locations that were deemed too vulnerable to further strikes.

Iran also damaged dozens of U.S. aircraft, including critical airborne warning and control aircraft and aerial refueling aircraft. These scarce platforms are vital to the U.S. ability to rapidly sortie combat aircraft and cannot be quickly or cheaply replaced. The fact that some were attacked while parked in the open in predictable locations reflects just how strongly the United States still believed in the sanctuary of its bases—even in a shooting war against an adversary whose formidable missile arsenal was one of the stated justifications for the war

 

Finally, Iran has systematically targeted U.S. air defenses in the region, with a particular focus on radars and communications infrastructure. This pattern, easily visible in publicly available satellite imagery of the region, shows Iran’s effort to puncture the regional U.S. defensive shield—a shield intended to cover not only itself but its allies. Unfortunately, the trend lines are clear: the operating environment in the Middle East has become dramatically less permissive than was previously the case.

Policy recommendations

Even at this early stage, the Iran war holds some lessons for potential U.S. policy toward and campaign planning against more formidable adversaries such as Russia and especially China. Not only are these foes just as likely to go to school on the U.S. way of war as Iran was, but their material capabilities to interfere with that way of war are significantly greater: Iran’s economy (including its defense industry) and population are a fraction of Russia’s and absolutely dwarfed by China’s. The Iran war should thus be thought of as a preview of coming attractions that could be much worse in a great power conflict—though the United States can turn its current predicament into future wisdom if it learns the right lessons.

First, the United States needs to finally come to grips with the reality that its bases and carriers (and potentially even its homeland) will not have sanctuary in future wars against major powers. Russia and China both have large inventories of accurate conventional long-range strike capabilities that can damage U.S. forward bases and ships. They have deliberately developed these capabilities to interfere with U.S. power projection capabilities, which they understand have underpinned U.S. power for decades.

The Iran war shows that when it comes to base attacks, Russia and China don’t even necessarily have to directly destroy combat aircraft in order to degrade U.S. combat power. If they use their large arsenals to systematically crater runways, destroy fuel depots, and damage enabling aircraft, they can significantly cripple the U.S. ability to project power, even if many of its fighters and bombers remain intact.

Similarly, the war shows that when it comes to naval attacks, adversaries don’t necessarily have to sink a major ship in order to achieve meaningful effects. Merely the threat of such attacks can be effective if it deters the United States from entering hostile waters and thereby reduces the U.S. ability to project power.

To deal with these threats, the United States should dramatically accelerate its thus far rather unimpressive efforts to disperse and harden its bases, particularly in Asia. While its Middle East bases are already dispersed, they require greater hardening and resilience as well. The United States should also invest in rapidly replenishing and increasing its munitions stocks if it wishes to continue to credibly defend its forward bases from attacks in anything like the manner seen in the recent war.

Finally, further investments in attack submarines are critical, as they provide a long-range strike capability not dependent on either bases or carriers. Large numbers of attritable unmanned systems can also help project power from a more diverse array of bases and ships and at a more reasonable cost.

While the Pentagon is unlikely at this stage to publish its much-anticipated Global Posture Review—for the first time in recent history—it should immediately reassess the assumptions originally embedded in that analysis. Some dynamics in this war should cause more conservative estimates, such as various Gulf and European allies and partners publicly restricting U.S. use of their bases in this war. Others may be more sanguine, such as the decreasing likelihood that Gulf states will permit a Chinese military base on their territory anytime soon, given that Beijing has enabled Iranian attacks on their territory. Therefore, defense planners should reconsider posture vulnerability in the Middle East; how allies and partners in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia are reconsidering granting the U.S. military access, basing, and overflight permissions following this war; and the dependencies of U.S. posture across regions. This war may have shaped these key issues such that the U.S. military is not appropriately postured to counter contemporary or future threats.

More broadly, U.S. policymakers must soberly recognize that the costs of fighting a war in Europe or the Indo-Pacific will be higher than what the United States became accustomed to in the unipolar era. That reality should, in turn, discipline U.S. diplomatic and political decisionmaking prior to a decision to ever employ military force. The United States will not be able to engage in relatively low-risk, at-will power projection against a great power the way it once did against Iraq, or even as it has managed to do in the current stalemate versus Iran.

Grand Strategy by Narges Bajoghli and Vali Nasr

 

How a Remade Islamic Republic Will Reshape the Middle East

 

At the outset of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran in February 2026, the Islamic Republic appeared battered and weakened. Large-scale bombing had destroyed industry and infrastructure, and a U.S. naval blockade had devastated an already ailing economy. In early March, U.S. President Donald Trump told reporters on Air Force One, “We’ve decimated their whole evil empire.” Several weeks later, he declared “total and complete victory.”

Three months in, however, the picture looks quite different. Iran retains its military and industrial capacity, and despite Trump’s call for Iranians to topple the regime, no popular uprising is in the offing. The war’s initial aim—to deliver a death blow to the Islamic Republic—has proved unattainable.

Rather than breaking Iran, the crucible of war has transformed it in unanticipated ways. To survive and establish new strategic advantages, the Islamic Republic had to adapt and innovate, changing how it waged war, ran the state, and managed society. And it had to do so with unprecedented speed. Tehran is now confident in what it has achieved and determined to consolidate those gains at home and abroad. The war has given rise to a new Iran, one that will reshape the Middle East and influence the course of geopolitics for years to come.

 A QUIET SUCCESSION

Sensing that the Iranian regime was weakened by Israel’s 12-day war in June 2025 and a popular uprising in January 2026, Israel and the United States launched airstrikes on Iran on February 28. They expected a quick victory through targeted assassinations of Iran’s leadership. But decapitation did not produce regime collapse. Instead, it opened the door for a new generation to take over.

 

Many Western observers view the new leadership that emerged during the war, which is dominated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as more ideologically hard-line and hawkish toward the United States and Israel. But that’s not quite right. What truly distinguishes it is subtler and more consequential. Observers outside Iran focus on the handful of top leaders such as Mojtaba Khamenei, the new supreme leader; Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of parliament; and Ahmad Vahidi, the commander of the IRGC. More important, however, is the transformation in the ranks below them: a new generation of IRGC commanders and civilian security officials who came of age after the 1979 revolution. They now hold key decision-making positions, and their nationalistic outlook on statecraft and security is redefining the Islamic Republic.

The worldviews of the founding generation of the revolution, including former leaders Ruhollah Khomeini and Ali Khamenei, were forged by their long opposition to the U.S.-backed rule of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and years spent in the shah’s prisons or in exile. Those at the helm today, Iran’s second generation of revolutionaries, including Mojtaba Khamenei, Ghalibaf, and Vahidi, were teenagers and young adults during the Iran-Iraq War. Their worldview was hardened in the trenches of the longest conventional war of the twentieth century. Those in the new managerial class of Iran’s political and armed forces, the third generation of the revolution, know nothing but postrevolutionary Iran. The members of this officer class of the armed forces and the IRGC, along with their affiliated security institutions, adopted a structured, technocratic culture and a strategic outlook built around national defense, not revolutionary ideology. And they govern with the confidence of leaders who believe they have successfully defended Iran in two wars against militarily superior powers (last year’s 12-day war and this year’s far larger conflict), achieving something the revolution had only promised: a genuine weakening of American power in the Middle East.

The previous supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed on the first day of the February war, was the product of the intellectual and political currents of pre-​revolutionary Iran in the Pahlavi era. His political education had been honed by debate with secular nationalists, leftists, and liberals who shared his goals of toppling the monarchy and standing up to Western imperialism. Once in power, the revolution’s leaders imposed their ideology on Iran, but they never overcame the insecurity inherent in asserting the right to rule over a society that would not wholly submit.

 

The new generation knows none of this firsthand. Most of them were children at the founding of the Islamic Republic and were raised believing in its right to rule. These men did not fight their way to power; they came of age inside the institutions of power, taking their legitimacy as given. The insecurity that marked the founding generation—the constant need to prove that the revolution was real, its claims serious, the old elite truly defeated—is largely absent. They are not defending a revolution. They are administering a state.

This psychological distinction has enormous practical implications. When Ali Khamenei’s generation confronted the world—in hostage negotiations, nuclear talks, regional confrontations—there was always an undercurrent of grievance, a voice rising in the rhetoric of historical injustice and Islamic vindication. It was powerful and real, but a strategic liability. It made them predictable, defensive, and prone to conflating the defense of their ideology with the defense of Iran’s national interests, which did not always neatly align.

The new generation has separated revolution from statecraft. At home and abroad, it neither espouses revolutionary grandiosity nor advocates revolutionary activism. The new leaders are establishment actors: pragmatic, hardened nationalists operating with a clear-eyed assessment of Iran’s capabilities and vulnerabilities. Unlike their predecessors, they can exercise strategic patience and act decisively. They look at Iran’s weaknesses frequently and publicly—something the founding generation was too insecure to do honestly—and they treat them as problems to be solved. That instinct drove the changes Tehran made between the two wars.

 

BATTLE HARDENED

Before the U.S.-Israeli attack in June 2025, Iran’s rulers had assumed they could indefinitely sustain a no-war, no-peace standoff with the United States and Israel. They were proved wrong, and the reckoning with that complacency began the moment the 12-day war ended. The new IRGC leadership expected the June cease-fire to collapse and another war to follow, possibly with the United States involved from the start. Iran’s universities, research institutions, think tanks, and government bodies began hosting debates about lessons learned and changes required. More institutional change took place in those eight months than in the previous ten years combined. Many executive decisions on trade, agriculture, and management of economic and social services were decentralized from Tehran to provincial capitals. And the organizations overseeing propaganda, communication with domestic audiences, and information dissemination abroad underwent a generational overhaul. Institutional lethargy had long defined the Islamic Republic’s bureaucracy; now it gave way to the imperative of rapid adaptation. In the process, the technocratic decision-makers took charge.

After Khamenei was killed in a U.S.-Israeli airstrike, the succession of his son Mojtaba was swift and remarkably orderly. The new generation that had emerged from the June 2025 war chose him in part because he had long championed them. Mojtaba was a member of the IRGC and fought in the Iran-Iraq War before entering the seminary to become a cleric. He later served at his father’s side, overseeing the IRGC’s transformation and the rise of its future leadership. Mojtaba’s ascent confirmed and accelerated the generational transformation, producing not the institutional collapse Washington expected but its opposite.

The manner in which the elder Khamenei was killed, at his home rather than in a bunker, mattered enormously. The new leaders immediately framed his death as martyrdom, and that framing worked. Rather than demoralizing the system, Khamenei’s assassination gave the new generation of leaders direction and purpose; their first act was to mobilize the Islamic Republic’s rank and file around his death. That messaging also drew a larger segment of Iranian society to rally around the flag.

 

Iran’s conduct of the subsequent war reflected the new generation’s technocratic approach. The Islamic Republic had long operated through a chaotic maze of competing power centers, which produced unending internal debate and sclerotic inertia. But between the two wars, that chaos gave way to organizational discipline and resilience. A new Supreme Defense Council—led by the IRGC generals Abdolrahim Mousavi, Mohammad Pakpour, and Ali Shamkhani—was created to expedite military changes. Ghalibaf, a former IRGC general who became speaker of parliament in 2020, and Ali Larijani, the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, performed parallel roles in the civilian and economic bureaucracy, working through government ministries and municipal authorities. Veterans of the Iran-Iraq War, these men had learned to manage against insurmountable odds on the frontlines. Facing Iran’s biggest challenge since the 1980s, the revolution’s founding generation moved swiftly to reorganize statecraft around war. These older leaders oversaw the transition to the new generation, which quickly reorganized the scattered nodes of power into a coherent decision-making structure that could survive the loss of any single leader.

Iran’s armed forces were reorganized into a web of operational commands resembling a guerrilla force more than a conventional military, with authority concentrated among like-minded cohorts rather than distributed among various factions. Larijani, Mousavi, Pakpour, and Shamkhani were all killed in subsequent Israeli strikes, but the resilience they had helped build was not diminished.

On the battlefield, Iran’s armed forces applied the lessons of the June 2025 war with precision. They responded to the U.S.-Israeli assault that began in February 2026 with systematic salvos of missiles and drones designed to deplete U.S. and Israeli interceptor stockpiles across the region. They had concluded that their adversaries expected to destroy Iran’s missile capability quickly and were not prepared for a prolonged campaign. During the 2025 war, Israel had targeted the entrances to Iran’s “missile cities,” effectively sealing them and forcing Iran to launch mainly from eastern regions beyond Israel’s reach. Iran responded by dispersing its missile launchers across its vast geography and embedding engineers inside the missile cities, alongside military personnel, to repair damaged launchers and entrances in real time. This enabled Iran to continue firing longer than Israel and the United States had expected.

The IRGC also deployed cheap drones to overwhelm U.S. radar systems and military positions across the Persian Gulf and Israel, impeding the bombing campaign and opening missile routes to targets all over the region. Drawing on the logic of asymmetric warfare—and on the experience of using human-wave attacks to overwhelm Iraqi positions in the 1980s—Iran dispatched swarms of Shahed drones. These cheap, expendable weapons degraded the air defenses protecting U.S. bases, as well as those of Washington’s Arab allies, and opened corridors for precision missiles to strike high-value targets. The Iranian military had learned not just to absorb punishment but also to win strategic advantage by frustrating its adversaries’ war aims.

 

A NEW BALANCE OF POWER

The most significant victory for the new generation of leaders is simply that their strategy worked. The state survived decapitation. It withstood the punishing U.S. and Israeli bombardment, asserted control over the Strait of Hormuz, and faced down a U.S. naval blockade. In the process, it expanded the battlefield into the Persian Gulf, inflicting heavy damage on 16 U.S. bases and rendering several inoperable. In March, Iraqi militias compelled the United States to abandon Camp Victory, a major U.S. military installation in Baghdad that U.S. forces had occupied since 2003.

Iranian attacks also created a crisis of confidence among the Gulf states. The United States had brought war to their cities and vital infrastructure and failed to protect them. Their economies became collateral damage. The breach of trust between Gulf capitals and Washington will outlast the immediate conflict. It remains an open question how many U.S. bases will be rebuilt and whether the United States or its Arab allies will see much use in them against an Iran that has shown it can control the Strait of Hormuz.

By closing the strait and targeting energy infrastructure, Iran imposed significant costs on global energy markets and trade. That offensive—combining drone swarms, a “mosquito fleet” of fast boats, and the threat of mines—demonstrated a capability that Washington had long dismissed. Tehran regards the resulting stalemate as a new balance of power. The U.S. naval blockade has squeezed Iran’s economy, but at the cost of laying bare the strategic importance of Iran’s grip on the strait. By shifting from air war to naval blockade, the United States in effect admitted that Iran had changed the battlefield on which the conflict would unfold.

 

Trump embraced the naval blockade as the silver bullet that would win the war, but it only put more pressure on the global economy. The stalemate implied greater strategic parity, which the Iranian leadership underscored by saying that the war would end only when the United States and Iran lifted their chokeholds on the Persian Gulf. Going forward, control of the strait, an undeniably vital global economic chokepoint, will serve Tehran as an economic lever and a deterrent against future attacks. For Iran’s leaders, that newly realized power partly offsets costs it has incurred during the war, including the degradation of its Lebanese ally Hezbollah, and other setbacks it has endured in recent years, such as the loss of Syria as a strategic corridor after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, which had been Iran’s staunchest ally in the Arab world.

In Tehran’s view, the United States’ decades-long containment of Iran has come to an end. The new regional order will be defined less by American primacy than by multipolarity, with China an increasingly central player and Iran an integral rather than a marginal actor. Tehran intends to lock in these gains in any agreement that concludes the war. Its insistence on controlling the Strait of Hormuz and collecting tolls from passing ships, and its preconditions for talks—a cease-fire in Lebanon and an end to the U.S. naval blockade—reflect the leadership’s belief that the war has shifted the balance of power in its favor. Iran’s new rulers are negotiating accordingly.

STATECRAFT OVER IDEOLOGY

Iran secured these strategic gains by applying the lessons of the 12-day war with surprising swiftness. In June 2025, Iran found itself fighting war on Israel’s terms. This time, it was determined to fight on its own. Beyond the reorganization of the Iranian military, several specific developments stand out. One was Tehran’s assault on information infrastructure. Iranian commanders understood early that they could not match U.S. and Israeli advantages in satellite intelligence, precision strikes, and integrated air defense. What they could do was frustrate U.S. and Israeli battlefield decision-making by creating gaps between what sensors observed and what commanders interpreted. Strikes on U.S. radar installations across the Persian Gulf degraded the early warning and targeting infrastructure underpinning U.S. and Israeli air operations in the region. Iran worked systematically to erode the adversary’s technological edge rather than confront it directly.

Iran’s seizure of the Strait of Hormuz was another major development. Closing the strait had long been discussed in Tehran as a practical option—and long dismissed in Washington on the grounds that it would hurt Iran’s own exports. Besides, U.S. officials reasoned, the United States’ naval power could destroy Iran’s surface fleet at the outset of the war, effectively removing Tehran’s capability to close the strait. Iran proved all these assumptions wrong. For over four decades, Iran’s military doctrine had centered on asymmetric warfare designed to exploit the vulnerabilities of U.S. and Israeli conventional forces. It did not need a traditional navy to close the strait. Using drones, fast boats, and the threat of mines, it exercised control over the strait—calibrating pressure methodically, sustaining it for weeks, and avoiding the full confrontation it was not prepared to win.

 The Strait of Hormuz is now understood by all parties as an Iranian asset rather than an open sea-lane backed by an American guarantee. “Sanctions relief is not important for us anymore because we know it won’t come, and even if it comes it won’t be long-lasting,” one Iranian analyst told us. “We’re not making the same mistakes as before. Now managing Hormuz is the key.” This represents a fundamental reorientation of Iran’s economic strategy—away from pursuing reintegration into the Western-led financial system, which the new generation considers unattainable, and toward leveraging Iran’s command of critical geography.

 

The war has also compelled Tehran to deepen its tactical alignment with China, building something closer to a strategic partnership. The Iranian leadership has concluded that there is no path to normalization with the United States but that it cannot face U.S. and Israeli pressure alone. Beijing, Tehran believes, sees a resilient Iran as a worthy and proven ally. “Our Chinese friends believe that Iran’s international position has improved since the war began,” Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said in May after meeting his Chinese counterpart in Beijing. “A new era of cooperation between Iran and China lies ahead.” Faced with the eventual task of rebuilding after the war, Iranian leaders are more open than ever to considering China as their primary external partner for reconstruction and economic recovery.

Tehran’s communications campaign during the war marked another break with the past. The Iranian government’s messaging through media and diplomatic channels demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of global audiences. Iranian embassies posted and shared viral content on social media, including animated music videos featuring Lego figures, that drove public conversation far beyond the Middle East. Iran’s framing of the war reached, and persuaded, audiences in the Arab world, Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and even in the United States and Europe. Iran’s strategic communication reflects the same technocratic dexterity that has characterized the military campaign.

Finally, Iranian leaders have come to understand that economic malaise is the greatest threat to their political stability. The lesson they drew from recent nationwide protests is that economic grievance acts as a force multiplier for the opposition. No sooner had the cease-fire been announced in April than the government moved ahead with an economic reform package, ending a number of subsidies and politically protected programs, a move that the leadership justified as necessary for managing the economic fallout of the war. The rush to publicize infrastructure reconstruction projects—bridges, railways, hospitals—signals that the government is moving toward a new social contract, one that will rest on demonstrated competence rather than ideology. The IRGC has made a public show of its technocratic capabilities on the battlefield. Whether it can bring the same efficiency to managing the economy is the question Iran’s new leaders are now asking themselves.

 

THE NATIONALIST TURN

In the aftermath of the mass uprisings and the subsequent massacre of protesters in January 2026, Iranians appeared united against the regime. The country’s politics were defined then by the rupture between a restless population tired of isolation and the deepening pain of U.S. economic sanctions and an increasingly unpopular and embattled government. The war has complicated that picture.

The war’s destruction has been vast: public infrastructure, factories, schools, hospitals, historic monuments, and even entire neighborhoods lie in ruins. As Israeli and American bombs and missiles pummeled the landscape, Trump threatened to arm separatists, redraw Iran’s borders, crush its economy, and annihilate its civilization. Together, these military and rhetorical assaults provoked a nationalist reaction that cut across political divisions. Public anger toward the regime has not disappeared. The grief, frustration, and accumulated resentment of decades of misrule and repression remain. What has changed is the political landscape in which those feelings find expression. Dissent is now refracted through a national struggle against a foreign enemy that Iranians compare to Alexander the Great, who conquered the Persian Empire in the fourth century BC; the Arab armies that invaded in the seventh century AD; and the Mongols, who came six centuries after that.

Contrary to American and Israeli expectations, the war has not sparked street demonstrations. The longer it went on, the less the regime appeared threatened by public uprisings. Iranian society mobilized not against the state but alongside it, holding daily rallies across the country, forming human chains to protect power plants, and gathering on bridges threatened by Trump. The sharp divide between state and society that had characterized Iran in January blurred—not through persuasion or repression, but through the shared experience of living through the bombing and witnessing its destruction.

 

According to a Bloomberg analysis, two-thirds of the targets struck in Tehran before the cease-fire were residential, commercial, and other civilian buildings. In interview after interview, Iranians described explosions that reverberated through their bodies night and day, leaving deep psychological wounds. To them, the Iranian armed forces were no longer the oppressors but the defenders. A chant heard at rallies across Iran to cheer on Iran’s missile and drone strikes captured the shift in mood: “Strike, for you strike so well.” As the Iranian philosopher and dissident Mohammad Mehdi Ardebili said in Tehran during the fifth week of the war: “In this moment in time, the Islamic Republic and Iran are one and the same. If the Islamic Republic falls, Iran falls.”

The sentiment extended to how the war was managed at home. Iranians noted, sometimes with surprise, that after weeks of bombardment and a naval blockade, there were no food or fuel shortages, and daily life continued largely uninterrupted. “Besides the bombs, it didn’t feel like we were at war,” one Tehran resident told us. “If the Islamic Republic can always manage society this efficiently, we wouldn’t have the number of complaints we usually have about them.” Such observations are not endorsements, but they do reflect a change in how Iranians view their leaders.

The government’s Internet shutdowns intensified this dynamic. When the government cut off outside information as a defense against U.S. and Israeli intelligence operations, Iranians were unhappy but had little choice but to turn to the domestic intranet and media. The blackout eliminated diaspora media and social media directed at mobilizing dissent, producing a different kind of national conversation. New and more complex perspectives took root, including about the IRGC, the security threats facing Iran, and what the country has built and must defend. “I always ignored or dismissed what the Revolutionary Guards or the governing system had to say about Israel or the United States,” said a longtime civil society organizer who had been repeatedly interrogated for their activism. “But these past few weeks, I only have access to internal Iranian messaging apps and news apps, and we’ve had to consider their positions and see the reality of being attacked on a daily basis.” A university professor told us: “The country has entered a national war, and a new identity is being forged.”

“ARE YOU IRANIAN ENOUGH?”

The Islamic Republic has always sought a social contract with its population, but the terms have shifted dramatically across its history. In the early years, that compact was based on revolutionary transformation and the redistribution of wealth. In the 1990s, it shifted to economic growth and limited social openings in exchange for political quiescence. Two decades ago, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad channeled oil revenues to the poor in exchange for loyalty to official ideology. His successor, Hassan Rouhani, promised economic growth through a nuclear deal and sanctions relief. All these efforts failed to create a stable relationship between state and society, to varying degrees and for different reasons.

What is now on offer is a nationalist-technocratic bargain, in which state legitimacy rests on a demonstrated ability to defend the country and rebuild it. The terms are national, not Islamic. State media is producing content that normalizes images of women with and without the hijab standing side by side, frames Iranian identity as cultural rather than purely religious, and reaches toward the parts of society that had most thoroughly rejected the Islamic Republic, such as the youth and the urban middle class.

This is not liberalization; in fact, the regime continues to crack down hard on political dissent. But the state now acknowledges that it needs a social base far larger than Islamic ideology alone can provide. Increasingly, the Islamic Republic looks less like a theocracy and more like a right-wing nationalist authoritarian state. Islamic ideology persists, but it is subordinated to the imperative of national cohesion. The test of political fealty is no longer “Are you Islamic enough?” but “Are you Iranian enough?” The mosque is still present, but the dominant political symbol on necklaces and lapel pins, worn by the young and old, is now the country’s map. Government rallies for the defense of the homeland are drawing even critics of the regime, some of whom paid a heavy price for their dissent in the past. These gatherings have become focal points for a nationalism centered on preserving Iranian civilization and celebrating survival with dignity in the face of overwhelming force.

The leadership understands that this is a unique and potentially fleeting moment. The same society that protected the power plants will return to its grievances once the immediate threat recedes. The Iranian people’s anger over repression, economic mismanagement, and mistreatment of women and minorities has been subordinated by war, not dissolved. The state’s concessions on social issues—the de facto relaxation of hijab enforcement, tolerance of concerts and women driving motorcycles—represent an attempt to make wartime unity durable before the political tide turns. Whether they are sufficient to fundamentally alter the relationship between state and society remains to be seen.

 

For Iran’s rulers, addressing economic grievances will be essential once the war ends. Washington assumes that Tehran remains interested in negotiating for sanctions relief. But the IRGC is not counting on diplomacy; it no longer believes the United States will ever lift sanctions. Rather, it seeks a deal that ends the war, consolidates Iran’s gains, and paves the way for economic dividends from taxing maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

Washington interprets this new posture as obduracy born of ideological rigidity and factional rivalry in Tehran. “Unfortunately, the hard-liners with an apocalyptic vision of the future have the ultimate power in that country,” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in April. “Our negotiators aren’t just negotiating with Iranians,” he added. “Those Iranians then have to negotiate with other Iranians in order to figure out what they can agree to, what they can offer, what they’re willing to do, even who they’re willing to meet with.” Vice President JD Vance echoed the sentiment in May. “Maybe the Iranians themselves aren’t quite clear in what direction they want to go,” he said. “They also are just a fractured country.”

Rubio and Vance are wrong. Tehran’s defiant approach reflects neither ideological rigidity nor factional infighting. Instead, it demonstrates Iran’s newfound confidence and the lessons learned from the war and previous rounds of talks. The country’s leaders understand that the United States is seeking to get from talks what it could not achieve in war and that Washington is not interested in a deal but in Iran’s surrender. Twice before, last June and in February, talks with the United States were interrupted by U.S. and Israeli strikes. And after a collapse in talks in Islamabad on April 12, Washington immediately imposed a naval blockade, followed by another demand for Iran’s unconditional surrender. Iranian leaders already claim they have won the war. They are not prepared to forfeit the gains they have made or to return to the containment cage they occupied before the war. This self-confidence—rooted in the belief that the war has empowered Iran rather than weakened it—is informing their international outlook. It is also central to the legitimacy they seek at home. Their diplomatic endgame must reflect what Iran’s defiance won in the war.

 

THE MULTIFRONT DOCTRINE

Iran’s pronounced turn to nationalism at home does not mean that Tehran will abandon its regional allies. It will not fundamentally renegotiate relationships with Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shiite militias in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen. But it will manage them with more strategic discipline and less ideological romanticism. The new Iranian leadership will not sacrifice Iran’s interests at the altar of revolutionary solidarity. These alliances will be deployed as part of a coherent regional strategy designed to sustain Iran’s strategic depth against sustained U.S. and Israeli pressure.

Iranian strategists have concluded that it was a mistake, during the war in Gaza, to allow Israel time to fight the different nodes of Tehran’s “axis of resistance” one by one. The U.S.-Israeli strikes over the past year followed directly from that failure of coordination. But in February, having learned its lesson, Iran quickly activated Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iraqi militias simultaneously, creating a second front for Israel in Lebanon, expanding the war across the region, and compelling the United States to close Camp Victory in Iraq—which Tehran views as validation of its multifront doctrine.

Iranian commanders maintain their regional network not out of ideological desire to project power, but from the calculation that Iran cannot be fully sovereign as long as it faces military threats and economic strangulation by the United States and Israel. Iran’s insistence that negotiations with the United States are contingent on a cease-fire in Lebanon, and that a final agreement must end war on all fronts and reflect Iran’s strategic gains, illustrates this expansive view of regional defense. U.S. and Israeli policy, in Tehran’s analysis, aims at Israeli hegemony across the Middle East—a goal that requires a weak and broken Iran.

The axis of resistance, once dismissed by many Iranians as charity for an ideological cause, is now understood by a larger segment of the population as an instrument of national defense. Iran’s aim to prevent the United States from rebuilding its damaged radar installations in the Persian Gulf is another expression of the same logic—a deliberate effort to degrade the early warning infrastructure that has underpinned U.S. military dominance in waters Iran regards as its strategic backyard.

A NEW ISLAMIC REPUBLIC

The war has been a crucible, forging a new iteration of the Islamic Republic and the first major generational shift since its founding. Power no longer resides with the founders. The second generation now runs military and political affairs while the third and fourth direct communications and international outreach.

In its first years under Khomeini, the Islamic Republic was a revolutionary state: organized around ideological transformation, legitimized by the charismatic authority of the supreme leader and his claim to implement God’s will, and oriented in foreign policy toward exporting the revolution. After Khomeini’s death, in 1989, on through the reform era and the hard-line consolidation under Khamenei, the republic was a postrevolutionary state perpetually negotiating between its founding ideology and the demands of governance. The leadership managed an increasingly skeptical population through repression, patronage, and limited openings. It saw resistance to American influence as an anti-imperialist imperative, but it was still, above all, an Islamic republic, ruled by the founding generation and animated by its internal battles.

The republic born of the U.S.-Israeli wars is defined less by ideology than by nationalism, less by revolution than by statecraft, less by clerical charisma than by the confidence and technocratic ethos of a new officer class. In comparative terms, it resembles the military-led nationalist states of the twentieth century—Turkey under the later Kemalists, Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser—in which ideology persisted but was subordinated to national interest and the imperatives of state power.

This turn away from dogma and toward pragmatic statecraft does not make the Islamic Republic more benign. Nationalist security states are often brutal to their own people and destabilizing to the international order. The emergent Islamic Republic will remain highly authoritarian. But the categories that Western analysts have often used to describe its various factions—hard-liners versus moderates, ideologues versus reformists—will be less accurate than ever. The priorities of the new Islamic Republic, and how it pursues them, will be shaped by the specific experiences of its two wars with Israel and the United States: the losses Iran sustained, the confidence its leadership gained, and the new social contract the fighting has made necessary and possible.

 

Dark patterns on the web are designed to manipulate you – why aren’t they all illegal? by Gregory M. Dickinson

 

You open a free app to do one simple thing. Before you even start, a full-screen message asks whether you want to try the paid version. The “Start free trial” button is large, bright and hard to miss. The option to keep using the free version is smaller, buried at the bottom. The same prompt appears again tomorrow. And the day after that.

A lot of people look at screens like that and think, “Surely this has to be illegal.” We even have a name for them, “dark patterns.” They feel pushy. They waste time. They seem designed to wear you down. But in most cases, they are perfectly lawful.

“Dark pattern” is not a legal term with a clear boundary. It is a broad label for digital designs that nudge, pressure, confuse or trap users. As a legal scholar who studies consumer protection and digital design, I think the most important thing for readers to understand is that the label “dark pattern” covers a broad spectrum.

Some of that spectrum is just annoying. Some of it is aggressive salesmanship. And some of it crosses the line into deception or coercion. Federal and state consumer protection laws are mostly aimed at that last category. They do not ban every design choice people dislike, only those that trick or coerce.

 Annoying isn’t illegal

 That reality may sound unsatisfying, but it is not unusual. Offline life is full of things that are irritating but not unlawful. Think of the cashier who asks whether you want to sign up for the store credit card, then points out the discount you are turning down, then asks again. Most people know exactly what is happening. They roll their eyes, say no and try to shop somewhere else next time.

 The same is true online. A repeated pop-up can be obnoxious. A guilt-inducing button can be tacky. But consumers recognize ordinary annoyance for what it is. In many cases, the market answer is simple: Close the app, ignore the pitch or take your business elsewhere.

 Similarly, law does not ban persuasive sales pitches just because they are effective. A car salesperson who keeps steering you toward the upgraded model is trying to influence your choice. So is the airline clerk who offers travel insurance. So is the restaurant server who asks whether you want dessert. Salesmanship is nothing new. Digital design often borrows from familiar techniques.

That helps explain why lawmakers cannot simply outlaw “manipulation.” And so many interfaces are built to persuade, openly and lawfully.

 

What crosses the line

What the federal FTC Act and analogous state consumer-deception statutes usually care about is not whether a design is annoying. They focus on whether the design is likely to mislead a reasonable consumer. That is the core idea in modern consumer protection law.

So a design is likelier to be unlawful when it hides key facts, makes an optional choice look mandatory or tricks people about the effect of the button they are pressing. A fake countdown timer, a disguised ad, a misleading one-click purchase button or a cancellation path that looks finished when it is not are all different from ordinary hard selling. Those designs do not just pressure users; they can deceive them.

That is also why the app maker’s intent is not always the key question. In many consumer protection cases, a company does not get a free pass just because no one said, “Let’s trick people.” The legal question is often about effect: What would a reasonable user likely understand from this screen?

Research on dark patterns reinforces that concern. Even relatively mild designs can push people into choices they would not otherwise make. And regulators have increasingly focused on subscription flows, hidden fees and cancellation obstacles for exactly that reason.

 

Why it feels like dark patterns are everywhere

One reason people might think there are no laws against dark patterns is that they see them so often. But that frequency reflects that the term covers a wide range of conduct, from lawful nagging to outright deception.

It also reflects enforcement limits. Regulators cannot chase every irritating screen on every app and website. They have to prioritize the worst cases. That leaves a lot of borderline conduct in the wild, which makes the whole problem feel bigger and murkier to ordinary users.

So when people ask why there is not a law against dark patterns, the best answer is that there already is, but the law does not prohibit every annoying or high-pressure design. It targets lies, misleading cues and coercive obstacles.

That line can be fuzzy. But the fuzziness is not a mistake. It is what you get when the law tries to separate persuasion from deception in a world full of both.

The last ‘little crappy ship’: What’s the future for the US Navy’s troubled LCS? By Brad Lendon Brad Lendon

 

The US Navy commissioned the last of its 35 littoral combat ships, the USS Cleveland, earlier this month at a pier in its namesake Ohio city.

“Steel. Strength. Power,” acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao posted on social media to mark the occasion.

Critics of the littoral combat ship (LCS) program had some other descriptions.

“Easy meat,” said one.

“An experiment that didn’t work,” said another.

And an expensive one. The price of the program is pegged at $60 billion, but a 2023 report from the investigative journalism site ProPublica said the eventual cost could top $100 billion.

“One of the worst boondoggles in the military’s long history of buying overpriced and underperforming weapons systems,” the ProPublica report said. 

 The LCS are at what the Navy calls the “low-end” of its surface ship fleet. They’re smaller than its guided-missile destroyers, carry fewer crew, and have less firepower and defenses, but they’re faster and able to operate in more shallow waters. 

 

But after the ships have been plagued by a range of mechanical failures and mishaps since the first one was commissioned in 2008, they’ve earned a derisive interpretation of the LCS acronym, “little crappy ships.”

After the Cleveland entered the fleet last weekend on the shores of Lake Erie, the big question became – what now for the LCS?

How we got here

The LCS had its origins around the turn of the century, as naval planners looked for a smaller platform to work in coastal environments, where conditions might make larger warships like destroyers vulnerable, according to a 2017 Navy report. 

 

The service was also facing the retirement of older, larger ships and was looking for ways to maintain its fleet size with smaller surface combatants that could be built more quickly and cheaply than bigger vessels, the report said.

Then-Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Vern Clark decided to go with the LCS, a warship unlike anything the Navy had acquired before.

And that may have been part of the problem.

Critics argued “Admiral Clark first decided he needed a ship and only then turned to figuring out what the ship would do,” a 2014 report by then Undersecretary of the Navy Robert Work says. 

 

In that report, written to explain the origins and complications of the LCS program, Work said the Navy got the shipped it asked for – “and in some key aspects a better ship than expected.”

But he acknowledged the ship’s development was “marked by constant change” that obscured its role and left it ripe for criticism.

The Navy acknowledged it was trying something different with the LCS.

“The LCS program marked a significant shift in how the Navy approaches shipbuilding and fleet modernization emphasizing flexibility, speed, and cost-effective construction,” a Navy fact sheet says, adding that the ships were to be rapidly reconfigured as missions – mine countermeasures, anti-submarine warfare or surface warfare – changed. 

 

But the service didn’t settle on a single design, instead building two variants, the monohulled, steel-constructed Freedom class – like USS Cleveland – and the trimaran, aluminum-hulled Independence class.

A Navy fact sheet says it was expected there would be only one design chosen between plans submitted by builders Lockheed Martin and Austal USA, but two variants were chosen after competition between the two yielded “a highly efficient” shipbuilding process. 

 

But two variants complicate logistics and supply chains, critics say.

The Independence class is the bigger of the two, 422 feet long and 104 feet wide, compared with 388 feet long and 58 feet wide for the Freedom class. The latter has the bigger displacement, at 3,450 metric tons to 3,200.

Neither uses propellor propulsion or rudders; instead, gas turbines power high-speed water jets. The design allows the LCS to operate in shallower coastal waters and avoid getting tangled in wires or cables, like those that might tether mines.

An LCS commander once touted the ships as “a military jet ski with a flight deck and a gun.” 

 

In 2008, the first monohulled LCS, USS Freedom, was commissioned. In 2010, the first trimaran, USS Independence, followed.

Problems pile up

The LCS was envisioned as a key component of US naval power in areas dominating current headlines, like the Persian Gulf, where the US and Israel are at war with Iran, and the South China Sea, where the US and its allies are defending freedom of navigation.

Early proponents of the ship called it a “streetfighter,” according to the Navy report, speedy and able to combat small-boat swarms, but with the versatility to hunt mines like those Iran is reported to have laid in the Strait of Hormuz. 

 But problems began to mount. In January 2016, USS Fort Worth suffered damage to its propulsion system in Singapore. Though the problem was later found to be caused by operator error, the then-4-year-old ship was out of action for eight months. 

 And the incident was one of four mechanical problems with the LCS fleet in a year, staining the reputation of the ships’ reliability.

As the LCS problems materialized, Navy leaders thought money budgeted for the program could be better spent elsewhere. 

 

In 2021, it began decommissioning the oldest of the ships – totaling seven to date – including the USS Sioux City, which was decommissioned in 2023 after spending only five years in a fleet where ships are expected to last 25 years.

An eighth, USS Fort Worth, is expected to be retired in July, but Congress blocked plans to decommission even more, citing the service’s need for ships and a wish to protect taxpayer investments of billions of dollars.

So, the Navy is forging ahead trying to make the best of ships its leaders didn’t want just a few years ago. 

 The 2026 Navy shipbuilding plan released earlier this month calls the LCS “an essential low-end fleet capability … capable of complicating adversary decisions,” saying it can be an effective mine countermeasures platform and armed with the Naval Strike Missile for surface warfare action.

“The strategy for LCS is a transition from acquisition to sustainment and modernization to keep these ships relevant, combat credible, and reliable through their service lives,” the plan says. 

 

Analysts are skeptical.

“What remains to be seen is how useful they would actually be in a combat scenario, as they have never been in one,” Emma Salisbury, a non-resident senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s National Security Program, told CNN.

She said she’s seen no evidence that, in the current war with Iran, the three LCS deployed to the Middle East for minesweeping duties have done the job. When asked by CNN, US Central Command said it could not comment on what role the LCS have playing in the conflict. 

 When US Central Command announced in April it was beginning to set the conditions for mine clearing in the Strait of Hormuz, it was not LCS but destroyers that were the first to go through the waterway. 

 

Since the war began, at least two of the three LCS assigned to the gulf for minesweeping have been spotted as far away as Malaysia and Singapore.

Carl Schuster, a former US Navy captain, told CNN the LCS lacks enough anti-aircraft defenses for any real war-time role in contested waters.

Though the Navy said in 2025 it had begun upgrading LCS defenses to counter drones, Schuster is unconvinced.

“They are easy meat to a cruise missile, drone or aviation platform,” he said. 

 “They are all but helpless in any kind of threat scenario. Even anti-pirate patrols are too dangerous in areas where there is a hostile air, drone, missile or swarm threat,” he said.

The LCS is “an experiment that didn’t work as advertised, so the US Navy does its best to use the ships for what it can,” Salisbury added. 

 Both Salisbury and Schuster see the LCS as primarily stopgaps for the Navy, likely to give way to a new generation of frigates that was announced last December. 

 

Those ships, known for now as the FF (X), will be based on the Coast Guard’s Legend-class national security cutters. They’ll be bigger than the LCS, displacing 4,750 tons, according to a Navy document presented at a naval symposium in January reported by Naval News.

A Navy announcement of the new frigate from December 2025 said the service hopes to have the first hull in the water by 2028. The Navy could eventually field 50 to 65 of the new frigates, according to Naval News.

Schuster doesn’t see a bright or long future for the LCS fleet.

“They will be kept until the new (frigates) enter service in 3-4 years … Then they’ll be quietly retired one or two at a time.”