Everything is changing. Including our influence.
We just failed to do all of those things quite visibly.
Iran made a choice not to escalate to destroying desalination capabilities and that's why a lot of Saudis and Emiratis are still alive. It's not because we protected them.
Such as a Russian strategic bomber base thousands of miles from the front?
Ukraine has other long-range strike drones but haven't heard of more than a thousand miles range.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb
https://sofrep.com/news/deepstrike-campaign-drone-attacks-ag...
You mean like when the Zionists openly stopped food from getting into Gaza, while the western governments were backing the Zuonists? Those people concerned with civilian casualties?
An enemy unconcerned with civilian casualties, give me a break.
But I am sure of who I wouldn't put in charge of critical military operations.
You make an incorrect conclusion which is unfortunately both quite popular and incorrect among westerners who read two and half editorials about Russo-Ukrainian war in some NYT/WAPO/whatever and think they now understand modern warfare. The reality of the situation is that drones are a very useful tool, but any side achieving actual air supremacy would result their fighters and bombers cruising over frontline and enemy towns on low altitudes taking out any high-value targets at whim. The situation would be similar to boots-on-the-ground phase of The Iraq War, resulting one of the sides to rapidly gaining ground and winning the war. Keep in mind that the cited "40k per-hour" price is quite cheap compared to per-hour operation cost of any kind of big ground force.
In fact, last thing US wants is to be in Russia's shoes unable to meaningfully advance into the territory of by all measures much weaker enemy.
The US war on Iran also demonstrates the problems of drones too: the US is currently able to wage a war 6000 miles away from its shores, because of the use of an awful lot of weapons systems that aren't drones. Iran is unable to dislodge that military, or even meaningfully impact its ability to carry out said war, not 100 miles away from its shores, despite a heavy use of drones to attempt to do so.
The war also demonstrates another big issue... the continued delusion of many civilian and military leaders that strategic bombing alone is sufficient to win a war despite this failing literally every single time it's been attempted in the past 100 years.
That used to be true, but I don't think that the case anymore. UA is now striking logistics ~150KM behind the contact line with drones. Regular artillery can't do that. Guided rockets maybe could, but they'd be more expensive and come in smaller quantities.
> US is currently able to wage a war 6000 miles away from its shores
For a rather restricted use of "wage a war". They did not stop Iranians from doing their thing. Bombing alone does not have a history of winning wars.
Even the fanciest self propelled artillery is getting destroyed by these little cheap buggers.
