핵심요약

• 비대칭 전쟁 전략: 현대 전략적 성공은 기습과 소모전의 논리(비대칭성, 소모, 분산, 적응, 심리적 고갈)를 수용하는 국제 행위자에게 속한다.
• 전통적 측정 기준의 한계: 군사력은 항공기, 전차, 함선 등의 전통적 지표로 측정되었으나, 실제 성공은 이러한 물리적 힘의 축적보다는 전투 거부라는 방식으로 달성된다.
• 현대 분쟁의 사례: 이란, 이스라엘, 미국의 2026년 전쟁은 표적 공격이 이란의 공군, 해군, 지휘 구조를 약화시킬 수 있음을 보여준다.
• 기술의 역할: Maven 스마트 시스템과 AI 언어 모델은 인간 지휘 체계가 따라잡을 수 없는 규모로 표적 설정과 우선순위를 생성하여 전략적 우위를 제공한다.

도입

투자자들에게 이 기사는 전쟁의 승패가 더 이상 절대적인 힘의 균형이 아닌, 비대칭적 소모전과 적응 능력에 의해 결정된다는 점을 시사합니다. 전통적인 군사력 측정 방식이 더 이상 현실을 반영하지 못하며, 대신 적대국의 의지를 꺾고 군사 능력을 고갈시키는 전략이 승패를 좌우한다는 점이 핵심입니다. 따라서 투자자는 단순한 군사력 지표를 넘어, 적대국의 생존력과 적응 능력을 평가하는 새로운 프레임을 이해해야 합니다.

본문 1: 비대칭 전쟁의 논리

전통적인 군사력은 항공기, 전차, 함선, 병력 수와 같은 전통적인 척도로 측정되어 왔습니다. 서구 전략 사상은 압도적인 힘과 기술 우위를 결합한 결정적인 전투를 추구하는 데 집중해 왔습니다. 그러나 베트남, 아프가니스탄, 남레바논, 홍해 등 여러 분쟁 사례는 물리적으로 약한 행위자들이 군사적으로 우월한 적을 좌절시키고 소모시키는 놀라운 능력을 보여주었습니다. 이는 힘의 축적보다는 전통적인 조건에서 싸우기를 거부하는 방식, 즉 비대칭적 접근을 통해 전략적 우위를 달성했음을 의미합니다. 즉, 승리는 적의 군사 능력을 파괴하고 계속 싸울 의지를 꺾는 데서 비롯됩니다.

본문 2: 기술과 군사력의 변화

최근의 분쟁은 이러한 비대칭적 접근이 어떻게 기술과 결합하여 효과를 극대화하는지를 보여줍니다. 이란, 이스라엘, 미국의 2026년 전쟁에서 이스라엘과 미국의 타격은 이란의 공공 방어 체계, 해군, 지휘 구조를 실질적으로 약화시키고 고위 장교들을 사살했습니다. 이러한 결과는 물리적 힘의 직접적인 사용뿐만 아니라, 정보 기술과 인공지능이 전략적 우위를 창출하는 데 결정적인 역할을 함을 시사합니다. 특히, 팔란티어와 AI 언어 모델을 통합한 Maven 스마트 시스템은 거의 180개의 기밀 데이터 소스에서 정보를 추출하여 인간 지휘 체계가 따라잡을 수 없는 규모로 표적 설정과 우선순위를 생성할 수 있게 했습니다. 이는 군사적 결정 과정이 더 이상 인간의 판단에만 의존하지 않고, 데이터 기반의 초규모 처리가 가능해졌음을 의미합니다.

본문 3: 장기적 전망과 리스크

비대칭적 소모전의 논리가 지배하는 환경에서, 미래의 분쟁 양상은 물리적 힘의 대결보다는 정보의 비대칭성과 시스템의 회복 탄력성에 더 크게 좌우될 전망입니다. 기술이 군사적 의사결정의 핵심이 되면서, 사이버전, 인공지능 기반의 정보전, 그리고 분산된 네트워크의 취약성이 새로운 전략적 리스크로 부상합니다. 따라서 각 국가는 물리적 자산뿐만 아니라, 정보 시스템의 안정성과 적응력을 확보하는 데 집중해야 합니다. 장기적으로 볼 때, 군사적 성공은 물리적 파괴의 크기가 아니라, 적대국의 시스템을 얼마나 오래 지속적으로 고갈시키고 적응을 강제하는지에 달려 있을 것입니다. 이는 지정학적 변동성이 심화될수록 기술적 우위와 정보 통제 능력이 국가 생존력의 핵심 요소가 됨을 의미합니다.

결론

결론적으로, 현대 분쟁의 승패는 전통적인 군사력의 우위가 아닌, 비대칭적 소모전의 논리와 첨단 기술의 결합으로 읽힙니다. 앞으로의 지정학적 환경에서는 물리적 자원의 규모보다 정보 처리 능력과 시스템의 회복 탄력성이 국가의 전략적 생존력을 결정하는 핵심 요소가 될 것입니다. 투자자들은 이러한 비대칭적 전략과 기술 통합의 흐름을 이해하고, 군사적 충돌이 장기적인 시스템 고갈과 정보 우위 확보의 과정으로 진행될 가능성에 주목해야 합니다.

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Iran Didn’t Need to Win The War. It Needed to Outlast It - Small Wars Journal

Strategic success now belongs to international actors who embrace the guerrilla logic of asymmetry, attrition, decentralization, adaptation, and psychological exhaustion.

The most enduring lesson of modern warfare may not come from advanced fighter jets, stealth bombers, or precision-guided munitions. It may come from guerrilla warfare.

For decades, military power has been measured through conventional metrics: the number of aircraft, tanks, ships, and soldiers a state can deploy. Western strategic thought has long been dominated by the search for a decisive battle, an idea that overwhelming force coupled with technological superiority and concentrated violence can compel an adversary into submission. Victory may thus be achieved through the destruction of an opponent’s military capacity and the erosion of its ability to continue fighting, or, as Clausewitz puts it, the breaking of its will to fight .

Yet recent conflicts have repeatedly challenged this. From Vietnam to Afghanistan , from Southern Lebanon to the Red Sea , materially weaker actors have demonstrated an extraordinary ability to frustrate, exhaust, and outlast militarily superior adversaries. This certainly was not the result of power accumulation in conventional hard power terms, but rather through the very refusal to fight on conventional terms.

The 2026 war involving Iran, Israel, and the United States offers the starkest reminder yet. As Erfan Fard observes , Israeli and US strikes substantially degraded Iran’s conventional military, damaging its air defense, navy, and command structure, and killing senior officials. The United States Central Command (CENTCOM) claims to have struck over 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours of the war and 5,000 within ten days. This was enabled by the Maven Smart System, built by Palantir and integrated with AI language models drawing from nearly 180 classified data sources to generate targeting and prioritization at a scale no human command chain could match. By any conventional measure, the campaign should have been decisive and the outcome unambiguous.

Yet declarations of decisive victory remain elusive, a paradox that has characterized the defining conflicts of the past half-century. The United States won most major battles in Vietnam, yet lost the war. Twenty years of military dominance in Afghanistan culminated in a Taliban return to power. Israel has repeatedly degraded Hezbollah’s military capabilities while remaining unable to eliminate it as a political and military force.

Dominant traditions in Western strategic thought, from Clausewitz’s decisive battle to Schelling’s coercive signaling , alongside their war-making institutions, rest on a quantifiable metric of success : body counts, numbers of destroyed launchers and navy ships, and the eliminated commander. All visible, politically actionable, and most importantly, announce-able. For more than two decades, it has shaped national security policy in Washington through one of its most seductive applications: decapitation strikes.

Trump’s declaration that Iran’s leaders were “all dead, so I think we won” was not an aberration of strategic illiteracy. It was the endpoint of a logic that Israel, Washington, and much of the Western security establishment have operated on for decades – the belief that killing the head kills the body.

Israel’s record is instructive precisely because of its consistency. Targeted killings stretch from German scientists assisting Egypt’s missile program in the 1960s to Iraqi scientists under Saddam, to Hamas commanders , to Hezbollah leadership , to Iranian military and political figures in 2026. The operational sophistication has only grown, particularly in terms of lethality, yet the strategic results have not. If every commander killed is replaced, and every decapitation produces adaptation, the failure has less to do with precision and more to do with defining success incorrectly.

Often, this occurs due to the treatment of asymmetry as a permanent advantage. That superior technology, like the F-35 Lightning II and Tomahawk missiles, and resources would reliably translate into decisive outcomes is opposite to the premise on which guerrilla strategies start. Instead, a political-military framework is designed to neutralize that advantage, built on the recognition that a weaker party cannot prevail by fighting on the stronger party’s terms.

This operates through two interlocking logics.

The first concerns the trade between time and space. Both Mao’s protracted warfare and Che Guevara’s Foco theory share a central premise: survival matters more than victory in any single engagement. By carefully regulating violence and exchanging space for time, a weaker force could convert an enemy’s material superiority into a logistical and political liability. The objective was not annihilation but endurance: sustaining pressure until the adversary’s domestic political constituency for continuing the war eroded faster than the capacity to fight.

In an era of deep economic interdependence, this logic carries greater force on the battlefield. As we have seen play out through Iran’s strategic and Mosaic defense doctrine , a strategic statement – denying America and Israel a decisive outcome by extending the conflict into a timeline where cumulative costs outpace potential gains – has essentially left the Trump administration “with no option but to settle for a deal that ends all fighting to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.” This not only represents protracted war logic at a state scale but also shows the development of guerrilla strategies in modern-day conflicts, where Iran traded military attrition for geo-economic disruption.

A targeted campaign of missile and drone strikes against commercial vessels, limited in number but calibrated for market impact, was sufficient to collapse transit volumes through the Strait of Hormuz by approximately 90%. The imposition of a coastal inspection corridor routing westbound tankers north around Larak Island under Iranian supervision allowed Tehran to reassert practical control over the waterway without formal interdiction, complicating any Western effort to force a clear resolution.

Critically, the costs were not absorbed by Iran alone. They were distributed across global energy markets, Asian fuel supplies, and international shipping and insurance industries. This is the geo-economic dimension of protracted warfare: the financial burden of conflict is exported well beyond the theatre of operations.

The second logic concerns where decisive pressure is applied. Conventional doctrine locates the centre of gravity on the battlefield – in the destruction of enemy forces and the seizure of territory. The guerrilla calculus places it in the political and psychological environment surrounding the conflict. The Houthis’ Red Sea campaign from 2023 onwards, for example, was not designed to defeat the US Navy in any conventional sense. Its objective was to demonstrate that the US Navy could not guarantee freedom of navigation; a narrower but strategically significant goal, and one they achieved. Global shipping rerouted , insurance premiums rose sharply, and naval assets were committed to open-ended deployments. These outcomes were produced by an actor with no air force, no blue-water navy, and defense resources that would not sustain a single American destroyer’s annual operating costs.

The numbers make this argument more straightforward. Houthi drones costing between $20,000 and $40,000 forced US interceptor launches costing between $500,000 and $4 million per shot. The Navy expended nearly $1 billion in munitions over six months of Red Sea operations alone. During the Iran war, the US was reportedly spending $2 billion a day, with serious concern that interceptor stocks could be exhausted within weeks. Iran’s Shahed drones, at $20,000 to $35,000 each, were being met by Israeli Arrow interceptors at $3.5 million apiece. Israel’s Alma Research Centre summarized the dynamic plainly: “hundreds of dollars are defeating millions of dollars.”

This is a cost asymmetry deployed as a strategy. The point is not to match the adversary’s firepower but to make its deployment fiscally irrational over time – to grind the adversary’s political economy of weapons until continuation becomes more expensive than withdrawal. This is Mao’s logic, now expressed through industrial cost ratios rather than territorial exchange. By mid-2024, senior Pentagon officials were already describing their reliance on high-end interceptors as unsustainable, with production lags running to years rather than weeks.

Where air superiority was once the preserve of wealthy states able to afford advanced aircraft and the pilots to fly them, cheap attack drones are eroding that advantage with considerable speed. Hezbollah has moved towards locally manufactured drones costing approximately $300 to $400 each, produced using 3D printing, that penetrated Israeli armored vehicles and, on multiple occasions, defeated the Trophy active protection system on Merkava tanks.

Hamas, facing one of the most sophisticated surveillance architectures in the world, chose to minimize electronic communications entirely and used paragliders to breach Israeli defense, circumventing billions of dollars of technology through deliberate technological regression.

Iran, having lost most of its conventional naval capacity in the early strikes, deployed instead dispersed formations of armed speedboats – what analysts have called “ mosquito fleets ” – to assert practical control over the Strait of Hormuz without offering a concentrated target to strike. The informational dimension runs alongside this. A Shahed drone striking a US military position or penetrating the Iron Dome matters. The footage of that strike, released within hours across Telegram, may matter as much strategically.

What connects these cases goes beyond improvisation to an increasing adaptation by global political actors to the rise of irregular warfare and, therefore, to the development of alternative strategies. The Gulf states seemed to come to this conclusion during the attacks they faced from their neighbor, where, despite a formal American security commitment, some brought in Ukrainian military experts to advise on countering Shahed drone swarms. Ukraine’s relevance lay not in its conventional military capacity but in its experience adapting to irregular warfare and its military innovation in real time.

There is also a long-term dimension. Western militaries have prided themselves on the AI systems they have developed. But that technology no longer remains the exclusive property of states. Commercial drones, open-source satellite imagery, and AI-assisted planning tools are increasingly accessible to non-state and sub-state actors. The guerrilla of the twenty-first century may acquire in AI what the guerrilla of the twentieth acquired in the AK-47: a tool that dramatically lowers the barrier to effective, sustained warfare.

As Henry Kissinger observed of Vietnam, “the guerrilla wins if he does not lose; the conventional army loses if it does not win.” The 2026 war reproduced that same logic, only at a far greater scale. Until the strategic assumptions underpinning conventional military strategies are revised, the pattern will hold.

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Source: https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMimwFBVV95cUxPZDQyNnM3cTRoeW12TkFPdVhoeHdVYUM1RmpYNF9KckV2aEozTWxXUi1LSG9TZlcyOEV1czZkM05BbU04blEyaTJGbUhZNW1CcnZvZWQ0VXYzQ3cwM1V3MG1jYmhZaFEyX19UeE1KMnVhaVlHQVRqRmJLcU9TaTBPY2JXcW84eHN3R1JaaHZUQVRGN1lvWlZORjJ5dw?oc=5