The U.S. war on Iran has laid bare a dichotomy in the world’s most advanced military: high-tech weapons and AI have delivered stunning blows at unprecedented speed, while defending against the swarm of missiles and drones launched in retaliation have come at unsustainably lopsided costs. Led by a massive air campaign, the U.S. has claimed more than 7,000 strikes on key sites, with Israel conducting a comparable number of sorties, as AI tools like Anthropic’s Claude recommend targets “much quicker in some ways than the speed of thought.” The relentless bombardment has decimated Iran’s military and leadership. But helped by…