These are the three social evils Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. warned would destroy America from within: Militarism, materialism, and racism. Decades later, they help explain the divisions in our country that led to the January 6 attack by protesters on the U.S. Capitol. Of the three, however, the role our recent wars have played in exacerbating these conditions is often the most overlooked.
Video produced by Khody Akhavi.
On Sunday, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Mike Waltz told ABC News that Arab Gulf states may soon step up their involvement in the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. “I expect that you'll see additional diplomatic and possibly military action from them in the coming days and weeks,” Waltz said.
Then, on Monday morning, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) slammed Saudi Arabia for staying out of the war even as “Americans are dying and the U.S. is spending billions” of dollars to conduct regime change in Iran. “If you are not willing to use your military now, when are you willing to use it?” Graham asked. “Hopefully this changes soon. If not, consequences will follow.”
Ten days into the war with Iran, Arab Gulf states have gone to great lengths to avoid joining the fight. But Iran has complicated their calculations with its decision to target both civilian and military targets in the territory of states like Bahrain, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. Now, hawks like Waltz and Graham are joining the push to pull these countries into war.
At this point, Arab states in the Gulf only see bad options. “The Gulf leaders are just really trying to calculate which is the lesser of two evils — complete chaos and destabilization in Iran or an even more sort of hostile and frightened regime,” said Annelle Sheline of the Quincy Institute, which publishes RS.
If it seems like the war is trending in Iran’s favor, then Arab leaders will have little reason to join the war, Sheline said. “Whereas if it looks like it's going more in the U.S. and Israel's favor, they may decide it's better to just get involved and end it sooner, because they do just want it to be over one way or another.”
Further complicating their calculations are the mixed signals coming out of Iran in recent days. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian apologized on Saturday for targeting Gulf states in the initial response to the U.S. and Israeli bombardment. But he walked back the comments Sunday, saying, “If they seek to attack and invade our soil from any country, we are compelled to respond to this aggression.”
Now, Iran is planning to refocus its attacks on “targets associated with Israel, while attacks on U.S. bases in the region may decrease to some extent,” according to a senior Iranian official who spoke to Drop Site. But “this reduction may not apply to U.S. bases in two particular countries, where such actions could continue,” the official said, without further elaboration.
Regardless of what Gulf leaders decide, “the long-term prospects for the Gulf are not really good either way,” Sheline said.
“They'd built this image of luxury and stability and sort of abundance in a part of the world that was all a facade,” she added. “There will always be a question in the back of everyone's mind: how safe are these places really?”
A provocative calculus by Anusar Farrouqui (“policytensor”) has been circulating on X and in more exhaustive form on the author’s Substack. It purports to demonstrate a sobering reality: in a high-intensity U.S.-Iran conflict, the United States may be unable to suppress Iranian drone production quickly enough to prevent a strategically consequential period of regional devastation.
The argument is framed through a quantitative lens, carrying the seductive appeal of mathematical precision. It arranges variables—such as U.S. sortie rates and degradation efficiency against Iranian repair cycles and rebuild speeds—to suggest a "sustainable firing rate." The implication is that Iran could maintain a persistent strike capability long enough to exhaust American political patience, forcing Washington toward a premature declaration of success or an unfavorable ceasefire.
There are, of course, valid reasons to approach this analysis with a healthy grain of salt. The model is structurally narrow, its empirical foundations regarding Iranian industrial recovery are speculative, and its strategic conclusions often leap further than the raw numbers can strictly justify. However, focusing solely on the mathematical flaws misses the broader point.
The most significant takeaway is that the analysis may be directionally accurate, even if specific data points are off-target. Its core assessment suggests that Iran may have time on its side. This is a serious proposition—one that deserves closer attention than the dismissive reactions of traditional defense circles would suggest.
The primary claim is straightforward: if the United States cannot achieve a "rapid collapse" of the Iranian drone infrastructure, Tehran can sustain a campaign of attrition against global shipping lanes, Gulf energy facilities, regional U.S. bases, and American partners. At some point, the cumulative economic and political costs of Iranian persistence become so visible that the domestic pressure in Washington to exit the conflict outweighs the strategic desire to stay.
In its most distilled form, the model reduces the entire contest to a mathematical relationship between two opposing forces: the rate of U.S. suppression and the rate of Iranian reconstitution. If the "regeneration constant"—the speed at which Iran can repair a bombed workshop or move assembly to a new basement—remains high relative to the "attrition constant" imposed by U.S. strikes, a functional portion of the production base survives. This surviving base acts as a floor for continued attacks. From this mechanical premise, the author moves to a political conclusion: continued attacks lead to prolonged disruption, which eventually results in a politically unfavorable outcome for the United States.
As a stylized exercise, this is far more useful than it might initially appear to those who prefer traditional "order of battle" analysis. It identifies a critical variable often obscured in grand strategy: the industrial contest. A war of this nature would not be decided solely by tactical successes. It would be a trial of industrial resilience. If Iranian one-way attack drones can be manufactured through a network of relatively simple, dispersed, and easily repairable facilities, then the standard assumption that Western airpower can "solve" the problem in a matter of days is dangerously optimistic. The model performs a service by directing our gaze away from slogans of "overwhelming force" and toward the slower mechanics of suppression, reconstitution, and sustained coercion.
The shift in emphasis toward industrial resilience is backed by recent history. The experience of the Russia-Ukraine war has fundamentally altered our understanding of Shahed-type systems. They are not "boutique" weapons requiring delicate, high-tech cleanrooms. Instead, they belong to a new category of "attritable" systems that can be produced in massive quantities and expanded rapidly under wartime duress.
Their strategic significance lies precisely in their lack of sophistication. They do not need the performance of a fifth-generation fighter to create a strategic crisis; they only need to be available in sufficient volume to saturate defenses and keep the global energy market in a state of perpetual anxiety. For decades, the U.S. military has thought in terms of "target sets": identify the factory, hit it hard, and watch the enemy’s capability collapse. This logic fails against a modular, dispersed, and industrially "flat" production ecosystem. If Iranian drone production is indeed an adaptive, decentralized network, the suppression problem becomes less like knocking out a building and more like trying to keep a biological organism below a certain threshold of activity. This is a repetitive, costly, and time-consuming endeavor.
This is where the analysis pulls its true weight. The real insight is not the exact ratio of drones produced per week, but the warning that even a "successful" military campaign might take longer than Washington’s political timetable allows. We can illustrate this with a medium-case scenario. Iran does not need to sustain a maximal, high-intensity attack indefinitely. It only needs to demonstrate that, for a period measured in months rather than days, it can keep the conflict "active" and "costly."
If Tehran can do this, it creates a classic asymmetry: long-term U.S. military superiority does not guarantee short-term, politically usable success. This distinction is vital. Iran cannot defeat the U.S. military in a head-to-head clash, but it can likely keep the conflict inside the "American political pain window." A four-month delay in achieving total suppression might seem like a minor tactical hiccup to a general, but to a politician, four months of rising oil prices, skyrocketing shipping insurance, and daily headlines about "failed" strikes is a catastrophe.
The issue is as much about perception as it is about material damage. U.S. administrations must make decisions amid the noise of market volatility, allied franticness, and domestic congressional fallout. In such a pressure cooker, Iran doesn’t need to "win" the war; it only needs to ensure the war feels "unresolved." Time, in this context, is the primary commodity being consumed by both sides.
Tehran’s goal is to ensure that Washington experiences the conflict as a corrosive drain before the U.S. military can produce a "stable and publicly legible result." This is a sophisticated strategy for a weaker power, exploiting the massive delta between a battlefield timeline and a political election or budget cycle. Even if the U.S. implements mitigation strategies—like escorting tankers or tapping into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve—these measures have a lag time. Iran’s opportunity exists in the gap between the initial shock and the eventual adaptation.
The real value of these calculations is that they force the U.S. to confront a specific category of failure: the possibility that the United States, while remaining the stronger party, may find itself under immense pressure to stop before its superiority has been translated into a real result. The risk is not that we cannot win, but that we may be politically disinclined to wait for the win to mature. Susie Wiles, for one, seems to be on the case.
The model might not be the most sophisticated, and it may oversimplify the complexities of military manufacturing, but its central intuition is inescapable. We are entering an era where the industrial simplicity of the adversary’s weapons allows them to compete not on the level of technology, but on the level of persistence. The looming question for U.S. policymakers is not "Can we hit the targets?" but "Can we produce a victory faster than the enemy can produce chaos?" That is a much harder question to answer, and it is the only one that truly matters in the end.
A new report finds that lawmakers added nearly $34 billion to the Pentagon’s procurement and research accounts for FY2026, through 1,090 individual program increases, many of which the Defense Department did not even request funds for.
Although individual program increases are not earmarks, they serve a similar function. Formal earmarks themselves were temporarily banned in 2011 to curb lawmaker-driven runaway spending, then reintroduced in 2021 by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) as “Community Project Funding,” and “Congressionally Directed Spending (CDS)” in the House and Senate respectively — and subject to transparency requirements, where lawmakers must associate themselves with the earmarks they propose.
But those transparency requirements do not apply to individual program increases, because Congress considers them to be competitively awarded — allowing lawmakers to use program increases like backdoor earmarks, directing funds to favored projects unscrutinized.
“In most cases, we have no idea who is proposing which increases or why,” said Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington, DC-based watchdog group that published the report. “Only 32 of the 1,090 increases we catalogued in Procurement, and Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation accounts were supported in floor amendments, which list their sponsors. The remaining 1,058, or 97%, don't list any sponsor.”Unless they propose program increases through amendments taken to the House or Senate floor, lawmakers do not need to identify themselves as sponsors for program increases in the Pentagon budget. But a small minority of lawmakers individually boast about their increases openly, frequently hailing them as projects that benefit their respective districts or states.
Often, these projects also benefit the defense contractors and affiliated lobbyists which supported their re-election campaigns — underscoring the practice’s potential for conflicts of interest.
Sen. Katie Britt (R-Al.), for example, took credit last summer for a proposed $220 million funding increase for 15 Abrams tanks in the Senate version of the FY 2026 Department of Defense Appropriations Act — a move that would support work in her district. (The final version of that bill included a $58.8 million program increase, for four Abrams tanks.) General Dynamics, which makes those tanks, donated $16,000 to Britt’s Senate campaign over the previous two election cycles. Between 2023 and 2024, moreover, General Dynamics also paid $390,000 in lobbying fees to Cornerstone Government Affairs; in turn, individuals affiliated with Cornerstone donated more than $43,000 to Britt’s campaign committee and leadership PAC for the 2024 election cycle.
Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) announced the “successful inclusion…of Nebraska priorities,” in the FY 2026 defense appropriations bill, such as $474.4 million for two EA-37B Compass Call aircraft for the 55th Wing, stationed at Offutt Air Force Base in his home state. Between 2019 and 2024, PACs and individuals linked to defense manufacturers L3Harris, BAE Systems, and General Dynamics, which make parts or systems technologies for the aircraft, together contributed more than $145,000 to Rep. Bacon’s campaign committee and leadership PAC.
Likewise, Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) published a press release that said she "advanced over $200 million for key national and Nebraska-based defense programs,” including a $60 million FY 2026 defense budget increase for MH-139 Grey Wolf helicopters. Before that backdoor earmark, individuals and PACs associated with Boeing — the MH-139’s primary manufacturer — donated over $34,000 in contributions to Fischer’s 2024 Senate campaign. Boeing also paid about $370,000 in lobbying fees to Cornerstone Government Affairs; individuals associated with that firm, including those lobbying for Boeing, gave almost $8,000 to Fischer’s 2024 Senate campaign.
Rep. Susie Lee (D-Nev.), requested $30 million for the Sierra Nevada Corporation’s UH-60M DVEPS Integration for FY2026, countering the Pentagon’s decision to pause funding for the helicopter pilotage system. After conversations with the defense contractor about DVEPS funding, Rep. Lee said she proposed the increase to help fund a system that would improve flight safety and visibility in dangerous conditions.
“Seeking to improve servicemember safety is a perfectly valid motivation for a program increase,” the Taxpayers for Common Sense report stressed, crediting Lee for disclosing her conversations with the Sierra Nevada Corporation about DVEPS funding. “Still, the lack of transparency in the program increase process means that, were it not for Rep. Lee’s voluntary disclosure, no one would know who proposed the increase.”
As the report mentions, the Sierra Nevada Corporation’s PAC contributed $11,500 to Rep. Lee’s previous two re-election campaigns.
Backdoor earmarks also whisk funding away from important DoD programs, or otherwise tack onto an already runaway Pentagon budget — which has now surpassed $1 trillion, and could ratchet up even higher as lawmakers consider billions in supplemental Pentagon funding for the new war on Iran. According to the report, three-quarters of the increases proposed for FY 2026 funded projects the DoD did not request funds for in its budget request.
For FY 2026, Congress appropriated $1.3 billion less than the Pentagon requested for Operations and Maintenance (O&M), which maintains important military equipment and facilities. Because many of the amendments proposed included O&M cuts, the Taxpayers for Common Sense report deems it “safe to assume” the funding cut helped pay for lawmakers’ backdoor earmarks.
But this funding “offset” also targeted important project elements. Flight training funding was slashed by $20 million — even while aviation accidents, which stem in part from declining training resources, are on the rise.
“Some of these [program] increases are offset by cuts within the Pentagon budget, and some of those cuts of course have consequences for national security,” Murphy told RS. “Lawmakers often aren't grappling with the tradeoffs that they're making by proposing these increases.”
“Some of the increases are not offset, but rather result in a higher [Pentagon budget] topline,” he continued. “Congress added $8.4 billion to the president's budget request this year.”
Perhaps buoyed by lawmakers’ anonymity, backdoor earmarks’ price tag is growing: since FY 2024, the average cost per program increase has surged by about 60%, even as the total number of requests grew by less than 2%.
“Backdoor earmarks are fertile soil for growing even more wasteful spending in the Pentagon's already bloated trillion-dollar budget,” Benjamin Freeman, director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute, told RS. “It's politicians putting what's good for them or their district ahead of what's good for the nation. When they're doing that with Pentagon funding, it not only wastes money, it makes us all a little less safe.”
“That's bad enough when one member does it, but with more than 500 members of Congress, it's spawned the broken war machine, where we spend more and more and get less and less security every single year,” Freeman said.
The report recommends Congress require backdoor earmark sponsors to publicly associate themselves with their proposals, offer justifications and long-term cost assessments for them, and indicate which companies might receive contract awards because of them.
“We're calling for transparency. If lawmakers truly believe their proposals are necessary for national security, they should jump at the chance to identify themselves as sponsors and explain their rationale,” Murphy told RS. “Bringing some jobs to their state or district or securing contracts for campaign contributors are not sufficient reasons for piling more tax dollars onto the trillion-dollar Pentagon budget.”
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