Editor’s note: In a presentation delivered at the East-West Forum in Istanbul on September 26, retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis argued that Washington has lost its post-1992 unipolar military superiority. Stating that the American administration and its European allies fail to read new military realities, Davis noted that China, Russia, and Iran are fully aware of shifting balances. He stressed that UAV systems such as the Bayraktar TB2 rendered conventional armored warfare doctrines obsolete in the Karabakh War and on the Ukrainian front, while the US has fallen far behind its adversaries in the unmanned systems race. Pointing out that Iran has built a formidable line of defense with underground mountain facilities and ballistic missile capabilities, the senior officer noted the necessity of returning to realistic diplomacy rather than military impositions.

So I have some breaking news to report. It is no longer 1992. Apparently I have to break that news because there are Those in Washington D.C. and in Europe that don’t seem to know that in 1992 the United States had just finished Operation Desert Storm where it completely took down the military of Iraq in just record time with its coalition.

The Soviet Union had just disbanded, the Warsaw Pact had disbanded. The surviving Russian military was. Its navy was rusting in ports and it couldn’t do anything on any conventional level. It had its nuclear weapons, of course, but on a conventional level it was nothing. China was still basically an infantry based army.

And so up until that point, the United States was definitely the supreme military power all on the on the global stage, we could deploy power better than anybody else. We could use it conventionally. And of course, we had our nuclear weapons.

It’s not 1992 anymore. The United States acts like today. It’s still 1992, and we are still this unipower military power dominant. But China’s not confused on this point. Russia’s not confused on this point. Now Iran is not confused on this point. They know that we are no longer the most powerful military force on the planet.

And you’ve had President Trump, you’ve had Secretary of War Pete Hexth, the Speaker of our House, Johnson. They commonly and routinely say we are the most powerful military force on the planet in history. Nobody else is even close. Well, there’s a lot of people that are close, but they’re close. Like on the other side of us right now.

We’re still trying to operate in the 21st century militarily, like it’s still the 20th century. We’re behind the scales here, and that has enormous implications.

You can’t be a unit power force, and you can’t tell people what they’re going to do, and you can’t try to dominate over people unless you have a military to do it. We no longer have that military. And it’s now becoming evident to everybody except us.

And, and that is so dangerous because if our leaders believe what they’re saying, that we’re the most powerful military, we can do whatever we want.

And unfortunately, one of the worst examples of that appearing to be true was Venezuela. So President Trump had what a colleague of mine called catastrophic success. He thinks that he was told by many people there could be a lot of problems with it, and there would have been if Venezuelans had actually fought.

But, but because we had some insider information and some people cooperating on the inside, it was basically a bloodless, near bloodless coup. There was still about 80 people that got killed. So definitely wasn’t bloodless for them, but it was a big success for Trump.

And so he came to the conclusion that all the people who said, all these naysayers said it would be a problem, it would be difficult, it would turn into a new Vietnam, something like that. They’re not. They’re nuts. So now then, he thinks everything will work.

And so he’s operating on this belief that we could go into Iran, that we could maybe go into Cuba, maybe go at least up until recently, maybe Greenland. Basically, he sees there’s. There’s nothing that we can’t do.

But we have now proven graphically that that is not true. And you know, and you and I were talking about this a couple of days ago.

To me, as a, as a former tank officer, I fought in a Desert Storm. Just so you know, I fought in the biggest tank battles Since World War II up until that point, the Battle of 70 Easting, I was the second in command of an armored cavalry squadron for the U.S. 1st Armored Division in the, in the 2000s in Germany. And so I was responsible for training and getting ready for combat. And then was the modern war.

So that was after the 2003 Iraq war that we fought, which was also conventional. It’s also not 2003, by the way, because in those fights we didn’t have to worry about an enemy that had air force, drone force, ballistic missile force. We didn’t have to worry about any of that kind of stuff.

The war that I fought in in 2000, my first one in 1991 in Desert Storm, we couldn’t do that today because of the presence of missiles, as Iran has absolutely graphically shown.

But in 2020, the Armenia, Azerbaijan War and the Baktiyar 2 drone, et cetera, showed that conventional warfare had radically changed forever. I thought there’s going to be a radical transformation in the U.S. army, especially our ground forces. And I thought ground forces all over the world, I thought everybody is so.

But you can never again fight on the ground the way we did even as recently as 2003 in Baghdad. You just can’t do it anymore because now you mass formations on the ground and armor, it doesn’t matter how good your tanks are, they’re going to blow up. And same with armor, so you can’t move in mass anymore. So you’re going to have to come up with some new ways to fight.

Russia, to my surprise, didn’t get that memo because when they had their initial operations into Ukraine 2022, they were still behind the curve. Ukraine was actually ahead of them at that point. They had, in fact, they used the Bakyar 2 drones in the early phases to significant effect.

Russia came around though. They definitely figured it out. And now then they are, in my view, the global leaders. Now Ukraine is very close and they’re really good at this sort of thing. But I think Russia has overtaken them, certainly in mass and scale.

We’re way behind. We’re still in the, in the 20th century. We haven’t even caught up. We’re just to show you we’re thinking now we would like to have at the end of 2027, about 300,000 drones of various types.

Russia’s making that many in what, two weeks? Something like maybe less than that. And Ukraine as well, even with their limitations and far cheaper, way cheaper. That’s just as important. So our mentality is still like a snail’s pace. And so we don’t understand it.

Well, we can’t do this, tell everybody what they’re going to do anymore, but we’re still trying. So President Trump won’t use the leverage he has to end the Russia, Ukraine war.

And he keeps having this fiction that we can keep helping them strike deeper into Russia and to make it more difficult than with some fantasy that that’s going to cause Russia to say, all right, I tell you what. Sure, go ahead. We’ll do whatever Ukraine wants to do. We’ll end it on their terms here. It’s absurd to even say, but that’s what we’re acting like.

Even more absurd in a certain sense is our war against Iran right now. I was screaming this from the rooftops before the war started, that militarily it can’t be won.

If you look at what the Uranian defensive systems are and in their attack systems with their ballistic missiles and their drones and a lot of the technology they got from Russia, which Russia improved upon and then probably returned some of that technological capability.

So Iran has this ability, they Learned from our 2003 war, that don’t put all your factories on the ground that can be easily hit by American missiles, put them under the mountains that we can’t reach. And they did all that.

And so now they have shown that whatever they shoot, they’re going to hit whatever our defensive capabilities are with PAC 3 interceptors or THAAD interceptors. It’s not sufficient. And Iran can hit whatever they shoot.

It is. It is remarkable how much restraint Iran has shown up to this point, because they could already have burned the Middle east down, which would have catastrophically impacted all of our national security and economic security for the world. They haven’t done that yet.

But you see President Trump in his nice speech that he gave the other day at the United Nations General assembly, which you may have seen some of you, that something I published on that right afterwards.

I was humiliated as an American and angry because I think of some of the great Americans like John Kennedy and Eisenhower, who had made some great speeches about, let’s find a way to get together with people. It’s work, peace and all this.

And now that here he’s setting himself up like a godlike thing that I can either grant peace and security for Iran or annihilate their country. And of course, that almost certainly means nuclear weapons, because you can’t do it conventionally.

He didn’t say it out loud, but whatever he was thinking, he’s thinking that we can and we can’t. We can kill a lot of Iranian people, no doubt about that. But you can’t take out their military capacity or prevent them from having a catastrophic impact on everywhere else.

The United States has got. I pray to God can come to sober recognition. It’s not 1992 anymore. And we can’t just tell people what to do.

There’s still an out. There’s an out in the Russia, Ukraine war, there’s an out in the Iranian war if we’ll sober up and take it. And we don’t even have to surrender. We just have to acknowledge reality.

But if we don’t, if we keep going down and thinking that we are this, this unipower, it’s still 1992 and we can, then everybody else has to do what we tell them, then it’s going to be catastrophic for everybody.

And I’m almost surprised more at the Europeans than the Americans. I’m disgusted about what a lot of the American leaders are doing, but I’m puzzled about the Europeans because this stuff is self evident. It’s not hard to see.

They, you see what we’ve tried to do, what we failed to do. And I’m talking like through nearly five years in Russia, Russia, Ukraine, war, and then all these years in Iran and none of it is militarily working. And yet we keep claiming the next time it’s going to work.

And you know, Trump, if they don’t do this, then I will not. You can’t. And it would. You see, Saudi Arabia, they recognized that that wasn’t going to work and they begged Trump not to attack the last time because they knew they were in the crosshairs and they could be devastated. And who knows if they’re going to survive if they lose their oil capabilities.

It is time for us. And that’s why I’m so excited about this opportunity here. That’s why I didn’t hesitate to come to this, because we’ve got to get recognition that we are not this military dominant power that can do anything at once.

And that’s good, because if you think you can, too many people die because you just say, if you don’t do what I tell you, I’m going to kill you. That’s not diplomacy.

A lot of the stuff we’re doing with Iran is not diplomacy. We’re saying, if you’ll agree to our terms, we won’t kill you. That’s not diplomacy.

And now then they have the ability to resist and they’re going to. And Russia is not going to just give in to that and say, okay, yeah, sure, if you say you’re going to hit us, then yeah, we’ll just do whatever you say. They’re never going to do that. It’s an existential threat for them too.

All of these things are self evident. And I just pray to God that we can find some way to come back to sanity before it’s too late.

Because there’s too much chance for a nuclear threshold to be crossed in both the Middle east and in Europe. And that would be catastrophic for all of mankind, no matter where it comes from.