Emerging technologies are giving the United States unprecedented levels of tactical excellence and enabling strategic stupidity. The combination should terrify European leaders.

In recent months, two operations showcased how modern technologies, especially AI-enabled sensing and targeting, now allow the US military to conduct missions that would once have been dismissed as impossibly dangerous.

The Caracas raid of 3 January 2026, which led to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and the recent decimation of Iran’s leadership and military assets through an air and missile campaign, both demonstrate that the US can execute – if not flawlessly, then successfully – daring military operations that not long ago would have been considered too complex and risky to contemplate. Even five years ago, penetrating defended airspace or assassinating the senior leadership of a hostile regime carried unacceptable dangers. Today, such operations are merely challenging.

The military campaign in Iran, now paused by a fragile ceasefire, has left a trail of thousands dead. The casualties on the American side are much lower compared to the first month of its operations in Iraq in 2003, and this was at least partially made possible by leveraging emerging technologies. As these technologies drive down US casualties, they also lower the threshold for action.

Consider the Caracas raid. As General Brenda Cartier and Professor Anne Harrington recently wrote in Small Wars Journal, an operation of this complexity once required much more extensive preparation and significant on‑the‑ground presence to manage deconfliction and avoid friendly fire. Capturing a foreign head of state would have demanded a large footprint and carried enormous tactical risks. Today, real‑time inputs from a dense network of sensors allow US forces to coordinate and adjust instantly, vastly reducing the dangers that previously made such missions nearly impossible. The result is straightforward: the US can now order its armed forces to execute raids like Caracas with far greater ease because emerging technologies have driven the tactical risks down to a politically acceptable level.

The war in Iran illustrates this even more starkly. When the US sought to remove Saddam Hussein in 2003, it needed an international coalition and a full‑scale ground invasion to target the Iraqi leadership. Today, we cannot be sure what the goal of the American war was (counterproliferation, regime change, or domestic political goals), but stealth platforms, advanced targeting systems, and precision‑guided missiles allowed Washington to start it. In four weeks, the US was able to eliminate Iran’s senior leadership with minimal exposure of American personnel. Palantir’s CTO Shyam Sankar recently described the war in Iran as the first major AI-driven conflict in history, and experts underscore that AI technology is being incorporated across the whole kill chain. Anthropic’s Claude platform, the same AI system that can organize your mailbox flawlessly, is now helping conducting lethal operations.

But this tactical brilliance enables a dangerous political pathology: it enables American leaders to approve bold military operations with almost no (or wishful) planning for the strategic consequences, regardless of whether the tactical mission succeeds or not. The US can leap into operations without seriously considering “what then.”

The Iraq War’s “day after” planning was infamously inadequate, but at least it existed. In Venezuela, the outcome happened to be relatively benign: a transition to another regime insider. In Iran, the consequences are far more severe. Now that the ink on the ceasefire agreement is not even dry, it appears that the Iranian regime is shaken but secure, in control of the Strait of Hormuz, with opposition fatally wounded and its legitimacy bolstered. As German historian Helene von Bismarck put it on social media, “Civilians dead, service people hurt, regime safe, Straits more difficult and expensive to navigate than before. US reputation down the drain.”  Yet, we are all paying a steep price for it in the form of higher energy and food prices.

Nothing about Iran’s attempt to close the Strait of Hormuz is surprising. Indeed, a prominent paper warned about the scenario we are seeing today almost two decades ago. Yet the US plunged into a conflict it soon became desperate to exit, unprepared for the strategic fallout of a tactically successful campaign. That is what “strategic stupidity” looks like.

The results should terrify European leaders for three reasons. First, US quagmires have a way of becoming alliance quagmires. Many European states felt pressured to support the Iraq War. Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth repeatedly tried to cajole Europeans into patrolling the Strait of Hormuz. President Trump went as far as to say that he would consider withdrawing from NATO if Europe does not help the war effort. Even without any direct involvement, Europe provides bases and airspace for US operations. It would not be entirely shocking had Iran decided to retaliate against Europe, although its capabilities are (thankfully for Europe) limited.

Second, Washington’s AI-enabled technological prowess should terrify European leaders because it exposes a gap in American and European warfighting. Already a half-decade ago, Erik Lin-Greenberg warned that the AI gap emerging within NATO threatens its very existence. European governments remain cautious about military AI, and most European militaries are only beginning to experiment with it, with the notable exception of Ukraine, which is pioneering AI in warfare out of necessity.

As my own research indicates, European governments are curious about AI applications but are only beginning to seriously implement them in military operations. That the US, a key ally, is so far ahead is itself a vulnerability for future European-American cooperation within the North Atlantic alliance, as it opens gaps in both capability and operations. If US forces are operating in AI-accelerated decision cycles while European militaries remain dependent on human-paced processes, then joint operations will not simply be difficult – they may become impossible.

Third, Washington’s recklessness is especially worrying because Europe remains deeply dependent on American technology, equipment, and expertise. Even with today’s surge in defence spending, the US still provides key intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities, as well as critical components for many current and future European systems – assets that would be costly and difficult for Europeans to replace, and for which there is limited political appetite to do so. Europe needs to invest more in defence and build more autonomous capabilities, but doing so entirely alone would be extremely challenging, if not impossible. The fact that this indispensable ally is increasingly prone to strategic miscalculation should give leaders pause.

Many observers will be tempted to chalk up the two interventions to President Trump and his unique leadership style. But there is a deeper reality behind the unconventional leadership of the man in the White House. What Europe is seeing in Caracas and Tehran are not anomalies. They are previews. AI‑enabled war will not be fought by cyborgs, but by militaries supercharged by computation. If European governments fail to draw the right lessons, they risk being blindsided by the consequences of the AI revolution. At best, that failure will make transatlantic cooperation in Europe’s defence far more difficult. At worst, it will leave Europeans woefully unprepared to defend the continent with limited – or even no – American cover.

To avoid such scenarios, European states must move urgently to close the capability gap. That means identifying and investing in specific shortfalls in platforms, data, and planning. Not because Washington asks for it, but because Europe needs it for its own security. The goal is simple: to be able to defend Europe alongside the US if we can, but to fight alone if we must. Escaping technological irrelevance is the only way for Europe to retain real strategic agency. The alternative is to rely on an increasingly risk‑tolerant America that may be willing to start wars it has not thought through. And Europeans should ask themselves: is that really the world we want to live in?

This work was supported by the REMIT research project, funded from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 101094228.

The European Leadership Network itself as an institution holds no formal policy positions. The opinions articulated above represent the views of the authors rather than the European Leadership Network or its members. The ELN aims to encourage debates that will help develop Europe’s capacity to address the pressing foreign, defence, and security policy challenges of our time, to further its charitable purposes. 

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