The Iran War may eventually end through a ceasefire, an interim agreement, or a broader diplomatic settlement. Regardless of how the fighting stops, one thing has become impossible to ignore. The Middle East’s existing security architecture has failed. For decades, the region operated under a series of overlapping assumptions. Gulf states relied heavily on American military protection. Israel maintained its own formidable deterrent capabilities. Arab governments pursued bilateral relationships with Washington while attempting to manage tensions with Tehran through diplomacy, economic engagement, or strategic hedging. The war exposed the limitations of that model. 

Despite decades of military investment, Gulf states found themselves vulnerable to missile and drone attacks. Critical energy infrastructure, shipping routes, and economic hubs became targets. Even where air and missile defenses performed effectively, the conflict demonstrated that no country can indefinitely defend itself against sustained missile salvos without deeper regional cooperation. 

The lesson from the war is not simply that Iran remains a challenge. The deeper lesson is that the region lacks a credible collective defense structure capable of deterring aggression before it escalates into major conflict. If the objective is to prevent future missile attacks, deter nuclear coercion, reassure regional partners, and avoid a destabilizing nuclear arms race, then the Middle East requires a new collective defense arrangement, not a direct replica of NATO, but instead an alliance inspired by some of its most successful features. 

The Collapse of the Old Model 

For many years, the Gulf security order rested on a simple bargain. The United States would provide military protection and extended deterrence while regional states focused on economic development and internal stability. The Iran War exposed the weaknesses of that approach. Even with a significant American military presence, missile and drone attacks reached the Gulf territory. Air defense systems intercepted many threats, but the sheer volume of attacks highlighted the vulnerability of individual states acting largely on their own. At the same time, regional governments discovered that they often had limited influence over strategic decisions that could profoundly affect their security. They faced the consequences of escalation without necessarily controlling it. The result is a growing recognition that future security arrangements cannot return to the status quo. 

Why Collective Security Is No Longer Enough 

For decades, regional cooperation has largely focused on collective security rather than collective defense. Collective security emphasizes diplomacy, dialogue, intelligence sharing, and crisis management. It helps states coordinate responses to threats but does not necessarily guarantee military support if a member is attacked. The Iran War demonstrated the limitations of that model. Missile attacks, drone strikes, maritime threats, and the possibility of nuclear coercion require more than consultation mechanisms. It requires credible defense that deters. 

Deterrence depends on an adversary believing that aggression against one state will trigger a broader regional response from others that is not worth the aggressive action. This is the essence of collective defense. The challenge facing the Middle East is therefore not simply to cooperate more effectively. It is how to build a framework capable of convincing potential adversaries that aggression against one participant risks confrontation with all. 

What a New Collective Defense Framework Would Look Like 

Rather than each country operating independently, a common air and missile defense network would provide a shared operational framework and faster response times. This is arguably the easiest and most practical first step because many of the required systems already exist. 

A successful post-war defense architecture would likely rest on five pillars. Each pillar supports the others in creating a collection of capabilities that can be brought to bear on an aggressor. 

Pillar 1, Integrated Missile Defense: The Iran war demonstrates that missile defense is no longer a national challenge; it is a regional one. A future framework should connect the radar, sensor, and interceptor networks of, Israel, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan, and the United States. 

Pillar 2, Integrated Intelligence: No missile defense system can function effectively without intelligence. A regional integrated intelligence network would combine missile warning systems, satellite surveillance, maritime monitoring, counter-terrorism intelligence, and track proxy groups. Israel’s intelligence capabilities would be particularly valuable, while Gulf states could contribute geographic reach, local networks, and regional expertise. 

Pillar 3, Conventional Military Integration: Deterrence works best when adversaries believe aggression will trigger an unacceptable coordinated response. Regional militaries should develop joint planning mechanisms, common operating procedures, maritime security coordination, air force interoperability, and shared exercises. The goal would not be to create a supranational military force but rather to ensure that any attack on one member triggers a coordinated defensive response. 

Pillar 4, A Credible Nuclear Umbrella: This concept is likely to be the most controversial component, yet it may also be the most important. Extended deterrence has historically been one of the most successful tools available for limiting nuclear proliferation among allies while maintaining strategic stability. However, the greatest long-term danger following the Iran War may not be Iran itself. It may be the possibility that multiple regional powers conclude they require their own nuclear weapons. If Saudi Arabia were to pursue an independent nuclear arsenal, others could eventually follow. The result could be a highly unstable multipolar nuclear Middle East. 

A more sustainable alternative would be a regional extended-deterrence framework similar in principle to NATO’s nuclear umbrella. Under such an arrangement, American nuclear weapons would remain under exclusive United States control but would be integrated into a broader deterrence architecture protecting key regional partners. Potential participants could include Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, and Jordan. The purpose would not be to spread nuclear weapons across the Middle East. Instead, it would be to prevent their spread. 

Pillar 5, Strategic Consultation: Military capability alone is insufficient to deter. One of NATO’s greatest strengths is not its military hardware but its institutionalized political consultation. This model reveals that regional leaders require standing mechanisms to discuss emerging threats, nuclear developments, crisis management, escalation risks, and collective responses. Security cannot be improvised during a crisis. It must be built before one occurs. 

Israel’s Role in Defense 

A future collective defense framework will be impossible without Israel. 

That reality may remain politically uncomfortable in parts of the region, but the war reinforced Israel’s position as one of the Middle East’s most capable military and intelligence powers. Israel could serve many roles ton include strategic intelligence partner, A missile-defense leader, advanced defense technology provider, and a contributor to regional deterrence. Rather than replacing American leadership, Israel would complement it. 

Not a Middle Eastern NATO 

Critics will inevitably describe this collective defense as a Middle Eastern NATO. That comparison is understandable, but incomplete. NATO emerged as a formal treaty alliance among largely like-minded democratic states facing a common Soviet threat. The Middle East presents a far more complex environment. Any future defense arrangement would likely involve monarchies, democracies, and other political systems with differing strategic priorities. Participation would almost certainly occur at distinct levels, with some states becoming core members while others cooperate selectively. Turkey and Pakistan, for example, could contribute through intelligence cooperation, military exercises, defense-industrial partnerships, and strategic dialogue without necessarily becoming full members.  

Instead of NATO, a collective defense would be more like the Triple Alliance, but more complex. These arrangements would provide a flexible and regionally tailored framework with multiple state interests. Yet it would share one crucial characteristic with NATO. It would be a collective defense. Its central message would be simple. Aggression against one participant risks a coordinated response from all. That principle, backed by integrated conventional and nuclear deterrence, would form the foundation of regional stability. 

Not a Perfect Solution, But the Alternative Is Worse 

Critics will argue that such a framework risks provoking Iran. This may do just this. However, the alternative may be far more dangerous. Without a credible collective defense architecture, the region could otherwise face, persistent missile wars, Iranian coercion, expansion of nuclear weapons programs, strategic fragmentation, and increased great-power competition involving the United States, China, and Russia. 

The purpose of a collective defense arrangement is not to prepare for another war. 

It is to make another war less likely. The Iran War exposed the weaknesses of the Middle East’s existing security order. The challenge now is whether regional leaders can transform that painful lesson into a durable defense framework that deters aggression, reassures partners, prevents proliferation, and creates the foundations for a more stable peace. 

History shows that major wars often reshape regional security systems. The question facing Middle Eastern leaders today is whether they will build a new order after this conflict or wait for the next crisis to force one upon them. 

Natalie Treloar is the Australian Company Director of Alpha-India Consultancy, a Senior Fellow at the Indo-Pacific Studies Center (IPSC), a Senior Analyst at the National Institute for Deterrence Studies (NIDS), and a member of the Open Nuclear Network. Views expressed in this article are the authors’ own. 

Why the Middle East Needs a New Collective Defense Arrangement After the Iran War  was originally published on Global Security Review.

The label of the “first AI war” obscures the reality that Operation EPIC FURY is still a conflict in which human judgment remains central to targeting. Artificial intelligence (AI) has not replaced human operators, but it has redefined how human judgment functions. The contemporary battlefield is now shaped by rate of fire, targeting accuracy, AI-enhanced cognition, and the real transformation that machine learning has introduced into modern warfare. 

One of the most persistent misunderstandings about AI-assisted targeting is the claim that humans have somehow been removed from the loop, decisions are made solely on AI recommendations, or strikes are approved in seconds without meaningful review. The human factor has not disappeared. Humans remain indispensable to targeting. What has evolved is not the elimination of human involvement, but the rapid synthesis of intelligence with target acquisition. That distinction matters because many assume there is little or no review before a strike is done. However, no systems make decisions independently. They supplement human decision-making by sorting and ranking information to generate recommended outcomes that must still meet rigid criteria. Analysts verify intelligence, legal teams conduct reviews, commanders make the final decision, and human beings remain responsible for the outcome. 

Critics often point to ambiguity in strategic-level U.S. directives. The Department of War Directive 3000.09 attempted to regulate certain AI-enabled systems, though the technology at the time was far less sophisticated than it is today. Military doctrine undermines the myth of autonomous targeting as well. The Army’s FM 3-60 frames targeting as an iterative command process and states that commanders remain the final approval authority for targeting activities and acceptable levels of risk. Machines may assist with detection, but they do not inherit command responsibility. The result is that humans remain in the loop because targeting is still a command process, not an autonomous one. Military doctrine frames targeting as a cycle of deciding, detecting, delivering, and assessing, but commanders retain authority over acceptable risks. AI can compress and organize the data, but it cannot make strategic or moral judgments. 

AI models remain central to identity-based targeting and advanced decision support. Open-source reporting indicates that sophisticated models, such as Anthropic’s Claude, integrated into systems such as Palantir designed Maven Smart System, have enabled rapid conversion of vast amounts of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), signals intelligence, and behavioral data into target packages. 

Human productivity has also increased. Tasks that once required weeks and a large staff can now be completed in minutes with fewer personnel. However, speed and efficiency do not mean AI independence. It does not change what Clausewitz described as the “grammar of war.”  

The most consequential shift in conflict today is the compression of time within the targeting cycle and its integration into intelligence. In the past, high-value or high-payoff targets were often missed because manual processes relied heavily on human operators and overwhelming amounts of ISR data. Past conflicts reflected these limitations. During Operation Desert Storm, Iraqi mobile Scud launchers exploited delays by firing and relocating before U.S. forces could strike them. Kinetic precision still frequently exceeds intelligence fidelity. A munition could hit its coordinates perfectly while the underlying intelligence remained flawed. The use of intelligence to target enemy combatants predates modern technology. AI did not invent decapitation strategies; it made them more data-driven and less dependent on purely human intelligence sources. The Information Age once overwhelmed operators with data. AI now provides a way to navigate that environment. This is why cyber intelligence and persistent access are essential to modern targeting. Pattern-of-life targeting relies on multiple streams of surveillance and behavioral data. AI’s greatest strength is its ability to combine these streams on a scale that would overwhelm most military units. Yet the central question remains unresolved by algorithms alone: should the target be neutralized? That decision is legal, moral, political, and strategic. 

A clear example of AI-integrated intelligence limits came on the first day of the 2026 Iran War, when a U.S. missile struck an elementary school in Minab, Hormozgan province, killing civilians, including children, in one of the war’s deadliest civilian incidents. The incident underscored a basic truth: AI-enabled targeting is only as dependable as its data. Here, the system likely relied on outdated intelligence that missed the school’s proximity to an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps compound.  

AI was not the likely source of failure. More likely, flawed intelligence and the fog of war were to blame. Human operators still validated the strike with satellite imagery and intelligence reviews, even though the target was effectively co-located with the school.  

The episode showed both the limits of AI models and the need for human review. Systems like Maven Smart System’s Target Workbench sort, correlate, and reveal intelligence, but humans still approve of final actions. AI can aid target validation, but legal review and command authorization remain essential. 

CONCLUSION 

The effectiveness of any algorithm depends entirely on the intelligence architecture and data supporting it. AI does not create certainty; it produces probability. If the underlying data is manipulated, incomplete, stale, or inaccurate, the output will reflect those flaws. The greater danger is not the removal of the human in the loop, but the compression of human judgment into groupthink. AI-generated recommendations can create an aura of probabilistic certainty that encourages agreement instead of scrutiny. Human operators may still make the final call, but the risk is that they increasingly validate model logic rather than independently challenge it. 

Humans remain in the loop today, but intelligence is now sorted at machine speed while generative systems provide recommendations to reviewers within the targeting cycle. Doctrine should evolve to ensure that human judgment takes precedence over AI-generated recommendations. The defining feature of this so-called first AI war is therefore not the replacement of human agency, but the intensification of human responsibility to judge, restrain, and decide at machine speed. 

Lieutenant Colonel Matthew J. Fecteau is an information operations officer working with artificial intelligence, and a PhD researcher at King’s College London. The views expressed in this report are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Department of War, or the US Government. 

Why the “First AI War” is Still a Human Struggle was originally published on Global Security Review.

Amid U.S. involvement in a war against Iran, President Donald J. Trump has decided to double down on previous public expressions of disregard and distrust toward NATO. President Trump has threatened to withdraw the United States from NATO several times since his reelection. His repeated jibes at the alliance have raised concern among European defense experts and government officials. Former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder recently noted that “It’s hard to see how any European country will now be able and willing to trust the United States to come to its defense.” And French President Macron indicated on April 2nd that, in his view, U.S. President Trump was undermining NATO through his repeated threats to withdraw from the alliance. Raising new fears of American abandonment on the part of European leaders, Trump, in various interviews and social media posts within a few days, said that the United States “will remember” France’s refusal to assist in the war against Iran; that NATO was a “paper tiger”; and that “Putin knows that, too, by the way.”

The most recent Presidential broadsides against NATO reflected Trump’s frustration with European allies who chose not to involve themselves in the war against Iran and/or denied their political and military support for the actions taken under Operation EPIC FURY—an effort that Secretary of War, Hegseth describes as “laser-focused [to] destroy Iranian offensive missiles, destroy Iranian missile production, destroy their navy and other security infrastructure – and they will never have nuclear weapons.” But this hesitancy among European allies should not have surprised U.S. leadership. Neither NATO as an alliance nor individual European governments were consulted before the decision to go to war, nor were they fully informed until the operation was already in progress. Further to the issue of NATO support, Trump’s address to the nation on April 1st simply assumed that the United States would wind up its military operations within several weeks and would turn the problem of unblocking shipping in the Strait of Hormuz over to European countries and others. In addition, Western European governments have strong public support for putting distance between themselves and the war in Iran. Popular majorities in every country oppose the U.S. and Israeli campaign, and European opposition to the war is enhanced by Trump’s personal unpopularity on that side of the Atlantic.

An additional element in the split between Trump and NATO was the Russian interpretation of its implications for the war in Ukraine, and more broadly, for Russia’s national security strategy writ large. Prolonged U.S. commitment to war in the Middle East could deplete the availability of military assets that would otherwise be available to sustain Ukrainian forces in their fight against Russia. The global spike in gas and oil prices was an obvious boon to the Russian economy and, from the standpoint of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, an unwelcome distraction for European leaders from the priority of supporting Ukraine. Russia also took advantage of Epic Fury to reinforce its support for Iran by providing targeting information for Iranian missile attacks against Israel and other regional states. Russia and Iran had already been sharing technology and knowledge with respect to drone warfare even prior to the launch of military operations against Tehran.

To some extent, the volatility in the Trump administration’s approach to NATO reflected the President’s frustration at his inability to broker a peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia. Vladimir Putin viewed Russia’s war as existential and refused to acknowledge that there was any distinction between Ukrainian and Russian civilizations, let alone sovereignties. The Ukrainians responded in kind, resisting Russia’s invasion and occupation of Ukrainian territory with creative use of drone technology and edgy defensive strategizing that put at risk a variety of targets in Russian territory, including bomber bases and critical infrastructure. Worse for Putin, his invasion in 2022, preceded by Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, refocused NATO on its primary mission of deterrence and defense in Europe as opposed to “out of the area” operations such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Even the formerly Cold War neutral states, Sweden and Finland, were added to NATO’s membership because of Russia’s attempted coup de main against Kiev that turned into the longest and most destructive war in Europe since World War II. Caught in a trap of his own making, Putin continued to pour troops and material into the battlefields of Donbas and elsewhere in eastern Ukraine to support a more favorable negotiating position, should productive negotiations ever materialize.

Given Trump’s propensity for rearranging the deck chairs on foreign policy via Truth Social memoranda, it is conceivable that he will tone down the anti–NATO rhetoric once he has decided on a strategy for winding down the U.S. military campaign in Iran. The process of deconflicting the Strait of Hormuz will likely involve participation from European nations and other countries. Almost nobody benefits from continued bottlenecks in global shipping of oil and other vital commodities. Regardless of the outcome in Iran, the United States needs NATO, and NATO needs the United States. Without the U.S. as the indispensable leading partner, NATO Europe has insufficient nuclear or conventional deterrence against further Russian aggression. This assertion implies no disregard for the steps that the U.S. European allies have already taken since 2022 to improve the quality of their armed forces and military–industrial complexes. It is instead a recognition that the unique American nuclear deterrent and conventional war-fighting capabilities, supported by European determination to resist further Russian aggression, create a global as well as a regional deterrent for Russia and its partners (The CRINKs – China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea) that benefits not only NATO but also world peace. On the other hand, a divided and internally fractious NATO invites further aggression within and beyond Europe.

Stephen J. Cimbala is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Penn State Brandywine and the author of numerous works on nuclear deterrence, arms control, and military strategy. He is a senior fellow at NIDS and a recent contributor to the Routledge Handbook of Soviet and Russian Military Studies edited by Dr. Alexander Hill (Routledge: 2025). The views of the author are his own.

Trumping NATO was originally published on Global Security Review.