WASHINGTON — The continued diplomatic engagement between Iran, Israel, and the United States, coupled with a pause in large-scale missile exchanges, offers grounds for cautious optimism despite recent cease-fire violations, according to Nathan Diller, a retired US Air Force colonel and current executive at defense technology firm Mach Industries.
“The fact that conversations are continuing is positive,” Diller said in a June 8 interview with RFE/RL, referring to ongoing efforts to prevent a broader regional conflict after more than 100 days of confrontation. “The fact that every day there’s not missiles in the air is a good thing,” he said, adding that efforts to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction were helping make the world safer.
Nathan Diller
Diller served as assistant director of aeronautics in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy during Donald Trump’s first term.
His comments come after Israel and Iran exchanged strikes for the first time since an April cease-fire, raising concerns that the Middle East could slide back toward a wider conflict. While both sides have issued warnings and threats following the latest exchanges, neither appears eager for a full-scale war.
Diller said the durability of any cease-fire would depend largely on both parties demonstrating a genuine commitment to peace and adhering to agreed frameworks.
“Both sides acting in good faith is the most important part,” he said. “There is a true desire to come to a proper peace settlement.”
Strategic Uncertainty Key To Deterrence
While policymakers increasingly question whether repeated cease-fire breaches are becoming more costly than the conflict itself, Diller argued that a degree of uncertainty remains central to military deterrence.
“Strategic uncertainty is a necessary thing,” he said, noting adversaries’ inability to fully predict the consequences of their actions often discourages escalation.
Diller said deterrence depends on maintaining clarity that aggression would be met with a proportional or overwhelming response while preserving enough ambiguity to influence an opponent’s calculations.
Reflecting on lessons from more than three months of conflict, he said the war underscored the growing importance of mass-produced, low-cost weapons systems, particularly drones and munitions, and exposed the limitations of relying on expensive defensive technologies to counter them.
“When we look at low-cost drones and low-cost munitions being countered by very expensive things, this is a lesson we can’t learn fast enough,” he said.
The conflict has reinforced the urgency for allied nations to strengthen military-industrial supply chains and build greater manufacturing resilience, Diller added, drawing parallels with lessons emerging from Russia’s war in Ukraine.
As a former fighter pilot, Diller said traditional military capabilities remain essential, but he argued that newer technologies could have reduced the cost and duration of the Iran-Israel conflict while establishing deterrence more quickly.
“It has taken two decades of ignoring this approach to warfare and this approach to mass,” he said, adding that recent US government initiatives, supported by Congress, were helping strengthen future deterrence.
‘The Factory Is The Weapon’
Diller said one of the most important lessons from the use of unmanned systems in conflicts ranging from Ukraine to the Middle East is that manufacturing capacity itself has become a strategic asset.
“What surprises me is that we have yet to realize the degree to which the factory is the weapon,” he said.
According to Diller, a country’s ability to rapidly produce and adapt military hardware could become a decisive factor in future conflicts and deterrence strategies.
“The speed of a country to create that agile factory is going to be directly proportional to our ability to deter in the future,” he said.
He argued that defense manufacturing must increasingly operate at the pace of software development, enabling rapid adaptation and production of new systems.
“The rapid development of those agile factories, where hardware can move at the pace of software, is cornerstone to peace and prosperity into the future,” Diller concluded.