The fiscal year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) reflects Washington’s recognition that the Middle East remains a strategic concern. Iran’s missile and drone attacks, Houthi disruption of global shipping, and the vulnerability of forward U.S. bases have forced realism into the conversation. The NDAA contains several constructive provisions on integrated air and missile defense, force protection, and defense-industrial cooperation with Israel. These are welcome. However, taken together, the bill still reveals a familiar weakness: It acknowledges problems without compelling the operational outcomes required to solve them.
[The 2026 NDAA] acknowledges problems without compelling the operational outcomes required to solve them.
The NDAA’s approach to the Red Sea is emblematic. The legislation references lessons learned from Houthi attacks on international shipping and emphasizes improved air and missile defense integration. That is necessary but insufficient. The Red Sea is not merely a defensive problem. It is an operational theater that demands a standing campaign. What is missing is a mandated, resourced approach that integrates maritime Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance, convoy and escort doctrine, interdiction authorities, partner naval tasking, and strike options against the Houthi kill chain. Without this comprehensive structure in place, the United States risks repeating crisis response rather than imposing durable control over one of the world’s most critical maritime chokepoints.
Closely related is the NDAA’s failure to treat smuggling and logistics networks as a strategic center of gravity. The Houthis do not sustain their campaign through ideology alone. They rely on permissive ports, free zones, brokers, dhows, and overland routes stretching from Iran through the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. The bill contains language on defense, cooperation, and monitoring but it does not force an interagency effort to dismantle these networks. As long as replenishment flows remain intact, the United States and its partners will remain stuck in a reactive loop, shooting down threats in the battlespace instead of interdicting them at the source.
Iran itself is another area where the NDAA stops short of strategic clarity. The bill emphasizes force protection, missile defense, and awareness of Iran’s evolving capabilities but it still treats Iran as a problem to manage rather than an adversary the U.S. military must roll back. Reporting and posture adjustments are not a strategy. What strategy requires is a framework that targets Iran’s proxies, such as its financing, training pipelines, maritime enablers, and sanctuaries, as an integrated whole that the United States must degrade and destroy over time.
The NDAA also gestures toward coalition-building, particularly through integrated air and missile defense and expanded security cooperation. Yet the region’s future stability will not be secured through bilateral partnerships alone; rather, it will require an institutionalized regional security architecture, including shared operating pictures, common standards, combined planning, and interoperable command-and-control. The building blocks are there, but the legislation does not compel their integration into a durable framework. In a region where quiet cooperation between Arab states and Israel already occurs, the failure to formalize cooperation represents a missed opportunity.
Until posture reform is treated as non-negotiable, U.S. forces will continue to operate under avoidable risk.
Force posture is another area where acknowledgment falls short of action. The NDAA’s attention to force protection at Qatar’s Al Udeid Air Base, where U.S. Central Command maintains its forward headquarters, is important and reflects a reality about base vulnerability in a missile- and drone-saturated environment. But recognizing the problem is not the same as fixing it. The bill does not mandate theater-wide adoption of distributed basing, hardening, deception, and rapid dispersal as foundational requirements. Concentrated basing remains a strategic liability, and until posture reform is treated as non-negotiable, U.S. forces will continue to operate under avoidable risk.
On the industrial side, the NDAA advances U.S.-Israel defense-industrial integration, including working groups and feasibility studies. This is positive. But the region’s most urgent constraint is not innovation but scale. Interceptors, counter-unmanned aircraft systems, maritime Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance platforms, and munitions are being consumed faster than they can be produced. A forward-looking strategy would expand production and sustainment pathways to include capable regional partners willing to align with U.S. objectives.
The fiscal year 2026 NDAA is not a failure. It reflects progress, realism, and a growing appreciation for the complexity of the current Middle East security environment. However, it still encodes a strategy that studies, reports, and encourages, rather than one that drives outcomes. The adversaries confronting the United States in the region are not waiting for additional briefings; they are adapting, replenishing, and exploiting seams.
If the goal is a new Middle East, one anchored to U.S. interests, resilient against Iranian proxy warfare, and capable of defending global commerce, then future legislation must go further. Anything less risks repeating a familiar pattern: recognizing the problem but leaving initiative to the enemy.
