(responsiblestatecraft.org)
On the naval front, Ukraine sunk the Moskva with a few truck-mounted missiles. That finally made it undeniable that sending naval vessels anywhere near a hostile shore is a thing of the past. Countermeasures can take out some attacking missiles, but not all of them.
This is a real problem for the U.S. Navy, because they've invested heavily in craft intended to operate near hostile shores. Littoral combat ships and amphibious assault ships are intended to operate offshore of trouble spots. This worked a lot better when the trouble spots couldn't do much to them.
The size of Iran means that knocking out drone and missile production for long won't work. Russia has been trying to do that to Ukraine for years now. Ukraine produced 4 million drones last year, and production continues to increase. Ukraine even exports drones now. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the UAE have been making deals with Ukraine for air defense systems. Iran exports drones to Russia.
Mass-produced drones today are a simple airframe, a lawnmower engine, and the smarts of a cell phone. Ukraine has people making them in basements. Presumably, so does Iran.
The US can't just pull out, either. The enemy gets a vote on when it's over. Israel, Iran, and Yemen now all have to agree. Probably the best deal the US can get at this point is a cease fire with Iran collecting tolls on the Strait of Hormuz.
Worst outcome is the US attacks Cuba, Cuba allies with Iran, it turns out that Cuba has been stocking up on Iranian drones, and Cuba becomes a forward base for drone and missile attacks on the southern US.
According to [0], in 2025 Iran had 86M people. Ukraine had 29M (~33%), Germany (highest in Europe) had 83M (~96%, uh?), Iraq had 46M (~53%), and Russia had 146M (~168% / ~59% reversed).
Wildly, wildly wrong about Germany but not too far off the rest[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
[1] Although if you include Turkey in "Europe", "more than any country in Europe" droops a little because Turkey's 86092168 (99.456%) is basically identical to Iran's 86563000 when it comes to projection and estimation errors.
If this happens and Cuba decides to launch drones/missiles against the US homeland, it's not an exaggeration to say that Cuba is flattened and invaded that same afternoon. After 9/11, there's no world in which any attack on the US homeland, however small or local, is met with anything other than overwhelming retribution.
Having difficulty projecting force from the air with fighter bombers launched from air craft carriers and refueling caravans from the Indian Ocean or Mediterranean Sea against a determined enemy that has been preparing for this eventuality since 1979 is one thing. Being able to fly non-stop B-52 and B-2 sorties from home air bases with single-digit-hour flight times is a different thing entirely.
Yes remember when they invaded Saudi Arabia? That taught everyone an important lesson on the consequences of terrorism on American soil.
It seems to have made things better for the Taliban.
Cuba is the easiest target the US could have. It's very close to the US and very far from any potential ally. The US has never shied away from committing acts of extreme cruelty, well into terrorist or war crime territory. From dropping nuclear bombs on civilians, phosphorus bombs, drone bombing innocent people, schools, hospitals, institutionalized torture, etc. even with far weaker reasons.
There is no scenario where a direct attack on the US wouldn't lead to an extremely violent response in complete disregard of Cuban lives. And get away with it.
The USA has been attacked before but it has never been invaded and forced to fight a war on its own soil against foreign enemies. It's possible that they unconsciously believe war is something they bring to others, never something others bring to them. It's impossible to predict how traumatizing it would be for them if that belief is proven wrong. They could absolutely reach for nuclear weapons if that threshold is reached.
It would depend on their patience.
The insurgency in Iraq was eventually suppressed (American COIN manuals were updated). The insurgency (?) in Afghanistan outlasted the patience of the invaders.
So how long do the 'gun nutters' want to keep at it compared to the opposing force?
Further, it's worth asking how effective, on average, is violent disobedience. Generally speaking a movement has about double the odds of success by not using violence:
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44096650-civil-resistanc...
This is the typical comment you expect from reddit.
Then there's nuclear defenses - if a country would have an effective anti-ICBM system (like Star Wars or whatever), it would make a nuclear counterstrike ineffective and end Mutually Assured Destruction. On paper anyway, in practice there are no perfect anti-ICBM systems, and they're effectively cluster bombs so in theory after the initial launch they can break up into half a dozen "dumb" nukes. Good luck hitting those.
There are three points of having nukes:
1. Deter other countries with nukes from using them against you, or your military ally.
2. Prevent total annihilation in the war. You can lose the war, but not too much.
3. Burn the world to ashes. Very few countries can do it. It effectively forces the whole world to make sure that this scenario does not happen. So you can be sure that scenario where Ukraine conquers Russia and completely destroys it - will be prevented by the very Ukraine supporters. They don't want to live in the nuclear post-apocalypse, because there are scenarios where Russia fires every single nuclear missile on every major city on the Earth. As Putin framed it: We will go to heaven as martyrs, and they will simply drop dead.
America lost several wars, recently they lost Afghanistan war and right now they're losing Iran war. They won't invoke nukes to overturn the table, they'll accept the lose.
No one said the US is acting smartly, either, but it should not be surprising that the US would react harshly to a neighbor sending rockets.
Who can recover from this, especially a small nation? You might as well declare everything to be radioactive.
So they'd react harshly even when they started it.
Boy they've really normalised this, haven't they?
No, it's not okay to destroy civilian infrastructure and make people homeless just because you dropped a pamphlet 30 minutes before you did do
If the US were to decisively flatten Cuba in the course of a day, obviously they would need to use nuclear strikes. It's idiotic to suggest otherwise and your comment is in bad faith.
Don’t forget this is the internet where 12 year old girls turn out to be 40 yo men.
Yes that would be a typical US solution. Let's liberate the Cuban people! By flattening them.
> Worst outcome is the US attacks Cuba ..
As you probably know POTUS was announcing already that Cuba would be next.
The US isn't magically off limits.
It lacks the ideology to fight such a war, since you have to be ready to die. That's why Yemen and Vietnam won, while Venezuela folded. This is also why US "culture" is so much more powerful as a weapon than the aircraft carriers.
The thing with war is that once you have it for a certain amount of time, you create a generation of people whose kids died, wife died, neighbors and family died, you have nothing to loose anymore.
There is a critical mass of casualties upon which you effectively create a population whose sole purpose, for generations, will be to resist and harm you, and that is not dependent on culture or whatever "tourism orientation" a country is labeled.
You... didn't learn history from before 1945 did you?
I sort of think it maybe is an exaggeration, you're evidently of the opinion that the U.S happens to have enough battle ready troops with the requisite hardware positioned within a few hours of Cuba so that they can invade and flatten in the time it takes to fly from Miami to Havana?
I don't know, but a Destroyer would take about 10 hours to get from Florida to Cuba.
It seems your definition of invade and flatten is just dropping bombs, but that definitely does not handle the invade part of things, and it remains to be seen as to whether, with drones, being able to fly non-stop is the great technological advantage it once was.
Some preliminary evidence from around the world suggests in a drone led conflict it confers the ability to have expensive hardware destroyed and pilots killed non-stop.
Cuba simply isn’t Iran. They’re a blockaded island with not much military experience. Iran is a huge mountainous country preparing for war for the last 40 years with first hand experience of getting blown up from above and from the inside by USA allies and surviving just fine.
I don’t know, maybe it’s time for USA to just stop getting involved in wars.
Politics will exist for as long as there are people.
Any country not able to or interested in waging occasional war will be destroyed by countries that can and do.
Simple as that.
But please I'm interested in hearing any utopia arguments that claim we can/should deprecate war. And remember - you have to convince your country along with every other country.
In this case it's especially depressing that the war's rationale exists only because Trump wanted to tank the deal made by Obama. Which was not a perfect deal but better than the status quo back then, and much better than any likely outcome of this war.
This is not to be underestimated. It is very rare to be able to project military power far from one's capital. That the US is able to do it at all is remarkable. We should not expect it to be easy.
E: 50% of PRODUCTION, not plants, as in a few plants responsible for 50% of US refinery / LNG production.
This is making a pretty big assumption that the long-term US energy mix is going to stay the way it is.
The primary historical impediment to electric vehicles was high up-front cost, in turn driven by high battery costs. However:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-battery-cell-pric...
We're soon to have electric cars (and trucks) that cost less ICE ones, on top of the lower operating costs. Which in turn cost even less when more solar and wind are added to the grid because the "charge more when power is cheap and less when it's expensive" thing lowers their operating cost even further and reduces the amount of natural gas you need in the grid because periods of lower renewable generation can be offset by deferred charging instead of natural gas peaker plants.
Even without any purposeful efforts to do anything about climate change, the economics point to fossil fuels declining over time as a proportion of energy. Meanwhile the US administration flips parties every four to eight years and the next time they're Democrats they'll be trying to hasten that result rather than impede it. Which makes a long-term strategy of building the capacity to target petroleum infrastructure something that could plausibly be increasingly irrelevant by the time it would take to implement it.
But at same time, extend IRBM range by 1000km, and replace refineries with hyperscalers, or whatever targets that worth deterrent value (energy at top of list). Refineries just most immediately very high value targets that happens to be closest to missile range.
But the assumption is less about US adaptability/smartness, as the way commodity conventional strikes is trending, CONUS _ will _ be vulnerable eventually. Fortress America is as much function of geography as technology. Just like how 20 years ago Iran couldn't hit Israel or many GCC companies even if it wanted to... now it can. The natural outcome of longer and longer range strikes is at some point US becomes in range of Monroe neighbours who doesnt want to be Monroed.
It's the stated goal of one of the parties to keep or increase fossil fuel usage, isn't it?
> Meanwhile the US administration flips parties every four to eight years
Magic 8 Ball says "yeah, in the past, 2028 isn't looking good though"
> next time they're Democrats they'll be trying to hasten that result
Which will be blocked and/or immediately overturned by the current/next Republic Congress/Senate/SCOTUS/President.
Of course US can try to coerce INF for conventional in Americas, but commoditized conventional precision strike are conventional... and commoditized, it's the kind of product where specialized dual use components may need to be sourced... among millions of TEU traffic, but otherwise local industries can build, like Iran.
There's also no global pariah status for proliferating conventional missiles for self defense and hence accessible to many players, coercion / enforcement would require trying to mow grass to keep capabilities out of 600m people...in perpetuity... tall task even for even US. Especially considering form factor of missiles... i.e. sheltered / hidden, they are not major battlefield assets like ships and planes that needs to be out to have wheels turned.
Ultimately it's not about winning vs US, it's about deterring US from historic backyard shenanigans by making sure some future time when US is tempted, and US always tempted, it would risk half of CONUS running out of energy in 2 weeks.
Like the Iran logic is extremely clear now, no amount of defense survives offensive overmatch, the only thing left is to pursue some counter offensive ability that can have disproportionate deterrence value. The thing about US being richest country is US has a lot of valuable things.
IE, they'd get to retain higher profits.
What I think would really happen, is the rest of the world would suffer and run out of energy. Not the US.
Gulf coast PADD3 refineries = disproportionate production of diesel, aviation, bunker fuel for CONUS use. Something like 70% of all refined products used in US comes from PADD3, other refineries cannot replace PADD3 complexity/production levels (think specialty fuels for military aviation, missiles etc). US economic nervous system is EXTRA exposed to gulf coast refinery disruptions. PADD3 refineries (or hubs / pipelines serving east/west coast which more singular point failure) itself enough to cripple US with shortages even if all exports stopped. Gulf gas terminal is for export i.e. doesn't materially impact CONUS, it's deterrence conventional counter-value target. There's also offshore terminals. The broader point being gulf coast has host of targets along escalation/deterrence ladder.
Other refineries can indeed take up the slack. Especially if the US stops exporting. Trains can deliver fuel, trucks. The US military would not be crippled, most certainly, and the domestic US would see primary production kept in-nation, not exported.
I'm not sure why you think that only Gulf refineries can make jet fuel.
NOTE: I'm not saying it wouldn't be a key attack vector, or non-disruptive. I'm just saying the US would do what it always has done, as any nation would do, it would ensure survival first, and so the rest of the world would suffer far more.
The US is essentially a military/petro-oligarchy wrapped inside a republic pretending to be a democracy.
If the global oil economy is badly damaged, the US will be badly damaged with it.
This isn't about who can blow the most shit up. It's about global standing in the economic pecking order, which is defined in part by threat credibility, but also by control over key resources.
If some of those resources stop being key, that's a serious problem for any hegemon.
We're seeing a swing towards global decarbonisation, and this war is an ironically unintentional turning point in that process. The US has had decades of notice that this is inevitable, but has failed to understand this.
The US was ensuring survival just fine when it was big on soft power. If you let go of soft power your remaining choices are diplomacy (which takes skill) and hard power (which takes a different kind of skill). If you go down the hard power road (which the US seems to be doing) you will end up with a very long list of eventually very capable enemies. It's a madman's trajectory and historically speaking it has never worked. I suspect it also will not work for the US.
Some specific products like SPECIFIC mixes of aviation fuel, only some PADD3 refineries are setup to produce or produce significant % i.e. IIRC something like 90%+ of military JP5/JP10 come from PADD3. That's why I said "specialty" aviation fuel, not just general aviation fuel. Or taking out out Colonial pipeline which ~2.5m barrels - US doesn't have 10,000k extra tankers or 5000 extra rail carts in reserve for that contingency. Turning off export has nothing to do with this, there isn't enough to keep in-nation due to refinery mismatch, or not enough hardware to move it in event of pipeline disruption.
Of course predicated on timeline/execution, i.e. US can potentially fix refinery mismatch and harden/redundant over next 10 years. We don't know if/when Monroe countries will start adopting their own rocket force. Just pointing out after Iran has demonstrated defense is useless for midtier powers and mediocre offense can penetrate the most advanced defense, the only rational strategic plan is go hard on offense for conventional counter-value deterrence. The logic like Iran, it matters less RoW suffers more, only specifically that US suffers as well, the harder the more deterrent value. And due to sheer economic disparity, could be trillions for US vs billions for others, even if trillions for US is relatively less.
For the 20 years war you are probably talking about: I wouldn't call significant civil unrest in opposition of the war "getting bored"
Cuba is not stupid. They will attack the infamous Conquistador Torture Base on their soil and US ships that carry out high piracy of their trade vessels.
But it is, the US is no position to flatten anything.
Afghanistan? Lost Vietnam? Lost Ukraine? Lost Iran? will be lost
And these are heavily embargoed 3rd world countries.
In the first days of the Israeli-US war in Iran (a country under decades of embargo by the way) the US, Israel and vassals lost 60+ planes (plus who knows what else they are not reporting.
Trump is not coming out of this, if he makes the grave mistake of sending troops to their demise this administration is done.
The US is certainly in a position to flatten (with conventional force) anything in the Carribean, whatever failures it had in long counterinsurgencies where the logistics tail wrapped nearly halfway around the world. (And however badly it would probably fail in occupation in many of the places it could easily flatten close by, for that matter; flattening is much easier than occupying.)
> Afghanistan? Lost Vietnam? Lost Ukraine? Lost Iran?
Lost Ukraine? Ukraine hasn't lost and the US was never a direct belligerent in that conflict.
Taliban is back in power, having stronger grap on power then before. Meanwhile, everybody knows what happens to those who cooperate with USA - they get abandoned and betrayed.
The bay of communism needs to be regularly watered with the blood of pigs or something.
I agree with you in principle, but I worry that the United States hasn't been stockpiling enough ordinance to keep that up for very long at all. We don't keep many munitions factories on a hot standby either.
Unless it's by a right-wing white male, obvs., in which case they get promoted / lauded / re-elected / etc.
How will the Americans do that? Nuclear bombs? Because it doesn't seem to me that they have the conventional arsenal to flatten a country like Cuba.
With what? The UK has already said we're not saving you this time. You're on your own now.
Iran knows that the US population really really doesn’t want a ground invasion. Right now, we have lost a handful of lives from missiles hitting US bases, but it’s not the same as a ground war.
Cuba, however, would very much get a ground invasion if they start striking the US with missiles. It’s not even a question. And I also assume their leaders are not religious fanatics with any interest in martyrdom.
Population size is relevant but not the most important factor. Russia has 146,000,000, more than 4x than Ukraine. It doesn't guarantee that Russia will win the war.
> On the naval front, Ukraine sunk the Moskva with a few truck-mounted missiles.
Ukraine also had Bayraktar TB2 overhead which distracted Moskva's crew and provided targeting information. Russia probably didn't sent a fighter to down it because skies around Ukraine are contested. Skies not only around but over Iran are not reallty contested. Having said that Iran could sink an american ship if the navy will become complaicent and will assume there are no threats.
> The size of Iran means that knocking out drone and missile production for long won't work. Russia has been trying to do that to Ukraine for years now.
Russia cannot fly planes over Ukranian territory. The US can fly not only F-35 but even B-52. That's a big difference. The only thing which could prevent the US from knowking out missile and drone production is insufficient intellegence.
There is, at this point in time, literally 0 evidence B-52s are flying over Iran with JDAMs. Every single photo we saw of B-52s literally shows them with AGM-158, which means they are launching outside Iran aerospace.
The biggest evidence for B-52s not flying over Iran is that there have still not been any losses. Go look at attrition rates in Linebacker 2 for comparison.
By your logic an OSINT account can show a picture of a SU-34 in the air with 4 UMPK bombs, write "On its way to Odessa" and people will think Russia has air supremacy over Odessa.
The US on other hand is flying over the Iran for a month so the claim that they started to use B-52 in addition to smaller jets is not extraordinary. It would be strange to deploy B-52 with GBU only to strike something on/near the Iranian border (where there are not many targets which would justify GBU usage) so it's a logical conclusion from the posted photo that B-52 can fly over the Iran (at altitude beyond MANPADS reach).
> USAF B-52H refueling from a KC-135 tanker on its way to strike Iran.
with emphasis on "on its way", so not "over" Iran. So not sure your link proves your original point (which, if I understood right, was that these Americans are flying these bombers over Iran itself).
It's also telling that the Americans haven't managed to gain their much desired air supremacy, lots of Dohuet fanboys in the US Military, hopefully this war will bring their Air Power ambitions a notch or two down (even though I have my doubts).
> Having said that Iran could sink an american ship if the navy will become complaicent and will assume there are no threats.
Also, this is an election year in the US, and the war is already hugely unpopular, so despite all of Hegseth's posturing, they're probably playing it extra extra safe. That's also the reason why Trump is so angry that other countries aren't willing to take the risk in their place...
I think OP meant land mass not people with the country comparison.
Well, looking at the news, it turns out they can't because every time they've put something up it's ended in a horrific crash.
The US is militarily weak, and is utterly reliant on its NATO allies, who don't want to get involved in the current round of war crimes.
You know what engenders nationalism? Attack on your way of life and the murder of someone you know by said attack.
If the enemy does the same kind of mindless killing to the civilians, then I would have different ideas.
You mean like bombing a school and killing about 150 schoolgirls?
The USA had a lot of local support and goodwill in Afghanistan, and turned it into support for the Taliban, because they kept killing civilians in their attempts to beat the Taliban with bombs, because they wanted to limit the unpopular ground troop deloyments. The chance that the same will happen in Iran is precisely 100%
You can't say for sure that you wouldn't wilfully join up if you were in that kind of information environment.
After a bombing campaign, most of the people tend to hate whoever bombed them.
On the other hand, until a couple of years ago, Iranians and Israeli never directly exchanged even a bullet between them and yet Iran was dedicated to the destruction of Israel, so YMMV.
Something the current US regime might have forgotten.
Nah, it wouldn't have worked with Khamenei after a few decades of destroy America and Israel rhetoric. It was a good decision to eliminate him and most of Iran's hardliner senior leadership. Now maybe they can make a "deal" with whoever they're replaced with, but I doubt it. The trouble was going all in without a clear plan. Or maybe they have one but they keep it to themselves?
Second, Khamenei in fact presided over Iran who exercised restrain in their responses to attacks and was willing to enter international agreements. And followed them to reasonable level. They did cause destabilization by proxis, they were still regime they were. But like, what Iran regime learned was that restraint makes them look weak and makes them be bombed every couple of months. And that negotiation and international agreements mean nothing.
Third, frankly, as evil regime was, American history and role in Iran was destructive one. You cant take down elected president, put cruel monarchy in power and then play victim when revolution happens. And yes, who ends up winning bloody revolution does not tend to be nice pro-democratic side either. It tends to be the side willing to kill and risk more.
The zionists do not want an economically prosperous Iran. They actually want Iran to descend into civil war and starvation. Also the reason why Europeans hate this war- we all know were the refugees will end up.
Israel has been killing iranians for quite some time. Here are some notable examples from the last twenty years or so:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassinations_of_Iranian_nucl...
The rebuild phase where allies put a lot of effort and money into rebuilding Germany did a lot to ensure good result there. And you still see fascists being popular in Germany, especially in former easter block. It is just that everyone else is still traumatized by the past, school system make sure everyone knows past and nazi propagation is literally illegal.
It doesn't mean that people like America- or Israel.
Every country has it's own elite who have their agenda independent from whatever the White House wants.
Cuba allying with Iran is pure fantasy though. There's no logistical connection between the two nations. It would be as irrelevant as Greenland allying with Antarctica.
The ships the LCS are intended to replace are significantly more capable at absorbing damage from this type of threat. If you are willing to go up to destroyer class, you are probably approaching immunity for this scenario.
> Former CIA intelligence officer Robert Finke said the blast appeared to be caused by C4 explosives molded into a shaped charge against the hull of the boat.[6] More than 1,000 pounds (450 kg) of explosive were used.[7] Much of the blast entered a mechanical space below the ship's galley, violently pushing up the deck, thereby killing crew members who were lining up for lunch.[8] The crew fought flooding in the engineering spaces and had the damage under control after three days. Divers inspected the hull and determined that the keel had not been damaged.
Germany has 83.000.000 people
agree with analysis of iran industry etc, cant see cuba happening. usmil could roll over cuba in a few months and the local population probably wouldnt be hostile
Cuba is in no shape to do anything. Even if they had drones, the leadership there is very unlikely to use them since doing so would result with almost 100% probability in the US killing or capturing them.
It's not really a lawnmower engine, but the L550E clones used in the Shahed drone are roughly the same scale as a big lawnmower engine (higher power/weight, but similar horsepower), and they've successfully taken out $100 million radar installations.
Is that really true? Just claim that Iran's Nuclear ambitions have been destroyed, and anyone who needs oil can "Buy it from the US or get it themselves from Hormuz" - mission accomplished!
With the US withdrawing (or atleast not attacking), Iran can stop the drone attacks and open Hormuz - collecting fees from passing ships, call it reparations and a win!
TIL: Germany has less than 45m inhabitants. Less than Spain! /s
Not necessarily disagreeing with your other points, but Germany has a population of ~84 million, so comparable size.
And the other thing is that I just dont understand how that can be called a regime change. Venezuela was not regime change either - Venezuelan regime stayed exactly the same as before, but now USA is co-responsible for the abuses.
Watch orange man pull that one out. There are no rules of behavior anymore, he can do whatever the fuck he wants, laws, treaties, morals, future and so on be damned, ego whims dominate the decision chain. Who is going to do anything. The only exception is israel, they seem to have a massive leverage on him and utilize it to the fullest.
Also he and his clan are heavily gaining from insider trading on those huge swings, we talk about billions here on just closest circle and everybody knows this. Also, US is gaining on big oil prices, another reason to sow more chaos. Not happy times ahead.
That's a funny way to spell "kompromat".
The current USA leadership, I’m afraid it isn’t impossible.
He’s a fucking moron.
It's a great sign for the US military as a whole: That is the primary American tactic to defeat China, using land forces hidden on the First Island Chain with anti-ship missiles, to control the seas around China. More here:
Even just the blockade cannot be considered as anything else but an act of war, even if, as usual, USA does not declare the wars it starts.
In the past, USA at least made attempts to appear that it follows the international laws, but today it makes great efforts to perfectly match the stereotype of the lawless "Imperialist Americans" that was used in the past in the propaganda of the former communist countries.
Any act of war that Cuba would ever do against USA would be perfectly justified by the already done actions of USA, which make random Cubans suffer from serious shortages.
I think most of what you said is just speculation, not founded on reality. The only thing that would stop the US from invading Iran in under 3 months is political will.
Russia doesn't have the scale and power of the US airforce, or the ability to project that power using the US navy and all the bases in the middle-east. Any comparison with russia at all makes me question your entire analysis.
Iran is big and geographically challenging, Afghanistan is notorious in the same sense as well, even more so by their infamous defeat and expelling of Russia in the 80's. The US invaded afghanistan in a matter of 1-2 months and held on to the country for 20 years.
Establishing a FOB initially will be challenging but with Kuwait and KSA eagerly cooperating, it won't be a challenge.
Drones are effective when your enemy is nearby and you can project it against them. Iran can threaten just about any US interest in the region but not the US homeland itself. They can't attack Europe because that would risk drawing them into the conflict, so their only option is to attack existing enemies in the region and do their best to inflate the price of oil.
And therein is their strategy that might win the war, it isn't all the reasons you listed, but political will as a result of economic pressure. The US lost in Afghanistan, Vietnam, and even arguably in Iraq because of loss of political will to continue the conflict. But then again, the current administration will not be deterred by pesky things such as the will of the american people, they'll use it to declare emergencies and attempt to hold on to power instead. The only thing that can defeat the US right now is the republican party in the US willing to turn on their beloved dictator.
> Ukraine has people making them in basements. Presumably, so does Iran.
The US has bunker-busters.
Even though your analysis is full of many technical flaws the most critical flaw in my opinion is how you aren't considering aerial advantage for the US, but yet you seem to think drones are an advantage. Drones are only useful at attacking pre-determined regional targets to influence political will. For the US however, unlike Russia, the US doesn't have a decrepit airforce, and doesn't flinch at launching $70~M/launch tomahawks. The ukrainain army right now isn't withstanding a constant barrage of bomber jets dropping on them. Russia is several decades behind US equivalent fleets from what I understand.
The US military hasn't been sitting on their hands watching the Russia-Ukraine conflict either. They've been testing all kinds of anti-drone tech in the desert for a while now, but this is the real opportunity for them to battle-test different techniques. No one is sanctioning the US either (more like sanctioning itself), and there is no real or practical shortage of war-chest funds (unlike Russia), and having a big war every two decades means the US military-industrial complex far more capable to meet the supply-chain logistics demands.
The US military certainly is the biggest in the world, dwarfing all other countries' militaries combined. But the thing most people don't realize is that is not what makes it the most capable invading force in the world, it is the sheer efficiency of the logistical effectiveness unseen the history of war before, backed by the ability to fund years-long wars without so much as flinching on the domestic economy front.
I would argue that the if the political will existed, the US can invade the entire region, from the Mediterranean to the Himalayas in less time than how long Russia has been at war with Ukraine. Even if the US couldn't use the bases and airspace in Europe at all, the calculus remains the same.
> This worked a lot better when the trouble spots couldn't do much to them.
Huh? what do you mean? They're entirely designed to address hostilities, they're not designed establish access in a non-hostile littoral, this goes back to WW2 beachead establishments (like normandy). The carrier ships are never meant to be close to land to where they're a target, but the carrier group itself is entirely designed to establish a beachead and deploy an expeditionary force under hostile conditions. I admit, maybe my history recall is lacking, do you know of any post-WW2 conflicts where the US navy established a beach head as part of an invading force that didn't face both aerial and naval resistance? Iran and Afghanistan didn't require it, neither did Korea or Vietnam as far as I know.
I want some of the good stuff you are using!
Much thanks to the impenetrable Mexico border, through which no foul thing has ever slipped past... /s
Iran can very much sneak drones into the US and do an Operation Spiderweb-style attack. Won't happen next week, but Russia thought they were done in 3 weeks.
There is value in much of what you're saying in your post, even though I don't necessarily agree 100% with all of it. However, no one involved in planning or starting this attack, underestimated the size of Iran at all. All of that would have been covered by all briefings. The US admin and military knew all of this, and frankly has planned all of this.
The US has some of the most capable spy networks, knowledge, and military experience on the planet. And yes, even the current admin takes advantage of this.
So the real question is, what is the end goal? None of the noise we hear from mouthpieces is really it. I suspect that causing trillions in damage to Iran is likely simply it. A bloody nose. I'd be astonished if 1000s of exit strategies weren't deep planned, maybe a dozen best-outcomes planned, before a single plane bombed anything. The US knows how to exit this.
The US military, and daily briefings have all covered every aspect of what's been happening in the Ukraine war. They know. They've been studying it. They're not surprised by it. They 100% knew that Iran has been supplying drones to Russia in vast quantities.
What I strongly suspect is that Iran is being given a message. One it didn't listen to when it was bombed months ago. Don't help Russia. Don't align with China. Don't sell oil to China. And also?
Right now, all those drones made-in-Iran? All the munitions. All the missiles. All the tech they've been shipping Russia? It's ground to a complete halt. So whether or not Iran was stubbornly going to continue to export these things to Russia, it can't, as it needs them domestically now.
Russia is now cut off from that supply chain, because Iran needs it for itself.
If you look at what's happening, Russia has been forced to withdraw from the world stage as it is bled dry by the Ukraine war. It first pulled back from Syria, and it (Assad) fell. It pulled out of Cuba, out of Venezuela, all troops and aircraft and support. Russia has ceased to be a world power, it's literally done. It's become nothing but a regional power, incapable of projecting any power on the world stage.
The Ukraine war is serving its purpose. The West and the US are only supplying enough weaponry to keep Russia bleeding. Never enough weaponry for the Ukraine to win, never enough support, the US just trickles weaponry to them. The Ukraine just serves one purpose -- keep Russia fighting, keep it off the world stage, keep it bleeding all its power and might until it's a complete empty husk.
Yet as Russia has pulled back, China has attempted to moved to fill that vacuum. It's been buying oil from places like Venezuela, and Iran. It was extending soft power into Cuba. The US cannot tolerate this, and back to the start, I suspect that this is also a secondary message being given. A message to China. "Don't do this".
Cutting Russia and China off, each for different reasons, could be viewed as a good success for the US. My thoughts are -- what's next? What other thing does the US want to cut off from China, and Russia?
Because I suspect that's where things will pivot to.
--
(One thought here is, about exit strategies, is that just walking away and leaving the straight Hormuz a mess, will literally force Western allies to police that straight with their navies. The US has been pulling back from policing shipping lanes world wide over the last 20 years, and unhappy with its allies for not taking up the slack, or what it deems a "fair share". With Hormuz, US allies will be forced to take up the slack, an interesting outcome. This too would be an immense success for the US.)
Isn't this just wishfull thinking?
I mean, more mature administrations than Trump's have blundered into Vietnam/Iraq/Afghanistan without real exit strategies...
Re: Iranian drones to Russia:
Russians now (for quite some time) have their own production and development of Shahed derivatives, I doubt there are shipments from Iran to Russia.
Re: policing Hormuz:
Europe won't do it, for the same reason US is not doing it (it is an impossible task).
Re: the overall aim:
deny China the access to the Gulf oil, succeeding so far, but ultimately pointless (China will be lifted by greatly increased demand for its renewables and battery tech, as well as their electric cars)
It's nice to wave away policing Hormuz, by simply asserting it can't be done. Is this accurate, however?
In terms of oil, the US has recently cut China off from Venezuela as well. Short term supplies are important, "the future", a cloud of probabilities about oil shortags helping China, is not immediately apparent. It's suffering shipment halts from two lead suppliers now, both which were non-open market shipments, and volumes are unclear.
I wonder, what if the Ukraine suddenly stepped up and crippled deliveries of Russian oil to China? Or what if Saudi Arabia was told "don't do that". From where I sit, it's China that's being most directly affected by these actions in terms of energy supply.
There have been plenty of analyses pretty much all concluding the same thing. How do you propose to do it? In normal times there were > 150 per day travelling through the gulf. Remember the coastline of Iran along the Gulf is about 2000km, all allowing them to launch strikes against ships (and they don't need to be sophisticated). So would you put a warship with every cargo ship? Occupy the whole coast? I don't see any feasible solution to police it.
Note that as long as there is a risk (even 1 to 20, maybe 1 to 100) that your tanker will be attacked, you just won't sail. (The logic of commercial shipping.)
Hence, blocking Hormuz does not mean total blockage, just a credible threat.
How do you propose to stop such a threat?
Adding warships to the mix, to shoot down incoming drones, simply adds those warships to the risked assets. What happens if a couple of escorts are hit/sunk?
We were not able to stop Houtis. What makes you think we can stop Iranians?
I do not understand this whole "Cripple China" thing. What do you think will happen if China decides that US is REALLY GOING AFTER IT NOW?
Maybe it will be enough for them to just stop shipping crap to US. What will the US do if suddenly the shop shelves become empty, CCCP-style?
The rest I fully agree with, although its a half-assed effort that will likely backfire long term.
Oh how cute, we are dusting off the cover on the greatest hits! I remember hearing this one back in the early 2000's! Unrelated, how many WMDs did they find in Iraq again? You know what, never mind, i'm sure it was just LOADS obviously!
> The US knows how to exit this.
Oh yeah, how's that? They gonna spend twenty years and $2.3 trillion dollars there?
Not only is China still receiving oil from Iran but Russias oil revenues have spiked significantly because of the conflict with the FT considering Russia the biggest winners of this conflict so far.
Hard to really analyze your post because you look at geopolitics through the lens of Jack Bauer
The scene in the book is just so familiar to the lines in Ukraine these days, nearly a hundred years later. Instead of spotter planes near the dawn of aviation, we have satellites and drones (similarly quite new in the role). Instead of just shells and fuzing experts, we have FPV drones and much more sophisticated shells. Instead of buddies from the same towns all huddled together in cold muddy holes, we have deracinated units spread far and wide in laying in fear of thermal imaging. This results in a no mans land again, but a dozen kilometers wide instead of a few hundred meters wide, and somehow more psychologically damaging.
My point is that absent any tech that will miraculously be invented and deployed widely in the new few weeks, the Iran war, if it should be a ground one, is going to be just like Ukraine is today, which is somehow a worse version of trench warfare.
Even casual Victoria II players know that WW1 is essentially the final boss of the game. And the 'lesson' of Vicky II is essentialy: Do not fight WW1, it ruins Everything.
To be clear: The US is choosing to fight a worse version of WW1 without even a stated (or likely even known) condition of victory. We're about to send many thousands boys to suffer and die for not 'literally nothing', but actually literally nothing.
If Iran were to become a major ground war, one of the sides would have air dominance, and we know which one. How that would change things remains to be seen. But it wouldn't be the same exact trench war, that's certain enough.
Ukraine must defend itself against an authoritarian Russia where nobody can publicly complain about what's happening.
This is not the case in the US, unless they go full dictatorship.
If you're looking for more reading maybe start with WW1 trenches, then look for YouTube videos about Ukraine drone usage? The drone stuff may be too new for lots of writing about it, but you'll get an oblique view of it by looking at how the Russians put those roll cages / turtle shells over their tanks, etc.
If you find anything and wanted to share it that would be interesting (if morbid)!
You're most likely to get droned when on watch or carrying supplies.
These clips highlight lots of incredibly disturbing events like Russian soldiers having exploding drones blow up close enough to them to cause eventually-fatal injuries without actually killing them, forcing them to kill themselves (and in some cases, their friends) with their own guns.
Its horrific to see on a human level regardless of the political circumstances of the war and who is or isn't in the right.
"The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston" by Siegfried Sassoon. (Ignore the title, it's actually his autobiography, and you could probably skip the first book in the trilogy).
"Goodbye to all that" by Robert Graves.
Two of the best writers in the English language recounting their times in the trenches.
Here's a revview: https://www.zeppjamiesonfiction.com/a-remarque-able-read-a-r...
I do not think this is correct. The problem in Ukraine is that anti-air defenses control the skies, so the only accurate long range fires are expensive missiles in short supply.
This seems to not be a problem in Iran. US forces can fly relatively cheap bomb trucks anywhere and drop ordinance on anything. Stealth aircraft and NATO doctrine apparently work.
I'm not advocating for a ground invasion, but there's no reason to believe it would go the way of Ukraine.
The US had complete air superiority in Iraq and Afghanistan and while it helped it is unclear how it would play out in a drone-heavy battlefield.
In Afghanistan for example the assault on Shah-i-Kot Valley and the ineffectiveness of air support is instructive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Anaconda#TF_Rakkasan
It's worth noting that the US lost both those wars - the Taliban rules again in Afghanistan and Iran is more influential in Iraq after the fall of Saddam than it was before, eg: https://www.cfr.org/articles/how-much-influence-does-iran-ha...
In Ukraine, neither side has access to the air weaponry (in capabilities or volume) that the US does - so the battlefield has evolved into one of drone superiority.
So yes, the US could (logistics willing) pummel Iran with B52s, B2s, and the like, maybe largely unopposed. However, this would only achieve so much: "winning" would be very different, especially when it's likely to turn into into a grinding resistance/insurgency ground war. A better analogy than Ukraine may be the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, only Iran has far more trained fighters and weaponry from the start. Or Vietnam, of course.
Maybe the US could "win", but it would depend on the strength of the political will to continue losing soldiers and spending huge amounts of money; and it would certainty be seen as a "forever war". And of course (as noted elsewhere) the US' more recent forays into Iraq and Afghanistan show how difficult regime change by force is.
Complicated by the fact that the logistic convoys can nowadays be trivially decimated by FPVs.
Air superiority is not going to help you much against small dispersed resistance groups with FPVs (ideally fiber optics, so not detectable by emissions from afar).
There is a chance that there will be similar democratization with AA (you will need proper AA missiles, the physics of reaching a fast jet flying high simply demands it), but the distributed passive targeting is made much simpler with current commodity computing and optics.
Achieving AA Denial is difficult, but forcing the attacker to use standoff munitions instead of gravity bombs/close-in air support not so much: shifting the risk of losing an aircraft from 1 in 100000 to 1 in 100 will do it.
In the 1974 movie The Four Musketeers, Athos needs to find a private place in which to impart some information to d'Artagnan. The musketeers are currently deployed battling some French rebels.
The solution he finds is to place a bet with another soldier that he and his friends will have breakfast inside a fortress that is being bombarded by the rebels. We see a similar comedy scene of five people attempting to cook and eat a meal while under attack. (Athos also struggles to get his information across, since the constant attacks understandably pull a lot of attention.)
It's not very comedic in the book. You can see for yourself: it is the entirety of chapter 47, here: https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1257/pg1257-images.html#cha... .
(Interestingly, I would have said that the translation I read came from Project Gutenberg, but it wasn't the one I just linked and no other is currently available there. Does Project Gutenberg take down existing versions of out-of-copyright books sometimes??)
Edit: apparently not. So Gutenberg is hosting whatever they legally can, which is older translations.
IMHO, This is pretty much the strategy the Khans used in the 13th century when they encountered arrogant Islamist Sultans emboldened with the bravery of their faith who refused to capitulate. They killed all the islamic people in Baghdad and then proceeded to fill all their canals and burn all their books. This decisively ended the Islamic golden age and Europe was able to survive after a very difficult 14th century where it would probably have been easily crushed by Islamists from the East had the Khans not set them back at least a few centuries. Truly one of the big turning points in World History.
Oh yeah, we can't do this to Russia because they have nukes, but the Ukrainians are trying to do it piecemeal.
Not having any sort of counterplay to Iran's one big move (the blocking of the straight), in a nation of some of the brighest minds on the planet, speaks volumes of how advisors are clearly not being listened to. The powers of the once mighty Republic have seemingly been vested in the hands of a bunch of incompetent nepo babies.
Found the assumption that caused the issue.
Sure on average, the population of the US is stupid, but that's true of everywhere.
The brightest minds we had working in government have all quit or been fired in the last year.
You mean the people who voted for trump or those who voted for the democrats?
Are there some causal reasons you think americans are smarter than people in other countries?
I'm not talking about plebs, I'm talking about people who know their shit and work at government level. We could just look at the invention of the past century and pluck out relevant events like the moon landing, electronic computer, transistor or ARPANET. Clearly there are smart people living in that nation. They have the talent to draw from to get good advice about stuff like: what Iran's first response might be to an aerial assault.
> Are there some causal reasons you think americans are smarter than people in other countries?
I never said that. I said America is home to SOME of the brightest minds in the world. That sentence does not apportion all the brightest minds to that nation. What you read is clearly something different from what I wrote. Do you have a chip on your shoulder?
I think america clearly had better opportunities for bright people in the past. Maybe some moved also there so the proportion is a little higher than in other places.
So yea, you misread that to assume that I was making some quasi-racist statement about Iran. So my question to you, is why do you think you made that intentional misinterpretation?
I agree that what the US did seems like they didn't ask anyone with expertise and brain to make a plan.
I think I filtered that out since I don't wonder about such things anymore. I live in Germany and what our government did in the last decades was so beyond stupid (like blowing up our nuclear power plants and going out of coal at the same time) that I try to ignore these kinds of things.
'intelligent', yes, big scary performative navy/gear, very very costly, here take most of the tax dollars. This is whats going on since WW2, where are these intelligent people who couldn't understand this?
We don't have all the intelligence but we do have many institutions to promote such talent. As well as formerly having policy which let other bright minds immigrate into the US.
Inbreeding as a cultural norm?
Not smarter than the Japanese.
That's usually the idea ever since bombs were a thing. It just so happens that it's harder to actually pull off than to say it.
I'm legit baffled by the US engaging in a war that suffers exactly the same negative properties as the Saudi's war in Yemen. You don't even have to learn from history, the Saudi/Yemeni conflict is still active today. Air campaigns alone are entirely insufficient, especially if your enemy has mountains.
Especially desalination plants (your sunshine promised to bomb those as well).
Nothing short of life in prison for the ones that plead guilty will accomplish that.
Why would the US want to bomb an ally?
It's just that Trump is Putin's biggest fan for some reason.
That is… not the easy way. That’s how you get a nightmare for decades to come, endless waves of refugees and a limitless supply of terrorists.
Though, to be fair, there is no easy way of doing what Trump claims he wants to do. Which is why it’s spectacularly stupid to do it in the first place. I mean, they did not expect retaliation in the strait of Hormuz. Amateur hour does not even begin to describe it. Spectacularly stupid is probably way too kind.
If you must learn from the Khans, you’ll find that decapitation is not enough. You need people to put in place of the former leadership, and enforcers so that the underlying power structure stays in place to serve the new masters. The reason why is that, as the US learnt in Iraq and Afghanistan, it takes a bloody lot of soldiers to keep a whole population in check. Trump does not want to do the former and does not have the latter.
The mental gymnastics required to be this specific and wrong and still believe this nonsense is truly incredible.
Don't let capitalism convince us to do bad stuff cuz it makes us feel like the moment is special. It isn't. There is a tomorrow. It will be yesterday soon enough.
The check and balances of the US President that can start an offensive war is more a political problem, not "capitalism" problem.
But, yeah the choice of Iran now isn't at all explained by "capitalism".
To the extent it's a money making scheme, well, capitalism gets blamed for all money making schemes even if it's supposed to be a specific subset of them which is useful for the feedback one can get from open markets.
(As that's a caveat inside a caveat, I'm mostly agreeing with you).
For that, you must look at the main beneficiary. Which country stands to gain the most from a completely dilapidated Iran? Which country stands to gain more when all the regional powers that could stand up to it have been destroyed?
I think the answer should be blindingly obvious.
Just look at the Sudanese conflict.
Or because America is filled with demented cultists who think a two thousand year old property dispute is the key to triggering the Apocalypse so they can all be whisked away to paradise.
American evangelicals don't care about 1900, differences between secular and religious Jews or their disputes. They don't care at all. They actually agree with a lot of what loosing side of WWII said and thought. And they in fact do believe the end of times prophecy and their duty to speed it up.
If you are unaware of that, maybe you should not be so arrogant when comment on politics. Because the radical American religious leaders are literally talking to the troops now as minister of war is their disciple.
I don’t think we should look too far for reasons. He got all excited with the adventure in Venezuela and wanted to do it again, but with bombs and his pal Bibi. He’s itching to do the same thing to Cuba, and he’s not subtle about it.
We won't know until everyone publishes their memoirs. I imagine absurd reasoning is entirely on the table. Given the administration's blind luck with its raid on Venezuela it assumed that scaling up the same plan would function, without realising how fortunate it was the first time. Reminiscient of Blair and Kosovo leading to hubris on Iraq.
They had a few people on the inside, who handed over Maduro to the US. May have been internal conflict in Venuzuela using US to get rid of Maduro.
Maybe US also had people on the inside in Iran, but killed them by accident on the first strike with the "precision bombings".
> Maybe US also had people on the inside in Iran, but killed them by accident on the first strike with the "precision bombings".
Yeah but no. Iran isn't Venezuela by a long shot, extremely different properties all round. Its hubris to think what worked out well in one case would apply to a completely different one on the other side of the world.
"Everything I don't like is capitalism." - Left
Virtually all climate scientists agree human activity is destabilizing the climate, the oceans, and entire biospheres.
Military spending is at record highs while housing, healthcare, and clean water remain out of reach for billions.
These are some things people "don't like", which share a common thread...
"Keep raging" is a good example of what's known as a "thought terminating cliche". You might not want to terminate your thoughts so easily.
That, or just a way to save face: when you can't argue the point, argue the tone... If that's what you were going for - do you feel like it worked?
The way this reads.
I thought the analogy was "i'm frequently in a hot tub with dudes with different names, the faces change, but i'm still in this hot tub"
The way this reads. I thought the analogy was "i'm frequently in a hot tub with dudes, with different names, the faces change, but i'm still in this hot tub with another set of dudes"
is not really backed up by reality. Pretty much the whole US operation so far, destroying much of Iran's military and leadership was done from US carriers. If anything it demonstrates how powerful they are.
Also straits being closed to shipping by whatever power controls the shores is not a new thing. The Bosphophorous has been closed on and off by the Ottomans or Turks since 1453 and the allies couldn't break through in WW1. They can send raiding ships, use canons, artillery, naval mines etc. You don't need the new tech.
No. This is absurd claim that can't physically comport with sortie generation math.
CSIS report from first 3 weeks noted Israel did more than half of strikes on ~15,000 targets... all Israel's hits would be from land basing.
2xCSG at surge for 3 weeks = ~6k sorties, ~20% for kinetic strike (80% of sorties supportive, cap, tanking, ew etc). Optimistically carriers hit ~2000 targets when not standoff during first 3 weeks. Likely strike compositions: Israel from land, 50%, US from regional land ~35% (we know lots of none carrier aviation was involved), carriers ~15%.
The real kicker is CSGs since been pushed to standoff - kinetic strike ratio to dwindle to single digit % sorties at those distances, making carrier cost:strike ratio even more unfavourable. This something most expect from peer/near peer adversaries, not Iran, i.e. carriers seem vulnerable to lower tier of adversaries than originally thought.
A US CSG could simply sit in the Hormuz strait shoot down any incoming missiles and keep it open.
Right now the US has 3 CSG in the middle east and nearly 50000 troops. After weeks of intensive bombing the strait remains closed and any associated asset in the region is at risk the loss of the E3 to drones is particularly shocking.
cruise missiles in the hands of a bad guy is a suicide drone and a suicide drone in the hands of a good guy is a guided missile
Drone means foam wings, plastic body, propellers, cheap camera, simple inertial navigation, maybe GPS, maybe 10-30 kilogram payload.
Guided missile means, metal airframe, jet engine, depending on targets thermal imaging or radar terminal guidance, radar altimeters, terrain imaging radars, 100 - 500 kilogram payload.
Remote guidance is a very hard problem, modern computers have made it much easier to solve.
Even an 80s missile, required hundred of thousands of dollars of equipment just for guidance. Now all you need is a simple computer, a cheap camera and a cheap accelerometer.
Drones are much easier to down than missiles, but they make it up in volume.
You need to seriously upgrade your level of knowledge about what is available in terms of drones today.
The drone/guided missile divide is really about dividing a continuum which on one end has foam wings and raspberry pie equivalents wrapped in tin foil and on the other million dollar tomahawks. The distinction is the price tag and the capabilities really.
Otherwise both are long range guided munitions.
So no. But the Lyutyi (sp?), the FP-1 and the Nynja all qualify as drones (and there are many, many more, it's a veritable zoo) if you make that distinction, as do all of the sea-borne gear.
While you're alluding to high-end reapers/etc., the majority of drones in the Ukraine-Russia conflict have foam wings and low cost components.
Sure, it won't sink it, but operations may be disrupted, for hours to days.
- One of them I could reliably build a factory for in my garage.
As has been demonstrated countless times in SINKEX training, it requires literal tons of deep penetrating explosives to severely damage a modern naval vessel. And even then they usually don't actually sink.
Nothing you can cheaply build in your garage will do meaningful damage to a large naval vessel. It will have neither the weight nor the penetration required.
Nothing/neither/cant when millions of dollars and hundreds of lives are on the line? 'Are you sure about that?' Defending against these types of threats is well worth considering.
There is a room called the combat information center, that's where the ship is run from during combat, and that is behind armor, even in modern warships.
Additionally ships are separated into semi independent zones, that can take control of the ship, and continue fighting even if the rest of the ship is on fire.
The real liabilities are the radars, and the rest of the sensors in surface combat ships and the airplanes on deck in the case of aircraft carriers. Aircraft carriers in general are heavily armored compared to other modern warships and it takes a significant amount of firepower to even disable them much less sink them.
The difference is strategic. A mission kill is a repairable loss. It is an order of magnitude easier to fix a battleship than to build a new one.
Then launch a second wave of heavy anti-ship missiles (which you might have too few, due to their costs) to transform mission kills into really sunken ships.
Assuming the opponent will be dumb is .. dumb.
The reason designed-for-purpose anti-ship missiles/drones are so expensive is they are literally designed to be somewhat effective at executing exactly the scenario you are laying out, while not being naive about the defenses that military ships actually have. Anybody that understands the capability space knows that your scenario wouldn’t survive contact with real defenses.
You are making an argument from fiction. Do you take the “hackers breaking cryptography” trope from Hollywood at face value?
If they're small - like quadcopter size - then how did you get them in range of a ship more then 10 miles off shore?
If they're large, like back of a pickup sized (which is roughly a Shahed[1] - link for scale) then how did you transport and move them without being noticed and interdicted?
For comparison one of Russia's largest drone attacks on Ukraine, and thus in the world, happened recently and included about 1000 Shaheds over a distributed area.
You're talking about flying a 1000 of something into exactly one target which has CIWS designed to track and kill supersonic missiles at close range (and is likely in a flotilla with data linked fire control).
You might get lucky I guess but I absolutely wouldn't bet on it.
[1] https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/russias-new-jet-pow...
As the article says, the Ukrainians have effectively denied the Black Sea to the Russian navy through use of drones.
you don't need to damage it severely. Some holes in radar, on board aircrafts and missiles containers will reduce capability by 80%
Thanks to movies, people both seriously overestimate and underestimate the capabilities of highly engineered explosive devices, albeit in different dimensions. Generally speaking, sophisticated military targets are not susceptible to generic explosives. A drone with a hundred kilos of explosive will essentially bounce off a lot of targets. An enormous amount of engineering goes into designing an explosive device optimized to defeat that specific target. They use supercomputers to get this stuff right. Exotic engineered explosive devices are unreasonably capable.
TBH, once you realize the insane amount of engineering that goes into it, it kind of takes the fun out of it. A lot of high-leverage research goes into aspects an amateur would never think about.
This is in some ways a blessing. Amateurs with bad intentions almost always fail at the execution because it isn’t something you can learn by reading the Internet.
An older friend of mine at Boeing told me how when he was a teen, he had a teen friend who built a pipe bomb. They drove off to a field to set it off. It didn't explode, so his friend went to investigate. Then it went off, and my friend had the pleasure of driving his gutted friend to the hospital to die.
What I don’t get is why we need to take Kharg island. Can’t we just blockade ships selling Iranian oil?
1) we want Iranian oil flowing and being bought elsewhere for the economy and to avoid hard decisions in Beijing, and as we’ve recently heard ad nausea money is fungible so… if one hasn’t thought to invade, dominate and occupy mountainous terrain filled with holy people, then ‘open’ means money to The Baddies.
2) it’ll only take a few wrecks to create navigation hazards, tankers are huge and that strait is shallow and narrow. The cleanup crews are slower, they also need massive ships.
3) let’s take a 0.01% reliability of missile attacks… drones, rpgs, suicide attacks, artillery, kamikaze plane attacks, mines, and trebuchets are also out there. So, again, unless we’re invading… fuhgeddabout 100%
And, fatally:
4) it’s not the missiles, it’s the threat, and who is insuring the massive money-boats. If your insurance company thought your car would, 0.01% of the time, be blown up resulting in a total wreck and complete loss of cargo and future revenue, your policy would not be what it is. You insure your oil boat for trips, and if not you don’t move it.
Trump doesn’t decide this, BigBoat Insurance brokers decide this, with their wallets and vibes. 0.01% x An Oil Tanker (slow, giant, vulnerable, + oil leak cleanup and ecosystem damage, loss of life) x totally foreseeable circumstances = a ‘closed’ straight on demand. Unless, again, the plan is invado-conquering.
Eventually you are beyond the range of being able to project force or risking losing billions invested in one asset to a $50k missile. That is where reality is heading.
One of the primary functions of navies historically has been to secure vital shipping lanes. It’s a big deal that USN can’t seem to fulfill that function anymore.
Good at hitting targets, terrible at achieving goals. Same as Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc. Were the Taliban destroyed by killing their upper echelons several times over? In terms of resilience, the Iranians are similar, arguably much more so.
Of course not, because that wasn't the goal and would be impossible, because we were recreating the conditions that led to the Taliban taking control in the first place (corrupt and amoral warlords oppressing the populace). Afghanistan's strategic location and suitability for poppy farming and generating dark money flows is why we went in. It was the staging ground for the plans to overthrow "Iraq [...] Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan" (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2003/9/22/us-plans-to-attack-...). We're still involved in active conflicts in most of those countries.
The country with 0.3% of global spending in military is putting a noticeable dent in assets of country that has 35% of global spending in military and are begging allies for help coz they can't even stop the drones
With that level of difference you'd expect whole thing to end already and yet it is not. So any actor at even 10% scale of US going all in in drones would probably obliterate US navy without all that much. US is behind and frankly invested in wrong tech over the years.
That is not to say carriers are going away any time soon, you need to ship the firepower to the target somehow, but one filled to 3/4 with drones would probably be far more effective
It should probably also be pointed out that doing nothing has a cost too, and it's probable that the bill for doing nothing over a long period of time has come due. I, like most people, never bought the WMD claims leading up to Iraq. I'm not sure what to think here. I certainly don't buy that Iran wasn't working towards getting the bomb after how well it worked out for North Korea. I can't claim to know the calculus involved in determining whether or not it's worth going to war with Iran to stop them from getting the bomb.
The US invaded Iraq and toppled its government; Iraqi militias are still firing drones and missiles at US bases. Tankers and oil infra are much softer targets… all it takes is hitting one or two tankers and folks will stop shipping.
The second half of that sentence is literally explaining why the "impossible" you reject in the first part.
Every think tank exist to further their agenda… do you have a more substantive critique?
With that in mind, what do you think the reality is? I am not leading you on. I am genuinely curious.
Though I do worry about the possibility of a more sophisticated opponent being able to launch swarms of drones and missiles at aircraft carriers. More than any air defense could ever stop.
The reason so many tankers have been lost and that E3 sentry is that the carriers are having to stay out of the preferred range and rely on refueling for the bombing campaign.
If the CSG could move to the Iranian coast they wouldn't have to maintain a constant chain of refueling tankers which have become so vulnerable.
umm, you have no idea what you are talking about.
the Iranian Shahed drones typically have an operational travel distance of approximately 1,200 to 2,000 kilometers (roughly 750 to 1,250 miles).
and
>USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) CSG: As of March 30, 2026, this strike group is operating in the Arabian Sea supporting Operation Epic Fury. Satellite imagery from mid-February and March 2026 placed the Lincoln roughly 700 kilometers (approx. 430 miles) off the coast of Iran and Oman.
Now, does it have the kill chain to supply it with an accurate targeting fix and update it during the flight? Or, does it have a radar good enough to find the Lincoln on its own? If it doesn't, then it's a really big ocean. But sure, they've got the range.
Of course the CSG and its advanced weaponry are going to obliterate them before they have a chance to do anything.
The Shahed-136 could 100% find the ship if Iran had the intel on the CSG location.
There's been a whole ramp up of very exquisite technology to try to get the upper hand here, but I don't expect we'll see the carrier be the force it has been over the last few generations. It's just too tempting a target.
Just the warhead alone on a standard anti-ship weapon weighs more than an entire Shahed-136 drone.
To render it useless for a while is easier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Enterprise_fire
All from a little drone-sized warhead.
(~20kg warhead)
This is Trump's America, brother, we don't learn from the past here!
Of course, this assumes the carrier is within range of the drone swarm, but that seems to be the assumption in this line of argument.
Eventually, I think they'll have more cost-effective defenses against small, cheap drones, but they don't have them yet.
Unfortunately warships have a lot of flammables and explosives aboard.
Many nations can blow stuff up but to actually project power, you need a mobile air base.
Regarding drones they are, by definition, not very sturdy: for they're drones and not B52 bombers or bunkers.
What's very likely going to happen is that, just I can take a Browning B525 Sporter balltrap shotgun and shoot any civilian drone from afar because the gun shoots an expanding cloud of tiny, cheap, pellets, armies are now going to come up with systems to both defend and destroy drones.
I'm not saying the drones used in war are the same as DJI drones: what I'm saying is that with the proper tech, they're much less expensive to take down than, say, a ballistic missile or an aircraft carrier.
Anyone seeing this conflict and thinking that the militaro-industrial complex isn't hard at work working on solutions to take down drones is smoking heavy stuff.
Ukrainian and Russian did it already (although it's nothing serious, it's just an example): here we were talking about actual tiny drones, carrying explosives, and running towards vehicles. As a cheap defense measures, they started immediately adding metallic "spikes" (not unlike hairs) to the vehicles, so that the drone wouldn't reach the vehicle's body and instead explode when hitting the mettalic spikes.
War has always been about "tech x" / "anti tech x". This time is not going to be different.
> Though I do worry about the possibility of a more sophisticated opponent being able to launch swarms of drones and missiles at aircraft carriers.
China. They're demos of thousands of drones fully synchronized in the sky at night making nice 3D patterns with everybody on the ground going "aaaah" and "wooooow" is a display of military capability.
I'm not saying it's not a concern: but it's not as if the US (and others) were going to sit and think "oh drones exists, the concept of war is over".
Not sure if they're organic, but they sure are free range.
Much of the administration and news media are only catching up to all of this long after the fact. Many still cling to the idea that this was unforeseen, or irrational on the part of the Iranians.
Keep in mind that a govt that feels (admittedly reasonably) that it has been backstabbed and has its head assassinated would not hesitate to call bluffs instead of acting cool. You've ever seen how a cornered wild animal behaves?
Asymetric warfare is a hell of a hole to dig oneself into, ain't it?
A cheap drone is only useful against soft targets. It is the reason Ukraine is scaling up heavy cruise missile production even though they already have vast numbers of cheap long-range drones. Being "cheap" isn't of much value if it is incapable of doing meaningful damage to the desired target.
The US has been designing and building thousands of anti-ship drones since the 1970s. It isn't like they have no experience with the concept and those drones are far more capable than anything Iran has. The US Navy has assumed drone swarms as a threat model for half a century.
Surface drones are effectively indistinguishable from that threat.
Easier than avoiding torpedos, which are also long-range drones.
It's pretty hard to imagine a scenario from the nineties where there are so many speedboats in an attack that all four CIWS on a carrier use all their ammo at once. (that's an awful lot of suicidal jihadis, or whatever)
On the other hand, if the CIWS are targeting clouds of aerial drones and jetski drones at the same time, that could be a pretty bad scene. About fifteen seconds of fire per CIWS (1550 rounds), five minutes downtime to reload, between one and three seconds to service each target...
The boat swarms would close the distance fast, and the US Navy was reluctant to engage potentially stupid but non-hostile targets. By the time the threat was clear the defensive weapon systems were outside their design parameters. The alternative was killing everyone a long way out even if they weren’t a clear threat.
Not an issue today, they have loads of weapons purpose-engineered for that threat. But they had to learn that lesson the hard way.
Problem isn't a single drone, it's the cost of intercepters. Iran could launch a swarm of 100s of drones with few antiship missiles mixed in to hone in at same time. CSG has to spend $million+ interceptors and will quickly run out of them. US hasn't taken anti drone defence seriously, or the cost of doing it seriously before going in.
As far as I know we have never seen that happen against a single target. I believe the reasons are operational not cost related. A single truck can fit like 5 shaheds. For 100 at the same target at the same time you need to coordinate 20 crews just to get them in the air all these drones need to be controlled to some degree as well. It's possible but we have not seen such an attack. We have seen hundreds of drones targeting hundreds of targets against an entire country. So it's definitely possible, but I wager it's harder than it sounds to send 100s of shaheds against a carrier strike group.
Shahed drones are very slow, and can thus be very easily distinguished from antiship missiles and can also be intercepted far befpre they reach the ships. You are thinking SM-2s. But the best way to deal with such a threat is a flight of f-18s with a bunch of laser guided rockets (like 50 or 70) and a targeting pod, intercepting the drones hundreds of miles from the target.
* cost of adding encrypted mobile comms to receive target location update,
* turn about time on russian sat intell on carrier positions,
* observed carrier path patterns wrt drone flight times ( or fractions of flight time if mid air updates can occur )
* numbers and timings of drones that can be launched with alt coords to play predictive battleships with.
Unless Iran bought some CM-302 missiles from China, the mere threat of which appears to mean that China and Iran now control the oil in the gulf.
But ELI5 me maybe I don't understand realpolitik
Nothing in this war has suggested carriers are obsolete. A carrier that launches drones and fields an anti-drone strike group would be amazing. We don’t have that. (And even what we do have is great in the carrier department, it’s given us air parity to superiority from way offshore.)
The change in dynamic here isn’t a function of carriers or their abilities. It’s a change in the cost of drones and missiles. The cost of a “good enough” drone and missile is now so low that opponents of the US can simply build the thing faster than the US can build and deliver them. In effect the technological advantage is that carriers represented for a long time has been completely neutralised.
This is also true of airplanes. The point is you choose where you launch your drones from anywhere in the world.
> change in dynamic here isn’t a function of carriers or their abilities. It’s a change in the cost of drones and missiles
It's a return to battleship economics. Except instead of direct fire from and onto shores, you have indirect fire via drones. Unlike shells, however, we have anti-drone capabilities on the horizon.
It's silly to assume the current instability will persist for more than a few years. If the U.S. were paying any attention to Ukraine, it shouldn't have persisted until even now.
> the technological advantage is that carriers represented for a long time has been completely neutralised
Really not seeing the argument. Again, being able to build and launch and being able to field drones–alongside other weapons–is night and day. (Note that all of these arguments were made when missiles first dawned, too. Drones are, in many respects, a missile for area denial.)
You can't win with stand-off strike capability. You can't seize and control territory, you can't keep strategic choke-points open, you can't change regimes.
But you can definitely lose by spending two or three multi-million dollar air defense interceptors per incoming projectile that costs 10x to 100x less. Especially when your supply chain can only produce hundreds of interceptors per year and your adversary makes that many missiles per month and 10x that many drones per month.
To be clear, there is zero historic evidence—going back to the Blitz—that strategic bombing has ever been able to do any of these things.
Except the one about choke points. That isn’t strategic. It’s tactical. And using artillery or airpower for shaping operations absolutely works.
> you can definitely lose by spending two or three multi-million dollar air defense interceptors per incoming projectile that costs 10x to 100x less
Agree. Fortunately, the MIC seems to have recognized this. None of it fundamentally changes the value of carriers. It just means they need to be defended differently from before. Sort of how you can’t sent lone carriers out into the ocean, they have to be escorted.
I'm also not aware of a single case in history where a massive bombing campaign from a hostile country resulted in an immediate populist uprising and a regime change that favored that aggressor country. Having your city bombed for weeks on end tends to cause people to shelter where they can, worry solely about how they will survive the wreckage, and bond with their fellow citizens.
The fact that an air campaign and magical thinking was the complete game plan from trump and hegseth shows how utterly unqualified they are for the positions they have.
Not quite. It is hard to build an airplane, it is easy to build a drone. So if the battle comes to who is going to send more drones, then a big carrier will lose: it doesn't have a factory to build drones.
The real economics of battleships (and their precursor ships of the line) were:
Given expensive armaments (cannon), it is cheaper to concentrate these on a mobile platform that can geographically reposition itself than build / deploy / supply equivalent power everywhere, and the former allows for local overmatch.
Sufficiently cheap and powerful unmanned guided munitions (drones, cheap cruise/ballistic missiles, UAV/USV/UUVs) are a fundamentally different balance of power, especially with enough range.
What does make sense is a return to cheaper escort carriers, where the carrier should be as cheap as possible (preferably unmanned) as the platforms it hosts are no longer exquisite.
The launch of drones and missiles could be completely automated and there would be no need for the complex maintenance of reusable airplanes, so such carriers would need only a much smaller crew.
https://www.militarytimes.com/industry/techwatch/2026/03/31/...
There is definitely an argument to be made that even APKWS is too expensive due to the cost of flying a F16 per hour, but it’s not at the level of a few million dollar missile.
Obviously the US was in no way prepared for the Iranian response, but it’s not like zero development has happened in the last few years. It’s far too slow, but it’s deployed and in active use in combat. Hopefully this will be a wake up call that military procurement and domestic manufacturing needs to be wholesale reconfigured with breakneck speed. Doubtful though without much more pain felt directly by American citizens.
These weapons have been around since the early 2010s, they aren't new, and have been deployed in the Middle East for many years. They were literally designed for killing swarms of Shahed-style drones.
Or, that is their advertised capabilities. Countries that buy them usually complain that they don't work as well on practice.
You can destroy 16 drones every 2 minutes. If you get attacked by 50 drones, you'll get 16-20 of them. Did that help you?
I mean, they are helpful (if they work as well as the marketing material says). Just not transformative or sufficient.
At a guess, I assume much of the scale of carriers is tied to the logistics of air power, which are considerably less relevant in drone warfare. Carriers will always remain useful for more accurate strikes and operating aircraft that work at higher altitudes, but this broadside idea of volume might work better on a platform that scales better instead of the huge and expensive carrier footprint.
The size of the ship has little bearing on the visibility of it to sensors. You should also consider that it is much more difficult to sink a large ship than a small ship.
An important variable missing from your calculus is distance from munitions factory/supply depot. There are far cheaper and scalable ways to deliver tons of explosives if your supply lines are short, such as rail when you're defending your homeland. Carrier groups are both transport and FOBs
> You should also consider that it is much more difficult to sink a large ship than a small ship.
How did that turn out for the Russian Black Sea flagship, the Moskva?
So you'd say, OK, what drones can we launch from the tiny fiberglass-hulled small craft that we can build lots of, but the issue is that such drones will be very small and will necessarily have ineffectively small payloads to suit.
I'm just saying that a carrier is probably the wrong footprint for something that serves up drones.
If you are the big boy with the bigger gun you don't necessarily need that.
PS: I will take that back when someone manages to hit a carrier with a low cost drone boat.
Where? When?
> if it's anywhere near its optimal deployment zone
What are you referring to? The entire modern carrier strike group is architected around using stand-off weapons to clear threats to make way for stand-in weapons. The relevant ranges are what your stand-in bombers can hit without re-fuelling versus with. The era of direct firing from ships passed ages ago–that doesn't make carriers less valuable, just changes their role.
The USS Plunkett? A destroyer, not a carrier, that sustained the best the Germans could throw at her and kept on going; earning 5 battle stars while participating in all the major allied invasions in europe. What part was the tragedy of her? That she was scrapped in 1975 instead of being turned into a museum?
Traditional anti-shipping missiles are a bigger danger.
The optimal deployment zone is far off shore, and there its very hard to reach.
Is your point that you can put a huge carrier literally in the straits?
Antiship missiles carry larger warheads, often double the size, and deliver that warhead deep inside a warship where it is much more vulnerable. A shahed blowing up on a carrier deck will be upsetting but won't do much. With particularly egregious negligence of standard US Navy damage control methodology, you might cause a lot of damage by fire, like what happened to the Ford. Not that I'm suggesting it was hit by a Shahed.
There's a plethora of various low cost systems being developed for some defence, but the assumption I always see on HN and elsewhere is that for some reason cheap offensive drones will just never have a countermeasure...which isn't how any of this works (exhibit A: massed infantry assaults can sometimes work against emplaced machine guns, but in general the machine gun was the end of that tactic).
There is absolutely no reason that the current disruption drones are causing should lead to some sustained power imbalance: if you don't have the big laser today that's one thing, but if tomorrow you're scoring 100% intercept rates against the same threat then how cheap it is doesn't matter anymore. And there's no particular reason to think that won't be the case (if a cheap drone can be on the offensive, you'd have to present a very good case why the interceptor cannot be built in similar quantities at which point you're back to high end systems deciding the day).
What are ours doing during this war?
This is a categorically false assertion that they have been putting to assuage their local populations - which are heavily opposed to the war and the US support. Maybe not all of them, but some of them, like the UAE and Saudi Arabia, are clearly hosting and allowing the US to prosecute the war from their soil. If they weren't, you wouldn't have had the AWACS aircraft getting turned to smithereens in Riyadh.
It’s perhaps a distinction without a difference but it’s the line that appears to have been currently drawn.
This is like arguing you don't need a military because you'll just have 1 spy turn the enemies own weapons on them.
Sure...its not that it can't work, but there's more then a few issues with the strategic plan.
Seriously, your question is borderline trolling, you know exactly which functions of a carrier group are and are not matched by drones flown from containers. The point is, in case it wasn't clear, that you can do a ton of destruction without necessarily opening yourself up to a counter attack, precisely the kind of advantage that parties that put carrier groups in distance places to project power tend to be looking for. The ability to destroy lots of stuff in a relatively short time without losing a lot of personnel or exposing yourself.
And that capability is now to a large extent available to states that before would not have been able to do meaningful damage to coastal cities and coastal infrastructure (think refineries and large scale shipping ports). And you can't even be sure that whoever operates the vessel is in on it.
It's not going to help you to stop China from invading Taiwan if they decide to. But it could put a very large dent in the economic capability of any country or bloc that came under a concerted attack. Also note that 'drone' is a pretty wide label that crosses over into what previously was territory reserved for cruise missiles and ICBMs for air power and on the water there are many developments as well.
So if you have to hide your carrier group at stand-off distance for fear of seeing it sunk then it is not all that different from that container full of drones. You can destroy stuff, and that's about it. And long term that just makes more enemies, it doesn't really solve anything.
Gottem! Not really though. I don't think anyone would claim a carrier group should be able to hold an adversary's coastal waters. Empty them from beyond visual range? Yes. Camp out in them? No.
That said, if and when Mango decides to land troops in Iran, the fleet will be an irreplaceable piece of that operation. That is global force projection.
> Seriously, your question is borderline trolling, you know exactly which functions of a carrier group are and are not matched by drones flown from containers.
I mean but it helps in coming to an understanding if you articulate them. Acknowledging them will suffice!
> The point is, in case it wasn't clear, that you can do a ton of destruction without necessarily opening yourself up to a counter attack
Agreed!
> So if you have to hide your carrier group at stand-off distance for fear of seeing it sunk then it is not all that different from that container full of drones. You can destroy stuff, and that's about it.
Disagree!
Against all available evidence I still hope he's not that stupid.
> That is global force projection.
I think I'll withhold judgment on that until the dust settles.
Now you're about to say "but I meant drones with better capability!" And they do exist: and they're no longer that cheap, nor compact because it turns out a drone with roughly the performance of an F-35 will need an airframe, engine and sensor suite...roughly as expensive as an F-35. And suddenly this is no longer a platform you can just crash into things. Nor will you be ordering them by the thousand. Nor do they fit in a cargo container.
An F-35 is of course going to absolutely outclass any drone. But a hundred million (roughly) spent on drones is going to do more damage than that F-35 and is going to be more versatile.
The second that F-35 lands it is going to be at risk from a (low cost) drone attack. And some aicraft aren't even safe in the sky anymore:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACjCP-Dt3GY
Speaking of Aircraft Carriers, how is the Ford doing?
At this point you've built a very slow, very short ranged undefended arsenal ship.
Your proposal is to put a large supply of systems closer to enemy forces and the you're implying that somehow this wouldn't be vulnerable to being attacked while landed?
Which is notably not going to be launching a drone the size of a even a Shahed, nor anything close to the same range.
It also cannot detect nor engage incoming air threats, like essentially every single in service submarine on the planet due to the whole "being underwater" thing.
> Which is notably not going to be launching a drone the size of a even a Shahed, nor anything close to the same range.
It doesn't need to. It is its own munition with a anywhere from 500 to a couple of tons of explosives on board. And a very impressive range.
What characteristics of a submarine might be considerably problematic to doing that?
Would these problems perhaps also effect a defensive mission to prevent air strikes on ships in the Strait of Hormuz?
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb
"The next country over" != Worldwide
The implications of the Ukrainian war have changed the balance of power for ever. No airport will ever be safe again.
Armor and artillery are basically useless against a fleet of seaborne drones.
Sounds like typical US revisionist history.
They developed ASDIC? HF/DF? Hedgehog? Even the depth charge?
No, that was all the British.
I would say technological development plus the Enigma decrypts were the biggest factor.
"When whole squadrons of very long-range aircraft were operating out of bases in the Shetlands, Northern Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland (and, after mid-1943, the Azores), and when the Bay of Biscay could be patrolled all through the night by aircraft equipped with centimetric radar, Leigh Lights, depth charges, acoustic torpedoes, even rockets, Doenitz’s submarines knew no rest." [0]
[0] Kennedy, Paul. Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned The Tide in the Second World War, from the chapter 'How to Get Convoys Safely Across the Atlantic'
And not even British. For example most of the Enigma decryption was the genius work of a Polish man. Britain received the immigration of half the Nobel prices of the world in a couple years as the jews escaped nazism.
For the much harder Lorenz cipher used by German High Command from 1940, the Colossus machine was developed by Tommy Flowers at the GPO and became operational in 1944.
None of which involved the US Navy, which was my original point.
The Army tried reducing the sizeof their tank force, and had to back down after screams from Congress because it would have meant job losses in some representative's district. The US poured money into the strike fighter and littoral ship projects, despite the brass telling them it was the wrong approach. And so on. (I suspect this is one reason why Anduril have been successful, since they have fewer sacred cows that must be fed.)
Now we are in a timeline where the top brass are being ejected unless they toe the Party line. I am not optimistic that this will lead to better outcomes in terms of our ability to win against adversaries.
These days I usually just get AI to do it!
Much more innovative, much more efficient!
So you can find new way to terrorise the world? Right attitude but wrong application.
Even when discussing a war that's obviously gone out of hand with no easy resolution in right, there's still this air, this attitude from American commenters that somehow the might and brilliance of the US military will prevail in the end and they can restore their position as leaders of the free world. Meanwhile the rest of the world has waited 50 years for this day.
Let me have a little schadenfreude with my €2.20+ litre of petrol.
I sympathize with the sentiment even though I am American. The problem with this is that Americans are not a uniform cohort.
The people who deserve to eat humble pie in this scenario are neck deep in propaganda and their own inflated egos and will never learn any rational lesson from this despite how catastrophically it might go. The Americans who are paying attention and will understand the harm of this operation already know it's a fiasco and wish the country was doing anything but what it is doing.
They will turn on someone or something they can blame.
50 years ago America got brought to its knees by a Middle East oil crisis. There was mass fuel rationing, nationwide laws passed for mileage and speed limits, and everyday citizens felt the pain acutely. In response, America developed a massive oil industry with cutting-edge technology and is now the largest oil producer in the world, by far. Now, 50 years later, America wages a war of revenge but they know they aren't going to feel the same pain they felt 50 years ago because of their strategic preparation.
Perhaps America isn't as dumb as you think. Perhaps it was the rest of the world that didn't make plans for the future?
A war of what? Do you really believe that states wage war because of "revenge"?
> Perhaps America isn't as dumb as you think
No, they are dumber.
If this presidency was in Europe - or any other 1st world country - it would have been obliterated immediately and the party wiped out in the next elections.
> because of their strategic preparation.
lol to that.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2026/03/25/americans-br...
don't confuse american citizens with the bought-and-paid talking & tweeting heads we are forced to live with
Plain anti-war protests could draw significant support across the political spectrum, so divisive issues are inserted as wedges. Same thing that happened in the 60's, when the anti-war movement went from a coat-and-tie affair to a laurel canyon one.
Seriously, I'm sure you're smart enough to know this is absurd. Just sit down and think about it a bit.
They are fed by entirely different media machines.
If you like, its a coordination problem where the various groups no longer have the commons of a shared reality to coordinate through.
Complaints against the right are usually about their actions, the terrible consequences and how they hurt people.
Complaints against the left are often how it makes the complainer feel, it's a mental struggle to not admit they like the result of right wing policies and not being able to embrace a left wing position despite knowing on some level that they should.
It's self-righteous to say they care about other people but want to help those people with other people's money, not their own. Statistically speaking leftists give far less to charity.
There is a legitimate cross-ideology opportunity here that the war party (which spans both american political parties) is desperate to keep from materializing.
Prominent right-wing figures who are against this war:
- Tucker Carlson
- Thomas Massie
- Candace Owens
- Marjorie Taylor Greene
- Rand Paul
- Steve Bannon
- Nick Fuentes
- Matt Gaetz
Honourable mentions:
- Joe Rogan (I know many people on HN would consider him right wing)
- Charlie Kirk (in the months leading up to his death he said it would be a "catastrophic mistake")
Trump's approval rating has dropped -16.7 points: this represents many of his core supporters bleeding away.
If no, then why does their disposition matter?
Yet, Americans elected Trump, twice even, and gave his party control over the other branches of government at the same time.
We'll see at the midterms how much the American populace really disagrees with what the government is doing.
Many Americans may be absolutely against this horrible, barbaric, idiotic action in the Middle East, but they might wisely not want to talk about it.
So let me say "Thank you to all American troops for your service, God bless America. Our military is the only reason we have peace and freedom." - this is my official public opinion as an American and I would never have at least two witnesses catch me saying anything different.
I'm almost perturbed to not see it discussed at all. What are the casualty estimates of blasting open the Strait?
-At the very minimum you would have to search and secure 130 000 square kilometers in a mountainous region, in a hostile country where you have no popular support, and where most of the male population has had somewhere around two years of military training. To be sure that Iranians couldn't lob anti-ship missiles into the strait, you'd probably need to double or triple that area. -And that's because of anti-ship missiles, with distances ranging from few hundred kilometers to thousand or more. And only one missile needs to get through to cause a mass casualty event onboard of a warship involving hundreds of people.
So, assuming that troops get to the shore, then there's the slight peculiarity of modern warfighting. Drones. Cheap and plentiful, with FPV drones having the range varying from 30 to 60+km, you can be assured that visitors stay on shore or island(s) will be filled with plenty of activities such as listening to never ending buzzing of drones or trying to find cover from those drones. As good as US electronic warfare efforts might be, wire-guided FPV drones don't really care. So unless the US incursion is going to be anything but a short 30 minute visit to a largely meaningless Tump island we're probably going to be looking at hundreds of casualties if we are extremely lucky. If they really want to open and "secure" the Strait, I think we're going to be looking at Russo-Ukrainian war-tier butcher's bill.
And since that would be perfectly fine for Israel, I think that's exactly what we'll be getting. I hope I'm wrong though.
Sending armed agents at protesters is seen as being the same thing as sending pest control to clear out beaver dams on the creek. Nobody cares what the beavers think, they are not human, they do not have feelings. They are simply a menace to be dealth with.
Or, if an anonymous and uncorroborated source claims tens of thousands of said protestors were allegedly massacred.
If it doesn't, and the strategy now involves blowing up desalinization plants ( https://apnews.com/article/trump-iran-threat-desalination-pl... ) and invoking a humanitarian crisis on the level of a nuclear catastrophe, well... then they're a bit less concerned about human rights.
We're just skipping Charlottesville and the Capitol? We have idiots on both of our fringes. But only one of them is in power right now.
Even the example you gave is incorrect. Lol. It's so obvious when conservatives cherry pick information to placate their views.
As long as you ignore the feces smeared on the walls and the injured police.
This article is actually unusually good, I wouldn't be surprised if the site was generally anti-war. It isn't unusual for the level of analysis to be "we're the in-group, we're morally right, they're the out-group, we can't imagine they're competent, lets kill them it'll be easy". The moment people start doing serious analysis they become well-armed pacifists. As a case study; this war is part of a trend of the US hurting itself in aid of ... nothing useful for the US. The only silver lining is I don't see the Trump presidency surviving this and that might be a lesson to the next guy about trying to start fights.
Just not planning for anything that might help "make America great again".
"This war will surely bring about regime change," says the Oracle.
"Good," thinks Trump as he heads into the defense meeting.
Looney Tunes language like this projects an aura of un-reality further in the article, which I like even less.
It's not mass killing, it's statecraft.
It's not casual, it's responsible.
[reads article]
Yep, got it in one!
If little Iran can prevent the US from being able to establish security in a little straight, it (ideally) shatters that image and causes some soul searching for what US taxpayers are buying with the military.
And just like the Vietnamese, Iran doesn’t have to win against the US. They only have to not lose. They control the straight, and at $1 per barrel toll, they’ll be making $1 Billion a week. Trump owned himself. This is going to suck.
Regardless of the analogies, the reality is that even with all the resources the US spent on its military, after a whole month, it cannot guarantee safe passage through a body of water adjacent to a small time adversary. Which, as an American, is embarrassing in terms of ROI on tax dollars spent.
To put it in perspective - in Vietnam, opposition forces lost over a million troops and continued to fight viciously. The US lost around 50,000 and gave up and left.
Democratic countries simply lack the stomach for this kind of thing (which is a good thing, really).
Obviously, there were other things going on in Vietnam (and Afghanistan and the larger War on Terror) to keep them fighting but it's much easier to muster up the manpower when a war seems existential because it's happening in your neighborhood.
High tech interceptors and missiles and aircraft carriers are great, but with China's help these are outnumbered by three (soon to be four) orders of magnitude.
It's unclear if we can do much other than threaten sanctions and nukes, with not much in between.
We make plenty of stuff at scale. We just haven’t designed any of military around it since WWII.
> unclear if we can do much other than threaten sanctions and nukes
We could learn from our allies in Ukraine. Give them capital and manufacturing bases in America.
I think the Ukranians are still unimpressed with the withdrawal of US support, especially from the shells which were being manufactured in the US (now moved to Rheinmetall), and the de-sanctioning of Russian oil: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm2871wyz9ko
Problem is that US wants to distance itself instead of ending the conflict
Sorry, what is "the other side" exactly?
Considering that Trump literally tried to blackmail Zelenskyy in his first term, why on earth would they have supported him in 2020?
Not the stuff that matters (chips, electronics, metals, etc). We don't even have a primary lead smelter, which we would likely need if we got into a peer conflict.
It's also important to note that the US lacks the ability to quickly pivot and set up plants. Much of the knowledge to do so has been disappearing as employment in that sector has been steadily declining for decades. Sure we make stuff at scale using automation, but that automation can't be changed to significantly different stuff in a reasonable timeframe.
Now granted, I'm not naive enough to think we should be able to be self-sufficient and manufacture everything ourselves. I think it is fine to import stuff. My bigger concern is, for some things, there just isn't a lot of options. I think its fine to buy some of the raw materials from Germany and China, but I'd also like to see a few more countries that they could be bought from.
If we suddenly had to, it would take billions of dollars and several months to spin up any real capacity.
All this stuff requires people. And we simply don’t have them. The folks who could be trained to build such stuff are still in primary school.
I really don't understand the FUD around US manufacturing capability, you'd essentially need to craft the greatest conspiracy ever to think that every politician, defense agency, intelligence agency, etc. is asleep at the wheel to not recognize this supposed threat and do nothing about it.
0: https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/where-does-us-ge...
Where do you think this originates from?
China ships a rather large amount of stuff to these countries to take advantage of the trade agreements. So much that you can find satellite images of large yards in Mexico that are used for this purpose with barely any effort.
These takes are much more doomer than I'm willing to bet the supporters of "bring everything back" realize. Do you have no faith in the US economy / populace adapting to a hypothetical all out war with China?
It’s not like WWII where you have a majority population that works on the farm or in a factory with their hands, and at home fixing stuff that breaks. That sort of population can be rapidly redeployed. We would need to start from the basics like “how to turn a screwdriver” for a huge portion of the workforce.
When you really start looking into things, nearly everything points back to China at some point. Pharmaceuticals? The APIs or at least important precursors largely originate there - even if they hit a middleman country first. Then you get into basic components and it’s the same story. That part from India or Mexico might not be available without China as a backstop.
It’s not an impossible problem, but it’s a problem that took decades and a generation or two to destroy. It’s far easier and quicker to destroy things than build them.
Maybe this video of a rather famous YouTuber trying to manufacture something as simple as a grill scrubber with a US supply chain would help you understand how bad it is?
I am finding it difficult to imagine it'll be any different for terrorists of a different ethnicity.
The device had a physical keyboard with a micocontroller that managed it and they ended up writing the code that ran on that micro as it was largely independent of the code we were writing, and easy for us to test. The first versions were not great, but they got better quickly.
As we talked amongst ourselves about why they were so emphatic about this, it became clear to us that they were taking a long term view of the importance of moving into the intellectual property side of things. Dustin points out that, in some areas, they are there.
Something that stuck with me was that dude had an uncle that worked at a bolt factory down the road, and now there is literally no way to source domestically made bolts. And that they could find one retired guy after scouring multiple states who could help make an injection mold. I'm sure some of the larger defense contractors have a few guys who can do this, but that makes for a pretty low bus factor.
US manufactured fasteners are available*, the Build America, Buy America Act created a market for them. You’re not going to find them at Home Depot or your local hardware store, professional supply houses will sell them to you.
Waivers are available if no US supplier is available, but there usually is a US supplier.
I assume bolt manufacturing is automated to the point where you load up a CNC machine with steel hex stock and get boxes of bolts on the other end, there’s not a ton of labor involved. The machine cuts the hex stock to length, then removes material to create a cylindrical shaft and then threads are cut.
* By US manufactured, I mean ‘compliant with BABAA requirements’, which is something like 55% of the materials and manufactured here.
I'd be shocked if bolts worth a damn weren't forged
Americans are fat and happy now but we are not always this way.
(1) In this back and forth I'm surprised mines in the straight are not mentioned.
(2) im having difficulty seeing how cheap drones incapacitates a carrier. They are there to project force well into enemy territory for precise strikes. The carrier can be some distance from the shore. Now, the question turns to strike what? Surely drone manufacturing plants and barracks would have to be on list or ... they'd be less effective.
(3) if drones are sub-mach speeds why not shoot down with a glorified gattleling gun as opposed to expensive missiles or lasers?
When people claim that America is losing manufacturing jobs, you get the "Oh we produce high value products, mostly military".
Then you get posts like this. How is one to reconcile these ideas? Is Lockheed Martin the Ferrari of weapons?
>When people claim that America is losing manufacturing jobs
That percentage goes down every year due to reduced manufacturing but also jobs are lost to high-tech automation in manufacturing. But it's still a buttload.
Many of the best known American products, e.g. computers, are only assembled in USA from imported parts.
If the imports from certain countries would be completely interrupted, it is unknown how much of that US manufacturing would be able to continue.
Should have worn a suit.
The US is not an ally of Ukraine, it sees Ukraine as a nuisance that should have rolled over long ago but somehow refuses to and because the US still needs Europe for a bit longer (but maybe not that much longer) they're still playing ball as long as Europe pays (as it should, but that's besides the point).
Allies come to each others aid, the US has all but abandoned Ukraine after Trump came to power and did far less than it could have done early on. Why you would expect Ukraine to be generous after the numerous put downs and actions that were clearly organized to benefit Putin is a mystery to me.
The same goes for when you try to strongarm a country into fabricating evidence to shore up your lies.
The USA was an ally in 1945 and has since steadily eroded that. In 2001 they briefly regained a lot of sympathy but squandered it just as fast and now we're at low tide. And I wonder how much lower it will go before people with common sense will be back at the helm and reparation of the relationship can begin, but I don't expect the aftershocks of this to be gone quickly.
And no, help was not offered '90% of the time'. Most of the time it was just business in disguise, altruism did not factor into it as far as I can see.
Already within the subreddits of my nation there is an increasingly dismissive attitude to the historic alliances that kept us safe for around the last hundred years and I can't blame them. Especially if Hormuz remains blocked and the US just walks away leaving this pile of sick of its own creation on the floor. I imagine a new rather loose coalition might rise of such a status quo and its possible that China becomes a major player in that, given its likely desire as a major manufacturer to keep trade open and shipping flowing, which is the opposite of what the US has been doing since 2025.
This is the perfect encapsulation of what I mean in my original response to you. This IS the popular European sentiment. And this is what is off-putting to many Americans. The weight of China and the US is not even worth preference, despite the US having contributed positively to the Ukrainian conflict and European defense. We are not even WORTHY of being placed above China, we're either just as bad or worse is the typical response I see.
Last I checked China hasn't threatened to take over either Canada or Greenland, has not started any major wars for which they expect the EU to pay for cleaning up their mess, has reasonably sane leadership and on top of that has been a fairly trustworthy business partner that does not engage in whim driven economic warfare. They also have a bunch of very dark sides that I am going to assume we are all familiar with.
I really wonder why you think that the USA should be given a free pass for what it has done in the last decade.
And that's before we get into human rights issues and other 'details'. Comparing yourself to China is not the flex you think it is.
Your bio says that "Farming negative karma is not trolling when you're expressing your honest views." and that's all fine, you have a right to your honest views but if they're indistinguishable from trolling to the point that you feel you need to pre-empt that classification then maybe HN is not the place for you?
You're not saying that it's wrong though. Just that you don't like it. So what. It's not wrong.
>You seem to be completely out of touch with the way the USA has been behaving towards the EU as of late, maybe get with the times and then report back. Last I checked China hasn't threatened to take over either Canada or Greenland, has not started any major wars for which they expect the EU to pay for cleaning up their mess, has reasonably sane leadership and on top of that has been a fairly trustworthy business partner that does not engage in whim driven economic warfare. They also have a bunch of very dark sides that I am going to assume we are all familiar with.
I'm aware of everything you've said. What I've noticed is Europeans just like to bash on the US given any reason. My original point is (proven by the exact quote of your words) that this type of European sentiment is accelerating a two-sided voluntary parting. Nothing much more than that. I am not defending the US's actions.
>Comparing yourself to China is not the flex you think it is.
Once again you are proving my point. Europeans are typically not willing to place the US above China. Any attempt to get them to do so will provoke this type of response.
>Your bio says that "Farming negative karma is not trolling when you're expressing your honest views." and that's all fine, you have a right to your honest views but if they're indistinguishable from trolling to the point that you feel you need to pre-empt that classification then maybe HN is not the place for you?
Calling me a troll is just an attack on me and not my argument. That's ok though, no offense taken. The bio is provocation for people who dig into people's profiles. I don't like to do that. I just take the person's posts as is.
This is not a scalar, it is a multi-dimensional array with tons of values that all individually can be ranked. One some of these the USA is better than China on others it is definitely not. You may want to collapse that all to a single 'but we're better' picture but that is just not how the world works.
> The bio is provocation for people who dig into people's profiles. I don't like to do that. I just take the person's posts as is.
And that's not true either because you clearly checked my account upthread to link it to Europe.
This is correct... and like I said the common European sentiment. I think we've exhausted this dialogue. We're restating the same things in more words.
>And that's not true either because you clearly checked my account upthread to link it to Europe.
Your post I originally responded to says "Should have worn a suit." and also mentions Europe and Ukraine. That's basically the entire context of our back and forth. If you have many other posts about the US and Europe's relationship... well I have no knowledge of those posts.
It's actually the common *global* "sentiment", in that it is the natural conclusion of any rational actor regardless of location, and also in that most of the world feels this way.
Europe has nothing to do with it – all the countries being slighted by the USA, including non-European ones, are coming to grips with the same conclusion: the USA can no longer be relied upon*.
* – except when israel asks
You keep saying this as if it's not a totally reasonable position given the behavior of the USA towards others over the past year or so.
The American point of view is, yes we did make a claim towards Greenland which is European territory, but we also helped with European security. These are two separate vectors, right? Now average them. And plot China's vectors. I imagine the vectors China produces is much lower in magnitude, and as such provokes a lower emotional response in terms of opinions.
It's an interesting question! Since you seem to have your finger on the pulse of Europeans, I'll toss it back your way to answer (with data, of course).
> yes we did make a claim towards Greenland which is European territory, but we also helped with European security.
"Yes, we did threaten to invade a sovereign European country for territorial conquest, but we also did good things in the past" is really weak. How has the US helped Europe's security over the last year?
Most of the work in that direction over several decades is being intentionally destroyed as of late by the USA's ruler as a signature policy position of his. We all understand that past performance is not a guarantee of future results, right? What happened recently outweighs what happened previously.
That’s a straw man. Nobody argued that before you mentioned it.
Pretending America has been a strong ally is foolish. The Biden policy yo-yo has resulted in thousands of dead Ukrainians, while Trump has actively sided with Russia in negotiations and cut off meaningful aid. But Ukraine is now essential for NATO security. It is fortunate they see EU membership as their future, because a Russia or China aligned Ukraine would be a huge problem.
What they have is a dire situation that drives efficient and pragmatic proucurement. This is much harder to export.
They built a network centric warefare with starlink and cheap android tablets down to the drone teams in the field.
They built a network of cheap acousting sensors (old phones) as passive sensors and using ML models to find the drones cheaply and increase the coverage. (Radars are expensive and easy to hit because they emit).
What they achieved is a "sensor fusion like" distributed system buid on cheap components and updated realtime. And all this is battle tested in the new environment of transparent battlefield (there is always a drone looking).
Also a lot of real-life electronic warfare stuff and drone applications.
This is what's missing in the US army. They are optimized for a symetrical 20th century warfare.
And ultimately whatever model of distributed lethality / survivability (which US planning foresaw) is less relevant that US global commitments requires high end hardware that has to be rotated / propositioned selectively, and sustainable only in limited numbers vs adversaries mobilized on total war.
But the fundamental problem is US adversaries are catching up on precision strike complex. Iran isn't asymmetric warfare, but restoration of symmetry. It's not so much US getting weaker as adversaries getting stronger, and without monopoly over mass precision strike (which naval / air superiority / supremacy is only delivery platform), US expeditionary mode simply on the losing side of many local attrition scenarios. Ultimately all US adversaries will gain commoditized local precision strike (even deadlier if bundled with high end ISR), at varying scales due to proliferation requiring persistence across global theatres US simply doesn't have numbers/logistics for.
TLDR: US expeditionary model is bunch of goons with rifles in trucks, driving around neighbourhood where everyone had knives that could not get in range. The second everyone else buys guns, then rifles, the expeditionary model breaks.
That is happening, only with "EU" not "America". Because the EU are Ukraine's allies.
https://kyivindependent.com/ukraine-to-open-10-weapons-expor...
https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-to-open-arms-factory...
https://euobserver.com/209049/eu-signs-off-on-e260m-grant-fo...
As for the US being Ukrainian allies as compared to EU, well: https://kyivindependent.com/us-military-aid-to-ukraine-dropp...
I think that it's understood that when we use shorthand such as "US is not supporting Ukraine" that it is the respective governments that we are discussing. The point about the "majority of Americans" is true enough (though you might say that the majority of Americans care about the price of gasoline and groceries and little else politically) but it is rather irrelevant if the administration does the opposite.
In other words, "thoughts and prayers from people" is not enough to make you an ally. Money and policy is the real thing.
But Putin would not like that! /s
The soviet union collapsed as a result of military overspending and massive supply chain corruption in an attempt to keep up with an opponent with lower levels of corruption and a far more powerful industrial base.
Which is to say, inviting the gold toilet brigade from Ukraine to come and build our weapons while showering them with cash would signal that that Christmas came early for Putin.
The US survived spending a trillion dollars to achieve very little in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm sure they'll survive spending another trillion over a decade to achieve nothing in Iran other than hundreds of thousands dead.
The west tolerates nearly all of the corruption in Ukraine but keeps tight control of two political organs in Ukraine - NABU and SAPO.
These "anti corruption agencies" will mostly hear and see no evil until a politican in Ukraine deviates from western foreign policy goals. Then they "discover" how corrupt this one individual turned out to be and crack down on them until everybody is once again on the same page.
Twice they have threatened Zelensky (once when he tried to bring the agencies under his direct control) and twice he has backed down.
Bombing a school is unconscionable but its a shadow of Russia's crimes in Ukraine.
Ukraine is a massive weapons manufacturer. It's a small country holding Russia's entire military-industrial complex at bay. We have a lot to learn from them, even if it's just tactics and industrial organisation. And those lessons don't only apply to fighting pisspot dictatorships like Putin's.
Getting into this war was stupid.
Being unable to win it is also pretty bad.
That sound like he knows what he wants to do, but that's not the same as knowing what he is doing.
One of the contracting things I turned down was someone who knew what they wanted to do was make Uber for aircraft.
I turned it down because they clearly didn't know enough about this goal to fill an elevator pitch, let alone a slide deck, and I think many of the current US Secretary of XYZ leaders are similarly unaware of how vast a chasm lay between what they wanted to do and a specific, measurable, realistic, and time-constrained plan to actually achieve anything.
Nothing about how this war is going suggests he has any idea what he’s doing as SecWar
Whats compounding existing reality, is how cheap it is to use commercial tech from any of these manufacturing hubs, china included, and turn it into a small but persistent offensive weapon.
So now Americas got billions of dollars worth of ammo up agains millions of dollars worth of fodder, and that won't clear the way to controlling a large, well defended plot of land.
America's leaders are drunk and high on their own propaganda, even while Ukraine has demonstrated just how useless the old, bulky and costly tech is.
Russia survives; business as usual, if much poorer. China doesn't want to poison that relationship.
Russia falls; China helpfully "adopts" the orphaned Asian lands.
Iran falls; turmoil follows; the USA as usual (since WWII) has no plans for afterwards. Do nothing until opportunity presents itself.
Iran survives; the US falters; wait and benefit from the opening that creates.
I can't see a path where China picking sides in UKR/RUS nor USA/IRAN benefits China at all.
Millennium Challenge 2002 (MC02) was a major war game exercise conducted by the United States Armed Forces under United States Joint Forces Command in mid-2002: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
Red, commanded by retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper, adopted an asymmetric strategy. In particular, Red utilized old methods to evade Blue's sophisticated electronic surveillance network: Van Riper simulated using motorcycle messengers to transmit orders to front-line troops and World-War-II-style light signals to launch airplanes without radio communications in the model.
Red received an ultimatum from Blue, essentially a surrender document, demanding a response within 24 hours. Thus warned of Blue's approach, Red used a fleet of small boats to determine the position of Blue's fleet by the second day of the exercise. In a preemptive strike, Red launched a massive salvo of cruise missiles that overwhelmed the Blue forces' electronic sensors and destroyed sixteen warships: one aircraft carrier, ten cruisers and five of Blue's six amphibious ships. An equivalent success in a real conflict would have resulted in the deaths of over 20,000 service personnel. Soon after the cruise missile offensive, another significant portion of Blue's navy was "sunk" by an armada of small Red boats, which carried out both conventional and suicide attacks that capitalized on Blue's inability to detect them as well as expected.
be that as it may, the lesson still stands
This article points out, rightfully, how scared we are to put our weapons in harms way because of how expensive they are. I made this argument many times to friends years ago. From a military strategic point of view we should be developing drone/cruise missile carriers (and upping our SSGN capabilities) and abandoning the carrier navy. They are only good for show at port visits and turn useful ships like DDGs into escorts instead of front line assets.
That being said, from a diplomatic strategic point of view, I really like a useless navy full of ships that are good for port visits and not real wars. If you build ships good for real wars you tend to get into wars. If you build ships good for visiting other countries you tend not to go to war with those countries.
It would take much more than the forces in the region, to secure the "strait". To actually secure the strait, you have to secure the entire Persian Gulf. It doesn't matter if tankers can pass through the strait only to be blown up just of Qatar. At it's widest the Gulf is about 360 kilometers, well within the range of most drones, aerial, surface and underwater. So they would have to protect every ship in the gulf, intercept all the drones all the time, or secure the entire coastline. It's simply a task air-power and naval power can't perform. Not without major casualties and without attacks going through.
The US navies ships are good for real wars, but for casualties to be accepted, there has to be a real purpose. Escorting a bunch of privately owned oil tankers to bring down the price of gas does not really cut it.
This is a real war.
Laser and EWar approaches are going to be more successful long-term as the price per "shot" is dramatically less, but deployments are slow.
These have been operational in the US military for almost 15 years now and are widely deployed in the Middle East. You may want to update your priors. The US military anticipated all of this.
While these are cheaper than the Shahed-136, lasers have the advantage of unlimited magazine depth, so it is obvious why the US would invest in that.
From what i understand, i think people use other systems than patriots to shoot down Shaheds except as a last resort. So the cost difference is bad, but its not nearly as bad as it would be if you were using something like a patriot for every drone.
No reason to use unproven technology when there's a practical means available.
It isn’t perfect. It has flaws. War is hard to get right in every dimension.
The British Commonwealth was the biggest factor in Africa, but it's questionable how quickly they could have won out and taken the Suez without the Americans coming in late in 42, which was critical for both vital supplies like oil and also invading Italy. Japan was already getting bogged down with China and even Burma so they wouldn't have suddenly been free to do much in the European theater but just getting Italy out of the fight and forcing Germany to replace their divisions elsewhere. Italy exiting the war removed 30+ divisions between the Balkans and France, while another 70 Axis divisions were being held down by Allied forces in the Mediterranean during D-Day, with there being 33 Axis divisions in Normandy for D-Day itself. A lack of US involvement also likely means that Germany is able to hold Caucasus for longer (and take more of the oil fields), solving a sizable portion of their oil shortage issues.
With Lend-Lease but no active participation in the war from a military deployment standpoint, the UK and USSR do likely eventually win but at much greater cost and not without risk of losing. Without Lend-Lease it is highly possible that the Axis wins, at least in the European theater. Japan had kind of set themselves up to lose from the start no matter what the US did.
Perhaps you're considering only the European theater, but even that would have been significantly more challenging for Russia without the U.S. tying up (and degrading) Axis resources and manpower throughout Europe and elsewhere (e.g. the Pacific). Japan could have very well opened an eastern front for Russia.
And, it was the U.S. that forced a two front war that prevented Germany's fuller focus on Russia's western front (millions fewer troops). Not to mention U.S. logistical and material support to the Soviet Union, which may well have prevented their industrial collapse.
Even with all of this support, the fatality rates for Russia were astronomical. To this day, it boggles my mind that one nation lost ~26 million people in a single war.
Hard to imagine how they would have succeeded without the U.S.
Meanwhile, the American public wants a quick skirmish and a bold "We WON" claim .. it has no appetite for body bags coming home and the price of oil rising.
Which is why if China makes a move on Taiwan, the US can do nothing.
That's what diplomacy is for.
I am not sure about that. Iraq, Afghanistan, to name the new ones and Vietnam to name an old one.
Sure you can take an easy/undisciplined target like Maduro. But many armies in the world can also do that. Another thing that has to be recognized: alternative warfare (ie: terrorism) is a legitimate form of warfare regardless of its morality. You can't, in my opinion, claim military supremacy while not being able to contain these other risks.
Another upcoming one: cyber-warfare.
Asymmetric war fare against a determined enemy is just hard and it always has been. Cheap drones and missiles are part of wars like that now. You can stash them all over the place and dig in. The Russians learned that the hard way in Afghanistan. As did the British before them. And more recently the US of course. The withdrawal from Afghanistan rivaled that of the one in Vietnam. Complete with chaotic scenes of people desperately trying to get out. That's only a few years ago.
In the Gulf, the Houthis still pose a threat after years of determined efforts to take them out. In the same way, it took the Israeli's very long to neutralize Hamas in Gaza. And that's a few tens of miles away from their capital. Same with Hezbollah on their northern border. In Iraq, IEDs kept grinding away at the US forces long after victory was declared. And that was with massive amounts of boots on the ground and the country fully defeated and occupied.
Iran of course has been supplying weaponry for proxy wars like this for decades. Iran is much bigger than Iraq or Afghanistan and much better prepared for a land/guerilla war on their own territory. The country was built on asymmetric warfare like this and has had decades to prepare and dig in and lots of experience via the various proxy wars I mentioned. The unfortunate reality is that that straight is only going to open when Iran decides that is in their interest.
The US navy ships, in this war have performed admirably, they have performed over 850 tomahawk strikes, and navy airplanes have performed thousands of sorties. And have had no casualties due to enemy action. I can't imagine a way they could have performed better.
Clearly the strategy behind the "bomb a bunch of stuff" objective is muddled at best, but that does not reflect badly against the navy. But to the people that set their objectives.
The Navy is performing well at the things it's being tasked with because it's only being tasked with things it can do well! But I think the point of this thread is that it still reflects poorly on the Navy if those things aren't actually useful in this war. They say generals are always preparing for the previous war and perhaps that's happening here.
Meanwhile, lots of innocent lives have been lost, the regime is still where it was before even if some of the faces have changed, there is an E2 that is missing a little piece of its tail, the price of oil has gone up considerably (that may have been an actual objective) and we've been distracted for a while from the Epstein files.
If you think there was an item in the above list that qualifies as an objective then that's fine by me but for me these do not cross that threshold.
Even Trump isn't that dumb. There's a reason he dialed the tariffs back so much; price hikes lose elections.
If there's one highly visible product of whose price all Americans are keenly aware, it's gasoline. And on top of that, it affects the price of pretty much everything else too.
I thought the tariffs would be his undoing but jacking up the price of gas is even worse for him.
Many countries ranging from advanced allies like Japan to random poor countries like the Philippines will see economic damages that are way worse than tariffs.
Iran was a hornet nest. A hornet nest is annoying and dangerous to have around. But it makes no sense to break it open with no plan on how to properly handle the fallout.
What is the point of having by far the worlds most expensive military if it can’t be used to at least ostensibly improve the lives of citizens?
It’s a giant money pit that does… nothing?
While I agree with you in principle, if I have learned anything about politics it is that under whatever political system you care to invent, the people will definitely demand war and a navy to escort private oil tankers if it means they get to drive for $0.01 less per gallon.
The first is bad due to the losses that will be incurred and the difficulty of holding territory.. for unclear strategic reasons (I thought we destroyed their nuclear program last summer / what was the urgency / is this even our war?). The second is bad because the strait was open before this started, so things are worse than starting conditions.
That is not to say Iran is winning. Remember this is not a sports game, and no one needs to win. It is possible, and likely, for everyone to lose (be in a worse position than prior).
These options are not mutually exclusive.
> That is not to say Iran is winning.
They are though, the US administration has already lost it's patience, their strategic objectives (whatever they might have been have clearly not materialized), the talk about talks may very well be the administration preparing to make a bunch of concessions proclaim victory and walk away.
As it's possible for both parties to lose, a party can win all the battles and lose the war.
As of right now, Iran looks likely to end the war with permanent control of the strait of Hormutz. They'll tax the gulf countries in perpetuity.
Gulf countries can't reasonably afford to go to war with Iran over this either, and it's even less likely that they could prevail in such a conflict. Gulf countries can't even afford to go to war with Iran now, with the US actively fighting there.
Iran can suffer terrible short-term and medium-term economic consequences while still establishing a whole new kind of dominance over the region.
This will sure warm one's heart when that one can no longer afford things.
But just tonight, while getting gas just outside St. Louis, a young woman was having an absolute meltdown outside her car about the price of gas being $3.65 a gallon. Wild.
So, yeah, perhaps the price of gas is high enough that the public would tolerate some heavy collateral damage at this point.
Or realize who had caused the whole thing.
- Reddit Ralph
Not sure I hold much hope for this one.
Trump once posted "THE BIDEN FBI PLACED 274 AGENTS INTO THE CROWD ON JANUARY 6".
It was, of course, still his FBI on that date.
"Did Biden drop out?"
Informed electorate, this is not.
Its a great way to diminish what lingering shreds of trust the (hopefully) former allies of the US may still have had.
The US has better ways to decrease oil prices internally that commit to losing boats in the strait.
This was more true in the 70s: the various fuel economy improvements mean that the impact is reportedly less than half this fine, and the millions of people who bought a hybrid or BEV don’t even notice. I think there’s less of an “war at any cost” bloc now, especially after the humiliating collapse of the last Republican president’s big Middle Eastern learning opportunity, and a lot of people would be willing to abandon Israel to fight Netanyahu’s war alone if it saved them money at the pump.
To what end? You can use them as an extremely expensive cargo ship, sure. But if you're talking about launching drones off of our carriers, you have the problem that whatever you are in drone range of is also in drone range of you.
And btw, if you can get a submarince close to your target, torpedoes and missiles are going to be much more effective than drones.
Space is limited on platforms, a submarine might have space for 60 drones or 30 missiles, given the immense cost of the submarine, going with the missiles is the right call.
The trucks launching shaheds that iran is using can fit like 5 such drones, a similar truck could probably fit 2 to 4 cruise missiles the only reason they are using drones is the rapid production and cost associated with drones instead of the cruise missiles.
It's also what Russia built their navy around. How'd that work out?
The US carriers have been involved in every naval action since WWII. They're hardly unused.
But attacking a country of 90 million people and a high level of military sophistication AND who's been expecting the attack and planning for it for many years was always going to be a tall order.
We know the cost. We've conducted that type of warfare before. It's incredibly destructive and barbaric and requires huge amounts of human sacrifice to positively take control of territory after you've finished battering it with high explosives from every available angle. It looks really bad on TV.
> cruise missile carriers
You don't get very large payloads this way. It's fine if you want to pierce the armor of another ship or if you want to launch an "assassination missile" at a single unit but not awesome if you want to replace the capabilities of carriers and battleships and the literal BFGs they carry.
> If you build ships good for real wars you tend to get into wars.
It was meant to be a deterrent against other nation states and one particular form of naval warfare. In the modern world of terrorist cells and asymmetric warfare this may be a moot point.
(As for elections, history has shown that there is no excuse for outright cancelling them; that is an autocratic ploy to become a despot.)
No, it could not. It would be a massive loss. For those that lose their lives, for the rest of the world.
Pesky little--very minor--side effect that it's extracted from Hell, and using it causes the denizens of Hell to spill over to our side. One would say they are "unleashed".
By raising the price of oil so much, our dear leader is trying his level best to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels.
But the consequences would be catastrophic. Not least that Russia would very likely nuke Ukraine to try to force a surrender. And France would have to decide whether to respond in kind.
Trump would not - of course - nuke Russia. Likely not even if Russia launched a first strike.
And it's unlikely Iran would surrender, because Iran has set itself up as a patchwork of semi-independent forces. The immediate response would be a mass missile strike on desalination plants and oil installations in Israel and the Arab states.
The absolute best outcome would be plumes of smoke all over the Middle East.
The worst outcome would be all of the existing minor nuclear nations - North Korea, India, Pakistan, Israel - deciding the safety was off, and why not?
Next Russia takes Ukraine in a week and rich countries will buy nukes from North Korea and Pakistan.
- Republican-led states voluntarily ending their elections.
- In the case where local election authorities refuse, allowing state governments to take action by arresting said local authorities.
- Ending all Federal assistance for states to run and secure elections.
- Posting ICE to all states who insist on having elections, to arbitrarily arrest people going to vote. By the time they can get in front of a judge the election is over. Even if they're released within a few hours they'd likely miss the vote.
- Having ICE seize all "illegally cast" ballots, and the voting machines, preventing counts from completing or being accurate.
- Declaring states who hold an election to be in rebellion, deploying the National Guard or standing military forces.
- Refusing to seat anyone elected from those states who refuse to go along with it. We could see something like Republican states are allowed to "elect" new representatives as long as they allow an ICE presence everywhere, along with the arbitrary arrest. Speaker Johnson then refuses to seat any newly elected officials from any other states.
- Arrest of newly elected officials as illegitimate, and the seating of Republican candidates instead, similar to the fake elector scheme from 2020.
We can insist that all of these things are illegal, or that people won't go along with it. We would likely see the start real, violent resistance, but that doesn't mean they won't try.
Edit: Looks like he's starting already, by trying control all mail in ballots. He's going to issue an executive order ordering the USPS to filter ballot mail according to a master list compiled by the administration. Obviously this why they wanted voter rolls and have been seizing ballots. Even if the court immediately rules it illegal, why would anyone trust mail in voting? He's essentially cancelled the election for those who vote by mail.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/31/trump-mail-in-voting-executi...
I think a lot of people struggle to imagine the kinds of dirty-deeds ("ratf***ing") that are both possible and effective, especially when the perpetrators don't (feel) constrained by an implicit baseline of plausible consistency or morality. Being unable to brainstorm them up is, perhaps, a kind of backhanded compliment.
Imagine trying to warn someone in 2010 that in a few years an outgoing President, stung at an election loss, could foment a violent mob that would break into the Capitol to hunt and chase legislators that were formalizing that loss, issue blanket pardons for everyone involved, and his party would still protect him from being impeached over it.
For that matter, some people are still surprised to learn about the "Brooks Brothers Riot" [0] of 2000, where a crowd of Republican campaign staffers threatened workers into stopping a recount of certain ballots.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/24/us-elections...
This shouldn't be hard to understand: there are any number of things an unfettered executive can do to turn the election that isn't simply cancelling them.
The law?
He doesn’t care about that…
It's not like ICE can just roll into a state capitol and stop elections.
How many folks would be required for that at each polling place? Ten? Fifty? There are 3500+ counties in the US, usually with multiple polling places. You'd need tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of troops for that.
And that's a lot of armed thugs. Likely the National Guard would need to be federalized, but I find it hard to believe that commanders would follow such illegal orders.
Do you think that the overwhelming tactical success in Venezuela, or the basically flawless decapitation strikes in the opening weeks of the Iran conflict were gut reactions?
Because of that’s the case I’d be terrified to know what the Pentagon is capable of if they really put their mind to it.
Ah, the flawless decapitation strikes that have shown Iran we truly mean business. Remind me, how quickly did they surrender after those strikes?
Oh, they didn't?
Maybe they weren't "flawless", hmm?
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5789279-strait-hormuz-oil...
If it was as effective as you presume, the strait would have been open by now.
some rearranged concrete, maybe mixed with missile parts
does not change anything
unless you know you have eliminated ALL threads
which you would never know
and probably never achieve anyway
The critical thing about hidden missiles that you seem to be missing is: you can't bomb them if you don't know where they are.
We've already seen a 4 week bombing campaign that has included everything from a children's school to a chemotherapy company to bunkers under Tehran, so I don't think there's a lack of "bloodlust" or "gumption" from any of the so-called leaders at the DoD. Rather, it seems that they simply - don't know where the missiles and drones are. Which as I pointed out earlier, makes it rather hard to bomb them.
Where I live - we face a severe shortage of LPG fuel due to this. Quite a few restaurants have shut down temporarily. Migrant workers around the parts who have no access to a kitchen because they live in tiny quarters with a bedding and a common toilet are struggling to find sustainable food. Acquaintances who own workshop are running around trying to figure out food arrangements for their employees. And we are not even party to this shitty war!
We are making do with electric alternatives but thats also because we are in the top 5%. Our household staff are struggling to figure out the situation. Induction gas stoves are either stocked our or selling for 3-4x their regular price. Even if they get access to one - electric supply is unreliable and they are not sure how to pay the bill. Electricity usage is subsidized (its free upto 200 Kwh / month) but if it exceeds that they will have to pay full price which hurts their budget quite a lot.
You're right. But you're also wrong. People who voted for this admin have been (and are being) deported. Or someone they know. Or their employees aren't showing up. Or, for some of us, we worry that someone close to us is at risk any day now.
I didn't vote for the asshole, but many are feeling the consequences. They can ignore some of them and they might have much more relief from the outcome, but a lot of people are suffering.
Meanwhile, rah-rah dumbasses think he can do no wrong and buy into propaganda that tells them why it's someone else's fault that they're worse off.
Drones and ballistic missiles make area denial asymmetrically cheap for a defending forces. This lesson needs to be incorporated because it would be the same tactic used by China to deny access to the South China Sea.
Is anti-missile defense is just that good on ships that no amount of simultaneous missiles and decoys can overcome it?
My sense at the moment is they are pursuing a "humiliation" strategy where they will persuade Trump to withdraw by making it too embarrassing to continue. For that, all they have to do is make him look impotent, which they achieve by continuously provoking just enough to force a response (either military, or Trump to issue yet another TACO threat he can't carry through with) but then popping up a few days later with a new attack showing it didn't work.
In fight against ISIS, the Iraqi amry, Shia Militias, Kurds and others were ground forces while Allies were in Air. In Afghanistan & Gulf War, US forces were on ground.
But in these "conflict", no party is ready to send ground forces, ground forces to stop the air drones, ship drones etc. So the "blockade" will probably continue.
The Gulf coastline is almost 1000 miles long, there would have to be a gigantic occupation of an area the size of a small country, at the same time as there would be 'all out war' with Iran, which would be backed by China and to a lesser extent Russia, and whereupon an invasion would provide them with millions of determined fighters.
We're talking 'Gulf War' scale of operation against a much bigger, more capable country, and of forces willing to fight.
And the US doesn't even have anywhere to do it from.
Assuming a Gulf country would host an invasion force - extremely unlikely - there's no magical way for US to cross the Gulf with large numbers of forces, as we can't get capitol ships in there in the first place.
There's no amphibious capability at the scale necessary on the Arabian Sea.
Literally just the logistics of large scale landings is almost impossible.
That leaves the Kuwait / Iran border, and maybe something a bit wider.
And then fight through the mountains across the Gulf?
The thought is absurd, it's a 'major campaign theatre' - of which US forces were theoretically capable of fighting in two at once, but that's not pragmatic. That's 'wartime economy' kind of thing.
It's possible but unlikely that 10K marines and paratroopers are going to be able to do much, because it's very risky and likely won't accomplish much.
If you want to secure even 5 miles inland over 1000 miles, that's 50,000 square miles, or an area bigger than more than half the countries on earth, including North and South Korea,
Iran is the 18th largest country in the world
If you want to secure the entire Strait, sure. My understanding is you'd only seek to hold the area around the Musandam Peninsula, along with a couple of the islands near it.
Granted it may not have to be 'the whole thing' but something like it.
Sure, but its effect is far more dilute. In the Strait–in particular, around the Musandam Peninsula–it has unique geostrategic leverage.
Iran only needs to score 'one point' to win the whole game.
If they can threaten tankers, then the gulf will remain closed, and that's that.
It's really debatable if the US really has the capability to play 'whack a mole' and get all the moles.
It’s a lot more feasible to escort tankers after the Strait than it is before, when American warships have to come close to shore. Iran doesn’t have the resources to deny access to the entire Indian Ocean.
I have what may be a scale issue in my imagination, so bear with me if this is silly.
There are reports of international drug transport via seaborne drones in the 0.5-5 tonne range, and of these crossing the Pacific, and the cost of the vehicles is estimated to be around 2-4 million USD each. If drug dealers can do that, surely Iran (and basically everyone with a GDP at least the size of something like Andorra's) should be able to make credible threats to disrupt approximately as much non-military shipping as they want to worldwide?
Sure. Do you think that means worldwide shipping would shut down?
And the point isn't to take the risk to zero. But to a level where military escorts can feel safe.
I think there's a danger of that, at least if countermeasures are not easily available for normal shipping.
Even 1-on-1 rather than 1-v-everyone, there's too many players (not all of them nations) with too many conflicting goals and interests. If Cuba tried to do it, could they credibly threaten to sink all sea-based trade involving the USA? If not Cuba, who would be the smallest nation that could?
And the same applies to Taiwan and China, in both directions, either of which would be fairly dramatic on the world stage, even though China also has land options. Or North Korea putting up an effective anti-shipping blockade against Japan.
> But to a level where military escorts can feel safe.
Are there enough military ships to do the escorting?
Note that the era of free navigation is recent and short. Countermeasures would certainly emerge. But shipping wouldn’t stop.
> Are there enough military ships to do the escorting?
For critical passage, yes. If Iran is just taking pot shots at any ships anywhere, you basically have to actually blockade it.
Also the US and Europe would be pretty fucked since we depend on it much more.
China could still get resources from russia and is much more self sustained.
Also China and Russia want to break the us hegemony.
America would be fine. We have the Americas and Asia to trade with, and Iran can’t restrict those oceans in any meaningful way.
Europe, the Middle East, Africa and non-China Asia would get screwed.
Iran hit an E-3's antenna in an airport in Riyadh with a precision strike. Was it not worth defending?
How many tankers inside the Gulf do they need to hit before the rest of the world decides it's a bad idea to send new tankers to the Gulf?
And if new tankers don't go into the Gulf, then it's simply not open for business. That's their leverage.
Hard to see it any other way.
(Edit: highly professional I might add. There are quirks, and obvious hints of 'nationalist bias' - but that's to be expected. They are not the 'cultural problem' we see on the news - at least not for now. They lean 'normal')
The current Joint Chiefs is a bit obsequious but he's not crazy.
These are very sane people, for the most part.
They may be pressed to do something risky, like land troops at Kharg island, but not completely suicidal.
That 'risk' may entail getting a number of soldiers captured, but that's not on the extreme side of military failure, it's mostly geopolitical failure. It would certainly end DJT as a popular movement.
Having a ship hit, or a few soldiers captured - and this sounds morose - is normal. That's why they exist. It's the political fallout that's deadly.
They won't do anything to crazy. The craziest thing they could do is 'full invasion' and Congress won't allow that. It's very unpopular and DJT has populist instinct as well - he's trying to 'find a way out'.
I don't know, they've been talking up a lot of crazy stuff, like strikes on desalination facilities and the power grid.
> The craziest thing they could do is 'full invasion' and Congress won't allow that.
Genuninely unclear to me whether Congress has control here; don't they currently have a Republican majority who will agree to anything anyway?
- Congress is in charge. First - they need budget, and the GOP majority has zero appetiate for approving this.
Remember that most of the GOP dislike Trump, and they also don't like this war, it's risky to the US - and - their own jobs.
So the GOP finds ways to 'resit' Trump without sticking their neck out. They do this collectively by grumbling and not passing legislation.
The majority leaders tell Trump 'We just don't have the votes for it!' thereby not taking a position against Trump, more or less 'blaming the ghosts in the party' kind of thing.
That's very different than passing legislation that reels Trump in, that's 'active defiance'.
So by 'passive defiance' and not approving $, the majority holds the Admin back.
Remember that nobody wants this, not the VP, not Rubio. Hegseth is a 'TV Entertainer'. The Defence Establishment and Intelligence Establishment knows this is stupid. 80% of Congress wants it over now.
If DJT has 65% poularity and 75% for the war, the equation would tilt, but as it stands, there is not enough political momentum.
But anything could happen ...
The death or capture of US soldiers could strongly evoke people to move one way or the other.
THE rest of your screed follows from inattentive disorder.
I'm paying relatively close attention.
Just FYI, US forces are enormous, and with a very long and institutionalized history, and it would take at least decade to tilt them in such a manner, moreover, it's not even happening in the way you're insinuating.
Removing certain DEI polices will have a very marginal affect on anything but senior officer promotions, as US forces are very meritocratic in most ways already.
Removing transgender personnel etc. is arguably unfair in many ways - but will have absolutely zero effect on those institutions overall. None.
Nobody is getting 'retired' for not being sufficiently MAGA, other than a few select positions in Washington.
Your comment is uninformed and unwelcome; you'll have to do a bit better than consume Reddit in order to gain actual knowledge and perspective, and save yourself the embarrassment.
Civilian leadership takes a few forms, there is a division between the powers of Executive and Congress. The military won't pursue anything long term without the backing of both.
There are a lot of legal thresholds, Congressional approval being just one of them.
There is institutional incumbency, and the military will push back extremely hard on things that it deems impossible, or excessively risky.
Populism etc. etc..
There are so many factors.
If they want to mount a risky 500 000 person invasion of Iran, they'll have to do a lot of 'convincing' and get a lot of buy in from stake holders. There is no chance that the Executive count mount that kind of operation without a lot of institutional buy in.
The part that makes the Strait weird is no belligerent wants it entirely closed. (Maybe Israel.) Iran wants to export. And America wants exports. So you get this weird stalemate where America doesn’t want to actually blockade Iran, while Iran seems to do just enough to keep America from actually shutting the Strait.
Single market. Every barrel China buys from Iran is a barrel it doesn’t scour the global markets for.
> getting out of the war with Iran by starting a war with China
China isn’t getting into a war with America over the Strait.
Not really, they were getting discounted oil prices previously that they are no longer able to get.
Also, they are a large importer of oil compared to the US, which is an exporter. They have much more to lose from high oil prices than we do.
Single market. Every barrel China buys from Iran is a barrel it doesn’t scour the global markets for.
Uhm, why would America shut the strait?
To deny Iran oil revenue.
The US is facing the same issue in Iran. You can bomb all you like, but a bomber, like a drone, can't hold land. Iran can launch drones and missiles towards the Strait of Hormuz from the entire country, denying anyone access, but also without being able to hold it.
Because they went in without a plan, or even a goal really, the US administration denied itself, and everyone else, access to the strait. The military leadership probably knew this. If not they could have asked Ukraine if this was a sound idea, given their knowledge and experience with Iranian drone technology.
You couldve seen anti militsry industry sentiment on HN for years, which apparently worked for US adversaries, who knows who was behind that propaganda :)
Inb4: im from eu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_projection
The leader image is ... a US aircraft carrier (the USS Nimitz). That's what the US uses its military power for, to influence events in lands far, far away from its territory.
But, now, tell me which one of the many wars that the US has fought in after WWII did not end in disaster. Afghanistan? Iraq? Korea?
There was a meme doing the rounds the other day: "Name a character who can defeat Captain America". The answer being "Captain Vietnam". The US has faced humiliating defeat after humiliating defeat while bringing death and destruction and immeasurable misery to millions around the world.
That is what HN users seem to have an "anti" sentiment for. If you watch the news you'll be able to tell that this goes far beyond HN. The whole of US society seems to be extremely tired with those "forever wars", those senseless excursions to faraway lands, that not only do not secure US interests but turn world opinion more and more against the US. Even the US' closest allies now fear the US: vide Greenland. Anyone with more than a video game or comic book understanding of how the real world works would do well to be concerned.
Edit: also from EU, btw. Greek but living in the UK.
Korea: the south became an economic powerhouse with whom we now trade for critical computer components and is a generally reliable ally in the region.
Vietnam: we now trade with them happily and enjoy generally productive relations, largely because they fought us for less than two decades but fought China for centuries and centuries.
Iraq: we aren't yet a generation past, but the government they have now is better than what they had under Saddam Hussein, even if it was almost immediately subverted by Iran. And jury is out on Iran because that hot war just started.
Afghanistan: we aren't yet a generation past, but very likely the most clear failure in this list. I remember thinking in high school (during the active phase of the war): "if we actually want to make a difference, we'd have to stay a century or more, and we don't have the will to do that the way the British or Russians tried to, and even they ultimately failed to make any local changes."
Europeans also need to realize that everyday Americans don't actually care about Europe very much and never truly have. It took the Lusitania to get us into World War I, Pearl Harbor (and Hitler's declaration of war) to get us into World War II, and the credible threat of the Soviet Union to keep us in Europe for decades after the war. The husk of Russia at the center of the Soviet skeleton isn't a credible threat to America, and the American reversion to the mean of isolationism began as the Cold War ended. That reversion completed sometime between 2010 and 2015. There is a new credible threat, but that is China, and even to well informed Americans Europe is slipping from their attention.
Most people in Trump's government probably don't care that much about reopening Hormuz quickly. Gas prices are only truly spiking in U.S. states where local environmental regulations have obstructed access to domestic and regional supply, and the largest of those states (i.e. California, New York) have broken against Republicans in every Presidential election (9 of them in a row) since the end of the Cold War.
At least you're honest. Personally I can't believe someone would think it's OK to invade someone else's county and massacre civilians on the scale of Vietnam or Korea in order to establish profitable trading relations.
This is the main thing I would disagree with, as an American who rubs elbows with conservatives quite a bit.
A large amount of Republican and conservative Americans want war. They're primed for a war they haven't had this generation. There are a lot of relatively young conservatives who are eager for war. A weird number of Republicans don't think we lost Iraq or Afghanistan, or a few other wars, so they aren't tired of it yet.
Like 15-25% of Americans also believe in some form of the end times prophecy involving Israel. I'm not kidding about this. The number really is that high. A lot might not openly state that they believe in it, but they were raised under a religious teaching that says it will happen. Hegseth, literally, has a crusades tattoo and openly talks about eradicating Muslims on his weekly or monthly sermon.
But yes a majority of americans, like 60%, are extremely tired of ongoing wars. But I can also drive to towns in the western US where trump still has majority support and they will openly say they support the Iran war. America is really polarized and a lot of conservatives only talk about this stuff to family now.
I grew up super rural and have to deal/work with very religious conservative Americans often enough. There are a lot more of them than people think. They've just learned to self-segregate and keep to themselves and say things a certain way.
People are just making the obvious choice most of the time. Why risk your business success unnecessarily?
Me.
US Forces and Defence Complex have most of the talent they need.
Even with prevailing capabilities in many areas, it's not possible to do most things. Armies are not 'magic' - we're lulled into a false sense of understanding of capabilities by focusing to much on 'special forces' and other kinds of operations.
They might not have been the best, but lets not pretend we're sending our brightest minds herw.
US weapons are pretty damn good for the most part. But trade protection is just not something fancy advanced weapons can solve.
Military planners have known this for a long time.
If anything, if you were serious you would say that the US didnt pay enough tradesmen and technician to build enough of the needed weapons.
The first thing they are going to see is the salary and run a mile. That's partly why Palantir 'works'; they pay tech salaries and have a tech culture, but do gov work. Booz Allen et al were less advanced prototypes of that as well.
Yeah, the ultimate place of military preparedness.
https://acoup.blog/2026/03/25/miscellanea-the-war-in-iran/
> This is the second sudden bombing campaign the country has suffered in as many years – they do not want there to be a third next year and a fourth the year after that. But promises not to bomb them don’t mean a whole lot: establishing deterrence here means inflicting quite a lot of pain. In practice, if Iran wants future presidents not to repeat this war, the precedent they want to set is "attacking Iran is a presidency-ending mistake." And to do that, well, they need to end a presidency or at least make clear they could have done.
Can they do that: yes, keep Hormuz shut until much closer to November, and "the economic and political fallout will be too big."
While neither of us have any special insight into that, and no-one has certainty, I urge you to read the essay linked, as this topic is in fact discussed with historic examples. "There is a frequent mistake, often from folks who deal in economics, to assume that countries will give up on wars when the economics turn bad ... There is a great deal of ruin in a nation."
You are right that the the Iranian regime's short and longer term goals align. But, happenstance or not, they are aligned and likely will stay that way.
That’s the thing there is no stopping it now. Trump walks away and Iran taxes every barrel that goes through the straight. There is no return to normal.
Right, Short of unconditional surrender, it is very hard for one party in a war to just end it without the other side also agreeing to cease. Otherwise, walking away just lets them target your back.
Practically speaking, the Musandam Peninsula [1]. Open that to the sea and you make everyone except Iraq and Kuwait happy.
Once you have sighted the ship it is an undergrad project to implement target classification and recognition using off the shelf algorithms. It doesn't need a fast GPU because naval engagements are very slow, a cheap mobile phone can do it.
Oman is a regional ally, but they would not stand idly by while their citizens are killed.
Actual short-range weapons can't cross the strait. The ones that can don't care much about the difference on the rest of the place.
Doubtful China would provide that because they want oil, but likely Russia would, because they want high oil prices and American humiliation.
Nice.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-01/trump-rages-at-allies...
There are also fewer ships than in the 80’s, and everything costs too much. F-35’s vs. F16 birds, the gripen argument in Canada or Europe. How to get companies and staff to embrace low tech solutions in a rapid mapper.
Perhaps they can remember history and make planes that support ground operations rather than high tech birds. Having more, slower birds with cannons would help with drone warfare. Armour also helps.
And yeah, selling ads vs more interesting tech solutions was a cliche 10+ years ago.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members'_Prot...
China's coast is mostly enclosed by the 'First Island Chain', which extends from Japan to Taiwan, through the Philippines and Borneo (look up a map and the situation will be very clear). Imagine strings of islands along the US coasts controlled by Chinese allies and with Chinese and allied forces training intensively there.
The American plan is to keep the Chinese navy trapped (or under assault) along its own coast by putting Marines (and Army soldiers too, I think) on the islands with anti-ship missiles.
The northern tip of the Philippines is as close to Taiwan as the Chinese mainland is; the US and Philippines are conducting an essentially endless series of military exercises and the US is placing some of its most advanced missiles there.
However, I doubt that the huge and vulnerable carriers of today have any future.
Carriers designed not for manned aircraft, but only for drones, missiles and guns would allow the use of a much greater number of small carriers instead of a few huge and expensive carriers.
Such carriers could be mostly automated and they would need much smaller crews, instead of being floating cities.
My own view is that if you have the power to delete your enemy while he's weak, you do it. Why the fuck would you wait until he gets the nukes he promises to get, or uses them on you like he also promises to do? At least the Israelis seem to understand this.
The US has already alienated their allies anyway, and as we've seen with this fiasco, it isn't like those allies are particularly useful anyway, so if the US did use nukes to very quickly solve what has been an intergenerational problem, so what? Oh no, condemnation from the international community. Nobody cares.
Unfortunately this will almost definitely occur after Israel has included it's invasion of Lebanon and annexed more territory, which is what this whole war seems to be a cover for.
> Zelenskyy also said that Ukraine is willing to share its expertise in unblocking maritime trade routes with the naval drones.
> “We shared our experience with the Black Sea corridor and how it operates. They understand that our Armed Forces have been highly effective in unblocking the Black Sea corridor. We are sharing these details.”
2nd Epstein war.
I guess that would involve admitting something about the morality of what the USA has been doing since the end of WWII though...
And yet none did. Because they listened to their security chiefs and advisors who would tell them, Iran is a highly complex multiethnic geographically complex country. If you can contain it with diplomacy, that’s preferable.
When listening to “experts” becomes taboo, there will be consequences.
The inhabitants of the Iranian plateau have been the subject of the ire of the military superpower of their era quite a few times. Alexander the Great conquered them and set their capital and their sacred books on fire and yet a mere 70 years later his Hellenic dynasty was gone. They were conquered by the Arabs and were forced to give up their religion but somehow, unlike Egypt and Syria/Lebanon and many other ancient places, these guys somehow kept their language and distinct culture intact. They were decimated (maybe even worse ) by Genghis Khan and followed quickly by Tamerlane and yet, it was their Turco-Mongol rulers who ended up adopting their language and culture.
The inhabitants of this land have deep memory of knowing how to suffer, to endure and to survive. It wasn’t that long ago that from Constantinople to New Delhi, the language of the Imperial Court was Persian.
You don't need to fight armies - just make it suicide to command them. Decapitation strikes work.
"What if you had a time machine and could go back to kill Hitler?" Well yeah, no need to fight all of Germany.
Would the Ukraine war still be going without Putin at the helm?
The logical conclusion of drone war is take out whoever controls the drones.
Could that work? It didn’t end well in Vietnam, which is about a fifth of the land area, and, in 1970, half the current population of Iran.
Also, they’ll pack a bigger punch, but I think the USA has way fewer bombers now.
We can't carpet bomb to regime change. But we can probably depopulate critical areas around the coasts while ships transit. It's stupidly expensive, both in materiel and collateral cost. But it's feasible. Whether we have the bomb-production is a separate question to which I don't have the answer.
(looks at map) the city of Bandar Abbas, population ~500k? It's already being hit as it contains the Iranian Navy HQ, but actually depopulating it is a much bigger project.
Carpet bombing. You don’t get to bury things in the sand, much less unbury them. It’s an old tactic—shaping movement with artillery—except done with remote pieces.
> range is so great you would have to pacify the entire east of Iran
West. Also, I don’t think so. Just critical zones. Worst case, only U.S. escorted and Iran toll-paying ships get through. (Worst case for the world. Not the belligerents. Which…that might be the solution.)
The vast areas in the East are where you can strike shipping. You would only strike the West if your intention was to kill Iranians rather than end the war.
But the Russians have been doing it. Iran may have targeted an Israeli power plant. The precedent, unfortunately, is set.
Different goals. Carpet bombing to deny Iran access to its coast is maneouvre warfare. It’s tactical. Carpet bombing to force Kyiv to capitulate is strategic bombing. It has never worked.
If you wanted to try it with bombs, it would take continual re-dropping of hundreds of thousands of bombs every few hours to cover (1600km * 8km) to keep people out, even assuming they have 0 shelter or cover.
I think this is more an open question than “it has never worked.” Nobody has tried to area deny FPV-drone navigators. Bases on lines of sight and line channels, one could probably back out from transit paths to the places one would need to be to hit that target, and then ensure anything there is turned from psychology to biology before a critical moment. You couldn’t do this with smart munitions, and couldn’t along the entire Hormuz coast. But for critical junctures that our closest allies (minus Kuwait) need to export? The math seems feasible, if fundamentally untackled.
The thing is that while Iran's water infrastructure is vulnerable, the Gulf states are much more reliant on desalination ... and hitting them hard there would be a total disaster ... which Iran is capable of doing, but has so far refrained.
I personally think there is a wide barrier between electrical and water infrastructure. But given water infra has allegedly been hit already, it doesn’t feel like it’s off the table for both sides the way it once was.
Trump is secretly an environmentalist but can't say it aloud because of his political base.
I want to believe.
— The X-Files
The sooner the guy is gone, the better. Some folks compared Trump to Lyndon B. Johnson, but as a lame duck from the get go. I think Trump in his own category - a new label of criminal and stupid. I want my money "back".