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.
It's also possible that I found a free translation of The Three Musketeers somewhere else, or that I read the same version PG has now and have misidentified it as being different.
The mental gymnastics required to be this specific and wrong and still believe this nonsense is truly incredible.
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.
I would say "built with American agency and commercial spirit", not minds.
Most of the things that we have were first built elsewhere (Germany being a prime supplier here with the mp3 or the Zuse), but turning them commercial was the input that came from America.
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.
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.
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.
But, yeah the choice of Iran now isn't at all explained by "capitalism".
"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"