Ed: The answer suggests to me this is highly overblown in combination with the total number of US military casualties from missile and drone attacks (7). It makes “obliteration” of bases sound like extreme hyperbole and propaganda. It certainly suggests that, given one of the most powerful militaries in the world threw everything they had at the US and couldn’t do anything more than that, that the calculus has not changed much due to new missile and drone tech. It’s not like the status quo before was invincibility.
US military could strike enemy targets and defend itself in the Iran war, just like in other wars in the past decades. But this time, its ability to defend its bases and the countries hosting those bases was clearly insufficient. Due to this deficiency, Iran managed to achieve not only its primary goal (to survive) but also a secondary goal (to make other countries in the region question whether US military presence is an asset or a liability).
Cheap drones and missiles create an asymmetry between offense and defense. A small offensive force can strike anywhere it wants, but the other side needs sufficient defenses at every target worth striking. The US had sufficient offensive forces, but it lacked the several times larger defensive forces needed to protect the region from Iranian counterattacks. Its regional allies might have had those, if the US had told them in advance and given them time to mobilize.
You and the other commenters keep focusing on overall strategy about eg the strait but the argument was about drones and missile attacks changing the game. Rather than changing the game, they were shown to be less effective than in past conflicts. The real video game thinking here is the bizarre idea that the US and was totally invincible and untouchable until this showed otherwise. They took shockingly few losses.
In a video game, military forces fight other military forces and the stronger side wins. In the real world, a military force may choose to fight enemy forces, if it believes that's the best way to advance its goals. But if the enemy is clearly stronger, fighting it directly is probably counterproductive, and it may be more useful to hit softer targets instead.
US forces suffered limited casualties, but that wasn't particularly relevant. Iran realized quickly enough that engaging US forces directly wasn't an efficient way to use its resources. It targeted infrastructure such as oil refineries in Gulf States allied with the US and caused serious enough damage to steer the course of the war.
I think the war revealed two deficiencies in US forces. First, the US did not have sufficient offensive capabilities to prevent Iranian counterattacks. Iranian drones and missiles were cheap and plentiful, while the US used expensive platforms designed for hitting high-value targets. And second, the forces available to defend allied civilian infrastructure were insufficient. The US only had limited forces in the region, and force composition focused heavily on offense.
The Iranians control the strait. This wasn’t a problem for the military, it was a problem for diplomats, as previous US governments knew.
> Iran changed the game with their missile and drone defense ability forever I think.
Not an invitation for discussion on the vagaries on the larger strategy and outcomes of the Iranian war: specifically a comment that this statement is clearly wrong; Iranian missile attacks performed worse than historically would have been expected due to US anti-missile defense tech and drone attacks performed markedly worse than "experts" have been anticipating for years. The "conventional Internet wisdom" was totally wrong and appears to perhaps be immune to actual events, since we continue to see comments like "drone and missile attacks changed the game".
You can argue about the larger strategy all you want but technical reality we saw is that the US military outperformed expectations when it came to missile and drone attacks: far from "changing the game", they showed that long-range attacks are less effective than at any time since the early development of missile technology. The fact the Iranians were unable to do anything about ships a few dozen miles off their coast is absolutely bananas and perhaps historically unprecedented for a military of that size and capability.
They can't (yet) hit an aircraft carrier. They can hit an airbase, though, and have. That's more than nothing.
Accurate long-range attacks are not new. If anything they are less effective than at any other time in modern history.
Turns out, none. Plenty of stationary targets, like US-owned data centres in US-aligned countries. Plenty of huge, slow-moving, undefended tankers.
2. The USN fired thousands of missiles at the Iranians so obviously they were highly motivated to retaliate. They tried and failed to do anything about it. Thus the idea that Iranian missile and drone tech changed the game would seem to be falsified, which is what this discussion is about. If anything it would appear that defense tech has changed things in the opposite way, considering its track record in prior conflicts.
The U.S. lost billions of dollars in expensive military hardware, proved incapable of defending Gulf allies, and had to abandon all of the stated goals for starting the war—note Trump’s eagerness to sign a treaty so bad even Congressional Republicans were willing to publicly criticize it—despite a massive disparity in the size of their respective military budgets. It’s hard to see that as the game not changing in key ways.