Wow, yeah, you'd need to have morons at the top of the chain of command and subordinates afraid to speak out in order for something like that to happen. Nothing like the US government today at all.
Venezuela was a raid, not a full on war. And it was so lopsided it was like putting Michael Jordan against a 10-year-old and based on that performance determining that Jordan is the GOAT. It demonstrated that against a remarkably unprepared and unready opponent the US can do well, which tells you nothing about the US's capabilities in actual warfare against a peer, near peer, or just damned determined opponents.
> Russia tried at Hostomel, didn't go so well.
That was not a comparable action to the Maduro raid. The raid was an in-and-out operation, with no need to control any territory for a significant period. Hostomel was a battle over control of territory.
It's absolutely a strategic failure to enter into a war without sufficient munitions or logistical capability to sustain the war.
It’s not as if the US, a few years ago, said it needed way more long-range precision weapons in 2026, and didn’t get them, despite promises to the contrary.
At the time of the Iraq war the US was holding all the cards. It had a perfected playbook, the optimal technology, and support from the population. In the Iran war the old playbook is ineffective, the technology is too expensive to keep it up, and the popular support for a war demanded by another country isn't there.
And yes... you have the current crop of leaders who couldn't lead their way out of a wet paper bag.
None of that seems like it jibes with your description.
So again - the execution shows significant tactical competence. But the strategic direction is absolutely disastrous.
The real question is whether political objectives are achieved. In Iran, those were vaguely defined to begin with, but depending on the moment and mood of the President they were:
1. Prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon now or in the foreseeable future (Not Achieved)
2. Remove Iran’s theocratic anti-American regime (Not Achieved)
3. Maintain international access to key shipping routes (Negative Achieved, much worse than pre-war status quo)
So after spending billions of dollars, depleting stockpiles of our most modern precision weapons against a vastly inferior military technologically, losing 18 American lives and resulting in both global economic disruption and to our Gulf allies, the war has failed to accomplish any objectives and left everyone in a worse position than before the war except the IRGC.
The US has been consistently tactically excellent. Strategically this is a blundering loss.
If you strategically aim your awesome unmatched powers the wrong way you can still lose.
Our ability to defend our allies in the region is non existent, and we lost almost all of our radar capabilities which will take a decade minimum to rebuild. That’s assuming hostilities end tomorrow.
Are you trolling
That's why even in the nuclear Navy, as crazy as they are about reactor safety, they would train and preach continuously that "safety of ship" is more important than reactor safety, because the reactor is not safe if the ship is not safe.
From a military standpoint, yes. You have to have your head buried in the sand to think we didn’t have significant loss of military assets in the region.
These costs are continuing since there is no end in sight and it seems the US is running out of some of the equipment it has used.
strategic failure - iran shrugged it off and now are causing massive damage to world economy with no end in sight.
Iran gained straight of hormuz. It gained chuckpaz and confidence too. It is now itching to play major regional power
As is, the US can stand-off and torment Iran for a very, very long time.
$31 trillion economy. $94,000 GDP per capita (nearly 3x Japan for reference). The US can spend $100 billion annually on bombing Iran for the next decade entirely without harming its economy in a meaningful way.
The US doesn't have to let off. Iran is pinned, massively eroded, and the US is only losing money. Iran has lost all of its proxies, its military is entirely broken (and fully capable of waging a guerrilla conflict), its navy is gone, its airforce is gone, its military manufacturing is substantially eroded, and Russia is boiling. The reason the US is going back and forth on peace, is for the same exact same reason it's in the US interest to bleed Russia. It's this: let's pretend we want peace, while we endlessly grind Iran down.
And the reasons for bombing Iran are...?
Shame the wonder weapon didn't surface in Ukraine nor in Iran nor in Yemen where it was desperately needed.
But we hear about the wonder weapon and how wonderful it was on TV. Must be really true :).
Iraqi invasion was 23 years ago. Again, almost everyone who was part of the initial invasion is out of service. I wouldn't call the occupation of either Afghanistan or Iraq "extremely competent." More like the exact opposite.
What in your view makes these ones proven and other ones not proven?
Right now, the US is half-heartedly trying to bomb Iran into submission, something that in the entire history of aerial warfare has worked exactly once (and even that one time is debatable).
Meanwhile Iran is in rough shape
A gross understatement.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=E...
Zoom in on this year and you'll see it's below $3 a gallon in January and February, then by the end of March it's over $4 and mostly above after that. That's a 33% increase. That's a substantial and sustained hike in a short time.
You must see the difference between us being unhappy that gas is more expensive, versus somebody living in Iran worrying that their entire government and country is in chaos.
Obviously this war is bad for a bunch of reasons, but the US is completely fine at home relatively.
With the exception of total wars, the domestic standard of living has very little to do with how well or not a foreign war is going.
How good Americans are living is a non-sequitur with regards to the war objectives set by the political and military leaders in Washington and Tehran. War, being politics by other means, has to be measured by political objectives. The average American didn't even notice when America relinquished control of Afghanistan to the Taliban, amd yet it was a clear-cut failure to achieve GW's stated goals.
Someone higher up the chain of command: "Fire the missiles, or I'll replace you with someone who will"
The US military is quite powerful.
Donald Trump is a moron.
Pete Hegseth is also a moron whose only qualification is that he looks like what the moron Donald Trump imagines someone playing his role would look like in the movies/TV.
That the US decided to expend it's precision weapon stockpile on a conflict of choice with no ground or dumb bombing campaign to fallback on is a mystery for later generations. It is not unbelievable that Iran is capable of blocking a dumb bombing campaign indefinitely, or that the viable targets for such a campaign are politically untenable.
There is no mystery. A dumb bombing campaign requires air superiority, and Iran actually has reasonable anti-air defense. They're not a bunch of guys running around with AK-74s.
The US absolutely can achieve that. But it _will_ result in aircraft losses, and it requires detailed planning. Both of these are not acceptable anymore.
To help put that in perspective: Iran's GDP today is a ~7x stronger than Iraq's was (in 2003) relative to the US GDP at each time.
In other words, they can spend more on military stuff making them a tougher opponent by default. Plus multiples of population, more land-area, etc.
This is a concerning statement, as it implies it'd be impossible for the United States to lose an engagement regardless of any and all evidence.
As much as I want to believe mainstream media, what is verifiable opinion vs state sponsored media and propaganda?
Or are we not supposed to think and assume all headlines are real?
Let’s stop pretending that the only reason Iran isn’t glass at the moment is because of the good will of the US.
Unbelievable.
Not committing a crime against humanity is not “good will”.
The article didn't mention anything about US strategic or tactical nuclear weapons, though that must be a fantasy of yours (along with the Chimp in the Whitehouse).
You feel better?
The US's stockpile of conventional precision munitions and the US's nuclear arsenal are two very different things. The depth of one has little to do with the other.
The US hasn't run out of precision conventional munitions, but it is running low. There's no reason this should come as a surprise. The US has been fighting a medium intensity air war for months without making any move to ramp up production of those munitions.
The reason Iran isn't glass is because doing otherwise would be a global catastrophe, and even the assholes in charge don't want to go down as the worst mass murderers in human history.
The Midway water shortage deception was a way to gain a tactical, followed by strategic advantage.
Running out of missiles is an "incovenient truth" for the zionist pro-war crowd. History is littered with innumerable examples of political leaders not adequately considering ground-truth military and logistical realities (Confederates fighting in Pennsylvania, Germans invading Russia, etc.).
The cretins in charge of the country think the problem is that the soldiers don't have enough testosterone and have too much facial hair, and these people are capable of this next-level deception of the enemy? I don't think so.
Their idea of an army is the movie "300" - on oiled up, violent homoerotic phantasy. Soon, that's what's going to be actually left.
I would argue that you are right with Ukraine vs Russia since the former has sunk so many of latter's assets. But that has not been the case with US vs Iran.
Sadly, I find it very believable. To build them costs lots of time and money. To use them, not so much. Going low tech might risk more casualties in some cases - and so all the political problems that follow along from that.
We've also seen plenty of wishful thinking from the civilian leaders of the military. I'm sure that in their minds, each strike they launch is surely the one that will finally break Iran, better hit them with the good stuff, shock and awe.
They've also been purging all kinds of top military officers, presumably over culture war issues and insufficient sycophancy.
Russia kept saying its the second most powerful military in the world and now it's the second most powerful military in Ukraine. You can't just keep saying words and then think they're true because you keep repeating them.
There's no secret US weapons factories hidden away somewhere, the inadequacy of the US industrial base to maintain production for long term war have been known for decades and were in some sense even an intentional shift after the end of the Cold War.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20220313151414/https://www.usnew...
The thing which has changed is the nuclear threat is almost just, losing interest? Yes any one of a handful of nations could launch a strike that would kill tens of millions and start a war that would kill billions but... why? A teenager could build in their garage that can take down a ship or a particular room in a building a thousand miles away so what's the point of vaporizing civilians? It is exclusively a weapon for genocide now and it seems like mutually assured destruction is an ending doctrine it's a weapon for a madman and there are just so many easier options to accomplish any goal.
The funniest thing I've seen with the Ukraine war (if it's not AI) is an old prop plane with it's canopy removed and the dude in the rear seat shooting down a drone with his automatic rifle. We're going to get Top Gun: RC Mini Edition in the next armed conflict and it's going to seem like a video game.
It will then become just another threat, and one that is managed well enough to no longer be a david v. goliath kind of weapon.