>The U.S. Army has used up much of its stockpile of highly accurate long-range missiles during its five-month war with Iran, according to three people familiar with the data, raising concerns about the military’s readiness for future conflicts.
>The missiles are principally the Army’s surface-to-surface weapons, known as Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) and Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM). The U.S. has used “virtually all” of these weapons, according to two of the sources.
That quite a bit less of an issue than the headline implies.
PrSM has been in production for only a short time, and ATACMS stocks were never high. Neither of these are the backbone of US long-range precision strike weapons. Article is misleading.
It IS an issue if stand-off war is your only war, and it seems to be the exclusive approach here. If you run out of long-range precision weapons, what do you have left? Boots on the ground? That's not going to happen, and that means you will never win this on and off war.
They do, but the current leadership does not have any appetite for entering Iran's airspace after the last downing drama. If Iran captures a pilot, there is going to be no more room for market manipulation.
They want this problem to be solved. So you spend the munitions, forcing the manufacturing problem to get fixed. This works in favor of Anduril, which cares about manufacturing scalability
Never high and a significant number were donated to ukraine specifically because a ground launched pgm has never been a high priority for the US since the USAF exists.
> That quite a bit less of an issue than the headline implies.
Here's a point that I ran across: these long range missiles are there to take out air defences and such (along with stealth sorties), which allows you go go in with 'regular' ordinance and non-stealth aircraft—of which there is much higher quantities and availability—in later phases.
In the early phases of the conflict you use stand-off munitions to reduce the chances of people being captured or killed.
Because Trump doesn't really have approval for this escapade (from either Congress or public opinion) these 'fancy' munitions are the ones primary being used to reduce the risk of casualties.
Now, trying to reduce casualties is not a bad thing per se, but the trade-off is that the fancy stuff is more expensive and takes longer to (re-)build-up. And what if there are other conflicts that flare up where these munitions would be useful? If they're not available do you start using piloted aircraft?
>Here's a point that I ran across: these long range missiles are there to take out air defences and such (along with stealth sorties), which allows you go go in with 'regular' ordinance and non-stealth aircraft—of which there is much higher quantities and availability—in later phases.
ATACMS and PrSM would definitely be used to strike air defense systems. The US military is very joint and the boundary you're delineating isn't part of the mission tasking.
Likely son of Ayatollah wanted to get rid of his weak father and Putin wanted the US to stop supplying weapons to Ukraine. So Putin asked Krasnov to get rid of Ayatollah and empty the stockpile of weapons.
OTOH reducing the supply raises the price of oil and thereby allows Russia to charge more for their main product of export. At the start of the war Trump reduced Russian oil sanctions[1]. Trump is also collecting all the money from Venezuelan oil sales[2].
But I don’t understand the fixation of US in middle east theatre. With the abundance of onshore oil through fracking revolution, presumably US doesn’t need to police the Middle East. The president himself said US doesn’t need their oil.
So what is this conflict all about? Is there bigger geopolitical price tag attached to victory in Iran? Or US is just besieged by corruption to the extent campaign finding from Israel lobby as they say dictated much of the foreign policy than national interest?
It’s just baffling and public seems largely fine with this with the lack of widespread protest that this should have caused (vaguely remember living across the bridge from Michigan all the protests there post Iraq war).
The Occam's razor explanation is that it's all about Israel.
They're the only country that actually benefits from all these misguided Middle Eastern adventures, and it's not like it's just one, there's a pattern and it's always the same
Tell me who funded ISIS. The last I checked it was the Iranians and the Hezbollah that fought ISIS/Daesh and brought them to their knees.
In 2026, if you don't know US funded religious extremism in the middle east, then I guess you believe whatever you want to believe. The time is way past.
I would speculate that it’s more about Israel interests. Iran produces 5% of the global oil but more importantly, it represents 20% of their gov income and the major engine of economic growth in the country. So .. you control their oil, you control the government.. and with it, the major antagonist to us interests in the region. Every other country in the region is aligned with the US or just too poor to be relevant. So it’d be a big win for the global geopolitics board.
It’s simple. Oil is traded in USD. A large share of the oil is produced in the Middle East. If oil stopped trading in USD the value of our currency would plummet. So we have a strong interest in all oil exporters.
What’s even more puzzling is that line of reasoning was one reason why trump was elected in the first place: increase domestic oil supply and get out of foreign wars
It stops being puzzling when you recall that Trump is a con man. This whole thing was never about making America great again, it was about lining Trump and his family's pockets. By every metric which matters to Trump, things are going exactly according to plan.
It’s because Israel has captured the US government through a combination of lobbying and probably blackmail. The endless wars in the Middle East are to bolster them as a regional and then global superpower.
The TikTok deal happened because too many young people were being exposed to anti Zionist content. It’s illegal to criticize Israel in many regions of the US, but not illegal to criticize the US. It’s illegal to boycott Israeli companies in many states, but not US companies. This war on Iran hurts everybody because of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, except for Israel who now has a severely diminished adversary to their regional dominance. It’s not even a secret, Israeli’s boast about this on social media and have a whole hit list of countries they want the US to attack. Turkey is next on the list so expect to start seeing more seemingly random antagonistic rhetoric from the US about Turkey.
The US doesn't need more oil, but if Iran were to cut off oil supply from the Persian Gulf it would make oil prices significantly more expensive by reducing total available worldwide supply.
The US economy, for the better or worse of it, depends on cheap oil to supply energy for commerce and transportation, and if that becomes more expensive, people stop traveling, trucks stop shipping, energy stops being produced and millions of US jobs are at risk.
The whole "Death to America" and USA is the "Great Satan" make them a much more morally easy target given they have practically no ability to fight back.
I don’t know, the US is the world‘s largest oil producer, and there’s a lot of people in America who are very happy about the high oil prices. Doesn’t exactly trickle down to the average American though. But there are many other industries is that matter a whole lot more to the US economy, for example, if Taiwan stop selling chips to the US, we would be really screwed.
Absolutely not defending anything the US gov is doing now or for the past years, and in general agreement (Iran is targeted for totally stupid reasons), just to point out:
> With the abundance of onshore oil through fracking revolution
Fracking isn't free of consequences, and while the current US gov doesn't care about them, people are directly affected and are rightfully pissed about it.
Bombing/invading foreign countries to get the oil is obviously not the right approach, but relying on fracking isn't a clean solution either.
Iran has been the instigator or financier of almost all global terrorism that affects US interests for the last 50 years. It's not like that's a secret.
The only reason why the US has been dealing with the effects rather than the cause for so long is best illustrated by the mess we have now.
I guess we can be a little thankful this is bogging down because next on the list is Russia and the little proxy war between the US and China going on in Ukraine.
I've linked this article several times on HN. Nobody goes to war over a solar panel [1].
You have to understand that the US is an arms dealer empire. We now spend >$1T/year on the military and a huge chunk of it is basically looting government coffers. Pretty much all post-WW2 moves by the US can be boiled down to selling weapons to somebody, sometimes both sides.
There is no pie anywhere in the world that the US doesn't have a finger in in some way unless they can't (eg China can't be bullied in this way). Global trade is a complex web. And even though the US is a net energy exporter now, there are second-order effects if, in the mind of US administrations, other countries start denying oil to allies, for example.
One reason among several is that middle east states fund the US fiscal deficit by buying treasuries with their oil revenues. If the US loses that source of financing then the US fiscal situation gets worse
This. Since it has been demonstrated that we can no longer guarantee the shipping of oil through the straight of Hormuz, nobody has any reasons to price oil in USD or to finance our deficits.
> So what is this conflict all about? Is there bigger geopolitical price tag attached to victory in Iran? Or US is just besieged by corruption to the extent campaign finding from Israel lobby as they say dictated much of the foreign policy than national interest?
An optimist would say:
America doesn't like Iran because it's a theocratic dictatorship that funds terrorist groups throughout the region, supplies drones to Russia, fires missiles at the only democracy in the region (Israel) and is pursuing nuclear weapons.
As energy markets are global, middle east politics impacts America's vital national interests, and prices consumers pay at the pump, even if America is a net exporter of oil.
Trump thought they could go in with a surgical strike, knock out the theocratic leaders and the nuclear facilities, enabling the protesters to overthrow the remains of the government, while the army steps back like we saw in the 2011 Egyptian revolution. Then they'd turn into a peace-loving democracy, and Trump would go down in history as having defeated one of America's long-term antagonists, making him a winner and a tough guy, and really showing Obama how it's done.
A cynic would say:
Trump wanted a distraction from the Epstein files (which this war has 100% delivered) and/or a country that wanted this war to happen has the Epstein evidence to blackmail him with.
Having deliberately installed loyal incompetents in leadership positions, even though military planners were 100% aware the Strait of Hormuz would get closed, and that their drones are an order of magnitude cheaper than our drone interceptors, that knowledge was dismissed by the executive.
Being able to make oil prices rise and fall by tweeting is an easy way to make money if you're exempt from the justice system.
Having the war drag on might not be good for Republican performance in the midterm elections - but Trump can't run for a third term, so he doesn't much care if the party is left in a shambles.
AIPAC is the single most influential special interest group in US politics. If you don't do what AIPAC says to advance their foreign policy goals, they will remove you from office at the next election. They do this on a regular basis and even publicly brag about it.
Israeli hegemonic ambition. Zionist funding of Trump's campaign. Corrupt profiteering from market manipulation. Distraction from the Epstein files. Gullibility of a large fraction of the US public. Trump's ego and stupidity. And when a nuclear superpower starts a war like this, there's not much anyone else can do to stop it. The result: a massive strategic blunder for the US, the true cost of which may not be fully understood for many years.
Both the reasons (AIPAC + pricing Oil in USD helps finance our deficits) are why we were there. But both of those reasons have been severely weakened, to the point of probably being eliminated anyways:
1. After the midterms, we'll get a read on how much AIPAC is still able to buy congressmen.
2. Before Trump obeyed Israel and bombed Iran, we had the illusion of being invincible. But now, we are faced with the brut reality that we cannot guarantee the flow of oil through the Hormuz straight, nor almost anywhere else in that whole hemisphere. Even to Europe: Ask Putin how much drones have changed the game.
This really eliminates any remaining motivations to keep pricing oil in USD. Which removes most of the motivations for the world to keep financing our deficit.
At this point our best option is to just leave the region, and try to transition to renewables absolutely as fast as we can. Oh, and raise taxes on everybody, because demand for our bonds is going to crater.
Maybe the abundance was just a lie. We never know. Considering the amount of shameless lies the west manufactures every day, I wouldn't believe one word that comes from there.
One has to re-examine every claim ever made about capabilities from the west. Never thought I would say this. Heck they lost with 2 aircraft carriers against Ansarallah last year.
Maybe I’m missing the subtler geopolitical point here, but I don’t think it’s about oil. It’s about preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons and threatening the region via their missiles, drones, and proxies.
Whether they succeed at it or not is an open question, but it seems clear that’s what it was about. Take operation midnight hammer last July. That was clearly only about the nuclear issue.
How many of these tiger deterring rocks can I put you down for? They're $1T each but we've got a 3-for-2 offer going. You may think you're not often attacked by tigers now, but can you afford not to own one of these rocks to keep that record?
Trump doesn't give a flying flip about Iran having Nuclear weapons. If he cared at all, in the slightest, he wouldn't have unilaterally broken our treaty with them.
Iran is generally a country run by some bad people. Letting them get nuclear weapons is a bad idea. Take a look at North Korea, they literally starve their people and there isn't much we can do about it now.
Iran has been two weeks away from getting the bomb for decades now. And last year the US supposedly set them back decades on their nuclear aims. This war was absolutely unnecessary if blocking them from nuclear weapons was the objective, or the president lied last year about the success of the bombings (which is definitely possible).
The US gives no shits about 'bad people'. There are plenty of bad people in other parts of the world - the oil is all that matters to us in the Middle-East.
I'm always confused by prices of "highly regulated" goods in the United States.
When I get a $150,000 bill for a 15-minute hand-reconstruction surgery, how much of that bill is the total margin vs self cost? And how much of that is warranted / acceptable?
When a single Tomahawk missile bills the taxpayer $3,600,000, how much of that bill is the total margin? When I say "total margin", I mean not just the margin of the company that builds the Tomahawk itself, but the margins of all the components that were used in it -- every last bolt and every ounce of aluminum.
There are a great many costs built into the system that this analysis won’t get you: mandatory useless ingredients, arbitrary standards, and pervasive regulations.
I worked in aerospace and know a bit about this. Say you want to make a missile. Well, you better have the paperwork for literally every component to show that the metal used in all of it originates from a foundry in one of a tiny handful of countries.
I agree. We want to expect competence at all levels of the private and especially public sectors, but we're only able to insist upon it in a few key areas (aerospace, medical devices, etc.)
It is funny to see the same story every time. It's all burdensome regulation by the nanny state until something goes very very wrong and the public wants answers NOW, at which point it's incompetent government getting led by the nose by monied interest groups and their public relations departments.
This is exactly what happened with Brexit. Bunch of people voted to leave the burdensome EU regulation environment, then realised they quite liked workers rights so they don’t get fired in an instant, having food quality standards was actually pretty good to protect us from chickens filled with hormones and they didn’t want a bunch of infrastructure built in their back yard so environmental regulation was also quite useful.
The real problem isn't the price of the missiles. I wouldn't even care about the price of the missiles if they actually worked. But Iran kicked our butts. We don't have air superiority, we cannot guarantee the shipping of oil through the straight of Hormuz, or anywhere else in that hemispheres, our bases and our aircraft carriers are useless.
I wanna know what they've been doing with our trillions of dollars, because it sure as heck wasn't making an effective military.
RTX, formerly Raytheon, has the same revenue and net income as PepsiCo. PepsiCo has a higher profit margin.
Most of these companies are public and you can find their stats.
A Tomahawk missile is $3.6 million because it uses specialty components, all made in small batches using very expensive American specialist labor. It's also staggeringly more capable than a drone, or a shahed. Those extra capabilities are enormously expensive, because they are hyper niche.
A single American Artillery Shell is $3000.
Meanwhile, your $150k surgery bill example is completely different. It's a fake number, made up to cause a process to generate an actual, intended price somewhere. Your insurer and the hospital play some insane game of chicken where the insurance promises only to pay a percentage of what they are billed and so the hospital submits a fake number to get what they actually want (or nowadays the system is even more byzantine)
If you were to count the margin of everything it would be 100%. At the end of the day everything is either a resource harvested from the earth or human labor.
The more common concept of margin used in this context is net profit after expenses, including labor expenses. The question is therefore roughly "How much is purely for capital profit taking rather than directly involved with compensating labor and purchasing materials?".
Now they'll exhaust interceptors and other long range missiles like tomahawks and whatnot.
And then China gets frisky with Taiwan and the US will totally not abandon them and tell them to just give up pressured by the lack of firepower to defend them, the risks of China getting back into bidding oil in international markets and the mess the treasury would be in if China raises capital by selling bonds (they just told the fed to print more so Japan can buy yens without selling their US bonds, so they are at least very concerned about the possibility).
The reality is that fighting any country with a decent military has to be all-out war. We should have plenty of precision missiles left today because they should have been used only to clear the way for runs with "dumb" bombs. A war with China would be the same, it can never be fought from a distance with primarily $1m+ precision surface to surface missiles.
Of course I only mean if the war was necessary to fight at all, I don't believe it was.
> We should have plenty of precision missiles left today because they should have been used only to clear the way for runs with "dumb" bombs.
That's what the US tried to do. The problem is that they were unable to degrade the Iranian missile systems enough that they could drop gravity bombs with impunity. This also means that they had to pull the aircraft that they would use to do bombing runs back to bases in Jordan and Israel because anything on the tarmac in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE is very vulnerable to Iranian drone and missile strikes. All of this means that they're forcing the US to choose between pulling out of the region or accepting losses of personnel and airframes (that likely cannot be replaced in a timely manner) at a level that the post-Vietnam US military has never had to face.
I suspect an all-out war between the US and China would go the same way as this one, if not worse. The US military in its modern form has focused on procuring very complex, advanced, and featureful weapons in tiny numbers. The problem is that this means that the US is incapable of fighting a sustained campaign against an adversary that can withstand attacks from American weapons and has a higher production capacity.
Yes but with the caveat that they wanted the lowest risk to US service members during the bombing. This means using up the fire and forget stuff rather than the guided munitions attached to planes. They have good air superiority, but poor logistical options to do that.
The traditional way to do this is to park two carrier groups within 500 miles of the target and convey tonnes of cheap munitions to the targets (as in iraq, Libya & kosovo) the problem for the US is that it means parking a carrier within drone range. You'd then establish a land base and move forward. Again all of the logistics of doing that are vulnerable to drone.
So this is the route they chose.
Until the US have something to counter drones cheaply, then they'll get stuck like this.
I would love to know the honest opinions of our top brass. They had to know sitting out of (most) drone range and leaning almost entirely on long range surface-to-surfsce missiles wouldn't even come close to clearing the way for more standard bombing runs.
They would have known going into this war the plan was fundamentally flawed before we even committed to firing a single munition.
China, in it's modern incarnation, and every living member of it's military, has never seen a single real battle. Nothing. No one has any rank that has bearing on any kind of combat. Just decades of self-congratulatory war games.
China has tons of weapons and resources. But it would remain to be seen if they can actually fight when every single person along the entire chain is a total day one rookie.
All of this talk about entering a hot war with China is crazy because of this fact. You don’t go directly from literally zero battles to starting a war with one of the strongest armies.
Dropping bombs and evading live anti-aircraft fire is of limited applicability? Are you sure you're not confusing combined arms exercises that the US has, and continues to engage in (Venezuela comes to mind recently) with your personal opinion on the validity of the war in Iran?
A smash and grab in Venezuela is not Iran and Iran is not China.
The closest analog we have to war with China is Ukraine/Russia. All evidence from NATO exercises and investigations is that Ukr/Rus conflict has virtually no relevance to OEF, OIF, or The Caracas Kidnapping.
Iran is a little taste of what's going in Ukr/Rus, but obviously China would be able to wield the same type of war at orders of magnitude greater intensity.
My comment was quite specific on my claim. You have provided zero evidence against it, and instead are just doing this weird presumptive ad hominem thing?
If you were paying attention to what's actually going on in modern battlefields, you'd know that in fact you're right: "dropping bombs and evading AA fire" is actually of limited applicability! Great examples! There are no bombs being dropped. Virtually no humans are being shot at with anti-aircraft fire. That's what I'm pointing out.
Ok so let me explain something to you as I think you might be a little new to the military or military theory, combat, &c.
Militaries need to train in order to test systems, test weapons, gain experience, and be able to generally perform better and accomplish any given objective. In the modern era, militaries need to engage in what is called Combined Arms exercises. These exercises, as the name alludes to, coordinate activities across different branches of the military. So it might be the army coordinating with the navy to attack a target or capture some piece of land or objective. Maybe the army is on the ground directing fire from naval ships off the coast, or it could be the Air Force providing drone coverage as special forces achieve some mission.
Coordinating these activities during peace time is a key function of successful militaries. It is incredibly important to align these activities to be effective. Because of this, not only do you have militaries that work on combined arms and other trainings internally, but in the case of NATO, or perhaps the US with alliances in the Pacific we also engage in combined arms exercises with other militaries to further enhance and integrate those capabilities so that when it comes time to fight, forces have been trained how to respond and can do so more effectively. A great example of this is KATUSA - Korean Augmentation to the United States Army where Korean soldiers are actually assigned to and reporting to American military command and train alongside the United States.
The reason Venezuela is important, for example, is because it was an exercise demonstrating combined arms coordination and execution. It shows what the US military is actually capable when air, sea, and land forces engage to accomplish some objective.
So why is this important re: Iran (and Ukraine certainly). Because it's combined arms activities except that it's the real thing. Real equipment failures might happen, real lessons are learned, you are actually getting shot at. Lives are at stake. The military is actually battle tested, even if the opponent is hopelessly outmatched.
So when you write something like this:
> All evidence from NATO exercises and investigations is that Ukr/Rus conflict has virtually no relevance to OEF, OIF, or The Caracas Criminal Apprehension.
Those exercises, the lessons learned from the wars such as OEF, OIF, and even how Ukraine is today using and testing American military equipment in battle, matter a whole lot. And that's one of Xi Jingping's primary concerns with his military. They have done 0 of this. They've never really been shot at. They haven't tested their equipment in any sort of real battle. For the software-minded, it's like they've always been in development and haven't even touched a preview environment, let alone production. And worrying enough the US has demonstrated the capability to bypass and/or destroy Chinese and Russian military equipment including air defense and radar arrays - this is worrisome for those countries. If it comes time for a real war, well the only evidence you have so far is your state of the art equipment or close enough to it was absolutely fucking useless when it came to operations involving the US. Whooops.
They may start a war and find out they made a lot of bad assumptions and didn't train well enough and then what?
I'd encourage you to think about this a little more than you are here.
I think that's a separate question from the validity of real-life combat experience that American (and other) forces are gaining that Chinese forces lack, with respect to the OP.
I'm not sure that any of that actually matters. Wars are not Call of Duty. It's politically difficult to invest actual manpower in Iran and Unless China were to nuke Hawaii, an all out war with China would also immediately be politically unpopular. China, like Iran, wouldn't doesn't need to defeat the US, they just need to hold out long enough for the US economy to collapse, which would happen way faster if China is the opposition.
The only reason we don't have $6 gas right now is because of a ton of financially engineering. I don't know how anyone could convince the American public that $10 gas and war time rations is worth defending Taiwan.
California has both very high taxes on gas and a custom formulation that is only used in California... which is just about the most Californian thing I can think of.
In "actual fighting" the losses are such that the units are weakened not like leveling up experience.
I don't think soldiers survive any meaningful amount of combat to get experience in combat. Pooping without WC is what they get good at which you can do in exerciss too.
Logistics and support staff might get experience maybe ...
Vs, the unities which has lost its engagement since.. the Vietnam or Korean war?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m pro-American all the way. I just am not sure which is better: to defer and not be in war or to be in war and lose due to economics vs brute firepower/manpower/superiority.
The upper ranks of the US military is absolutely littered with guys who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Its the difference between having a CEO who was a competent engineer for years before becoming the CEO, and having a CEO who went to business school and played software dev tycoon for 10 years before walking in the door to be CEO on the first day of their first real job.
> China, in it's modern incarnation, and every living member of it's military, has never seen a single real battle. Nothing. No one has any rank that has bearing on any kind of combat. Just decades of self-congratulatory war games.
Ukraine wasn't really wearing the war crown either and they managed to redefine the face of war to the point where countries with trillion dollar militaries are taking notes.
Your jab isn't totally unwarranted, China like most countries has no battle tested military. But your correct premise suggests a conclusion which just isn't there. If I say "China hasn't lost a war in decades, while the US is successfully losing to an enemy that's been strangled from all sides for decades" the premise is true but the conclusion is still up for being written.
The problem is production capacity. The US has gutted the lower-value parts of its supply chains, closed refineries and foundries left and right, and is thoroughly unequipped to even produce cheap weapons at the rate required to support a war.
The number of airplanes built in the US during WWII is greater than all the airplanes NOT in that category. Obviously we can't maintain that level of industry during peacetime, but we've fallen so far below that level and are so low on weapons that if another major war starts we won't even be able to rapidly scale up.
No, the problem is that nobody actually gives a fuck about this war.
The reason we don't have industrial capacity dedicated to this war is because everyone knows we're fighting it for no reason, there's no plan, it stops and starts every 4 days, so on.
Simple consequences of having actual stupid people leading our government.
If the US got into a war that anyone actually cared about, it would almost certainly snap into action at incredible speed.
Looking back at COVID crisis, the rate China vs US snapped to action when it come to PPE production is probably good glimpse into the disparity. I'm not sure we have done anything to improve this situation.
That is, again, a great example of the same administration being utterly incompetent at directing production.
Every single manufacturer in the US stated plainly that they did not feel safe scaling up production, because the demand was always going to be temporary, and they didn't want to be left with unusable factories.
A competent admin could have worked with them to arrange for financial help to temporarily expand and not leave them hanging.
That's what happens when "The free market is the only one allowed to make resource distribution choices" hits reality. Sometimes all rational actors making rational choices will leave you fucked.
Ethanol did not have that fear, as the infrastructure for it shares a lot with other industries, and we scaled that production quickly.
It's just more examples of, again, the way the free market will respond to changes in demand is not always a good thing, and sometimes you do have to nudge the market or buoy producers to keep things running well and quickly respond.
The admin could also have, you know, not stolen the critical stockpile of PPE, given it to a business spun up by his family, and let them sell it for personal profit.
> If the US got into a war that anyone actually cared about, it would almost certainly snap into action at incredible speed.
I'm gonna push back on "nobody cares." The United States is somewhat unique in that our doctrine calls for wars to be fought on distant shores, and that the main role of our military is to ensure that our ideology (liberal democracy) is protected across the world.
That's why we entered WWII, it's why we keep carrier groups around the world, and it's why Iran/Ukraine/Taiwan are so critical. The threat of an American response and the visible follow-through is a significant factor in deterring anyone who's even considering a war.
Yes, Trump is unspeakably stupid, he's managed to make the worst possible decision at every step of this nightmare, but the truth is that a conflict like this has only been getting more likely since the GOP killed the nuclear deal.
We need weapons for Ukraine. We need weapons for Iran. And, God forbid, but we need weapons for Taiwan.
>our ideology (liberal democracy) is protected across the world
this is pure propaganda and is completely false statement, not grounded in reality. US has no problem protecting despotic autocracies like the Pinochet's junta in Chile or Saudi Arabian theocratic monarchy (a birthplace of islamic wahhabism).
The actual goal of military is to protect the status of USD as a global reserve currency and ensure all important nations are its vassals, fully subordinate to the US government.
The underlying reason is America is printing trillions of dollars out of thin air, not backed by anything, other than the threat from US military, so vassal states keep recycling their earned surplus currency into USD bonds and treasuries
For years leading up to that point Congress was passing "neutral" bills that allowed the country to sell weapons to the Allies but not the Axis. Since we're discussing weapons production, yes, the US joined the war effort on the side of the Allies well before formally declaring war.
Yes, there were isolationists, but there weren't enough to change the fact that fascist/communist victories in Europe would be bad for America. The neoliberal thing where we support liberal democracies is an evolution of the Monroe doctrine, because we've recognized for a long time that the best path forward for America is free trade and interdependency with other like-minded countries.
This argument usually depends on how you quantify defense spending, no? [0] In terms of PPP, the U.S. is falling behind. To be perfectly clear, that doesn't somehow absolve the size of U.S. defense spending. If anything, it's damning of all these wunderwaffe projects defense contractors take on and the taxpayer funds.
That's because the primary goal of the spending is not to produce a capable military. It's an expensive, inefficient jobs program, but one that you can get conservatives to support
> they had to pull the aircraft that they would use to do bombing runs back to bases in Jordan and Israel because anything on the tarmac in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE is very vulnerable to Iranian drone and missile strikes.
Looks a lot like the US went into this war assuming it's a rerun of the Iraq war where they could build a mountain of supplies in Saudi Arabia where they were effectively unreachable for the enemy, and take advantage or the friendly skies just across Iraq's border to support their air superiority, and keep the long and lengthening logistics lines protected.
It wasn't a rerun. They can't stock up and just stay beyond Iran's border to be safe, now everything they care about has to stay far, far away, out of drone or missile reach. Any supply lines can be hit far behind the front line so they were non-existent.
I figure it would probably be like the US backing Ukraine's defense against Russia but backing Taiwan's defense against China. It would probably be quite hard for China to take Taiwan. There's a lot of sea in between and you can see how well Russia's navy has done against Ukraine's drones and missiles.
I don't think so because China would not be sure what and how the US would be involved and because it would be incredibly risky to attack Taiwan without striking US forces in the area they'll likely attempt to strike US forces in Korea, Japan, Guam, the Philippines, and elsewhere.
The best US strategy is to just arm Taiwan to the teeth by selling weapons to make the invasion as risky as possible. But China can (and this is their smart play, IMO) is to just win Taiwan over politically over the long term.
> But China can (and this is their smart play, IMO) is to just win Taiwan over politically over the long term.
Yeah, that is certainly the smart play and one China is almost guaranteed to win in the long run. But that won't secure Xi as the leader that reunited the nation. He might prefer the option where he gets a chance at glory to the smart one.
Economic integration and benefits, trade stuff, whatever they'd like to ask for. I think there's a local party in Taiwan that's been pushing for it a little?
Read up on current politics in Taiwan. The KMT, the party that lost the civil war, fled to Taiwan, and still claimed to be the true government of China, is now essentially a PRC puppet.
How hard would it be for China to make sure no ships or airplanes arrive to Taiwan for a few weeks? The island has only days worth of food and energy. No bloody D-Day landings needed to force a political capitulation. To continue to borrow from your example, Russia has completely shut down all commercial Ukrainian seaborne and airborne traffic.
> If they can exhaust all their firepower in a couple weeks fighting Iran, China would have no reason to feel threatened in the first place.
Well but war will be like this now. Like for ICBMs, with PGMs it's use it or lose it, so lots of ordnance is fired off at the outset (onset?) of hostilities.
Of course there can be - likely with a gentleman's understanding that neither would use them, and each side careful to not back the other into a corner where they'd have nothing left to lose.
It's just going to be your typical meatgrinder and attrition warfare.
Yeah, arguably the war in Ukraine is teaching everyone who is listening that nobody is willing to be the first to use nukes and destroy the planet, which means that nuclear powers can actually fight wars--which is incredibly dangerous, of course.
Living systems actively regulate water, stabilize soils, moderate heat, absorb shocks, reduce flood peaks, buffer storm surge, sustain food systems, support biodiversity, protect public health, and preserve the ecological conditions that make human communities viable
Ecosystem resilience is based in the so called natural buffers. They are a product of the interactions between life beings. Imagine the life bar in a videogame. A natural buffer is like a 4-D life bar, where each character actualize their life bars at the same time. You lose some life and your friends will change their energy automatically to fix your health bar, Is paid with energy but also needs some "time currency".
With healthy buffers, even big impacts in an ecosystem are absorbed and the system returns to the initial situation again and again. But it has a coast in the buffer. The life bar gets shorter.
When the buffer is spent, the system is not 'elastic' anymore. At this moment the danger is extreme, but the warnings are subtle or none. Just further impacts, even tiny impacts, on the ecosystem cause a total, devastating and irrevocable collapse that may extend over several years and can't be stopped.
Is unclear if we had crossed this line yet.
The life has recovered from huge collapses at a planetary level five times yet, but it needed millions of years for that.
Just because we had luck before, does not mean that we will have luck forever.
My takeaway is that Russia, China's vassal, wanted to use nukes and China told them they can't[1].
I don't believe Russia really cares about the rest of the planet. At the same time, China doesn't care if Russia gets a bloody nose on Putin's little vanity project and realizes a nuclear war is bad for their mercantile economy.
This coming from the leader of the other country in a war... I mean, I do find it credible that Xi might have told Putin to think very hard before doing something extremely stupid, but from there to stating that Russia is "China's vassal" and will do whatever they're told by a party who has long been a direct competitor (China and Russia have been solid "frenemies" for a long time, pushing very different views of what "real socialism" looks like)... It's a big jump.
The Soviet Union's relationship with China was more of a peer rivalry situation. The Russian relationship with China is nowhere near parity. Russia would fold tomorrow if China withdrew their backing and went along with the US/EU sanctions.
So Russia is only able to prosecute their war with China's permission. When your foreign policy is decided by another power, that's the textbook definition of a vassal.
I think the biggest risk of war between nuclear powers is from mistakes and accidents that might trigger nuclear escalation/MAD. Systems can malfunction. War can spiral out of control, fast.
>"gentleman's understanding that neither would use them, and each side careful to not back the other into a corner where they'd have nothing left to lose."
So we'll just grind each other into a halt? And what is the end state? What a BS.
That's what's happening in Ukraine right now, I don't understand why you think it's BS. The point is reaching a situation where one of the parties is ok with going "alright, enough". Not all wars are WWII-level fight-to-the-death conflicts, a lot of them just end with both sides agreeing a new status quo.
In case you did not notice, that is exactly what happened between China and India. Disputes at the border are frequent and they fight with sticks: https://youtu.be/T1-Gi_l-024
China imports food and has stressed or extremely stressed fresh water reserves. You take out the method they keep alive hundreds of millions of citizens, you think they won’t launch a nuke?
Although for all the strategic thinking we’ve seen out of the “department of war” (that offers gender affirming testosterone shots and then runs out of missiles), I wouldn’t be shocked if you worked at the Pentagon, hahahaha.
This interesting way of saying PRC distant fishing fleet fishing in international waters. Geopolitical drama aside, DWF is like 3% of PRC fishing catch, much of it just luxury consumption or resold globally. Reality is PRC more or less absolute caloric self sufficient on staples, chicken/fish. They import a lot of soy for animal feed but shit hits fan, people eat less pork/beef.
We have thus far been supremely lucky that irrational actors have not acquired a nuclear bomb. But the reality is that throughout history most leaders have been irrational.
My country (America) is behaving increasingly irrationally. I've been hearing fringe conservatives calling for nuking the middle east since the early 2000s, but the rot has spread and became deeply religious.
Now I hear talk of the end times from the most powerful people in the country, actively building bunkers. Groups of Republicans openly talking about the US being allowed to take whatever we want from anyone we want through war (Venezuela, Iran, Greenland, Canada).
Almost all of our leadership has been replaced in every branch of government. SCOTUS is clearly compromised and bought. The legislative may as well be dead. Almost all executive agencies have been purged, what remains have had their heads swapped with sycophants. Something like half of the military generals have been turned over. The DoD was renamed to the DoW with cheers, as an alcoholic prison guard was put in charge and has started touting hypermacho religious warrior catchphrases and openly advocating for war crimes.
The other day we testimony from judges before legislature who refused to say if Presidents can run for three terms or that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. Under oath, just simply refused.
And that's before getting into how the President of the United States started a war to distract from his involvement in the highest profile sex trafficking ring in human history, and has continued to use his position to perform insider trading on oil prices repeatedly for weeks.
If you said any of this would be happening in 2005, I would have laughed at how "that would never happen in the US". And now it's just... reality. Like Russia. And it seems to have no end in sight. So what actually happens if Trump gets so deranged he hits the red button? And if not him, who will the loonies pick tomorrow - someone who actually believes in "the cause", who doesn't understand it's a grift?
And what are the external long term consequences of Trump's actions in countries like Iran and Venezuela and Ukraine? The US is not to be trusted anymore, every country has a clear signal to build their own nuclear arsenal ASAP. We have a river of blood behind us, so are we just expecting to get lucky that no one in Iran, for instance, who gets to a position of power leverages an irrational hate for the US and just... Does it in a religious or hate-driven Armageddon?
Incompetence is one thing, but the aspect of the current leadership that I (as a non-American) find most shocking is the corruption. That is, the use of state power to enrich an individual and his family members and to bend state institutions into tools for conducting petty personal vendettas. Pardons are sold for “investments” into private business owned by the president. Legal “settlements” agreed with organs of state under the direct control of the executive. Granting themselves perpetual immunity for tax evasion. The use of federal regulatory bodies to force private media companies to cancel comedians who hurt the president’s feelings.
The fact that these actions barely seem to register with the US public at large truly blows my mind. That over 35% of the population are completely fine with this stuff is frightening. The fact that none of the constitutional checks and balances are effective in preventing this abuse of office is alarming.
> That over 35% of the population are completely fine with this stuff is frightening
Most literally don't even know, because what little information filters down to them, is all radical right-wing propaganda from Fox or worse. The country has been drowning in it for decades.
The US is still fixable if young people will just fucking vote. Irreparable damage has been done, which means the old structures are gone, but they can be replaced with new ones -- a hypothetical Democratic president would need to clean house top to bottom. Obama's greatest flaw was that he didn't see the need to do that after Shrub.
I don't fall in the ring category, but I will be voting Democrat for the first time. That's how bad this is getting for me. I have real reasons to hate the Democrats as a party, but I'm scared of them less than the modern Republicans .
Fair. And I agree with nearly everything in your comment.
One thing about tRump, is that he is more blatantly obvious about the "bully" side of America. He is not the first bully; just the first un-subtle American bully.
What I find disturbing is the others who enable him. I've long despised the Repugnant Party for their anti-worker ideology but under tRump 2.0 they've gone to a new low that I never thought possible. As much as I despise tRump, the other Repugnant members of congress (the odd rare exception) are absolutely disgraceful.
What I still struggle with is the huge percentage of people that support the behavior. Seeing what the Tate brothers did and seeing the sheer number of people who cheered on the crimes and exploitation they did was shocking. The fact that Epstein is just a minor talking point now. Did I miss when we became so evil? I actually know a kid who went down the red pill path following Tate -- he seemed like a good kid, but to do the things he has done is something that I can't imagine any person with any heart doing.
I fear I've lost so much faith in the goodwill of many people. At the same time, I know that so many people are good. But there numbers of truly bad people are much larger than I thought.
I remember looking around at the people in my friend and family circles who supported and defended the imprisonment of migrants at CECOT, often repeating the propaganda that they were terrorists and criminals, etc - and realizing chances are they'd do the same if it happened to me. Quite a surreal, scary feeling.
> If they can exhaust all their firepower in a couple weeks fighting Iran, China would have no reason to feel threatened in the first place.
I think the reason China has no reason to be threatened is the US outsourced most of it's manufacturing to them, meaning China now has more skills, know-how, and manufacturing infrastructure to redirect to wartime production.
That was truly a brilliant move by US business leaders and the 90s political elite. Besides creating the military vulnerability, it also helped get Donald Trump election, who they all love dearly.
1. The U.S. produces a massive share of global manufactured goods, ranking second globally behind China in total value added.
2. Only low skilled jobs were shipped overseas. Lower-value consumer goods like clothing and basic electronics are heavily outsourced, whereas complex machinery, aerospace equipment, chemicals, and medical devices are largely built domestically
Cheap toys? You seem stuck in the 90s, and you're quoting a 10 year old article. Since then China has taken over the car industry with EVs, solar industry, building more new energy every than the us has installed total, leading in humanoid robotics and drones. WTF are you talking about?
A timeline in which AI is everything Amodei and Altman say it is and intel is still stuck in an older node while tsmc has the good gaafet stuff on could be one where it's worth fighting for taiwan.
Also, if the US doesn't fight for taiwan, will they fight for the phillipines? Malasia? South korea?
I really dislike the manufactured conflict with China because it only exists to sell weapons. There are several flaws in this theory:
1. All but about 10 countries in the world recognize Taiwan as an independent nation. This always seems to get in people's feelings when I point this out but I'm sorry, the One China policy is the official policy of the US and virtually every country on Earth [1];
2. US military policy is that the US is the only country allowed to be a global superpower (aka "hegemon"). Taiwan is a key link in containment, known as the island-chain strategy [2]. If Taiwan falls into China's sphere of influence then that strategy falls apart. And that's really why this Cold War 2.0 narrative has been manufactured;
3. The level of hypocrisy here is insane. Every allegation is a confession. For one thing, China has shown no imperial ambitions. This gets the inevitable "But Tibet!" rejoinder. It was 1950. Let it go. Also, 90% of the people in Tibet prior to annexation were slaves. They have euphemistically been called "serfs" in Western coverage (when it's mentioned at all) but these "serfs" could be traded like property. You know, like slaves. Also, Tibet and the Dalai Lama is a CIA project [3]; If you find yourself on the same side as the CIA, it's probably time to be asking some questions;
4. In the event of a direct military conflict with China, what are the goals? What is the theory of victory between two nuclear powers? The US has been militarily defeated by Iran. Do you think they'd fare better against China? Really? For one thing, China has a virtual monopoly of rare earths, which are essential for all these missile systems and radars we've depleted; and
5. There's no credible fear of a military invasion of Taiwan. Or even a blockade. China's position is simply to leave the question unanswered, which is typically called strategic ambiguity in policy circles. That's the US position as well, officially. China believes the question will resolve all on its own at some point. That may take decades. There's no reason to do anything, particularly when most of the world already recognizes Taiwan as Chinese territory.
Also, China simply does not have the military to invade Taiwan over 100 miles of open ocean. This would likely require half a million to more than a million troops. The amphibious capability simply doesn't exist. Nor does maintaining the supply lines to maintain that. This is also the issue with any invasion of Iran, btw. It's impossible.
So why are we spending so much time drumming up fear of something that doesn't benefit China at all and is impossible to carry out? That question should lead you to the true motive: American imperial interests and the continued sale of arms.
An organised army is the most effective coercive tool that money can buy, so every nation has to have one otherwise it'd be crushed by foreign militarys. And an organised army requires a large group of people who obey orders rather than stopping to debate the wisdom or morality of them charging out to get shot or shoot some other people. An army has to obey orders in a hierarchical fashion to be effective.
That basically sets up an equilibrium where you have a small number of people who can cause the deaths and suffering of millions. To escape it there'd need to be an economic sweet spot where armies couldn't cost effectively coerce small groups of people. But that seems unlikely because the economies of scale to outfit an army favour large groups. We've been lucky enough so far in the modern era that a strong army requires supporting a thriving economy.
And how well is it coercing Iranian government right now? It is proving itself not only ineffective, but also ludicrously inefficient in terms of money. And to think all that could have been accomplished by building diplomatic relationships, building schools, hospitals, colleges, and, ultimately, cultural and economic ties… When an empire needs to resort to military might, it’s usually in its final states - the US itself made the Soviet Union spend itself into oblivion, and now it’s falling on that very same trap.
It's very simple, really: we're susceptible to indoctrination and brainwashing. That's what one of the main objectives of military training - throughout history.
Although, you don't know how many species before us caused their own suffering and destruction. Perhaps it's normal and expected. There's a slight chance we'll leave documentation to whatever species comes after us, but they'll probably ignore it, because they know best and it's different that time.
The point is that before the era of modern weapons, many wars were a net positive for the winners. Much of our genome is inherited from successful conquerors, many of whom are long forgotten.
Starting wars has only been unequivocally negative for maybe the last 100 years. Not enough for an evolutionary change to manifest itself.
The US made about $68 billion just by kidnapping Venezuela’s president (and making sure the successor would be next if she didn’t allow the sacking). For something that required intelligence work and two choppers, the margin was great.
On a purely Machiavellistic level, coups with an inside element helping along (and that is what Venezuela was: Delcy Rodriguez going full Judas on Maduro) are a distinct phenomenon with a different profile of risks and rewards. As you say, even today, they may pay very well - but precisely because they don't lead to a large-scale war with all the destruction it entails.
Iran is a true war, where the local elite didn't even partly defect, and it is already becoming an expensive quagmire with nothing of value gained.
Of course some politicians do mistake one for another. Putin in 2022 probably expected a swift coup by his crony Medvedchuk, who instead turned tail and ran. Instead he got a brutal war of attrition.
LBH US hasn't been in position to defend 1st island chain in a while, US performance vs Iran just made that obvious.
The one thing we have learned in recent wars is highend hardware can shoot down subsonic munitions reliably, highend missiles can penetrate high end defense reliably. AKA PRC is uniquely positioned to blunt most of US fires (subsonic munitions) while having tons of highend fires vs US defense. But really PRC doesn't even need highend fires for TW scenario, see their subsonic cruse missile / drone gigafactory (like proper not ghetto tier) that can churn 1000s per day, i.e. even with pure subsonics PRC can fully saturate entire US posture/basing structure in 1IC/2IC.
US in westpac has been thoroughly functionally cooked for years. It just took Iran performance for sensible people to realize how cooked. Not just how not up to task i.e. force balance, but how US tech stack uniquely vulnerable to PRC, who TBF has spend past 10 years of modernization strictly on this issue. NVM PRC can now conventionally hit CONUS as recognized by recent Pentagon China Power report, something PLA watchers have known for years, meanwhile said report still assumes PRC highend missile stockpiles is about size of Irans which is kek territory if not delulu.
TLDR people should stop hopiuming about PRC and evaluate consequences of commodity precision fire for mid tier operators. What Iran can do today, most of Americans can do in 10-15 years, i.e. we are entering a world where CONUS is vulnerable due to tech again (remember US project almost extinguished to wooden British boats). CONUS isolation/security as much man made as god/geographic given. It relies on US expeditionary model containing everyone ability to project fires to their shores. Once that's done, entire US defense model post war breaks. All of which is to say, forget Iran, anticipate Monroe wars in the future.
@cmxch [dead]
>Sure about that? Give the US a permissive RoE and the ability to ignore the CNN/MSNOW peanut gallery and then get back to us about that series of claims.
Reasonably sure given US RoE vs Iran has been extremely permissive, even more permissiveness just means depleting highend munitions faster for same marginal effect. reality is US simply doesn't have the standoff stockpiles - US can go Vietnam / close air but then you'd be dealing with more down pilots and peanut gallery unavoidable. Given that VS PRC is forgone, ROE has nothing to do with fundamental US techstack/stockpile (mis)allocation. If US cannot defeat high end hypersonics at scale then expeditionary model with exquisite tooth/tail logistics cannot survive to reach theatre to deliver standoff munitions, and given most US standoff munitions subsonic, even if they could deliver theoretically they face near 100% interception rate. US would also have to retool basically entire delivery systems around supersonic munitions, which are more expensive, larger, i.e. reduced fire bandwidth. These are geometric not RoE constraints.
The USA will not really defend Taiwan anyway. Perhaps they may send some ships or airplanes but even that attempt at show of force will quickly collapse when Beijing increases pressure.
The only thing Beijing can not control is what Taiwan does and invading an island is always difficult. Also Taiwan needs a nuclear arsenal just as Israel has; Japan too, Canada and the EU as well. The days where the big countries abuse the smaller ones are over - we all can see this past the point of Putin starting his genocide against Ukraine. His next step of escalation will be mass mobilization; that's why his propaganda department already now calls the "special military operation" (which it never was) a war (which it always was from the get-go, but now he wants to send more of his slaves to die for him and his oligarch-bros).
What about it? TSMC now has fabs on U.S. soil. Intel and Samsung also have fabs and are working on processes that compete with TSMC's, even if their yields may be somewhat lower.
Washington will have to decide whether the U.S. is willing to pay slightly more and rely on domestic Intel, Samsung, and TSMC fabs, or risk a military defeat and potentially millions of American lives if the situation escalates to intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The choice is obvious. Real life is not a Hollywood action movie. Also, anyone who thinks South Korea or other Asian allies would automatically go to war with China is delusional. So U.S. would be left alone. U.S. has never faced an opponent like China so a country that is also the world's leading manufacturing power. Nazi Germany was nowhere near as economically and industrially formidable as China is today, and the U.S. fought it alongside most of Europe and the Soviet Union.
If anything happens, Taiwan will probably give up. They are mostly posturing, and China may not even need to invade. they could simply impose a blockade.
Bombing things may seem normal to the U.S., but as Sun Tzu argued, the best victories are achieved without fighting, once swords are clashing, that's a strategic failure.
3 generations of wealth poured into the most expensive military in recorded history - the reason that we don't have health care, clean energy, decent social safety nets and so many other things... and they can't even control a small stretch of water. What a waste.
The health care issue in the USA isn't due to lack of funding, the US spends more on health care per person than any other country, double that of many European countries with single payer systems.
The costs of medicare, medicaid and CHIP to tax payers are about what most Europeans pay in tax for universal health care, but then they also need to pay for health insurance for themselves.
As for controlling Hormuz, the US military absolutely could control Hormuz. I'm confident it's quite capable of it. It's that the US public wouldn't support the immense cost in lives and treasure it would take to do it, and maintain that control. No other military could even try, but the the USA could. It's not a matter of lack of military capacity.
>As for controlling Hormuz, the US military absolutely could control Hormuz. I'm confident it's quite capable of it. It's that the US public wouldn't support the immense cost in lives and treasure it would take to do it, and maintain that control.
This is like saying "I could easily afford a Ferrari. It's just that I wouldn't be able to make the interest payments on the loan". Military conquest is more than just guns.
The reason the US can’t take the strait is that the war is unpopular and the American people don’t want it to happen. The US military could absolutely 100% invade and take the street, but it would be extremely unpopular and very expensive.
No, it's like saying "I can easily afford a ferrari but I won't be able to afford groceries for a year after that because I've emptied my savings account.
The military might be capable of a ground invasion and succeeding. It would be Pyrrhic. Even if Iran was a genuine nuclear threat (I am not convinced at this point that Iran would launch a nuke at anyone if they had it), is it worth 500k dead Americans?
There was never a path to victory that didn't involve ground troops. We aren't losing in Iran because of military incompetence, but policy incompetence. Previous administrations did not do this because the cost was well understood.
There has never existed a military who could win this conflict without ground invasion. This was understood when this administration started it.
>We aren't losing in Iran because of military incompetence, but policy incompetence.
My point is these two things are inseparable, and to conflate them is simply Call of Duty-esque military fantasy. It's a feel good war story that doesn't actually reflect the reality of actually winning a war.
If the US military does not have the ability to hold, occupy, and install allied regime change, then the US military cannot win a war with Iran. You cannot separate the short term wins from the long term objectives. No one looks at Imperial Japan and says "they easily bombed pearl harbor, but due to policy failures they couldn't keep control of the South West Pacific theatre.
The US winning WW2 wasn't just dropping the nukes and high fives. There was rebuilding the Japanese nation, aligned to the US, becoming a long term ally.
This is no different than Afghanistan. Future humans aren't going to look back and say "the US easily controlled Afghanistan for 12 years, and then just returned to the Taliban". The lessons learned will be the US failed to hold Afghanistan and the Taliban returned to power and it was a military failure.
No matter how you dress it up, I can't afford the ferrari.
> the US military absolutely could control Hormuz. I'm confident it's quite capable of it. It's that the US public wouldn't support the immense cost in lives and treasure it would take to do it, and maintain that control
I never understood these kinds of arguments and they always come from those defending US military might.
Either they can do it or they cannot, if "the US public wouldn't support the immense cost in lives and treasure it would take to do it" is true, which it appears to be, then the US Military cannot control Hormuz.
The American public has shown willingness over decades and decades to commit to long term wars of choice. Not infinitely patient, but patient.
Of course, other Presidents have been willing to put in some sort of effort to make to make a case. And usually have some of theory of victory or purpose. And generally avoid making weird random claims about invading NATO allies.
The distinction between political resolve and military might is relevant specifically to the "what has all this money gotten us?"
All the money in the military has gotten us, almost certainly, the ability to conquer virtually any plot of land anywhere on the planet at any time.
But that does not (thankfully) intrinsically generate the political resolve required to do so.
Democracy and markets are beautiful things. It's fantastic that it can constrain even a military as mighty as the US and a commander in chief as braindead as Trump.
Health insurance company margins are 3% to 5%. The book America’s Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Back-Room Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System (2015) by journalist Steven Brill blames mostly wasteful practices in hospitals, pharma and device manufacturers, government and corporate health administration costs.
Not to dismiss your point, but the US healthcare system has one meta problem.
Complexity.
There are too many parties. There are too many bespoke party-party contract. There are too many new middle-parties being created, with their own contracts. There are too many systems. There's too much tech debt.
That's a reason improvements to the US healthcare system have generally been via HHS/CMS imposing standardization mandates ('or no Medicare payments').
But providers, facilities, and insurers (most operating on low margins) can't be collectively more meta-efficient without simplifying the system.
Single payer / Medicare for all is a critical start not because of coverage, but because of simplicity.
There are so many intractable problems with the current system simply by virtue that changing anything about them requires 100s of parties to update 10,000s of party-party contracts and interfaces.
That's the biggest source of waste in the current system: constant duplicative re-engineering.
Health insurance company margins are meaningless. All the large insurers are actually "pay-viders", meaning they own huge (and growing) chunks of the physicians (providers) they pay out.
Go read STAT's Colossus investigative series on the myriad ways UnitedHealth Group abuses this structure. All the other pay-viders do the same.
Pay-viders can "generate x% profit" for any value of x. They control all the relevant levers, which also by coincidence eliminates any incentive in the entire system to reduce costs.
They are required by law to only make a certain value of x, and so, surprise surprise, they all make x!
Right, they don’t “profit” much because they pay themselves so much. The CEO of united healthcare total compensation is $60 million a year.
Where do you think that money comes from?
You could just delete united healthcare and save bucketloads of money. They don’t actually do anything anyone wants, other than extract money as a middleman.
US health insurance margins are thinner than European private insurance. Their administrative cost however are 9-10%, when in Europe (or really, France and Germany, I haven't looked elsewhere) they are 5-8%. The difference is probably in negotiating costs and audits. But that means that in total, for every 100 dollar paid, US insuree pay 4-10 dollar in efficiency+dividend that a European doesn't.
Dumb argument though when UHG owns the hospitals, pharmacy and the insurance company. They can make the "profit" of any one of them be anything they want really.
> The costs of medicare, medicaid and CHIP to tax payers are about what most Europeans pay in tax for universal health care, but then they also need to pay for health insurance for themselves.
People always say this, but I suspect Americans are more unhealthy in general and actually need more healthcare per person.
We have a development pattern where people barely walk, but less walk or cycle to work.
> As for controlling Hormuz, the US military absolutely could control Hormuz
I don't see how they could manage that without a full-scale invasion and control of Iran. It's far too easy for Iran to launch drones/torpedoes from small watercraft or from nearby land. I expect they could control Hormuz for a while, but it would be very expensive and I'd expect the logistics to break down fairly quickly if the economics doesn't stop it first.
"I don't see how they could manage that without a full-scale invasion and control of Iran" - that's precisely what they're saying, and that the domestic populace wouldn't put up with it.
I suppose "could" here is a bit of a stretch. Like technically, yes, you could if you whipped up your country into enough of a frenzy to support it. Hell, Iraq happened (twice), so I suppose it has historical precedent. And yes, a full-scale invasion of a fully committed US military should absolutely be able to conquer and hold Iran. But I can't imagine any circumstance where that's possibly going to happen in today's reality (outside of an Iranian terrorist event on USA soil, for instance).
> a full-scale invasion of a fully committed US military should absolutely be able to conquer and hold Iran
I doubt that - Iran is very large and would require something like conscription in the US to get anywhere near the required amount of troops. The US doesn't have a great track record with conquering and occupying other countries.
What are we even talking about here? Controlling the strait? This actually means controlling so much land around the strait that Iran can't launch missiles or drones at ships. Essentially conquering all of Iran by ground invasion. The USA could do this, sure, but we don't want to because its too stupid even for us.
Even if we threw everything at it and turned it into a war economy making everything to focus on this task, we'd lose most of our influence in the rest of the world at that time and then we'd end up in a Russia situation once we control the land where we are in a non stop war with people dying the entire time we are there. There's no situation where it makes sense for us to do this or to have attacked Iran in the first place.
Yeah it's stupid, though with this administration stupid seems to be the flavor they prefer.
Iran is on a level so much worse than even Afghanistan.
In Afghanistan, there are some mountains, but they are in the middle. The Taliban fucked off into the mountains and they couldn't do jack.
Iran on the other hand is a plateau fortress lined by mountains on all (accessible to US/western allies) sides. A land invasion of Iran means no supply lines and no way out. The words "one does not simply" come to mind. It is essentially the ultimate meat grinder unless you can win decisively in days, which is impossible because the entire apparatus you are trying to destroy is distributed within aforementioned mountains and operates with decentralised/autonomous command that has been preparing for this exact eventuality (being invaded by an opponent with vastly more firepower and overwhelming air superiority) for the last 40 years. Not to mention absolute fucking hellscape it will be for troops on the ground with FPV drones and Shahed flying into clusters of US marines and being broadcast on Telegram.
A land invasion of Iran is empire suicide. You can't win, you can't go home and you are left with just pouring an infinite amount of resources and lives into the most asymmetric and geographically hostile theatre of all time.
The land of Iran has changed hands many times throughout history. I think we need to avoid some level of historical / geographical determinism. The terrain is a problem but a solvable one for a sufficiently committed power / alliance. We can look back in history at e.g. the Anglo-Soviet invasion.
But the commitment does not exist at present. No one wanted this apart from a few hawks and the Israeli security establishment.
If the US were ruled by a dictator and had no market forces, the US could obviously conquer any of the above. It would just come at such immense cost and require such horrors that a voting public and a responsive market make it politically untenable to actually pursue. Which is good!
Soft power would have gone a long way towards furthering US interests in the Middle East. Unfortunately, it seems too late for that. By the time a new administration's diplomacy reverts the current antagonism and lack of trust, the dollar will have lost ground as the default reserve currency and financing US debt will become much more expensive than it is now, making military expenses prohibitive, but still a priority.
This is usually the point the economy is flipped around into a war-based economy where all output is directed to military equipment.
I think it's worth pointing out that the US almost certainly could have taken control of the strait. But it would have required boats in the water and boots on the ground. But that puts many more lives at risk, would have been very unpopular (much moreso then the current war situation), etc.
You can't win a war purely through air superiority and bombs. That's not a new lesson but it's one the administration failed to learn through history and is apparently now failing to learn through practice).
> You can't win a war purely through air superiority and bombs. That's not a new lesson but it's one the administration failed to learn through history and is apparently now failing to learn through practice.
This is a lesson that conservative administrations have refused to learn for decades. I hope Curtis Lemay is experiencing a toasty afterlife for all of the suffering he has caused humanity due to a zealous conviction that aerial bombing campaigns win wars, and his lasting legacy in conservative war strategy.
The delusion is somewhat over a century old now. It originates from factions within the military community (vs. politicians) and there's nothing particularly conservative about it -
> But it would have required boats in the water and boots on the ground. But that puts many more lives at risk, would have been very unpopular (much moreso then the current war situation), etc.
Boats in the water and boots on the ground can be popular. But it needs a credible story, told by credible sources.
There's control and there's enough control so not a single missile can hit a cargo ship in the strait.
Maritime insurers are understandably conservative. If the ship stays trapped it continues to pay premiums (insurance company wins). If it risks passage it risks a $10M payout (insurance company loses). If there's risk of a single missile the insurers won't allow the ships through. How can an insurance company thousands of miles away stop a ship? "If you risk the passage you're not covered by insurance"
Pretty sure Iran has spent the last 30 years ensuring that they can mount gorilla attacks indefinitely in the face of overwhelming invasion.
That has been their deterrent strategy for decades. Intelligence analysts out front should have told ya.
(A massive invasion would also not open the strait.)
I mean, we could, the issue is that it would be politically untenable. Controlling the straight means controlling Iranian territory, which means a ground invasion and occupation, which means ~2 million deployed personnel until you set up a compliant regime (because Iran, is absolutely massive). Which is why literally every other president has chosen to negotiate with them or keep them at arms length.
Leaders profit off the military industrial complex. Take away that complex and they would certainly look for the next opportunity so bleed the working class, but the sham would be far more visible and less efficient. Either way, a massive stepfoward -- at least it wouldn't be there to actively make the world a worse place, as it has done exclusively post 1945.
Jobs creation. That's another way to think about it. There are, of course, better jobs to be created than military though, but job creation is still a factor.
2. Running out of munitions is bad but it's the least bad possible problem. We know how to solve it, just pay for higher volume munition purchases. There's no suggestion the missiles don't work well. They actually are quite effective! We just spent the minimum on expendable purchases and bought new carrier groups instead.
Restocking at much much much higher volume than we just spent will cost $50-100 billion, which is not cheap, but is not THAT expensive compared to any other government program (it's like... 2% of our COVID spending). And it's actual effective reindustrialization unlike other uses of the money.
"There's no such thing as public opinion, merely published opinion". While on the one hand we should never discount the impact of incompetence, gross negligence, or deliberate mismanagement there's a reason this story is circulating. For the most-dominant military power in the world to "whoopsy" run out of weapons because of a low-stakes engagement isn't readily believable.
Slightly concerned that there could be an unreported tit-for-tat. China "allegedly" arming/equipping Iran to perhaps the USA coverty planting unbalancing arms and equipment to Taiwan. The Ukraine (and Iran?) theater has shown how drone warfare has changed the game. A nation without a navy can now inexpensively counter a nation with one (ongoing 2-for-2 at the moment).
> For the most-dominant military power in the world to "whoopsy" run out of weapons because of a low-stakes engagement isn't readily believable.
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.
(Not American, need to preface with this) I think the US military has shown itself to be extremely competent in the last war. Reading about Desert Storm and later the invasion of Iraq it's just insane. It's still possible they miscalculated how rapidly warfare would change, but to call them morons... As far as I can see, there are only three proven militaries in the world, the US, Israel and Ukraine, and the US is orders of magnitude larger than the rest. Have we already forgotten what happened to Maduro? What other country in the history of the world could pull something like that off? Russia tried at Hostomel, didn't go so well.
> Have we already forgotten what happened to Maduro? What other country in the history of the world could pull something like that off?
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.
As a note, while there was no war Russia has already acquired Crimea a few years before and it was only a matter of time before invasion itself was to happen, so Ukraine was preparing for that attack more or less.
I think their point is that it doesn't really matter how competent the lower levels of the command structure are if the ones at the very top are bumbling fools unwilling to listen.
If you don’t have an objective, no amount of military might is going to get you there. This was the USA’s biggest mistake in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Iran.
It's not a tactical failure of the US; it's a strategic one. The US operates a tremendously powerful military, but that doesn't change the fact that the war with Iran was a tremendous strategic blunder. "Moronic" is a pretty fair characterization.
Is executing a strategy that you (should) know to be impossible to implement because of logistical limitations really a logistics failure?
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.
You have tactics and strategy mixed up. Killing Iran leadership was a tactical success. Continually shooting long range missiles into a giant country is a strategic failure.
You think the US has shown itself as to be extremely competent in the Iran war? If you were talking about Iraq, that was completely different leadership.
Not only leadership, war looked different back then. The Ukraine war made everyone throw away the classic war playbook.
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.
The son of the elderly Iranian ruler, aligned politically with his father, took over. The war prompted Iran to operate one of the world's largest economic pressure levers, to great effect. The U.S.'s unilateralism, leadership rhetoric, and war crimes (like bombing a school) have lost it a significant amount of global goodwill.
None of that seems like it jibes with your description.
It does. The initial strike, while effective, has proven to achieve absolutely nothing, or less than nothing. Neither Iran's military nor logistic nor even administrative capability was impacted to any serious extent. The population, of which a large proportion was against the regime and potentially on the brink of a revolt, quickly fell in line and became supporters, faced with the external opposition. And Iran has proven its ability to unilaterally close the straight of Hormuz, a crippling blow to the entire world's economy that the USA is simply unable to stop.
So again - the execution shows significant tactical competence. But the strategic direction is absolutely disastrous.
Success or failure isn’t judged by how many explosions or dead bodies each side racks up. Def Sec McNamara admits he made that mistake during the Vietnam war when he repeatedly asserted the US was winning with all sorts of statistics and charts with steep lines pointing up.
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)
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.
Minimal cost? We’re at about a billion dollars per primary target and rising. Not to mention north of 250 US casualties. I’d hardly call that minimal cost.
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.
Yes, but the military exists for the nation, not the other way around, so a military success that turns into a national disaster is not a military success at all.
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.
A very cursory investigation suggests the Iran war has cost the US approximately 100 billion dollars.
About half in hardware and half in increased costs for citizens.
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.
Congrats, now even more hardline leadership got power. And it was conclusively proven that US trears accomodating or measured responses as weakness, so the new leadership wont makr the same mistake.
Iran gained straight of hormuz. It gained chuckpaz and confidence too. It is now itching to play major regional power
How many lives has the US lost? What has Iran lost so far in the conflict with the US and Israel (a conflict which is not over)? The propaganda attempting to spin this as setting up as a strategic defeat for the US, is almost comical.
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.
I mean it doesn't, it's just that Iran is ruled by fanatics who'd rather see their country cease to exist than to give up power. If your definition of winning is just infinite willingness to die then Iran definitely won.
One of these things is not like the other. Russia is a threat to Europe, and is in the midst of invading a country with a lot of agricultural, industrial, and cultural upside that should be on the road to EU integration. Bombing the snot out of Russian trenches in eastern Ukraine might even be a good idea.
Perhaps letting Iran, a country ruled by fanatics, build enough military infrastructure to the point that they're able to hold a significant part of the world's energy hostage was the original blunder?
You could argue they'd never use their power unless attacked, but I don't think you can be certain of that. It comes down to if you can accept that a non-rational actor can be allowed to have this power (or nuclear weapons for that matter).
Now that the cat is out of the bag it would be a terrible idea not to finish the job and make sure Iran doesn't have this power ever again.
Desert Storm was 35 years ago. Almost everyone who fought in it is out of service or dead.
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.
I was left scratching my head why Ukraine would be there, but not Iran, on the basis that it too has stood its ground in what the superpower aggressor planned to be short and decisive conflict.
Iran has survived this war so far because the aggressor hasn't made any attempt to actually defeat them. It's very different from Ukraine, which is holding its own against an all-out invasion. Iran might well be able to withstand an all-out invasion by the US, but it hasn't had to yet.
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).
Have they? Obviously there have been a ton of issues due to the US’s strategy in Iran. But almost nobody in the US has any affect from this war. Gas prices are up a bit. Mildly inconvenient for the majority of people, and that’s the biggest failure people are mad about.
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.
Gas prices are up a bit? In my area it’s gone up at least $2 from before the war. Which is just another way that everything has gotten so much more expensive recently (not that all of that is caused by the war).
Agreed yes that’s not great. But really if that’s the worst thing you’re noticing in your daily life at home, things must be pretty ok?
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.
> 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.
Military competence has nothing to do with running low on munitions after months of war. There are four ways to address the issue: have larger stockpiles before the war, ramp up production during the war, end the war, or don't go to war in the first place. None of those can be done by the military. It's all up to the civilian leadership, and the current civilian leadership is catastrophically incompetent. The current commander in chief is a "fucking moron," to quote his former Secretary of State.
(Am an American, don't know if it matters that I preface with this)
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.
It's been discussed for decades that the US would run out of precision munitions in any multi-week conflict. The presumption was that the US would either be in a nuclear war at that point, or a ground campaign would complete the task along with dumb munitions.
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.
> 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.
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.
> Iran actually has reasonable anti-air defense. They're not a bunch of guys running around with AK-74s.
To help put that in perspective versus Iraq: 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, bigger economy, better-equipped military.
Plus having ~2x the population, and ~3x the land area.
Also, the most powerful country of the world, with the most advanced medical science, faling to manage a deadly measles outbreak because a conspiracy theoricist and antivax has been chosen as Secretary of Health wouldn't have been readily believable just 12 years ago. Yet here we are.
I guess you view what would be the worst crime against humanity ever to be committed (and yes, I really do mean to include all the previous ones in that statement) to be an acceptable answer to “oh, we have no more smart bombs, let’s just kill everyone in this country”?
Not committing a crime against humanity is not “good will”.
Not killing someone when one can (in a not them or me situation) is not “good will”, it’s one of the most basic ethical principles. I’m surprised you need to ask this question.
If my grandmother had wheels, she would have been a bike.
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).
I’m absolutely on the record of being against nukes. Not really sure why you posed that personal attack, but it’s about as shitty a thing as you could say.
How are those things even related? The US has lots of munitions, because US goodwill is the reason Iran isn't glass? That's a complete non-sequitur.
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.
This doesn't account for the substantial difference between military deception and political (self-)deception.
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.).
Leave it to HN to over-intellectualize and twist something obvious because why not?
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.
> nation without a navy can now inexpensively counter a nation with one
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.
Given that all of the advisors who warned against starting something with Iran called this out as a risk (before hegseth cleaned house of anyone competent willing to speak up), why do you think this is so unbelievable?
> For the most-dominant military power in the world to "whoopsy" run out of weapons because of a low-stakes engagement isn't readily believable.
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.
>For the most-dominant military power in the world
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.
I was thinking about this too because some years ago, there was a ranking article that’s now unavailable by the U.S. News and World Report (more famous for its college and university rankings) that had listed Russia as the strongest military.[1] A lot of people were questioning or poking fun at the ranking because of how Russia was struggling with Ukraine. Also, a lot of people seem to confuse analysis with endorsement or validation. But really it’s important to note that a lot of stuff also has to do with how information is very sensitive and can influence a lot of people. If mainstream media can be believed, the U.S. is also struggling a lot with Iran right now, but you might not realize that if you mainly used Trump’s Truth social posts as your only source of info.
Russia could still trigger a mass extinction and end civilization as we know it.
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.
Once proper defenses for cheap and slow suicide drones is created (fast small unmanned interceptors with bullets instead of missiles) this temporary drone threat phase of war will be mostly over. The ability to build $1000 drones in everybody's garage was an obvious but unhandled threat, surely it will be though.
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.
US apologists thought this is Hollywood. That Iron man and Thor will fly down from the sky.
Instead we saw videos after videos of Iranian missiles rain down from the sky.
There is a reason distributed systems are resilient. Iran's military doctrine of decentralized mosaic has proven to be a masterclass in military organization.
Indeed fellow current events observer, this will portend the imminent collapse of the cowardly west and the grand rise of the stalwart and wise Ayatollahs of Iran (I was not paid by state actors to write this)
You seem well versed in the wiseness of the Ayatollahs. Fellow world events observer.
The ayatollahs are stupid for their restraint. I wouldn't have their patience. They only recently resorted to 2 for 1 and promised 10 for 1 on escalation. I would have gone 1k to 1 on the first day if it were me :)
That's the one glaring weakness of relying too heavily on missiles. They are expensive and difficult to manufacture. And they have a limited shelf life, making stockpiles also expensive
In previous conflicts the US military could get a lot done with bombs, but that's risky if you can't get air superiority and take out all enemy anti-air systems. Which is more difficult against an enemy who can shoot at your air bases and aircraft carriers. But those previous conflicts might have contributed to a false sense of security about required missile stockpiles
Doctrine never intended for these bombs to be used almost exclusively as means to wage wars. These are meant for strikes that need to be precise and carried in a short notice.
If you have 10 targets and use atacms in all 10, there's something wrong in the decision making process or the strategy.
like waging a war while insisting they aren't really waging a war and it's just a special military operation and as a side effect having effectively no access to a lot of the resources/means normally used
Air superiority was established fairly early on in the conflict. Flying F-15 and F-16s now. Not even stealth and they drop more than just missles - they carry bombs. B-52s weren’t sent in to carpet bomb the area of that’s what you mean.
US could indiscriminately drop dumb bombs but you would have a higher civilian casualty rate.
Except not really. If they were willing to risk sending many aircraft deep into Iranian airspace with SDBs and JDAMs they wouldn't be running out of ballistic missiles.
And when an F-15E was shot down they got spooked. They're relying heavily on missiles because it doesn't cause a multiday story in the news when one is shot down on its way to the target (and because they're incapable of thinking more than one move ahead, and because it's not their money...).
This is hilarious. Yeah. Air superiority. Last I heard they moved all their equipments to Jordan to stay out of range from Sijjeel and they are still getting hammered in Jordan.
Saw the video taken by the US service men. In movies you see US soldiers yelling "go go go" while in the battlefield we saw them scream "run run run".
Your confidence in claiming air superiority is commendable. Keep it up.
You can't really stockpile missiles, their explosives and fuel needs to be replaced with some interval, so having a massive stockpile doesn't make that much sense, because it's as you suggests expensive to maintain.
In the case of an war (like you know, a war-war) the US is perfectly capable of ramping up manufacturing to ungodly numbers (but it won't be cheap). I would however like to see what Ukraine does, if they get the go-ahead to start making Patriot missiles. They probably won't just do a run of 50 or 100 missiles and call it a day.
I think you should avail yourself of this thing called the Internet to research before you beclown yourself.
US missile production is extremely, painfully slow. From Standard missiles used by the Navy to Patriot. From THAAD to PrSM. LRASM, Tomahawk, you name it, we have a Tiffany weapons arsenal. We're winning so much, we just put the F-15 back into production; a plane that entered service 50 years ago.
Historians used to mock the Nazis for continually developing wunderwaffe; while the Allies overwhelmed them with Sherman and T-34 tanks. Now we've become the Nazis (in so many more ways than one.)
>the US is perfectly capable of ramping up manufacturing to ungodly numbers
Evidence? Genuinely curious. I read that for every ship the US can build, China can build 200. Our drones come from China. Have we got a magic tomohawk cruise missile factory that can be dialed up to the rate that China can produce? We have the raw materials pipeline and know-how still?
JDAM's are a lot cheaper. They are a guidance kit bolted on to a MK-82 gravity bomb. There are a lot of MK-82's in stock, as they have been made since the 1940's.
Problem is you put a crew and an expensive airplane at risk.
We are out of missiles because the current administration wants to minimize combat losses. Looking at the dollar cost; it seems like a bad idea. But is this war worth any of our soldiers / sailors / airman ? (no)
> That's the one glaring weakness of relying too heavily on missiles. They are expensive and difficult to manufacture. And they have a limited shelf life, making stockpiles also expensive
I don't think so. This observation completely misses the root cause, and it ain't missiles.
Armed forces size their stockpiles in terms of their short term needs focused on rapid reaction and deterrence. The goal is to be able to react to immediate threats and then shift the economy to a war economy to supply the effort in economically efficient ways.
What failed this time is that the trump administration was hoping to attack Iran without having to declare war, effectively starting a war without preparing for the war.
The results are obvious: the peace time stockpile was depleted at a time where the country was not prepared to replenish it. Trump shifter the us armed forces to deplete their stockpile while avoiding the responsibility of supporting them in their mission by taking care of supplies.
And so they ran out of ammo.
There are further compounding factors such as a lack of plan and lack of exit strategy. But placing your military in a state where they spend their ammo without any plan to ressuply it... You will have the same problem if you replace hellfire missiles with sticks and stones.
Those are interesting points. The US military is optimised for limited strike "special military operations", which it does all the time, and deterrence. Neither of those require a super deep arsenal, just enough to complete a limited intervention, or blunt an initial assault. Initiating a long deep ongoing offensive campaign is a whole other thing the US never planned for.
> Initiating a long deep ongoing offensive campaign is a whole other thing the US never planned for.
I don't know that that's the case. There are almost certainly plans for a long deep ongoing offensive campaign. But you can't do an ongoing campaign and keep saying it's a short term thing and expect logistics to work.
> Those are interesting points. The US military is optimised for limited strike "special military operations", which it does all the time, and deterrence.
I don't think so. The US military still has the same Gulf War kind of punch. It's the same armed forces that supported multiple large scale military engagements and outright invasions without requiring changes to it's economy.
But that requires preparation and planning.
Trump did nothing of the sort, and forced the us military into an untenable position. The same armed forces that could easily occupy both Afghanistan and Iraq can't even support a limited engagement with Iraq until they started running out of ammo. That tells you everything about the level of planning that went into this mess.
"...deplete their stockpile while avoiding the responsibility of supporting them in their mission by taking care of supplies."
And blames Biden for this mess. "Oh... the cupboards were bare when I came back...". If you KNEW you were running low on supplies, why start a war? There's enough general answers to this, all revolving around his immaturity, lack of intelligence and the cult around him - the truth is somewhere in the middle of all that...
This logic doesn't hold under closer scrutiny. The timeline to expand missile production is on the order of years. This isn't the 1940s anymore where you can convert every car factory into making tanks and missiles. The idea of a war economy is wildly outdated. Either you have enough stockpiled until your weapons manufacturers can scale their production, or you're just out of missiles. Being out after some weeks of a "military operation" is frankly a damning indictment of the US military's logistics and manufacturing.
> This logic doesn't hold under closer scrutiny. The timeline to expand missile production is on the order of years.
You're missing the whole point. The point is not that missiles are easy to build. The point is that military interventions planned not only to prop up logistics but also to accommodate for supply constraints. There is no plan on earth that consists of firing a constant barrage of expensive missiles, and instead you have armed forces planning around using dumb and cheap alternatives that are easier to source and provision.
And Trump did nothing of the sort. There was no plan, no exit strategy, nothing. Not even a war declaration to kickstart the country's logistics infrastructure. Of course ammo runs out if there is no plan to provision it.
> This isn't the 1940s anymore where you can convert every car factory into making tanks and missiles.
That's also another point you missed. Trump even failed to mobilize the infrastructure to supply with basic ordnance. There is no plan.
Pay attention to what you are saying yourself: how do you start a war when you don't even secure your own supply needs for the first weeks of the engagement?
There was no actual plan that could have been made short of one that spanned multiple administrations over at least a decade to spin up enough missile or interceptor manufacturing for such a thing.
It’s just silly to think that the US has the domestic manufacturing base left to do such a thing short of generational scale timelines. The line workers you need in those plants are in grade school today. Better start introducing machine shop again!
Trump could have decided day one of his admin he wanted to do this, told everyone, and held off until the last day of his presidency to fire the first shot. At best you’d get a couple more weeks of ammo.
It’s a pure fantasy to think US arms manufacturers - even given a blank check and nationalized - could get a supply chain going in under a few years. We do not even have the semi-skilled manufacturing talent to spin up such a base, much less the latent capabilities to easily pivot.
Sure there is no plan. Having one would not have helped much either. You can’t plan your way out of having spent three generations outsourcing your industrial base.
The WWII comparisons are laughable. Today the US would still be getting factories on-line by the same time the atomic bombs were dropped. We would have a whole cycle just learning how to build things again - much less actually build them.
To build ammo at a “all out war” scale you would need entirely different weaponry designed foremost to be rapidly built. You cannot rapidly scale up manufacturing of current designs. If we could, we already would have since there is effectively an unlimited decade out backlog of demand for just Patriot missiles and has been for close to half a decade already. The common rebuttal that a factory would need 30 years of increased demand to make the investment worthwhile proves the point.
The USA has never been defeated. It's never been taken over by force and forced to submit to a foreign power. War getting a little too expensive or politically unpopular for their tastes is not really a loss, and it implies nothing about their true capabilities.
It's their relentless deindustrialization that will eventually do them in. The USA's industrial output back in WWII was staggering, its enemies had little hope of victory given the sheer number of materiel that would eventually get deployed. Since then they've been voluntarily giving up much of that industrial advantage out of greed.
Did the entity now known as the USA defeat the British in the mid-1770s or did it just get a little too expensive and more of a headache than it was worth for the British to hold on to them?
> The USA has never been defeated. It's never been taken over by force and forced to submit to a foreign power. War getting a little too expensive or politically unpopular for their tastes is not really a loss, and it implies nothing about their true capabilities.
It feels like semantics here. The US empire hasn't been defeated but its specific invasions have been.
But just knowing the US military is too weak to accomplish its objectives doesn't help much, because the US leadership is so mercurial it might decide to attack anyway. The deterrent effect only helps if you have rational leadership who is capable of evaluating the chance of failure.
Repelling such an invasion, while possible, is still a pyrrhic victory for whoever the US is attacking, because so much of their population will suffer in the invasion regardless.
If you start a war in someone else's country and they push you out...they won the war which means the US lost it. Your definition that the country has to be taken over to lose is a very different situation. If you can't accept we started a war, lost thousands of US lives and left without achieving any objective we set out as a loss you might need to reflect on the propaganda you've been fed and how it's affected you.
The US inflicted an order of magnitude more casualties than the ~60k deaths they suffered in Vietnam. The US has proven its willingness to withstand much greater losses: ~300k deaths in WWII, ~200k deaths in its civil war.
They did a staggering amount of damage but were unable to secure a decisive military victory. So the war started to drag on, the casualties started to mount, costs started to pile up and the unpopularity of the war applied political pressure.
Writing this off as a simple "loss" doesn't seem to accurately describe what happened. I think they could have won, but the cost was too high so they pulled out. Engagement must not have been important enough to warrant another 200k-300k deaths.
Doesn't feel like the same loss you suffer when you fully commit to the task only to end up getting routed.
So your argument is that they could have won in an alternative reality where it was worth paying a much higher cost for victory, therefore they didn't lose?
Going back to Clausewitz, war is a continuation of politics through other means. Moreover, victory is achieved by using force to compel one's opponent to carry out one's will.
> intact and combat capable
On its own, this claim is likely true. Nevertheless, this does not mean one's opponent is going to carry out one's will. Hence, one cannot declare victory. It follows that anything short of achieving one's goal is a loss. A loss doesn't have to be complete and utter destruction. It's fair to say that Argentina did not achieve its strategic objectives during the Falklands War, no?
> Losing is what happened to Germany after both World Wars.
Yes, but Germany is not as good of an example in this case as Japan during WWII. Japan would have likely accepted something short of unconditional surrender much sooner than August 1945, but the U.S. insisted on unconditional surrender. As such, the U.S. did not win until Japan agreed to unconditional surrender.
>The USA has never been defeated. It's never been taken over by force and forced to submit to a foreign power. War getting a little too expensive or politically unpopular for their tastes is not really a loss, and it implies nothing about their true capabilities.
Except for the capability to prevail in those conflicts.
On the other hand the US did prevail in Iraq, and often prevails in smaller interventions such as Kosovo, or various strikes on particular targets.
>Since then they've been voluntarily giving up much of that industrial advantage out of greed.
American workers just don't want to do those jobs any more, at least not enough of them, and the country won't tolerate enough immigration to make up the shortfall domestically. There just aren't tens of millions of Americans sitting around waiting to take up manufacturing jobs. If citizens prefer to do other jobs, then non citizens have to do them, whether that's in the USA or outside it.
> Except for the capability to prevail in those conflicts.
Doubt. The US suffered around 60k deaths in Vietnam before it pulled out, yet it has proven a willingness to withstand at least 5x more losses than that. WWII cost the US around 300k deaths, its civil war cost around 200k deaths.
I think they just didn't want to commit more american lives to whatever objectives it is that they had. They definitely had and still have the capability to do so, but they chose not to.
the modern USA territory was never taken over, but the US military had to pack and leave quickly in a few occasions. Just because Vietnamese couldn't fight back in the US, nor the Talibans, doesn't mean that the US wasn't defeated.
But even that, let's remember that the British invaded and occupied Washington, burned down White House and Capitol, etc etc.
Sorry, but this is a comic book understanding of victory and defeat. Not your fault, many people think this way post-WWII as they have come to see this conflict as a template for what “real” war looks like.
Tactical defeat is when you are prevented from meeting your objectives for a particular operation, such as securing a target area or destroying/degrading a target enemy force. Strategic defeat is when the enemy prevents you from achieving your broader objectives (typically political, as war is politics by other means). The US has experienced both of these in the last century.
Most active militaries have experienced both types of defeat at one time or another. It’s practically impossible to avoid losing sometimes if you overuse war as a tool of diplomacy.
> Not your fault, many people think this way post-WWII as they have come to see this conflict as a template for what “real” war looks like.
Yeah I certainly see it that way. I think saying the US got "defeated" by Vietnam drops some nuance.
WWII proves the US is perfectly willing to suffer at least 5x the casualties of Vietnam in order to achieve their objectives. They probably just didn't want to commit to that sort of cost and pulled out instead. Feels like a different failure mode compared to going all out and getting routed.
“They didn’t want to” is hiding some of the complexity behind it. Vietnam had turned into a political crisis at home; there were widespread protests and lots of people openly dodging the draft. Grunts would sometimes “frag” commanders who pushed them into overly risky missions. Running up the casualties would have created a real risk of a violent revolt at home and mutiny among the soldiers. The US as a society was likely incapable of winning the war, so it turned into a defeat.
There may have been a window earlier on when greater commitment could have won the war or frozen the conflict, via invasion of North Vietnam, but not once the public turned against it. But this came with a big risk of direct intervention from China or the Soviet Union, as happened in Korea. In Korea, Chinese intervention led to a stalemate.
Additionally, early success doesn't mean long term success. The US won in Afghanistan initially, then they got dragged in a conflict for 20 years and ultimately Taliban came back.
> WWII proves the US is perfectly willing to suffer at least 5x the casualties of Vietnam in order to achieve their objectives.
The US today isn't the US on the dawn of WWII, and this war is unlike WWII as a whole.
Domestic political support for the war is so low due to the huge costs (of the war itself and on the American pocketbook). Furthermore, due to the open and blatant corruption in the current administration, and the passing of economic policies that increase the struggle of everyday people while enriching the billionaire class, there has been a huge loss of trust in the US federal government in general.
Contrast this with the establishment of the Social Security act and WPA before WWII, which greatly increased the public's trust/confidence in the federal government to secure their welfare in the wake of the Great Depression, and made them willing to sacrifice for their country.
Finally, unlike WWII, this war didn't start with any attack by Iran on US territory, or attacks on closely allied countries. To the extent that allies have been attacked, it has been in response to US aggression, further undermining the public's will to commit American lives to further conflict.
"The estimated cost of the war in Vietnam during the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations was $176 billion."
Adjusted for inflation, that is $1,192 billion in 2026 dollars.
"The longest war in American history had significant economic effects both domestically and internationally in terms of what was spent on the war and what expenses had to be cut."
They have been preparing for 50 years yet lost all their leadership, nuclear facilities, ballistic missile manufacturing ecosystem and air defenses in minutes to days.
The US is not doing amazing in this war but no need to give the Iranians too much credit. The Iranians are expanding a lot of resources of their own as much as this war drags on.
It is still very early to say how a country will fare considering that it ran out of water and was on a verge of economic breakdown and revolt before fighting a prolonged war with economic blockade of its main export.
According to the US administration Iran military was supposed to be obliterated, and still.
Either way, they have figure out they have a much cheaper way to hold Trump by the balls, and let him dance to their tune. I believe Ukraine and Iran are showing that there is a new level of inflicting damage to your aggressor.
They are mainly using the known fact that there's no chance in hell that the US will invade Iran with ground forces. They also previously negotiated as if this war would never start, so they might make a mistake as this is Trump after all.
In any case, Iran is not in a prime position either, it has many economic assets that can be completely destroyed as it has no air defense and then leave them in a much worse situation, while the only real damage they can do to the US is by attacking their own neighbors
I think that's an unfair assessment. Depleting a stockpile of a particular munition (since missile strikes are less unpopular than a full-scale deployment) because of overreliance shows a particular strain, not a pervasive weakness.
yesn't in case of Russia a lot of their military just "didn't work properly"/"was ineffective in a very fundamental way"
this wasn't the case for the US, their military did work and was effective in context of the specific think they where used for. It's just that the thing they where used for isn't effective in winning the kind of conflict the US did start.
while this is "just" the "non effective" part being some where else it is a very fundamental difference in the end
like to put it this way,
if weapons of mass destruction like nukes, bio weapons etc. would magically disappear an invasion and takeover of (part of mainland) Russia would be relatively viable (mainly by China, but others might want a slice, too).
on the other hand even without weapons of mass destruction trying to invade the mainland US still seems futile/to be a losing battle, no matter who tries it.
No, the opposite has happened with this war. Adversaries globally have seen the ability of the US and Israel to operate with near-impunity over Iran, and it has destroyed confidence in non-Western defence systems.
The big weakness is industrial capacity, but only China can exploit that at scale.
North Korea has a bunch they're willing to sell. Russia is buying already so get 'em while they're hot.
I have been vaguely watching the Ukraine conflict over the past few years. From my distant and zero experience observations, it seems like missiles are extremely effective BUT also extremely limited. So you blow up that one building or SAM you targeted. Well done. What about the other 10,000 static targets? What about the guys with FPV drones and shoulder-launched anti-air now inside the rubble of the building you just destroyed? Send another XX-million USD missile to blow up the building you already blew up?
Feels like a determined adversary who is not easily cowed with a quick bit of "shock and awe" and armed with cheap, mobile winged/quad drones and man-portable guided anti-air/-tank missiles has totally changed the equation. Expensive limited missiles/planes/tanks/ships in smaller numbers seem kinda limited in their ability to get results in today's battlefield where there are FPV drones literally at every turn, and can be operated from literally a hole in the ground 15km away by people who aren't about to easily surrender.
It feels somewhat like the US doctrine has been to start with a "hit 'em hard" opening salvo of cruise/ballistic missiles and rockets etc and hope for immediate surrender. So far the lesson from Ukraine and Iran seems to be expect a big wave first attack or two and if you survive that initial push then suddenly the big super-power has no more cards left to play and it's down to men on the ground with hand-held weapons and drones. I wonder if people will look back at this era as a "WW1 moment" where the old ways of battle suddenly looked hopelessly out of date.
It depends on the specific nature of the conflict. Not every conflict is about control over land; Iran is a perfect example. Their missiles provide a credible threat against globally critical infrastructure, which gives them a way to retaliate without committing ground troops. And their drone strikes are using heavier one-way drones, not FPVs, which wouldn’t make a dent in oil infrastructure or tanker ships.
The current US force configuration was designed to fight quick wars against opponents who mostly can’t fight back. It’s a military built to play “global police,” and for a short while this was probably the correct configuration.
Building a military that stands ready to fight any kind of war is probably impossible—it would be too expensive. You need to look at the biggest threats and optimize for those conflicts. The problem that the US now faces is that rival nations have optimized for defense against its particular style of maneuver warfare with heavy air bombardment. Air defense (not missile defense) is better and cheaper than ever.
This article seems strange to me talking about the lack of ATACMS mattering for a war against China. The publicly available range of the ATACMS is 300 km. Seems to me an ATACMS could not reach China from American bases in Japan, South Korea or the Philippines. The only place you could launch an ATACMS from to hit China would be Taiwan. But Taiwan is so small and likely so well covered by Chinese air defenses that I don't think ATACMS would be that effective there.
That's hard to believe. US with it's military spending should be able to join two large scale conflicts at the same time, not to have problem with a one minor conflict.
Venezuela thought the same thing. Keeping a full-scale deployment at arm's length, and 'only' targeting military targets with exhaustive use of precision missiles is poor strategy, but if a military victory were the US's only ambition the Iranian regime has no capability that could prevent its country from being turned into a smoldering parking lot.
Venezuela was likely a palace coup disguised as a purely foreign intervention by both parties involved. There is a reason why instead of holding an election or having the opposition take over, they just handed the country to Maduro's very own vice president.
>the Iranian regime has no capability that could prevent its country from being turned into a smoldering parking lot.
This is a laughable amount of ignorance. The capability that Iran has to prevent this is physics
Iran is gigantic. Iran has 90 million people.
If you put together every long range precision munition the US has ever built, you could attack a single City and severely damage it.
People have zero sense of scale. To level cities the way we did in WW2 requires the level of industrial output that we had in WW2, because we have literally not made enough explosives to do so since
The US dropped 1.4 million tons of bombs on Germany alone in WW2
That's the equivalent of 3 million Tomahawk missiles. The US has built less than 10k total
>if a military victory were the US's only ambition the Iranian regime has no capability that could prevent its country from being turned into a smoldering parking lot.
I read this and I wonder, "are we back to 2003 and Iraq?"
Incredible how little memory Americans have. Absolutely none. You just have no grasps on reality.
Missiles (BIG EXPLOSION) look better when presented in video briefings to Trump and as propaganda on Fox news. It's all optics and style. No other goals.
The conflict with Iran is only 'minor' in certain respects, it's a major air campaign otherwise, involving strategic bombing on par with the Iraq War 2 - or at least the initial period.
The US is bombing them from very far away places, the amount of logistical overhead is unthinkable.
These munitions cost a fortune in part because they are purchased in lower quantities, and yes, they have to be able to do a 10x-50x instant ramp up in order to be effective (aka capacity not inventory which is the strategic key).
It takes 2 years minimum to adjust an economy in that way and the US does not have good supply chains.
It's unlikely the US could hope to fight any kind of prolonged conflict with China 'in the area of Chinese territory' for very obvious reasons: they have the supply chains, 1 billion workers, and can turn them on a dime, and don't have 'far to go' to deploy weapons.
The US doesn't even have reliable ways of getting goods and materials into the theatre and has limited quantities of everything.
That said, there are still ways to defend Taiwan and/or to make an invasion futile - but 'broad conflict' ... nope.
Then I’d stop at claiming “best” is meaningless in a military context without defining what the mission is. If it is starting wars, I’d say it’s great. If it means achieving goals, then it’s kind of meh.
America could theretically sustain other cheaper losses, like a few more F15s going down - but Trump is rightfully terrified of the political fallout of American pilots being capturred and torture videos showing up on Telegram.
Im no military planner so Im not gonna get invested in this debate haha - and obviously a human death is a huge loss - but presumably you could drop a lot of bombs for each lost fighter, so the bang/buck (literally) would be better than with missiles.
Planes aircrew high fixed/operating cost - lower unit costs on strikes.
Missiles, more expensive - depending on.
Missiles are not 'rocket science' - pun intended. They're expensive because of the overhead of military industrial complex.
Russia is making ballistic missiles 'China style' - super fast, super cheap. Basically - much bigger than ATACMs, longer range, a bit less precise but vicious. Similar to Iran.
"Minor" conflict? You really don't realize how much ressources Hesgeth has committed to this, and how much your president likes to make things go "boom".
See also: the number of strikes on boats in the Caribbean (with absolutely no result on drug trafficking).
If I was an ex KGB man running the rump of an ex empire, I'd be thinking of ways of disarming the strongest military in NATO. "Sure go ahead invade Iran, we are so impressed with your leader we wouldn't dare do anything to dissuade you."
From what I've seen the US has never really put much effort behind surface-to-surface missiles in the first place because when you have a massive and well-funded air force that's a lot better tool for executing long-range fires. Not to say that losing those missiles won't hurt if we get into a war in the medium-term (or want to supply more firepower to our allies), especially in a more land-based theatre like eastern Europe.
How is this not hidden even after 9 hours? The article vs the title is a crystal clear case of clickbait (or as the kids say these days: engagement farming).
Anyone have insight into the overlap of techies and armchair military experts? Every thread like this ends up overflowing with comments like "Let me explain to you what's really happening..."
War is one of the most high tech and technologically interesting things humans do, and is often the first place that truly state of the art abilities are showcased.
It's not hard for me to understand why techies would be so interested.
That's fine but not entirely what I'm trying to understand. There is an aspect of it that connects back to the Qanon mentality of having insider information and a level of expertise beyond the society sanctioned experts. There are plenty of tech topics that come up here that do not get the same response, so "techies just like tech" isn't the full explanation.
It might actually be for the best to stress the system in this way. It's not practical to keep a military based only around "stockpiles" that you're scared to use up. Modern combat looks like long wars of attrition where two countries compete to see who can burn through more missiles so you need to keep the actual supply chain active.
Hopefully they're able to learn lessons from Ukraine as well and pivot towards cheaper missiles and autonomous vehicles
- A country, even as big as the US, is strictly, evidently, not exceptional.
- The US lost the majority of the wars it joined/started in the last 100 years and came home every time trying to sell it as a victory despite not achieving their war goals.
- You may have weapons or power of some kind, but every move you make costs you some kind of currency: time, material, energy, credibility, goodwill. You may have large amounts, but they're never infinite.
- Acts of raw destruction as mean towards a goal is often not ideal: change and control are "constructive" concepts, while bombs can only offer you guaranteed chaos. You MIGHT be able to steer that chaos afterwards, but it's not guaranteed and numbers do not simply improve your position here. (see: Iraq, etc.)
No - the Iran war is a total strategic failure, but the US is very obviously 'exceptional' - I'm not saying necessarily admirable, or more moral etc but it is hugely 'stand out' in terms of capabilities. That's just a fact of reality irrespective of all of the political and moral context.
- The US did not 'lose' the majority of the wars it started - it won most of them, and arguably failed to achieve strategic objectives in some.
- "Acts of raw destruction as mean towards a goal is often not ideal " - this is a misrepresentation of US doctrine for decades. Even in Vietnam the US did not pursue 'full war' and refused to do strategic bombing in North Vietnam for a decade. As soon as Nixon did (op: Linebacker) - basically, the US 'won' right away. They decimated N. Vietnamese ability in a very material way. Were that strategy to have been undertaken in 1967, the war would have had a completely different outcome, probably more like Korean detente.
- US is very careful in their campaigns, there are chains of authority, externalizations are always assessed. The rules of engagement may shift a but - but it's false to suggest it's 'arbitrarily destructive' in targeting, it's generally minimal.
If you want to see what 'destructive' is, just look at Russian engagement in Ukraine, or Assad in Syria, or Saudi in Yemen. They don't care what they hit, it's a totally different environment.
To this day Iran's Oil Infrastructure remains intact. Just let that sink in.
All of this is outside of any moral or whatever other consideration - it's just 'what it is'.
The 'important note' here is that 'Power Has Limits' and that's truly the defining characterization of this war. This is not 'America is not capable' is that 'capabilities have limits' - and they become very obvious in difficult ways if power is applied poorly.
The Generals 100% warned Trump of all of this - this conflict is not a military failure in that sense, this is predictable. It's the political apparatus pushing the boundaries. The Generals would have none of this.
> To this day Iran's Oil Infrastructure remains intact. Just let that sink in.
The US was going as far as issuing sanctions waivers to Russia to try and get oil to the market it was so worried about what the war in the middle east would do to prices. All the indications are they're desperate to preserve as much middle eastern oil infrastructure as possible, even to the point where they look like losers vis a vis Iran. No surprise if they aren't inviting tit for tat exchanges on oil infrastructure. And the Russia-Ukraine war had vaguely similar parallels, with Ukraine allowing transit of Russian gas through the country to Europe for ... I want to say at least 12 months. So clearly neither side was so lost in the battle that they thought disrupting the pipelines was a good idea.
That type of targeting discrimination seems to be fairly normal. Armies are only indiscriminate when they think that helps their war aims. Although what exactly the US war aims are in Iran is very much a guess, Trump was struggling to even lie consistently when he was trying to come up with one.
Yes, that's a fair assessment, but then general context is still one of very specific strategic targeting. And FYI it's not just about 'Oil Prices', the US has left many other strategic industries in place whereas by any other ugly consideration, they would just 'blow up whatever'.
I'm not sure how far the Administration would go but they are very strongly restricted by US Armed forces procedures and just norms.
>If you want to see what 'destructive' is, just look at Russian engagement in Ukraine, or Assad in Syria, or Saudi in Yemen. They don't care what they hit, it's a totally different environment.
Show us the difference with Vietnam (and Cambodia).
The difference is deliberate and arbitrary attack of civilians at scale and total lack of concern - popularly, politically, operationally, and practically for casualties outside military targeting.
The notion one would even try to compare 'the Caribbean' - where USN is destroying drug running boats - which is arguably against some maritime laws but is nevertheless exceedingly acute, I think shows how wound up people are in the political context.
There is no relevant kinetic fallout in the Caribbean - it's an Elephant precisely stepping on a single ant.
Capture of Venezuelan Oil ... almost certainly illegal.
But that's a different thing
As for Vietnam - start by laying the context for why the N. Vietnamese imprisoned, tortured, killed 100's of thousands of political dissidents and civilians of all kinds, and continued that horrible repression for decades even to this day as they continue to crack down on mild dissent. The actual facts on both sides are actually ugly, but woefully misrepresented and the same utterly bizarre dual moral lens is applied ... a bit like in the Iranian situation as well.
Implied in the question is the despotism in plain site: why did N. Vietnam invade Cambodia? Against the will of those people? And murder and maraud in that territory?
The difference is between that, as a starting point, and strategic bombing of rural roadways (Ho Chi Min trail) etc., which ironically was in lieu of actually bombing North Vietnam which should have been done right from the onset, would have prevented a war, and saved 1/2 the population from a perennial nightmare and given the citizens some say in their future.
But it's also an example of the extent of the ability of superpowers to project power.
You get it completely backwards: the US Navy is "allegedly" destroying drug running boats, and it is completely, totally, "inarguably" against maritime laws - and laws of war (but there is no war, right?) and basic law principles in civilized countries.
>it's an Elephant precisely stepping on a single ant.
It is not a cute animal simile. It is US Navy sailors commiting 200+ summary executions. It is burning alive and drowning. It is widows and orphans.
"It is widows and orphans." - you lost the argument by trying to characterize these people as innocents, because it's such an awful position it undermines your own legitimacy.
These are 'Cártel de los Soles' etc they are thugs and killers, the source of untold violence and harm.
This the hysterical rhetorical position that I'm actually hinting at - contempt for a party (in this case the US) renders people intellectually incoherent - willing to defend the most vile actions such as mass murder by Hamas, Iranian regime, mass killings, torture and imprisonment, by North Vietnam etc..
The same people that overlook Stalin's literal genocide - for example, the German Centre Left Party, the Social Democrats, who used to 'retreat' in Russia, at one of Stalin's summer homes.
This 'USA always bad / actual terrorists are victims' nonsense is the psychological affliction at work here, in almost all these discussions.
It's the flip side of the 'USA good and justified in everything' nonsense.
One posture does not justify the other.
First - The US has a reasonable moral claim against stopping these parties, even if they are going too far by not using interdiction, and killing those who were floating at sea. The basic legitimacy remains even if the methods are not justified.
Second - The situation if anything demonstrates US exceptionalism, which is the argument here. This isn't about 'moral claims' - it's about if the US is actually an exceptional military force.
The OP indicated 'the US clearly not exceptional'.
This is completely delusional. Obviously, they are. It's not a moral assessment, which is much more complicated.
Contempt for the US turns people's brains to rubbish.
>The US did not 'lose' the majority of the wars it started - it won most of them, and arguably failed to achieve strategic objectives in some.
I mean if we look at all recent wars, Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam and now Iran we completely failed in our objectives. We spend billions, kill a lot of people and get a lot of our own people killed and didn't manage to instill democracy anywhere. How is that not losing the wars? It's complete failure to do what we set out to do 3 times now in recent history.
It's fair to say overall engagements were bad, but it's hard to argue that a military looses when it streamrolls the opponent, and then 'decides to leave'.
The US generally wins wars, but can fail on occupational and grander objectives, which are different things.
The US 'tied' in Korea, eventually 'won' in Vietnam but then quickly decided to leave - strategic failure), 'won' in Iraq but a grinding occupation left it a strategic quagmire but no total failure.
Middling intervention in Syria was effective in bringing down Assad and now there is a transition to 'something somewhat better'.
There was no fight to even win in Afghanistan as the Talibain was overthrown without direct intervention - the follow up was entirely occupational - and though it was a strategic failure, it wasn't a military defeat. The West just did not want to continue paying the cost of keeping the fighters at bay. That's a 'stupid set of decisions' which is different than 'losing'.
This is all different from Russian failure in Ukraine where it cannot meet it's military objectives.
Iran is shaping up to be a 'military tie' - because US is engaging from afar it' abilities are limited and is taking real losses ... and a pretty big strategic failure, having lost control over the Gulf, no 5th fleet presence in the Gulf, allies attacked, Iran emboldened. Bad.
Hi, the guy with the original claims here: You can really argue this one either way - If you look at Wikipedia, the field seems fairly even, but when you start looking into the details, things don't look quite as rosy: There's a few "wins" that are literally just a plane getting shot down or similar, there's a lot of revolutions they were involved in (some turning out good, some bad) But as you've observed: the big, memorable ones they lost. even the ones Wikipedia claims as wins/mixed bags are sometimes consequences of an earlier battle that they lost. For example, Korea: the division counts as a 'win', because it happened during WW2 and the US were part of the victors of WW2. Defending the south in the Korean war counts as 'mixed' and gets thrown in with the lost counteroffensive of taking the north. You can play the numbers however you like here, it feels like.
> Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. - Dwight D. Eisenhower 1953
That fools running a country who turfed out military experience for loyalty were completely blind to what they were doing? I had no idea that running out of missiles was a distinct possibility until Spencer Ackerman started beating that drum in his newsletter around the start of the conflict. Forever Wars (along with the pieces he links to) has been an eye opening read.
US adversary countries have to love everything that is happening. If you’re China you win by doing nothing, just let the US administration pillage the country
It bodes well for Europeans when the Americans begin their invasion of Denmark, at the very least. Not great for a potential Russia-USA war and Taiwan wouldn't get as much support if the Chinese invade would also be difficult, though.
The title says "virtually all" but the first paragraph says "much". The actual stockpile is probably larger than this news report would make it seem. It would be convenient for Trump and his Russia-loving cronies if it would appear that the USA has no more weapons to support Ukraine with, of course.
Many advanced NATO weapons being difficult to produce and only being available in small quantities is something that has been discussed before, I don't think that's news. The rate at which they're being spammed without much result at Iran is, but that's hardly surprising given the current people in charge.
"Play stupid games, win stupid prizes", international relations edition.
America is not happy when it is not at war. There has to be an enemy. The old WOT had finally run out of steam; people are coming out of college who were born after 9/11. Venezuela (and Latin America generally) made a good enemy for a while, but they were too easily defeated. But Iran? America has wanted a rematch since Jimmy Carter.
(A bipartisan problem, mostly, but propped up by pro-war media. The only people against it are a few Democrats, almost all of whom are women)
Not sure why anyone has a taste for the kind of butch, chest-pounding performative foreign policy we have these days. Not only does it not work, it's dangerous to national security.
Does this mean that from now on bombings will happen with dumb bombs and that we can expect way more Iranian casualties? Otherwise this seems incorrect.
A lot of the problem is with the current commander in chief's not very good strategy. Iran is huge and populous and would be very expensive to occupy with boots on the ground so no one really wants to go there. Trump thought he could just bomb their military assets and government and things would all be ok but the Iranians have been planning for that for ages and have everything distributed, duplicated and protected. A more normal leader might consult with allies who have been dealing with Iran for decades and make a coherent plan but he ignores them, tariffs them and threatens their territories. I'm not sure how it's supposed to work. He could launch 100% of the US's missiles at Iran and still not achive much.
> A fourth person familiar with the matter said that while Central Command — which oversees U.S. forces in the Middle East — has nearly used up the land-based missiles it had before the war began, it has been able to reload from U.S. military supplies elsewhere in the world.
It also says they declined to say how many the US has left. And saying “person familiar with the matter” is doing a lot of work. It could be anyone with no direct information. This is what laundering a bogus story looks like.
Exactly how many people do you think are allowed to communicate the status of weapon stockpiles? You are only ever going to get off-the-record comments or a top official letting details slip that should have remained secret.
I don’t think the title is inaccurate and robbing Peter to pay Paul isn’t the military flex Pete Hesgeth may think it is. Anyone who has ever slept under a too-small comforter knows how this will go.
The headline is inaccurate, as the article actually says that the US Army has used nearly all of its long-range precision missiles, referring to ATACMS and PCM.
First, those are short- to medium-range weapons.
Second, the USAF and USN hold most of the US's long-range precision weaponry, the only real exception being the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW), which is not yet fielded.
Goes to show every army does the same: they make, especially the lower echelons, largely correct predictions of future conflicts. Then they refuse to prepare for them.
> Analysts say such weapons – which cost over $1 million each – would also be important in any conflict with China.
Said without context, there are not very many places close to China where these could be fired from, so I'm not so sure how useful they would really be in any South China Sea hot wars
And we've advertised it to the entire world. And we've destroyed our economy. And we've further isolated ourselves from the world, culturally, politically, and economically.
Good job everyone with the voting. All those people voted for "let's make things universally worse for everyone except billionaires in America".
I have no idea if this is true or not. If it is it shows a new level of incompetence for Hegseth and the current administration and clear hypocrisy in their messaging of 'america first'. It was ridiculous that we started the war believing it will be over in a weekend, but this is a mistake the US has made many many times before so to say this administration is different is silly. Then Hegseth allowed vaccine mandates to go away because no military in history has ever be harmed by disease. Now we (possibly) have depleted strategic munitions with essentially no strategic gain? This is a teenager's view of how to run/use the military. No understanding of history. No understanding of history (medical reediness or basic military tactics of the danger choke points), no understanding of the present (understanding Iran's likely responses and resolve or how vulnerable our bases and allies in the region were and are) and no understanding of the future (depleting strategic stockpiles of munitions without understanding what 'strategic stockpiles' means). We are idiots for even remotely tolerating such utter incompetence.
It's a good job their allies will defend them then if their ammo is low - this isn't sarcasm, it's the point of NATO, but hey if Trump still wants to pull out of that alliance...
There are several conclulsions you can draw from all this:
1. The US has been strategically and militarily defeated by Iran and this has been clear since at least April to anyone who was paying attention and has achieved none of its objectives. More [1];
2. Continued use of so-called "stand off" weapons confirms that the US has been unable to achieve air supremacy over Iran and use gravity bombs. The article mentions this but doesn't really explain the implications; Reaper drones have been lost in large numbers. Air sorties are limited to also firing stand off weapons, mostly. One reason for this is an Iranian developed weapons system of loitering missiles that the US has designated as 358 and 359 missiles [2];
3. The US is spending an unprecedented amount of money on a war it has already lost that nobody wants. In some ways this mirrors the Nixon-Kissinger plan to bomb Cambodia until morale improves. Nobody wants to admit defeat. But wars are good for business. Some people are getting incredibly wealthy off all this. Munitions are the ultimate product. You use them once and then have to buy them again, often at $1M+ apiece;
4. This is the real story of American oil dependence over rewnewables. Nobody goes to war over a solar panel [3];
5. The article also mentions the drastically low inventory levels of missile interceptors (eg PAC-2, PAC-3, THAAD). This is in part why several US bases in the Gulf have been effectively destroyed and abandoned because the military cannot defend them. Iran is using very cheap weapon systems, particularly the Shahed drone, and can produce them in much higher numbers. Shooting down a $20k drone with a $1-4M missile does not scale;
6. This is going to rewrite Gulf politics as the promise of the American security-for-oil guarantee has shown to be a paper tiger. This is going to force a change for Gulf countries;
7. For all the complaining about the JCPOA, this administration has for absolutely no reason kicked the hornet's nest and the price of ending this war is going to be far, far higher. That will include (IMHO) an end to economic sanctions, unfreezing of Iranian assets, weakening of the petrodollar, compensation for Iran in the hundreds of billions and a concession that Iran can and will charge tolls for transit of the Strait of Hormuz in concert with Oman. Well done, everybody, the system works.
This is already the lifeline Europe is using to save its auto industry from the electric... the US is next. Just need to open up competitive bidding for the production of these components. Licensing patriot production to Ukraine will be a good start... S. Korea next
Someone that wants peace shouldn't be happy that, let's say, China is well stocked while the US isn't when we consider China's position on Taiwan and the South China Sea. Russia having multiple production lines for artillery and drones while Europe has sent everything they had to Ukraine isn't good for the balance. And so on.
I'm not saying that you should support whatever is happening with Iran, but understand that if a country thinks no one can punish them if they start shit, then they may do it, and then you end up with war, not peace... the opposite of what you expect.
There is not really any strategy here in place that makes sense
from an US point of view. There is a strategy in place that may
make sense for Netanyahu (e. g. remain in power) but this is not
a US strategic point of view. Trump seems to be the most easily
influenced roleplaying as "president". People need to follow the
money trail here - that would explain the whole situation right
now best.
The strategy was to get Epstein off of everyone’s mind. And if it cost over $40billion and counting then it was deemed worth it, because the president comes first, that how’s our president thinks, me first, and our politicians, party first, our lobby second and the oligarchs third.
Americans living in their bubble might be unable to see from a perspective, but from outside is quite apparent that American-Israeli conflict against Iran will long outlive both Trump and Netanjahu. Hopefully that was the last dumb thing and decision they made.
Is it even a correct framing for the conflict ? Iran seems to have big issues with UAE and Saudi Arabia and repeatedly fired at them and got fired by them.
This is good for Anduril. The future of war is cheap, massed, intelligent drones. Its strategically fortunate for us to burn through all of this expensive, obsolete crap.
I like how China and Russia are mentioned as adversaries that the US might be less likely to deter with their dwindling supply of long-range munition, but the country that so helpfully "received" (being bombed) all that supply and is the reason for the stockpile being minimal right now, isn't mentioned as an adversary that could take advantage of this.
Think Ukraine is the reason the US is low on missiles? Do the numbers actually support that? The numbers don’t seem to support that. From a very cursory search, offensive missiles seem to be around 2:1 Iran. And that’s just raw numbers; someone other than me who might do a little moral editorializing would point out the use in Ukraine was to fight off an illegal invasion while the most effective strike in Iran killed a hundred schoolgirls.
The US only used long range precision missiles for the first 3 days of the war. Since then, its been almost all JDAMs. The interceptors got used a lot more but even with those we only went through about 5% of the stockpile. This is CNBC. If you trust them on topics like this, well...that's on you. Please remember that they don't have a single person on staff with any military experience or expertise.
The CNBC article's source is "as reported by Reuters", and the Military Times article is just a reprint of the Reuters Article, if you look, immediately under the headline it states "By Reuters".
So there is only one news outlet reporting on it, Reuters, and the rest are just reporting on the reporting.
> but even with those we only went through about 5% of the stockpile.
Source? In terms of VLS-packed high end interceptors, I'd imagine they're much deeper into the magazine than that. Quad-packed point defense missiles might be lower, but those aren't useful against theater ballistic missiles like Iran has been deploying.
> Their source was probably the IRCG...
That doesn't make much sense as disinformation. Iran stands to gain very little by lying like that, and judging by the exodus of US generals and admirals I'd wager to say that this was an internal point of disagreement in the US armed forces. A lot of assets earmarked for the Pacific theater have been expended with no quick replacements incoming.
>The U.S. Army has used up much of its stockpile of highly accurate long-range missiles during its five-month war with Iran, according to three people familiar with the data, raising concerns about the military’s readiness for future conflicts.
>The missiles are principally the Army’s surface-to-surface weapons, known as Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) and Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM). The U.S. has used “virtually all” of these weapons, according to two of the sources.
That quite a bit less of an issue than the headline implies.
PrSM has been in production for only a short time, and ATACMS stocks were never high. Neither of these are the backbone of US long-range precision strike weapons. Article is misleading.
It IS an issue if stand-off war is your only war, and it seems to be the exclusive approach here. If you run out of long-range precision weapons, what do you have left? Boots on the ground? That's not going to happen, and that means you will never win this on and off war.
The USAF has a pretty substantial inventory of stand-off weapons, and an absolutely enormous inventory of guided bombs.
They do, but the current leadership does not have any appetite for entering Iran's airspace after the last downing drama. If Iran captures a pilot, there is going to be no more room for market manipulation.
They want this problem to be solved. So you spend the munitions, forcing the manufacturing problem to get fixed. This works in favor of Anduril, which cares about manufacturing scalability
Never high and a significant number were donated to ukraine specifically because a ground launched pgm has never been a high priority for the US since the USAF exists.
No PrSM were donated to Ukraine, and only a small number of legacy ATACMS were delivered. Under 200 from open sources...
> That quite a bit less of an issue than the headline implies.
Here's a point that I ran across: these long range missiles are there to take out air defences and such (along with stealth sorties), which allows you go go in with 'regular' ordinance and non-stealth aircraft—of which there is much higher quantities and availability—in later phases.
In the early phases of the conflict you use stand-off munitions to reduce the chances of people being captured or killed.
Because Trump doesn't really have approval for this escapade (from either Congress or public opinion) these 'fancy' munitions are the ones primary being used to reduce the risk of casualties.
Now, trying to reduce casualties is not a bad thing per se, but the trade-off is that the fancy stuff is more expensive and takes longer to (re-)build-up. And what if there are other conflicts that flare up where these munitions would be useful? If they're not available do you start using piloted aircraft?
>Here's a point that I ran across: these long range missiles are there to take out air defences and such (along with stealth sorties), which allows you go go in with 'regular' ordinance and non-stealth aircraft—of which there is much higher quantities and availability—in later phases.
Not ATACMS. SEAD is an Air Force/Navy activity.
ATACMS and PrSM would definitely be used to strike air defense systems. The US military is very joint and the boundary you're delineating isn't part of the mission tasking.
Sure, it's possible in theory. In reality, the army has other priorities.
You’re giving trump a lot of credit that you think he’s capable of thinking of second order effects of his actions.
Two birds with one stone for benefit of Putin.
Likely son of Ayatollah wanted to get rid of his weak father and Putin wanted the US to stop supplying weapons to Ukraine. So Putin asked Krasnov to get rid of Ayatollah and empty the stockpile of weapons.
Trump always delivers for Russia.
I don’t know if I am convinced. Russia also uses a lot of Iranian drones, which presumably are going to have supply troubles because of this war.
OTOH reducing the supply raises the price of oil and thereby allows Russia to charge more for their main product of export. At the start of the war Trump reduced Russian oil sanctions[1]. Trump is also collecting all the money from Venezuelan oil sales[2].
1. https://www.nbcnews.com/world/russia/trump-eases-russian-oil...
2. https://newrepublic.com/post/213566/trump-hoarding-billions-...
Not an American but live here.
But I don’t understand the fixation of US in middle east theatre. With the abundance of onshore oil through fracking revolution, presumably US doesn’t need to police the Middle East. The president himself said US doesn’t need their oil.
So what is this conflict all about? Is there bigger geopolitical price tag attached to victory in Iran? Or US is just besieged by corruption to the extent campaign finding from Israel lobby as they say dictated much of the foreign policy than national interest?
It’s just baffling and public seems largely fine with this with the lack of widespread protest that this should have caused (vaguely remember living across the bridge from Michigan all the protests there post Iraq war).
The Occam's razor explanation is that it's all about Israel.
They're the only country that actually benefits from all these misguided Middle Eastern adventures, and it's not like it's just one, there's a pattern and it's always the same
Saudi Arabia benefits just as much, if not more, from a diminished Iran.
Not just Saudi Arabia but the UAE, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Egypt, and Gaza.
Iran has funded terrorism and religious extremism in the region leading to massive death tolls in many of them. Not to mention Iranians themselves.
Tell me who funded ISIS. The last I checked it was the Iranians and the Hezbollah that fought ISIS/Daesh and brought them to their knees.
In 2026, if you don't know US funded religious extremism in the middle east, then I guess you believe whatever you want to believe. The time is way past.
I would speculate that it’s more about Israel interests. Iran produces 5% of the global oil but more importantly, it represents 20% of their gov income and the major engine of economic growth in the country. So .. you control their oil, you control the government.. and with it, the major antagonist to us interests in the region. Every other country in the region is aligned with the US or just too poor to be relevant. So it’d be a big win for the global geopolitics board.
It’s simple. Oil is traded in USD. A large share of the oil is produced in the Middle East. If oil stopped trading in USD the value of our currency would plummet. So we have a strong interest in all oil exporters.
There's also the petroyuan [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroyuan
What’s even more puzzling is that line of reasoning was one reason why trump was elected in the first place: increase domestic oil supply and get out of foreign wars
It stops being puzzling when you recall that Trump is a con man. This whole thing was never about making America great again, it was about lining Trump and his family's pockets. By every metric which matters to Trump, things are going exactly according to plan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxptRmMBIrE + https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54if9r6yiQ8 + https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DDbYSg0Alw taken in concert. It's a bit complicated, but all 3 together will give you a pretty holistic picture.
It’s because Israel has captured the US government through a combination of lobbying and probably blackmail. The endless wars in the Middle East are to bolster them as a regional and then global superpower.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clean_Break:_A_New_Strategy_...
The TikTok deal happened because too many young people were being exposed to anti Zionist content. It’s illegal to criticize Israel in many regions of the US, but not illegal to criticize the US. It’s illegal to boycott Israeli companies in many states, but not US companies. This war on Iran hurts everybody because of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, except for Israel who now has a severely diminished adversary to their regional dominance. It’s not even a secret, Israeli’s boast about this on social media and have a whole hit list of countries they want the US to attack. Turkey is next on the list so expect to start seeing more seemingly random antagonistic rhetoric from the US about Turkey.
My understanding is that the point is not to hit iran, but the oil market.
The US has stocks and production, but EU and china, trumps favorite economical targets, do not.
No proof to offer, but it fits with his other move when it come to economy.
The US doesn't need more oil, but if Iran were to cut off oil supply from the Persian Gulf it would make oil prices significantly more expensive by reducing total available worldwide supply. The US economy, for the better or worse of it, depends on cheap oil to supply energy for commerce and transportation, and if that becomes more expensive, people stop traveling, trucks stop shipping, energy stops being produced and millions of US jobs are at risk.
The whole "Death to America" and USA is the "Great Satan" make them a much more morally easy target given they have practically no ability to fight back.
I don’t know, the US is the world‘s largest oil producer, and there’s a lot of people in America who are very happy about the high oil prices. Doesn’t exactly trickle down to the average American though. But there are many other industries is that matter a whole lot more to the US economy, for example, if Taiwan stop selling chips to the US, we would be really screwed.
Oil can't be the whole story, can it? If it was, we'd be more heavily investing in moving away from oil.
From what I can tell, it's as much extremism of "democracy", religion, and a version of "manifest destiny" as anything else
Absolutely not defending anything the US gov is doing now or for the past years, and in general agreement (Iran is targeted for totally stupid reasons), just to point out:
> With the abundance of onshore oil through fracking revolution
Fracking isn't free of consequences, and while the current US gov doesn't care about them, people are directly affected and are rightfully pissed about it.
Bombing/invading foreign countries to get the oil is obviously not the right approach, but relying on fracking isn't a clean solution either.
Iran has been the instigator or financier of almost all global terrorism that affects US interests for the last 50 years. It's not like that's a secret.
The only reason why the US has been dealing with the effects rather than the cause for so long is best illustrated by the mess we have now.
I guess we can be a little thankful this is bogging down because next on the list is Russia and the little proxy war between the US and China going on in Ukraine.
The US benefits from causing instability as it prevents a true rival peer power from forming.
It's the same technique China has been using economically and Russia politically for decades against the US.
I've linked this article several times on HN. Nobody goes to war over a solar panel [1].
You have to understand that the US is an arms dealer empire. We now spend >$1T/year on the military and a huge chunk of it is basically looting government coffers. Pretty much all post-WW2 moves by the US can be boiled down to selling weapons to somebody, sometimes both sides.
There is no pie anywhere in the world that the US doesn't have a finger in in some way unless they can't (eg China can't be bullied in this way). Global trade is a complex web. And even though the US is a net energy exporter now, there are second-order effects if, in the mind of US administrations, other countries start denying oil to allies, for example.
[1]: https://www.theenergymix.com/no-one-goes-to-war-over-a-solar...
MICE - Money, Ideology, Compromise and Ego.
I think at least three might be at play here.
Guess who I'm talking about.
There is only ONE country in the Middle-East whose borders are, continuously growing...for the last 78 years ;-) Something about a promise from God...
One reason among several is that middle east states fund the US fiscal deficit by buying treasuries with their oil revenues. If the US loses that source of financing then the US fiscal situation gets worse
This. Since it has been demonstrated that we can no longer guarantee the shipping of oil through the straight of Hormuz, nobody has any reasons to price oil in USD or to finance our deficits.
Get ready for the mother of all tax increases.
> So what is this conflict all about? Is there bigger geopolitical price tag attached to victory in Iran? Or US is just besieged by corruption to the extent campaign finding from Israel lobby as they say dictated much of the foreign policy than national interest?
An optimist would say:
America doesn't like Iran because it's a theocratic dictatorship that funds terrorist groups throughout the region, supplies drones to Russia, fires missiles at the only democracy in the region (Israel) and is pursuing nuclear weapons.
As energy markets are global, middle east politics impacts America's vital national interests, and prices consumers pay at the pump, even if America is a net exporter of oil.
Iran had a series of nationwide protests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025%E2%80%932026_Iranian_prot... indicating there was widespread popular support for a new, less theocratic government.
Trump thought they could go in with a surgical strike, knock out the theocratic leaders and the nuclear facilities, enabling the protesters to overthrow the remains of the government, while the army steps back like we saw in the 2011 Egyptian revolution. Then they'd turn into a peace-loving democracy, and Trump would go down in history as having defeated one of America's long-term antagonists, making him a winner and a tough guy, and really showing Obama how it's done.
A cynic would say:
Trump wanted a distraction from the Epstein files (which this war has 100% delivered) and/or a country that wanted this war to happen has the Epstein evidence to blackmail him with.
Having deliberately installed loyal incompetents in leadership positions, even though military planners were 100% aware the Strait of Hormuz would get closed, and that their drones are an order of magnitude cheaper than our drone interceptors, that knowledge was dismissed by the executive.
Being able to make oil prices rise and fall by tweeting is an easy way to make money if you're exempt from the justice system.
Having the war drag on might not be good for Republican performance in the midterm elections - but Trump can't run for a third term, so he doesn't much care if the party is left in a shambles.
They literally told us it was about Israel. There's no mystery.
Empire
AIPAC is the single most influential special interest group in US politics. If you don't do what AIPAC says to advance their foreign policy goals, they will remove you from office at the next election. They do this on a regular basis and even publicly brag about it.
Israel.
Israeli hegemonic ambition. Zionist funding of Trump's campaign. Corrupt profiteering from market manipulation. Distraction from the Epstein files. Gullibility of a large fraction of the US public. Trump's ego and stupidity. And when a nuclear superpower starts a war like this, there's not much anyone else can do to stop it. The result: a massive strategic blunder for the US, the true cost of which may not be fully understood for many years.
Israel bought and/or blackmailed our politicians. We are doing it for them, our greatest ally .
Both the reasons (AIPAC + pricing Oil in USD helps finance our deficits) are why we were there. But both of those reasons have been severely weakened, to the point of probably being eliminated anyways:
1. After the midterms, we'll get a read on how much AIPAC is still able to buy congressmen.
2. Before Trump obeyed Israel and bombed Iran, we had the illusion of being invincible. But now, we are faced with the brut reality that we cannot guarantee the flow of oil through the Hormuz straight, nor almost anywhere else in that whole hemisphere. Even to Europe: Ask Putin how much drones have changed the game.
This really eliminates any remaining motivations to keep pricing oil in USD. Which removes most of the motivations for the world to keep financing our deficit.
At this point our best option is to just leave the region, and try to transition to renewables absolutely as fast as we can. Oh, and raise taxes on everybody, because demand for our bonds is going to crater.
Maybe the abundance was just a lie. We never know. Considering the amount of shameless lies the west manufactures every day, I wouldn't believe one word that comes from there.
One has to re-examine every claim ever made about capabilities from the west. Never thought I would say this. Heck they lost with 2 aircraft carriers against Ansarallah last year.
Maybe I’m missing the subtler geopolitical point here, but I don’t think it’s about oil. It’s about preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons and threatening the region via their missiles, drones, and proxies.
Whether they succeed at it or not is an open question, but it seems clear that’s what it was about. Take operation midnight hammer last July. That was clearly only about the nuclear issue.
How many of these tiger deterring rocks can I put you down for? They're $1T each but we've got a 3-for-2 offer going. You may think you're not often attacked by tigers now, but can you afford not to own one of these rocks to keep that record?
Trump doesn't give a flying flip about Iran having Nuclear weapons. If he cared at all, in the slightest, he wouldn't have unilaterally broken our treaty with them.
Iran is generally a country run by some bad people. Letting them get nuclear weapons is a bad idea. Take a look at North Korea, they literally starve their people and there isn't much we can do about it now.
You think the USA are the good guys making sure the bad guys don’t get nuclear weapons? Like in the movies?
Iran has been two weeks away from getting the bomb for decades now. And last year the US supposedly set them back decades on their nuclear aims. This war was absolutely unnecessary if blocking them from nuclear weapons was the objective, or the president lied last year about the success of the bombings (which is definitely possible).
The US is also a country run by some bad people.
The war is not about nuclear arms. Plus, there was enforced followed agreement that ended because of people who started this war.
US leadership does not give a flying fck about other people starwing right now. Not in gaza, not in Iran, Syria, Afrika anywhere.
The US gives no shits about 'bad people'. There are plenty of bad people in other parts of the world - the oil is all that matters to us in the Middle-East.
I'm always confused by prices of "highly regulated" goods in the United States.
When I get a $150,000 bill for a 15-minute hand-reconstruction surgery, how much of that bill is the total margin vs self cost? And how much of that is warranted / acceptable?
When a single Tomahawk missile bills the taxpayer $3,600,000, how much of that bill is the total margin? When I say "total margin", I mean not just the margin of the company that builds the Tomahawk itself, but the margins of all the components that were used in it -- every last bolt and every ounce of aluminum.
There are a great many costs built into the system that this analysis won’t get you: mandatory useless ingredients, arbitrary standards, and pervasive regulations.
I worked in aerospace and know a bit about this. Say you want to make a missile. Well, you better have the paperwork for literally every component to show that the metal used in all of it originates from a foundry in one of a tiny handful of countries.
That sounds superficially reasonable. The supply chain should be trustworthy and reliable.
I agree. We want to expect competence at all levels of the private and especially public sectors, but we're only able to insist upon it in a few key areas (aerospace, medical devices, etc.)
It is funny to see the same story every time. It's all burdensome regulation by the nanny state until something goes very very wrong and the public wants answers NOW, at which point it's incompetent government getting led by the nose by monied interest groups and their public relations departments.
This is exactly what happened with Brexit. Bunch of people voted to leave the burdensome EU regulation environment, then realised they quite liked workers rights so they don’t get fired in an instant, having food quality standards was actually pretty good to protect us from chickens filled with hormones and they didn’t want a bunch of infrastructure built in their back yard so environmental regulation was also quite useful.
The unknowns of defense spending is a feature and not a bug - for defense contractors
The us military has been a wealth transfer mechanism for decades.
The real problem isn't the price of the missiles. I wouldn't even care about the price of the missiles if they actually worked. But Iran kicked our butts. We don't have air superiority, we cannot guarantee the shipping of oil through the straight of Hormuz, or anywhere else in that hemispheres, our bases and our aircraft carriers are useless.
I wanna know what they've been doing with our trillions of dollars, because it sure as heck wasn't making an effective military.
They ate the money. They got really fat and slow.
RTX, formerly Raytheon, has the same revenue and net income as PepsiCo. PepsiCo has a higher profit margin.
Most of these companies are public and you can find their stats.
A Tomahawk missile is $3.6 million because it uses specialty components, all made in small batches using very expensive American specialist labor. It's also staggeringly more capable than a drone, or a shahed. Those extra capabilities are enormously expensive, because they are hyper niche.
A single American Artillery Shell is $3000.
Meanwhile, your $150k surgery bill example is completely different. It's a fake number, made up to cause a process to generate an actual, intended price somewhere. Your insurer and the hospital play some insane game of chicken where the insurance promises only to pay a percentage of what they are billed and so the hospital submits a fake number to get what they actually want (or nowadays the system is even more byzantine)
If you were to count the margin of everything it would be 100%. At the end of the day everything is either a resource harvested from the earth or human labor.
The more common concept of margin used in this context is net profit after expenses, including labor expenses. The question is therefore roughly "How much is purely for capital profit taking rather than directly involved with compensating labor and purchasing materials?".
Everything is human labor. There is no such thing as a “resource” without human labor to convert raw earth into something useful.
Two things that are necessary are both necessary. That doesn’t mean one collapses into the other.
IP at the margin?
Everything is food and air. There is no such thing a "human labor" without food and air to sustain it. I'm not sure what your point is.
Help me understand this.
There's the cost that the employees pocket, and then there's the share that the shareholders pocket, right? Doesn't "margin" represent the latter?
100% of the money ends up going to people.
It’s not like you get to the end of the chain and trade a fistful of dollars with the ingot of aluminum itself.
Sure, the concept of money is only meaningful / valuable to humans.
But isn't there a conceptual difference between the "owners" of the Tomahawk factory vs. the people who are actually putting the missiles together?
Ukrainian FP-5 Flamingo has 2x official Tomahawk range and payload and costs ~$600K to make with minimal margins.
I think most of the cost is in R&D
Those margins are the cost of Capitalism.
Many defense contracts are cost plus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost-plus_pricing
Nope. Very few defense contacts are still issued on a cost-plus basis. Especially not those for serial production of existing munitions.
Now they'll exhaust interceptors and other long range missiles like tomahawks and whatnot.
And then China gets frisky with Taiwan and the US will totally not abandon them and tell them to just give up pressured by the lack of firepower to defend them, the risks of China getting back into bidding oil in international markets and the mess the treasury would be in if China raises capital by selling bonds (they just told the fed to print more so Japan can buy yens without selling their US bonds, so they are at least very concerned about the possibility).
Sorry for the rant.
If they can exhaust all their firepower in a couple weeks fighting Iran, China would have no reason to feel threatened in the first place.
The reality is that fighting China would be a proper all-out war, not whatever this spitting match with Iran is.
The reality is that fighting any country with a decent military has to be all-out war. We should have plenty of precision missiles left today because they should have been used only to clear the way for runs with "dumb" bombs. A war with China would be the same, it can never be fought from a distance with primarily $1m+ precision surface to surface missiles.
Of course I only mean if the war was necessary to fight at all, I don't believe it was.
> We should have plenty of precision missiles left today because they should have been used only to clear the way for runs with "dumb" bombs.
That's what the US tried to do. The problem is that they were unable to degrade the Iranian missile systems enough that they could drop gravity bombs with impunity. This also means that they had to pull the aircraft that they would use to do bombing runs back to bases in Jordan and Israel because anything on the tarmac in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE is very vulnerable to Iranian drone and missile strikes. All of this means that they're forcing the US to choose between pulling out of the region or accepting losses of personnel and airframes (that likely cannot be replaced in a timely manner) at a level that the post-Vietnam US military has never had to face.
I suspect an all-out war between the US and China would go the same way as this one, if not worse. The US military in its modern form has focused on procuring very complex, advanced, and featureful weapons in tiny numbers. The problem is that this means that the US is incapable of fighting a sustained campaign against an adversary that can withstand attacks from American weapons and has a higher production capacity.
> That's what the US tried to do.
Yes but with the caveat that they wanted the lowest risk to US service members during the bombing. This means using up the fire and forget stuff rather than the guided munitions attached to planes. They have good air superiority, but poor logistical options to do that.
The traditional way to do this is to park two carrier groups within 500 miles of the target and convey tonnes of cheap munitions to the targets (as in iraq, Libya & kosovo) the problem for the US is that it means parking a carrier within drone range. You'd then establish a land base and move forward. Again all of the logistics of doing that are vulnerable to drone.
So this is the route they chose.
Until the US have something to counter drones cheaply, then they'll get stuck like this.
I would love to know the honest opinions of our top brass. They had to know sitting out of (most) drone range and leaning almost entirely on long range surface-to-surfsce missiles wouldn't even come close to clearing the way for more standard bombing runs.
They would have known going into this war the plan was fundamentally flawed before we even committed to firing a single munition.
China, in it's modern incarnation, and every living member of it's military, has never seen a single real battle. Nothing. No one has any rank that has bearing on any kind of combat. Just decades of self-congratulatory war games.
China has tons of weapons and resources. But it would remain to be seen if they can actually fight when every single person along the entire chain is a total day one rookie.
> China, in it's modern incarnation, and every living member of it's military, has never seen a single real battle.
I wish people would take a short stop here and contemplate a bit on this sentence.
The PLA has engaged in many battles over the last few decades. There were some as recent as 2024.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Liberation_Army#Eng...
All of this talk about entering a hot war with China is crazy because of this fact. You don’t go directly from literally zero battles to starting a war with one of the strongest armies.
Goals tbh
NATO exercises and, ya know, the war in Iran, seem to suggest there's limited applicability of the US's experience.
Dropping bombs and evading live anti-aircraft fire is of limited applicability? Are you sure you're not confusing combined arms exercises that the US has, and continues to engage in (Venezuela comes to mind recently) with your personal opinion on the validity of the war in Iran?
Uhh yes. I am sure.
A smash and grab in Venezuela is not Iran and Iran is not China.
The closest analog we have to war with China is Ukraine/Russia. All evidence from NATO exercises and investigations is that Ukr/Rus conflict has virtually no relevance to OEF, OIF, or The Caracas Kidnapping.
Iran is a little taste of what's going in Ukr/Rus, but obviously China would be able to wield the same type of war at orders of magnitude greater intensity.
My comment was quite specific on my claim. You have provided zero evidence against it, and instead are just doing this weird presumptive ad hominem thing?
If you were paying attention to what's actually going on in modern battlefields, you'd know that in fact you're right: "dropping bombs and evading AA fire" is actually of limited applicability! Great examples! There are no bombs being dropped. Virtually no humans are being shot at with anti-aircraft fire. That's what I'm pointing out.
Ok so let me explain something to you as I think you might be a little new to the military or military theory, combat, &c.
Militaries need to train in order to test systems, test weapons, gain experience, and be able to generally perform better and accomplish any given objective. In the modern era, militaries need to engage in what is called Combined Arms exercises. These exercises, as the name alludes to, coordinate activities across different branches of the military. So it might be the army coordinating with the navy to attack a target or capture some piece of land or objective. Maybe the army is on the ground directing fire from naval ships off the coast, or it could be the Air Force providing drone coverage as special forces achieve some mission.
Coordinating these activities during peace time is a key function of successful militaries. It is incredibly important to align these activities to be effective. Because of this, not only do you have militaries that work on combined arms and other trainings internally, but in the case of NATO, or perhaps the US with alliances in the Pacific we also engage in combined arms exercises with other militaries to further enhance and integrate those capabilities so that when it comes time to fight, forces have been trained how to respond and can do so more effectively. A great example of this is KATUSA - Korean Augmentation to the United States Army where Korean soldiers are actually assigned to and reporting to American military command and train alongside the United States.
The reason Venezuela is important, for example, is because it was an exercise demonstrating combined arms coordination and execution. It shows what the US military is actually capable when air, sea, and land forces engage to accomplish some objective.
So why is this important re: Iran (and Ukraine certainly). Because it's combined arms activities except that it's the real thing. Real equipment failures might happen, real lessons are learned, you are actually getting shot at. Lives are at stake. The military is actually battle tested, even if the opponent is hopelessly outmatched.
So when you write something like this:
> All evidence from NATO exercises and investigations is that Ukr/Rus conflict has virtually no relevance to OEF, OIF, or The Caracas Criminal Apprehension.
Those exercises, the lessons learned from the wars such as OEF, OIF, and even how Ukraine is today using and testing American military equipment in battle, matter a whole lot. And that's one of Xi Jingping's primary concerns with his military. They have done 0 of this. They've never really been shot at. They haven't tested their equipment in any sort of real battle. For the software-minded, it's like they've always been in development and haven't even touched a preview environment, let alone production. And worrying enough the US has demonstrated the capability to bypass and/or destroy Chinese and Russian military equipment including air defense and radar arrays - this is worrisome for those countries. If it comes time for a real war, well the only evidence you have so far is your state of the art equipment or close enough to it was absolutely fucking useless when it came to operations involving the US. Whooops.
They may start a war and find out they made a lot of bad assumptions and didn't train well enough and then what?
I'd encourage you to think about this a little more than you are here.
brother, how do you think this is going for us
I think that's a separate question from the validity of real-life combat experience that American (and other) forces are gaining that Chinese forces lack, with respect to the OP.
The claim above is that neither side has experience that's all that relevant to the type of conflict we'd expect in a China/US conflict.
Nothing to do with "validity." Your lived experience (or whoever's you're defending) is valid.
That is factually incorrect then if that's the claim. The US has that experience.
I'm not sure that any of that actually matters. Wars are not Call of Duty. It's politically difficult to invest actual manpower in Iran and Unless China were to nuke Hawaii, an all out war with China would also immediately be politically unpopular. China, like Iran, wouldn't doesn't need to defeat the US, they just need to hold out long enough for the US economy to collapse, which would happen way faster if China is the opposition.
The only reason we don't have $6 gas right now is because of a ton of financially engineering. I don't know how anyone could convince the American public that $10 gas and war time rations is worth defending Taiwan.
> The only reason we don't have $6 gas right now ...
I see you are not in California.
California has both very high taxes on gas and a custom formulation that is only used in California... which is just about the most Californian thing I can think of.
In "actual fighting" the losses are such that the units are weakened not like leveling up experience.
I don't think soldiers survive any meaningful amount of combat to get experience in combat. Pooping without WC is what they get good at which you can do in exerciss too.
Logistics and support staff might get experience maybe ...
This isn't WW1, not a lot of experience is necessary to point a missile or a drone towards the target.
You could also reduce WW1 to “pointing your rifle towards the target.”
Vs, the unities which has lost its engagement since.. the Vietnam or Korean war?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m pro-American all the way. I just am not sure which is better: to defer and not be in war or to be in war and lose due to economics vs brute firepower/manpower/superiority.
Didn't at least some living generals fight in Vietnam?
I think this comes out in the wash mostly.
While we're going to have lots of officers who've been to war for a while yet, turnover eventually evens the playing field.
The people who would be doing the actual fighting in a war today have never been to war.
And as we've seen in Ukraine, warfare is always evolving, making some subset of past war experience less valuable.
The upper ranks of the US military is absolutely littered with guys who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Its the difference between having a CEO who was a competent engineer for years before becoming the CEO, and having a CEO who went to business school and played software dev tycoon for 10 years before walking in the door to be CEO on the first day of their first real job.
> China, in it's modern incarnation, and every living member of it's military, has never seen a single real battle. Nothing. No one has any rank that has bearing on any kind of combat. Just decades of self-congratulatory war games.
Ukraine wasn't really wearing the war crown either and they managed to redefine the face of war to the point where countries with trillion dollar militaries are taking notes.
Your jab isn't totally unwarranted, China like most countries has no battle tested military. But your correct premise suggests a conclusion which just isn't there. If I say "China hasn't lost a war in decades, while the US is successfully losing to an enemy that's been strangled from all sides for decades" the premise is true but the conclusion is still up for being written.
The problem is production capacity. The US has gutted the lower-value parts of its supply chains, closed refineries and foundries left and right, and is thoroughly unequipped to even produce cheap weapons at the rate required to support a war.
The number of airplanes built in the US during WWII is greater than all the airplanes NOT in that category. Obviously we can't maintain that level of industry during peacetime, but we've fallen so far below that level and are so low on weapons that if another major war starts we won't even be able to rapidly scale up.
No, the problem is that nobody actually gives a fuck about this war.
The reason we don't have industrial capacity dedicated to this war is because everyone knows we're fighting it for no reason, there's no plan, it stops and starts every 4 days, so on.
Simple consequences of having actual stupid people leading our government.
If the US got into a war that anyone actually cared about, it would almost certainly snap into action at incredible speed.
Looking back at COVID crisis, the rate China vs US snapped to action when it come to PPE production is probably good glimpse into the disparity. I'm not sure we have done anything to improve this situation.
That is, again, a great example of the same administration being utterly incompetent at directing production.
Every single manufacturer in the US stated plainly that they did not feel safe scaling up production, because the demand was always going to be temporary, and they didn't want to be left with unusable factories.
A competent admin could have worked with them to arrange for financial help to temporarily expand and not leave them hanging.
That's what happens when "The free market is the only one allowed to make resource distribution choices" hits reality. Sometimes all rational actors making rational choices will leave you fucked.
Ethanol did not have that fear, as the infrastructure for it shares a lot with other industries, and we scaled that production quickly.
It's just more examples of, again, the way the free market will respond to changes in demand is not always a good thing, and sometimes you do have to nudge the market or buoy producers to keep things running well and quickly respond.
The admin could also have, you know, not stolen the critical stockpile of PPE, given it to a business spun up by his family, and let them sell it for personal profit.
> If the US got into a war that anyone actually cared about, it would almost certainly snap into action at incredible speed.
I'm gonna push back on "nobody cares." The United States is somewhat unique in that our doctrine calls for wars to be fought on distant shores, and that the main role of our military is to ensure that our ideology (liberal democracy) is protected across the world.
That's why we entered WWII, it's why we keep carrier groups around the world, and it's why Iran/Ukraine/Taiwan are so critical. The threat of an American response and the visible follow-through is a significant factor in deterring anyone who's even considering a war.
Yes, Trump is unspeakably stupid, he's managed to make the worst possible decision at every step of this nightmare, but the truth is that a conflict like this has only been getting more likely since the GOP killed the nuclear deal.
We need weapons for Ukraine. We need weapons for Iran. And, God forbid, but we need weapons for Taiwan.
>our ideology (liberal democracy) is protected across the world
this is pure propaganda and is completely false statement, not grounded in reality. US has no problem protecting despotic autocracies like the Pinochet's junta in Chile or Saudi Arabian theocratic monarchy (a birthplace of islamic wahhabism).
The actual goal of military is to protect the status of USD as a global reserve currency and ensure all important nations are its vassals, fully subordinate to the US government.
The underlying reason is America is printing trillions of dollars out of thin air, not backed by anything, other than the threat from US military, so vassal states keep recycling their earned surplus currency into USD bonds and treasuries
> That's why we entered WWII
The US entered World War II in the pacific after Pearl Harbor and in Europe after Germany declared war.
Before those 2 events, there was still a strong isolationist contingent in the US.
For years leading up to that point Congress was passing "neutral" bills that allowed the country to sell weapons to the Allies but not the Axis. Since we're discussing weapons production, yes, the US joined the war effort on the side of the Allies well before formally declaring war.
Yes, there were isolationists, but there weren't enough to change the fact that fascist/communist victories in Europe would be bad for America. The neoliberal thing where we support liberal democracies is an evolution of the Monroe doctrine, because we've recognized for a long time that the best path forward for America is free trade and interdependency with other like-minded countries.
> the main role of our military is to ensure that our ideology (liberal democracy) is protected across the world.
How is US defending liberal democracy?
So far they've killed 3,000+ Iranians. 110k+ causalities in IRAQ and Afghanistan.. don't even get me started on Vietnam.
> and that the main role of our military is to ensure that our ideology (liberal democracy) is protected across the world.
This is why the US military is partnered with all the Middle East democracies, like the one in Bahrain, or the one in UAE, or the one in Qatar…
Nobody cares about the war in Iran.
Ship production is in much worse shape.
And we still manage to spend more than the next six countries combined on our military!
This argument usually depends on how you quantify defense spending, no? [0] In terms of PPP, the U.S. is falling behind. To be perfectly clear, that doesn't somehow absolve the size of U.S. defense spending. If anything, it's damning of all these wunderwaffe projects defense contractors take on and the taxpayer funds.
[0] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2026/05/11/by-one-m... (no paywall: https://archive.ph/X9zzc)
That's because the primary goal of the spending is not to produce a capable military. It's an expensive, inefficient jobs program, but one that you can get conservatives to support
> they had to pull the aircraft that they would use to do bombing runs back to bases in Jordan and Israel because anything on the tarmac in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE is very vulnerable to Iranian drone and missile strikes.
Looks a lot like the US went into this war assuming it's a rerun of the Iraq war where they could build a mountain of supplies in Saudi Arabia where they were effectively unreachable for the enemy, and take advantage or the friendly skies just across Iraq's border to support their air superiority, and keep the long and lengthening logistics lines protected.
It wasn't a rerun. They can't stock up and just stay beyond Iran's border to be safe, now everything they care about has to stay far, far away, out of drone or missile reach. Any supply lines can be hit far behind the front line so they were non-existent.
they should've just given Hegseth the Producer Button
>fighting China would be a proper all-out war
I figure it would probably be like the US backing Ukraine's defense against Russia but backing Taiwan's defense against China. It would probably be quite hard for China to take Taiwan. There's a lot of sea in between and you can see how well Russia's navy has done against Ukraine's drones and missiles.
I don't think so because China would not be sure what and how the US would be involved and because it would be incredibly risky to attack Taiwan without striking US forces in the area they'll likely attempt to strike US forces in Korea, Japan, Guam, the Philippines, and elsewhere.
The best US strategy is to just arm Taiwan to the teeth by selling weapons to make the invasion as risky as possible. But China can (and this is their smart play, IMO) is to just win Taiwan over politically over the long term.
> is to just win Taiwan over politically over the long term.
That was their plan until Xi became ruler for life and decided that he wanted Taiwan sooner rather than later.
> But China can (and this is their smart play, IMO) is to just win Taiwan over politically over the long term.
Yeah, that is certainly the smart play and one China is almost guaranteed to win in the long run. But that won't secure Xi as the leader that reunited the nation. He might prefer the option where he gets a chance at glory to the smart one.
I think Hong Kong has been enough of a cautionary experience for Taiwan that this is more or less not going to happen willingly.
What does winning them over look like? Are the Taiwanese supposed to come to the CCP with open arms?
Economic integration and benefits, trade stuff, whatever they'd like to ask for. I think there's a local party in Taiwan that's been pushing for it a little?
https://www.npr.org/2026/06/11/g-s1-127478/taiwan-opposition...
Read up on current politics in Taiwan. The KMT, the party that lost the civil war, fled to Taiwan, and still claimed to be the true government of China, is now essentially a PRC puppet.
How hard would it be for China to make sure no ships or airplanes arrive to Taiwan for a few weeks? The island has only days worth of food and energy. No bloody D-Day landings needed to force a political capitulation. To continue to borrow from your example, Russia has completely shut down all commercial Ukrainian seaborne and airborne traffic.
Yes they could starve them out and maybe they will. But China is certainly preparing for an amphibious invasion, so they think it might be necessary.
Taiwan is one of the most heavily armed land masses on Earth (they buy mostly from the US).
> If they can exhaust all their firepower in a couple weeks fighting Iran, China would have no reason to feel threatened in the first place.
Well but war will be like this now. Like for ICBMs, with PGMs it's use it or lose it, so lots of ordnance is fired off at the outset (onset?) of hostilities.
But there wouldn't be a Chinese navy left which would give Taiwan and it's allies some breathing room.
There won't ever be an "all out war" of nuclear states with each other. Only via proxies.
Of course there can be - likely with a gentleman's understanding that neither would use them, and each side careful to not back the other into a corner where they'd have nothing left to lose.
It's just going to be your typical meatgrinder and attrition warfare.
Yeah, arguably the war in Ukraine is teaching everyone who is listening that nobody is willing to be the first to use nukes and destroy the planet, which means that nuclear powers can actually fight wars--which is incredibly dangerous, of course.
Nukes don't "destroy the planet", they're just really powerful bombs. Nuclear munitions have been detonated 2058 times already.
https://www.atomicarchive.com/almanac/test-sites/testing-chr...
Living systems actively regulate water, stabilize soils, moderate heat, absorb shocks, reduce flood peaks, buffer storm surge, sustain food systems, support biodiversity, protect public health, and preserve the ecological conditions that make human communities viable
Ecosystem resilience is based in the so called natural buffers. They are a product of the interactions between life beings. Imagine the life bar in a videogame. A natural buffer is like a 4-D life bar, where each character actualize their life bars at the same time. You lose some life and your friends will change their energy automatically to fix your health bar, Is paid with energy but also needs some "time currency".
With healthy buffers, even big impacts in an ecosystem are absorbed and the system returns to the initial situation again and again. But it has a coast in the buffer. The life bar gets shorter.
When the buffer is spent, the system is not 'elastic' anymore. At this moment the danger is extreme, but the warnings are subtle or none. Just further impacts, even tiny impacts, on the ecosystem cause a total, devastating and irrevocable collapse that may extend over several years and can't be stopped.
Is unclear if we had crossed this line yet.
The life has recovered from huge collapses at a planetary level five times yet, but it needed millions of years for that.
Just because we had luck before, does not mean that we will have luck forever.
My takeaway is that Russia, China's vassal, wanted to use nukes and China told them they can't[1].
I don't believe Russia really cares about the rest of the planet. At the same time, China doesn't care if Russia gets a bloody nose on Putin's little vanity project and realizes a nuclear war is bad for their mercantile economy.
[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/volodymyr-zelenskyy-china-ur...
This coming from the leader of the other country in a war... I mean, I do find it credible that Xi might have told Putin to think very hard before doing something extremely stupid, but from there to stating that Russia is "China's vassal" and will do whatever they're told by a party who has long been a direct competitor (China and Russia have been solid "frenemies" for a long time, pushing very different views of what "real socialism" looks like)... It's a big jump.
The Soviet Union's relationship with China was more of a peer rivalry situation. The Russian relationship with China is nowhere near parity. Russia would fold tomorrow if China withdrew their backing and went along with the US/EU sanctions.
So Russia is only able to prosecute their war with China's permission. When your foreign policy is decided by another power, that's the textbook definition of a vassal.
I think the biggest risk of war between nuclear powers is from mistakes and accidents that might trigger nuclear escalation/MAD. Systems can malfunction. War can spiral out of control, fast.
We had some very close calls in the cold war.
>"gentleman's understanding that neither would use them, and each side careful to not back the other into a corner where they'd have nothing left to lose."
So we'll just grind each other into a halt? And what is the end state? What a BS.
That's what's happening in Ukraine right now, I don't understand why you think it's BS. The point is reaching a situation where one of the parties is ok with going "alright, enough". Not all wars are WWII-level fight-to-the-death conflicts, a lot of them just end with both sides agreeing a new status quo.
In case you did not notice, that is exactly what happened between China and India. Disputes at the border are frequent and they fight with sticks: https://youtu.be/T1-Gi_l-024
They called World War I “the Great War” because they couldn’t conceive of a sequel.
Never say never.
You could fight conventionally over logistics chokepoints. China’s not going to lob nukes just because their oil’s dried up.
China imports food and has stressed or extremely stressed fresh water reserves. You take out the method they keep alive hundreds of millions of citizens, you think they won’t launch a nuke?
Although for all the strategic thinking we’ve seen out of the “department of war” (that offers gender affirming testosterone shots and then runs out of missiles), I wouldn’t be shocked if you worked at the Pentagon, hahahaha.
China is already sending their fishing fleets to just off the EEZ of South American and is rapidly depleting their stock.
https://latinamericanpost.com/americas/environment-en/a-sile...
This interesting way of saying PRC distant fishing fleet fishing in international waters. Geopolitical drama aside, DWF is like 3% of PRC fishing catch, much of it just luxury consumption or resold globally. Reality is PRC more or less absolute caloric self sufficient on staples, chicken/fish. They import a lot of soy for animal feed but shit hits fan, people eat less pork/beef.
Until there is.
We have thus far been supremely lucky that irrational actors have not acquired a nuclear bomb. But the reality is that throughout history most leaders have been irrational.
My country (America) is behaving increasingly irrationally. I've been hearing fringe conservatives calling for nuking the middle east since the early 2000s, but the rot has spread and became deeply religious.
Now I hear talk of the end times from the most powerful people in the country, actively building bunkers. Groups of Republicans openly talking about the US being allowed to take whatever we want from anyone we want through war (Venezuela, Iran, Greenland, Canada).
Almost all of our leadership has been replaced in every branch of government. SCOTUS is clearly compromised and bought. The legislative may as well be dead. Almost all executive agencies have been purged, what remains have had their heads swapped with sycophants. Something like half of the military generals have been turned over. The DoD was renamed to the DoW with cheers, as an alcoholic prison guard was put in charge and has started touting hypermacho religious warrior catchphrases and openly advocating for war crimes.
The other day we testimony from judges before legislature who refused to say if Presidents can run for three terms or that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. Under oath, just simply refused.
And that's before getting into how the President of the United States started a war to distract from his involvement in the highest profile sex trafficking ring in human history, and has continued to use his position to perform insider trading on oil prices repeatedly for weeks.
If you said any of this would be happening in 2005, I would have laughed at how "that would never happen in the US". And now it's just... reality. Like Russia. And it seems to have no end in sight. So what actually happens if Trump gets so deranged he hits the red button? And if not him, who will the loonies pick tomorrow - someone who actually believes in "the cause", who doesn't understand it's a grift?
And what are the external long term consequences of Trump's actions in countries like Iran and Venezuela and Ukraine? The US is not to be trusted anymore, every country has a clear signal to build their own nuclear arsenal ASAP. We have a river of blood behind us, so are we just expecting to get lucky that no one in Iran, for instance, who gets to a position of power leverages an irrational hate for the US and just... Does it in a religious or hate-driven Armageddon?
Incompetence is one thing, but the aspect of the current leadership that I (as a non-American) find most shocking is the corruption. That is, the use of state power to enrich an individual and his family members and to bend state institutions into tools for conducting petty personal vendettas. Pardons are sold for “investments” into private business owned by the president. Legal “settlements” agreed with organs of state under the direct control of the executive. Granting themselves perpetual immunity for tax evasion. The use of federal regulatory bodies to force private media companies to cancel comedians who hurt the president’s feelings.
The fact that these actions barely seem to register with the US public at large truly blows my mind. That over 35% of the population are completely fine with this stuff is frightening. The fact that none of the constitutional checks and balances are effective in preventing this abuse of office is alarming.
> That over 35% of the population are completely fine with this stuff is frightening
Most literally don't even know, because what little information filters down to them, is all radical right-wing propaganda from Fox or worse. The country has been drowning in it for decades.
The US is still fixable if young people will just fucking vote. Irreparable damage has been done, which means the old structures are gone, but they can be replaced with new ones -- a hypothetical Democratic president would need to clean house top to bottom. Obama's greatest flaw was that he didn't see the need to do that after Shrub.
While it would certainly help, you perhaps underestimate the numbers of young people who would vote in support of continued irreparable damage.
I don't fall in the ring category, but I will be voting Democrat for the first time. That's how bad this is getting for me. I have real reasons to hate the Democrats as a party, but I'm scared of them less than the modern Republicans .
>We have thus far been supremely lucky that irrational actors have not acquired a nuclear bomb.
Cough, cough. Who is currently in the White House?
Read the rest of my comment, I get there eventually.
Fair. And I agree with nearly everything in your comment.
One thing about tRump, is that he is more blatantly obvious about the "bully" side of America. He is not the first bully; just the first un-subtle American bully.
What I find disturbing is the others who enable him. I've long despised the Repugnant Party for their anti-worker ideology but under tRump 2.0 they've gone to a new low that I never thought possible. As much as I despise tRump, the other Repugnant members of congress (the odd rare exception) are absolutely disgraceful.
And then is there is the feckless Democrats...
I think there's probably a "in a long time" missing from unsubtle bully. American diplomacy was a lot less subtle in the past.
What I still struggle with is the huge percentage of people that support the behavior. Seeing what the Tate brothers did and seeing the sheer number of people who cheered on the crimes and exploitation they did was shocking. The fact that Epstein is just a minor talking point now. Did I miss when we became so evil? I actually know a kid who went down the red pill path following Tate -- he seemed like a good kid, but to do the things he has done is something that I can't imagine any person with any heart doing.
I fear I've lost so much faith in the goodwill of many people. At the same time, I know that so many people are good. But there numbers of truly bad people are much larger than I thought.
I remember looking around at the people in my friend and family circles who supported and defended the imprisonment of migrants at CECOT, often repeating the propaganda that they were terrorists and criminals, etc - and realizing chances are they'd do the same if it happened to me. Quite a surreal, scary feeling.
> If they can exhaust all their firepower in a couple weeks fighting Iran, China would have no reason to feel threatened in the first place.
I think the reason China has no reason to be threatened is the US outsourced most of it's manufacturing to them, meaning China now has more skills, know-how, and manufacturing infrastructure to redirect to wartime production.
That was truly a brilliant move by US business leaders and the 90s political elite. Besides creating the military vulnerability, it also helped get Donald Trump election, who they all love dearly.
Sorry, but this is only partially informed.
1. The U.S. produces a massive share of global manufactured goods, ranking second globally behind China in total value added.
2. Only low skilled jobs were shipped overseas. Lower-value consumer goods like clothing and basic electronics are heavily outsourced, whereas complex machinery, aerospace equipment, chemicals, and medical devices are largely built domestically
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/0222_ma...
During war with China, the US is not going to suffer due to lack of cheap toys or clothes from China.
Cheap toys? You seem stuck in the 90s, and you're quoting a 10 year old article. Since then China has taken over the car industry with EVs, solar industry, building more new energy every than the us has installed total, leading in humanoid robotics and drones. WTF are you talking about?
>not whatever this spitting match with Iran is.
Are you openly saying the president and the secretary of war are lying when they say they have done "massive" bombings of Iran?
The president openly lies all the time. About his pool refurbishment, the size of his crowds and even how good he is at golf.
Yep. And when he's not deliberately lying, he's often confabulating as a late-stage dementia patient.
In short, Trump is not a source.
Are their mouths open and are they making noise? Then yes.
I don't trust anything the North Korean government says without external verification, why would I believe the U.S. government?
That's an easy one: I don't even have to look at what the facts are to be sure they're lying. Just a question of what about.
Although "massive" is a subjective word. Nothing can be as massive as WW2 carpet bombing.
Or even what they were regularly doing to grids of rainforest in Vietnam.
As much as I support Taiwan, there's no realistic timeline where the US goes to war against the PRC over Taiwan. None.
A timeline in which AI is everything Amodei and Altman say it is and intel is still stuck in an older node while tsmc has the good gaafet stuff on could be one where it's worth fighting for taiwan.
Also, if the US doesn't fight for taiwan, will they fight for the phillipines? Malasia? South korea?
I really dislike the manufactured conflict with China because it only exists to sell weapons. There are several flaws in this theory:
1. All but about 10 countries in the world recognize Taiwan as an independent nation. This always seems to get in people's feelings when I point this out but I'm sorry, the One China policy is the official policy of the US and virtually every country on Earth [1];
2. US military policy is that the US is the only country allowed to be a global superpower (aka "hegemon"). Taiwan is a key link in containment, known as the island-chain strategy [2]. If Taiwan falls into China's sphere of influence then that strategy falls apart. And that's really why this Cold War 2.0 narrative has been manufactured;
3. The level of hypocrisy here is insane. Every allegation is a confession. For one thing, China has shown no imperial ambitions. This gets the inevitable "But Tibet!" rejoinder. It was 1950. Let it go. Also, 90% of the people in Tibet prior to annexation were slaves. They have euphemistically been called "serfs" in Western coverage (when it's mentioned at all) but these "serfs" could be traded like property. You know, like slaves. Also, Tibet and the Dalai Lama is a CIA project [3]; If you find yourself on the same side as the CIA, it's probably time to be asking some questions;
4. In the event of a direct military conflict with China, what are the goals? What is the theory of victory between two nuclear powers? The US has been militarily defeated by Iran. Do you think they'd fare better against China? Really? For one thing, China has a virtual monopoly of rare earths, which are essential for all these missile systems and radars we've depleted; and
5. There's no credible fear of a military invasion of Taiwan. Or even a blockade. China's position is simply to leave the question unanswered, which is typically called strategic ambiguity in policy circles. That's the US position as well, officially. China believes the question will resolve all on its own at some point. That may take decades. There's no reason to do anything, particularly when most of the world already recognizes Taiwan as Chinese territory.
Also, China simply does not have the military to invade Taiwan over 100 miles of open ocean. This would likely require half a million to more than a million troops. The amphibious capability simply doesn't exist. Nor does maintaining the supply lines to maintain that. This is also the issue with any invasion of Iran, btw. It's impossible.
So why are we spending so much time drumming up fear of something that doesn't benefit China at all and is impossible to carry out? That question should lead you to the true motive: American imperial interests and the continued sale of arms.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_China
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_chain_strategy
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_Tibetan_program
Hey look on the bright side - every time we cut CDC staff by 25% or kick a 100K people off SNAP, we can afford a few more weeks of missiles.
100k people is like 400mil, one day of war is estimated at 2billion dollars. So more like one volley of missiles or 1/5th of a day
I imagine elements in the Taiwanese govt are pushing a massive drone network to turn the nation into a porcupine.
Unfortunately, they are instead spending lots of money on procuring surface fleet for their navy. They just recently announced 10 more frigates.
On the flip side, at least the press is not hammering the Epstein files and the lack of any prosecution for the crimes documented in those.
Much of the press is pro-regime or owned by regime oligarchs.
Trump's Iran war is known as "operation Epstein fury"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactions_to_the_2026_Iran_war
I used to believe Israel was a US colony meant to control the middle east. Now I believe the US is Israel's colony meant to control the middle east.
It's amazing how a handful of people can cause the deaths and suffering of millions.. throughout history.
What the fuck is wrong with the human species and its tendency for self-destructive leader-worship??
An organised army is the most effective coercive tool that money can buy, so every nation has to have one otherwise it'd be crushed by foreign militarys. And an organised army requires a large group of people who obey orders rather than stopping to debate the wisdom or morality of them charging out to get shot or shoot some other people. An army has to obey orders in a hierarchical fashion to be effective.
That basically sets up an equilibrium where you have a small number of people who can cause the deaths and suffering of millions. To escape it there'd need to be an economic sweet spot where armies couldn't cost effectively coerce small groups of people. But that seems unlikely because the economies of scale to outfit an army favour large groups. We've been lucky enough so far in the modern era that a strong army requires supporting a thriving economy.
> most effective coercive tool that money can buy
And how well is it coercing Iranian government right now? It is proving itself not only ineffective, but also ludicrously inefficient in terms of money. And to think all that could have been accomplished by building diplomatic relationships, building schools, hospitals, colleges, and, ultimately, cultural and economic ties… When an empire needs to resort to military might, it’s usually in its final states - the US itself made the Soviet Union spend itself into oblivion, and now it’s falling on that very same trap.
It's very simple, really: we're susceptible to indoctrination and brainwashing. That's what one of the main objectives of military training - throughout history.
Although, you don't know how many species before us caused their own suffering and destruction. Perhaps it's normal and expected. There's a slight chance we'll leave documentation to whatever species comes after us, but they'll probably ignore it, because they know best and it's different that time.
The point is that before the era of modern weapons, many wars were a net positive for the winners. Much of our genome is inherited from successful conquerors, many of whom are long forgotten.
Starting wars has only been unequivocally negative for maybe the last 100 years. Not enough for an evolutionary change to manifest itself.
The US made about $68 billion just by kidnapping Venezuela’s president (and making sure the successor would be next if she didn’t allow the sacking). For something that required intelligence work and two choppers, the margin was great.
The fallout will come later, of course.
On a purely Machiavellistic level, coups with an inside element helping along (and that is what Venezuela was: Delcy Rodriguez going full Judas on Maduro) are a distinct phenomenon with a different profile of risks and rewards. As you say, even today, they may pay very well - but precisely because they don't lead to a large-scale war with all the destruction it entails.
Iran is a true war, where the local elite didn't even partly defect, and it is already becoming an expensive quagmire with nothing of value gained.
Of course some politicians do mistake one for another. Putin in 2022 probably expected a swift coup by his crony Medvedchuk, who instead turned tail and ran. Instead he got a brutal war of attrition.
LBH US hasn't been in position to defend 1st island chain in a while, US performance vs Iran just made that obvious.
The one thing we have learned in recent wars is highend hardware can shoot down subsonic munitions reliably, highend missiles can penetrate high end defense reliably. AKA PRC is uniquely positioned to blunt most of US fires (subsonic munitions) while having tons of highend fires vs US defense. But really PRC doesn't even need highend fires for TW scenario, see their subsonic cruse missile / drone gigafactory (like proper not ghetto tier) that can churn 1000s per day, i.e. even with pure subsonics PRC can fully saturate entire US posture/basing structure in 1IC/2IC.
US in westpac has been thoroughly functionally cooked for years. It just took Iran performance for sensible people to realize how cooked. Not just how not up to task i.e. force balance, but how US tech stack uniquely vulnerable to PRC, who TBF has spend past 10 years of modernization strictly on this issue. NVM PRC can now conventionally hit CONUS as recognized by recent Pentagon China Power report, something PLA watchers have known for years, meanwhile said report still assumes PRC highend missile stockpiles is about size of Irans which is kek territory if not delulu.
TLDR people should stop hopiuming about PRC and evaluate consequences of commodity precision fire for mid tier operators. What Iran can do today, most of Americans can do in 10-15 years, i.e. we are entering a world where CONUS is vulnerable due to tech again (remember US project almost extinguished to wooden British boats). CONUS isolation/security as much man made as god/geographic given. It relies on US expeditionary model containing everyone ability to project fires to their shores. Once that's done, entire US defense model post war breaks. All of which is to say, forget Iran, anticipate Monroe wars in the future.
@cmxch [dead] >Sure about that? Give the US a permissive RoE and the ability to ignore the CNN/MSNOW peanut gallery and then get back to us about that series of claims.
Reasonably sure given US RoE vs Iran has been extremely permissive, even more permissiveness just means depleting highend munitions faster for same marginal effect. reality is US simply doesn't have the standoff stockpiles - US can go Vietnam / close air but then you'd be dealing with more down pilots and peanut gallery unavoidable. Given that VS PRC is forgone, ROE has nothing to do with fundamental US techstack/stockpile (mis)allocation. If US cannot defeat high end hypersonics at scale then expeditionary model with exquisite tooth/tail logistics cannot survive to reach theatre to deliver standoff munitions, and given most US standoff munitions subsonic, even if they could deliver theoretically they face near 100% interception rate. US would also have to retool basically entire delivery systems around supersonic munitions, which are more expensive, larger, i.e. reduced fire bandwidth. These are geometric not RoE constraints.
The USA will not really defend Taiwan anyway. Perhaps they may send some ships or airplanes but even that attempt at show of force will quickly collapse when Beijing increases pressure.
The only thing Beijing can not control is what Taiwan does and invading an island is always difficult. Also Taiwan needs a nuclear arsenal just as Israel has; Japan too, Canada and the EU as well. The days where the big countries abuse the smaller ones are over - we all can see this past the point of Putin starting his genocide against Ukraine. His next step of escalation will be mass mobilization; that's why his propaganda department already now calls the "special military operation" (which it never was) a war (which it always was from the get-go, but now he wants to send more of his slaves to die for him and his oligarch-bros).
If you look at Taiwan history when the US gave PRC the UN seat and Nixon visited Beijing it was pretty much decided.
Taiwan is no West Berlin and everyone knows it.
What about TSMC?
What about it? TSMC now has fabs on U.S. soil. Intel and Samsung also have fabs and are working on processes that compete with TSMC's, even if their yields may be somewhat lower.
Washington will have to decide whether the U.S. is willing to pay slightly more and rely on domestic Intel, Samsung, and TSMC fabs, or risk a military defeat and potentially millions of American lives if the situation escalates to intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The choice is obvious. Real life is not a Hollywood action movie. Also, anyone who thinks South Korea or other Asian allies would automatically go to war with China is delusional. So U.S. would be left alone. U.S. has never faced an opponent like China so a country that is also the world's leading manufacturing power. Nazi Germany was nowhere near as economically and industrially formidable as China is today, and the U.S. fought it alongside most of Europe and the Soviet Union.
If anything happens, Taiwan will probably give up. They are mostly posturing, and China may not even need to invade. they could simply impose a blockade.
Bombing things may seem normal to the U.S., but as Sun Tzu argued, the best victories are achieved without fighting, once swords are clashing, that's a strategic failure.
3 generations of wealth poured into the most expensive military in recorded history - the reason that we don't have health care, clean energy, decent social safety nets and so many other things... and they can't even control a small stretch of water. What a waste.
The health care issue in the USA isn't due to lack of funding, the US spends more on health care per person than any other country, double that of many European countries with single payer systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...
The costs of medicare, medicaid and CHIP to tax payers are about what most Europeans pay in tax for universal health care, but then they also need to pay for health insurance for themselves.
As for controlling Hormuz, the US military absolutely could control Hormuz. I'm confident it's quite capable of it. It's that the US public wouldn't support the immense cost in lives and treasure it would take to do it, and maintain that control. No other military could even try, but the the USA could. It's not a matter of lack of military capacity.
>As for controlling Hormuz, the US military absolutely could control Hormuz. I'm confident it's quite capable of it. It's that the US public wouldn't support the immense cost in lives and treasure it would take to do it, and maintain that control.
This is like saying "I could easily afford a Ferrari. It's just that I wouldn't be able to make the interest payments on the loan". Military conquest is more than just guns.
The reason the US can’t take the strait is that the war is unpopular and the American people don’t want it to happen. The US military could absolutely 100% invade and take the street, but it would be extremely unpopular and very expensive.
You watch too much Hollywood. What is next, they will loose marvel characters against Iran. That will show them. Huh.
And nice cop you have there. Its because the US public didn't want it. Not because US military capabilities were up to the mark. Nice try.
Was the 300 billion war reparations US signed to pay also something that the US public wanted?
No, it's like saying "I can easily afford a ferrari but I won't be able to afford groceries for a year after that because I've emptied my savings account.
The military might be capable of a ground invasion and succeeding. It would be Pyrrhic. Even if Iran was a genuine nuclear threat (I am not convinced at this point that Iran would launch a nuke at anyone if they had it), is it worth 500k dead Americans?
There was never a path to victory that didn't involve ground troops. We aren't losing in Iran because of military incompetence, but policy incompetence. Previous administrations did not do this because the cost was well understood.
There has never existed a military who could win this conflict without ground invasion. This was understood when this administration started it.
>We aren't losing in Iran because of military incompetence, but policy incompetence.
My point is these two things are inseparable, and to conflate them is simply Call of Duty-esque military fantasy. It's a feel good war story that doesn't actually reflect the reality of actually winning a war.
If the US military does not have the ability to hold, occupy, and install allied regime change, then the US military cannot win a war with Iran. You cannot separate the short term wins from the long term objectives. No one looks at Imperial Japan and says "they easily bombed pearl harbor, but due to policy failures they couldn't keep control of the South West Pacific theatre.
The US winning WW2 wasn't just dropping the nukes and high fives. There was rebuilding the Japanese nation, aligned to the US, becoming a long term ally.
This is no different than Afghanistan. Future humans aren't going to look back and say "the US easily controlled Afghanistan for 12 years, and then just returned to the Taliban". The lessons learned will be the US failed to hold Afghanistan and the Taliban returned to power and it was a military failure.
No matter how you dress it up, I can't afford the ferrari.
> the US military absolutely could control Hormuz. I'm confident it's quite capable of it. It's that the US public wouldn't support the immense cost in lives and treasure it would take to do it, and maintain that control
I never understood these kinds of arguments and they always come from those defending US military might.
Either they can do it or they cannot, if "the US public wouldn't support the immense cost in lives and treasure it would take to do it" is true, which it appears to be, then the US Military cannot control Hormuz.
Right I think its only an interesting argument in separating existential vs non-existential threats to the country.
So it means we aren't fighting in Iran the way we would in defending a hypothetical invasion of the lower 48 states, great.
But does it mean we'd fight any differently in the South China Sea, a Russian incursion into Poland, etc. Unclear, and presidential whim based.
The American public has shown willingness over decades and decades to commit to long term wars of choice. Not infinitely patient, but patient.
Of course, other Presidents have been willing to put in some sort of effort to make to make a case. And usually have some of theory of victory or purpose. And generally avoid making weird random claims about invading NATO allies.
The distinction between political resolve and military might is relevant specifically to the "what has all this money gotten us?"
All the money in the military has gotten us, almost certainly, the ability to conquer virtually any plot of land anywhere on the planet at any time.
But that does not (thankfully) intrinsically generate the political resolve required to do so.
Democracy and markets are beautiful things. It's fantastic that it can constrain even a military as mighty as the US and a commander in chief as braindead as Trump.
I dont think it's fair to say it's from those defending US military might.
I've seen the same logical fallacy used everywhere; including people hyping Russia and China.
> As for controlling Hormuz, the US military absolutely could control Hormuz
They don't though
Health insurance company margins are 3% to 5%. The book America’s Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Back-Room Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System (2015) by journalist Steven Brill blames mostly wasteful practices in hospitals, pharma and device manufacturers, government and corporate health administration costs.
I think the most correct and probably most discouraging answer is that American healthcare costs about what it should.
Drug prices in the US are >2x the price as compared to other developed countries [1].
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK611301/
Yes I know. That sounds about what it should be. Maybe less actually.
Why should drugs in America cost >2x the price of drugs in other countries?
Invert the question. Why do other countries pay half as much? Because they can't afford to pay more.
Not to dismiss your point, but the US healthcare system has one meta problem.
Complexity.
There are too many parties. There are too many bespoke party-party contract. There are too many new middle-parties being created, with their own contracts. There are too many systems. There's too much tech debt.
That's a reason improvements to the US healthcare system have generally been via HHS/CMS imposing standardization mandates ('or no Medicare payments').
But providers, facilities, and insurers (most operating on low margins) can't be collectively more meta-efficient without simplifying the system.
Single payer / Medicare for all is a critical start not because of coverage, but because of simplicity.
There are so many intractable problems with the current system simply by virtue that changing anything about them requires 100s of parties to update 10,000s of party-party contracts and interfaces.
That's the biggest source of waste in the current system: constant duplicative re-engineering.
Wrong.
Health insurance company margins are meaningless. All the large insurers are actually "pay-viders", meaning they own huge (and growing) chunks of the physicians (providers) they pay out.
Go read STAT's Colossus investigative series on the myriad ways UnitedHealth Group abuses this structure. All the other pay-viders do the same.
Pay-viders can "generate x% profit" for any value of x. They control all the relevant levers, which also by coincidence eliminates any incentive in the entire system to reduce costs.
They are required by law to only make a certain value of x, and so, surprise surprise, they all make x!
Thanks for the recommendation.
Right, they don’t “profit” much because they pay themselves so much. The CEO of united healthcare total compensation is $60 million a year.
Where do you think that money comes from?
You could just delete united healthcare and save bucketloads of money. They don’t actually do anything anyone wants, other than extract money as a middleman.
US health insurance margins are thinner than European private insurance. Their administrative cost however are 9-10%, when in Europe (or really, France and Germany, I haven't looked elsewhere) they are 5-8%. The difference is probably in negotiating costs and audits. But that means that in total, for every 100 dollar paid, US insuree pay 4-10 dollar in efficiency+dividend that a European doesn't.
Dumb argument though when UHG owns the hospitals, pharmacy and the insurance company. They can make the "profit" of any one of them be anything they want really.
> The costs of medicare, medicaid and CHIP to tax payers are about what most Europeans pay in tax for universal health care, but then they also need to pay for health insurance for themselves.
People always say this, but I suspect Americans are more unhealthy in general and actually need more healthcare per person.
We have a development pattern where people barely walk, but less walk or cycle to work.
> As for controlling Hormuz, the US military absolutely could control Hormuz
I don't see how they could manage that without a full-scale invasion and control of Iran. It's far too easy for Iran to launch drones/torpedoes from small watercraft or from nearby land. I expect they could control Hormuz for a while, but it would be very expensive and I'd expect the logistics to break down fairly quickly if the economics doesn't stop it first.
"I don't see how they could manage that without a full-scale invasion and control of Iran" - that's precisely what they're saying, and that the domestic populace wouldn't put up with it.
I suppose "could" here is a bit of a stretch. Like technically, yes, you could if you whipped up your country into enough of a frenzy to support it. Hell, Iraq happened (twice), so I suppose it has historical precedent. And yes, a full-scale invasion of a fully committed US military should absolutely be able to conquer and hold Iran. But I can't imagine any circumstance where that's possibly going to happen in today's reality (outside of an Iranian terrorist event on USA soil, for instance).
> a full-scale invasion of a fully committed US military should absolutely be able to conquer and hold Iran
I doubt that - Iran is very large and would require something like conscription in the US to get anywhere near the required amount of troops. The US doesn't have a great track record with conquering and occupying other countries.
>No other military could even try
Iran military is trying alright.
You got me there.
What are we even talking about here? Controlling the strait? This actually means controlling so much land around the strait that Iran can't launch missiles or drones at ships. Essentially conquering all of Iran by ground invasion. The USA could do this, sure, but we don't want to because its too stupid even for us.
Even if we threw everything at it and turned it into a war economy making everything to focus on this task, we'd lose most of our influence in the rest of the world at that time and then we'd end up in a Russia situation once we control the land where we are in a non stop war with people dying the entire time we are there. There's no situation where it makes sense for us to do this or to have attacked Iran in the first place.
Yeah it's stupid, though with this administration stupid seems to be the flavor they prefer.
Just like how US conquered all of Vietnam and Afghanistan.
US would lose a land war with Iran. They’d lose it spectacularly too.
Iran is on a level so much worse than even Afghanistan.
In Afghanistan, there are some mountains, but they are in the middle. The Taliban fucked off into the mountains and they couldn't do jack.
Iran on the other hand is a plateau fortress lined by mountains on all (accessible to US/western allies) sides. A land invasion of Iran means no supply lines and no way out. The words "one does not simply" come to mind. It is essentially the ultimate meat grinder unless you can win decisively in days, which is impossible because the entire apparatus you are trying to destroy is distributed within aforementioned mountains and operates with decentralised/autonomous command that has been preparing for this exact eventuality (being invaded by an opponent with vastly more firepower and overwhelming air superiority) for the last 40 years. Not to mention absolute fucking hellscape it will be for troops on the ground with FPV drones and Shahed flying into clusters of US marines and being broadcast on Telegram.
A land invasion of Iran is empire suicide. You can't win, you can't go home and you are left with just pouring an infinite amount of resources and lives into the most asymmetric and geographically hostile theatre of all time.
The land of Iran has changed hands many times throughout history. I think we need to avoid some level of historical / geographical determinism. The terrain is a problem but a solvable one for a sufficiently committed power / alliance. We can look back in history at e.g. the Anglo-Soviet invasion.
But the commitment does not exist at present. No one wanted this apart from a few hawks and the Israeli security establishment.
If the US were ruled by a dictator and had no market forces, the US could obviously conquer any of the above. It would just come at such immense cost and require such horrors that a voting public and a responsive market make it politically untenable to actually pursue. Which is good!
>"Essentially conquering all of Iran by ground invasion..." - you have already conquered Korea, Vietnam, etc.
Soft power would have gone a long way towards furthering US interests in the Middle East. Unfortunately, it seems too late for that. By the time a new administration's diplomacy reverts the current antagonism and lack of trust, the dollar will have lost ground as the default reserve currency and financing US debt will become much more expensive than it is now, making military expenses prohibitive, but still a priority.
This is usually the point the economy is flipped around into a war-based economy where all output is directed to military equipment.
I think it's worth pointing out that the US almost certainly could have taken control of the strait. But it would have required boats in the water and boots on the ground. But that puts many more lives at risk, would have been very unpopular (much moreso then the current war situation), etc.
You can't win a war purely through air superiority and bombs. That's not a new lesson but it's one the administration failed to learn through history and is apparently now failing to learn through practice).
> You can't win a war purely through air superiority and bombs. That's not a new lesson but it's one the administration failed to learn through history and is apparently now failing to learn through practice.
This is a lesson that conservative administrations have refused to learn for decades. I hope Curtis Lemay is experiencing a toasty afterlife for all of the suffering he has caused humanity due to a zealous conviction that aerial bombing campaigns win wars, and his lasting legacy in conservative war strategy.
The delusion is somewhat over a century old now. It originates from factions within the military community (vs. politicians) and there's nothing particularly conservative about it -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell#Post-war_advoca...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomber_Mafia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_hawk
Big picture, I'd categorize the problem as human nature and "sounds too good to be false".
> But it would have required boats in the water and boots on the ground. But that puts many more lives at risk, would have been very unpopular (much moreso then the current war situation), etc.
Boats in the water and boots on the ground can be popular. But it needs a credible story, told by credible sources.
There's control and there's enough control so not a single missile can hit a cargo ship in the strait.
Maritime insurers are understandably conservative. If the ship stays trapped it continues to pay premiums (insurance company wins). If it risks passage it risks a $10M payout (insurance company loses). If there's risk of a single missile the insurers won't allow the ships through. How can an insurance company thousands of miles away stop a ship? "If you risk the passage you're not covered by insurance"
Pretty sure Iran has spent the last 30 years ensuring that they can mount gorilla attacks indefinitely in the face of overwhelming invasion.
That has been their deterrent strategy for decades. Intelligence analysts out front should have told ya.
(A massive invasion would also not open the strait.)
I mean, we could, the issue is that it would be politically untenable. Controlling the straight means controlling Iranian territory, which means a ground invasion and occupation, which means ~2 million deployed personnel until you set up a compliant regime (because Iran, is absolutely massive). Which is why literally every other president has chosen to negotiate with them or keep them at arms length.
Leaders profit off the military industrial complex. Take away that complex and they would certainly look for the next opportunity so bleed the working class, but the sham would be far more visible and less efficient. Either way, a massive stepfoward -- at least it wouldn't be there to actively make the world a worse place, as it has done exclusively post 1945.
Jobs creation. That's another way to think about it. There are, of course, better jobs to be created than military though, but job creation is still a factor.
1. It's not the reason for any of those things
2. Running out of munitions is bad but it's the least bad possible problem. We know how to solve it, just pay for higher volume munition purchases. There's no suggestion the missiles don't work well. They actually are quite effective! We just spent the minimum on expendable purchases and bought new carrier groups instead.
Restocking at much much much higher volume than we just spent will cost $50-100 billion, which is not cheap, but is not THAT expensive compared to any other government program (it's like... 2% of our COVID spending). And it's actual effective reindustrialization unlike other uses of the money.
"There's no such thing as public opinion, merely published opinion". While on the one hand we should never discount the impact of incompetence, gross negligence, or deliberate mismanagement there's a reason this story is circulating. For the most-dominant military power in the world to "whoopsy" run out of weapons because of a low-stakes engagement isn't readily believable.
Suspicious me likens it to the supposed "water shortage deception" at Midway in WW2 https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2024/december/bat...
Slightly concerned that there could be an unreported tit-for-tat. China "allegedly" arming/equipping Iran to perhaps the USA coverty planting unbalancing arms and equipment to Taiwan. The Ukraine (and Iran?) theater has shown how drone warfare has changed the game. A nation without a navy can now inexpensively counter a nation with one (ongoing 2-for-2 at the moment).
> For the most-dominant military power in the world to "whoopsy" run out of weapons because of a low-stakes engagement isn't readily believable.
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.
> morons at the top of the chain of command and subordinates afraid to speak out
Hey now! Let's not forget that half of congress is also complicit.
(Not American, need to preface with this) I think the US military has shown itself to be extremely competent in the last war. Reading about Desert Storm and later the invasion of Iraq it's just insane. It's still possible they miscalculated how rapidly warfare would change, but to call them morons... As far as I can see, there are only three proven militaries in the world, the US, Israel and Ukraine, and the US is orders of magnitude larger than the rest. Have we already forgotten what happened to Maduro? What other country in the history of the world could pull something like that off? Russia tried at Hostomel, didn't go so well.
> Have we already forgotten what happened to Maduro? What other country in the history of the world could pull something like that off?
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.
Venezuela was also a palace coup. They didn't raid, they came to collect.
That as well, what resistance was present was reduced from what it could have been (not everyone was in on it).
As a note, while there was no war Russia has already acquired Crimea a few years before and it was only a matter of time before invasion itself was to happen, so Ukraine was preparing for that attack more or less.
I think their point is that it doesn't really matter how competent the lower levels of the command structure are if the ones at the very top are bumbling fools unwilling to listen.
If you don’t have an objective, no amount of military might is going to get you there. This was the USA’s biggest mistake in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Iran.
Since the objective was never disclosed, one might assume it was to deplete our magazine depth.
It's not a tactical failure of the US; it's a strategic one. The US operates a tremendously powerful military, but that doesn't change the fact that the war with Iran was a tremendous strategic blunder. "Moronic" is a pretty fair characterization.
But running out of missiles—which is the accusation being made above—would be a tactical and logistics failure, not a strategic one.
> But running out of missiles—which is the accusation being made above—would be a tactical and logistics failure, not a strategic one.
It's absolutely a strategic failure to enter into a war without sufficient munitions or logistical capability to sustain the war.
Is executing a strategy that you (should) know to be impossible to implement because of logistical limitations really a logistics failure?
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.
You have tactics and strategy mixed up. Killing Iran leadership was a tactical success. Continually shooting long range missiles into a giant country is a strategic failure.
Unless the counts were unclear it would actually be all three!
A bit disparaging of morons. It takes a special kind of imbecile to ignore decades of war planning that pointed out the vulnerability of the strait.
You think the US has shown itself as to be extremely competent in the Iran war? If you were talking about Iraq, that was completely different leadership.
Not only leadership, war looked different back then. The Ukraine war made everyone throw away the classic war playbook.
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.
The US killed almost the entire Iranian regime leadership with minimal cost. What definition of competence are you going by?
The son of the elderly Iranian ruler, aligned politically with his father, took over. The war prompted Iran to operate one of the world's largest economic pressure levers, to great effect. The U.S.'s unilateralism, leadership rhetoric, and war crimes (like bombing a school) have lost it a significant amount of global goodwill.
None of that seems like it jibes with your description.
None of that contradicts what I said. Obviously, the Iranian regime will replace them.
It does. The initial strike, while effective, has proven to achieve absolutely nothing, or less than nothing. Neither Iran's military nor logistic nor even administrative capability was impacted to any serious extent. The population, of which a large proportion was against the regime and potentially on the brink of a revolt, quickly fell in line and became supporters, faced with the external opposition. And Iran has proven its ability to unilaterally close the straight of Hormuz, a crippling blow to the entire world's economy that the USA is simply unable to stop.
So again - the execution shows significant tactical competence. But the strategic direction is absolutely disastrous.
Success or failure isn’t judged by how many explosions or dead bodies each side racks up. Def Sec McNamara admits he made that mistake during the Vietnam war when he repeatedly asserted the US was winning with all sorts of statistics and charts with steep lines pointing up.
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.
You don’t know the difference between tactics and strategy.
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.
Minimal cost? We’re at about a billion dollars per primary target and rising. Not to mention north of 250 US casualties. I’d hardly call that minimal cost.
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.
I'd argue that seriously upending global energy markets (and perhaps the entire economy) is quite a high cost.
Politically, yes.
Nobody stateside is immune from the very real, very steep, very ongoing financial costs of this “conflict”.
“With minimal cost”
Are you trolling
From a military standpoint, no.
Yes, but the military exists for the nation, not the other way around, so a military success that turns into a national disaster is not a military success at all.
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.
https://defencesecurityasia.com/en/iran-strikes-us-bases-mid...
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.
And then what happened?
tactical win - they achieved that quite easily.
strategic failure - iran shrugged it off and now are causing massive damage to world economy with no end in sight.
A very cursory investigation suggests the Iran war has cost the US approximately 100 billion dollars. About half in hardware and half in increased costs for citizens.
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.
Congrats, now even more hardline leadership got power. And it was conclusively proven that US trears accomodating or measured responses as weakness, so the new leadership wont makr the same mistake.
Iran gained straight of hormuz. It gained chuckpaz and confidence too. It is now itching to play major regional power
The US fully achieved its objective of distracting attention away from the Trump-Epstein files.
How many lives has the US lost? What has Iran lost so far in the conflict with the US and Israel (a conflict which is not over)? The propaganda attempting to spin this as setting up as a strategic defeat for the US, is almost comical.
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.
Damn the USA seems really powerful, I’m assuming handling a country like Iran shouldn’t give them any trouble
I mean it doesn't, it's just that Iran is ruled by fanatics who'd rather see their country cease to exist than to give up power. If your definition of winning is just infinite willingness to die then Iran definitely won.
One of these things is not like the other. Russia is a threat to Europe, and is in the midst of invading a country with a lot of agricultural, industrial, and cultural upside that should be on the road to EU integration. Bombing the snot out of Russian trenches in eastern Ukraine might even be a good idea.
And the reasons for bombing Iran are...?
Perhaps letting Iran, a country ruled by fanatics, build enough military infrastructure to the point that they're able to hold a significant part of the world's energy hostage was the original blunder?
You could argue they'd never use their power unless attacked, but I don't think you can be certain of that. It comes down to if you can accept that a non-rational actor can be allowed to have this power (or nuclear weapons for that matter).
Now that the cat is out of the bag it would be a terrible idea not to finish the job and make sure Iran doesn't have this power ever again.
Ahhh. The Maduro operation. You remember a soldier from Maduro's guard saying they were brought to their knees by a wonder weapon.
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 :).
Desert Storm was 35 years ago. Almost everyone who fought in it is out of service or dead.
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.
> As far as I can see, there are only three proven militaries in the world, the US, Israel and Ukraine
What in your view makes these ones proven and other ones not proven?
I was left scratching my head why Ukraine would be there, but not Iran, on the basis that it too has stood its ground in what the superpower aggressor planned to be short and decisive conflict.
Iran has survived this war so far because the aggressor hasn't made any attempt to actually defeat them. It's very different from Ukraine, which is holding its own against an all-out invasion. Iran might well be able to withstand an all-out invasion by the US, but it hasn't had to yet.
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).
Have they? Obviously there have been a ton of issues due to the US’s strategy in Iran. But almost nobody in the US has any affect from this war. Gas prices are up a bit. Mildly inconvenient for the majority of people, and that’s the biggest failure people are mad about.
Meanwhile Iran is in rough shape
> Gas prices are up a bit.
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.
Gas prices are up a bit? In my area it’s gone up at least $2 from before the war. Which is just another way that everything has gotten so much more expensive recently (not that all of that is caused by the war).
Agreed yes that’s not great. But really if that’s the worst thing you’re noticing in your daily life at home, things must be pretty ok?
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.
> 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.
Maduro operation wasn’t a war my good man and the other two you reference were 20 and 30 years ago.
Regarding Iraq, please Google “Dick Cheney 1994” he predicted exactly what happened in 2003.
Extremely competent military expert: "Sir, we should hold back up strikes to preserve the stockpile of valuable high-precision missiles"
Someone higher up the chain of command: "Fire the missiles, or I'll replace you with someone who will"
Military competence has nothing to do with running low on munitions after months of war. There are four ways to address the issue: have larger stockpiles before the war, ramp up production during the war, end the war, or don't go to war in the first place. None of those can be done by the military. It's all up to the civilian leadership, and the current civilian leadership is catastrophically incompetent. The current commander in chief is a "fucking moron," to quote his former Secretary of State.
(Am an American, don't know if it matters that I preface with this)
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.
Never attribute to malice that which can easily be explained by stupidity.
It's been discussed for decades that the US would run out of precision munitions in any multi-week conflict. The presumption was that the US would either be in a nuclear war at that point, or a ground campaign would complete the task along with dumb munitions.
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.
The US is always going to slap a JDAM kit on for better effect.
> 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.
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.
> Iran actually has reasonable anti-air defense. They're not a bunch of guys running around with AK-74s.
To help put that in perspective versus Iraq: 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, bigger economy, better-equipped military.
Plus having ~2x the population, and ~3x the land area.
> For the most-dominant military power in the world to "whoopsy" run out of weapons because of a low-stakes engagement isn't readily believable.
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.
At the same time, this is how intelligence and counter intelligence works.
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?
Also, the most powerful country of the world, with the most advanced medical science, faling to manage a deadly measles outbreak because a conspiracy theoricist and antivax has been chosen as Secretary of Health wouldn't have been readily believable just 12 years ago. Yet here we are.
How’s this. I can tell you with absolute certainty the US has a lot of munitions, they have not run out.
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.
I guess you view what would be the worst crime against humanity ever to be committed (and yes, I really do mean to include all the previous ones in that statement) to be an acceptable answer to “oh, we have no more smart bombs, let’s just kill everyone in this country”?
Not committing a crime against humanity is not “good will”.
Then what is good will? A movie character?
Not killing someone when one can (in a not them or me situation) is not “good will”, it’s one of the most basic ethical principles. I’m surprised you need to ask this question.
Ah, I have a trolley to show you.
I agree that if things were different, things would be different, but I'm not sure what this adds to the conversation.
If my grandmother had wheels, she would have been a bike.
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).
I’m absolutely on the record of being against nukes. Not really sure why you posed that personal attack, but it’s about as shitty a thing as you could say.
You feel better?
How are those things even related? The US has lots of munitions, because US goodwill is the reason Iran isn't glass? That's a complete non-sequitur.
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.
This doesn't account for the substantial difference between military deception and political (self-)deception.
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.).
Leave it to HN to over-intellectualize and twist something obvious because why not?
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.
Most dominant does not mean most intelligent
> nation without a navy can now inexpensively counter a nation with one
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.
Given that all of the advisors who warned against starting something with Iran called this out as a risk (before hegseth cleaned house of anyone competent willing to speak up), why do you think this is so unbelievable?
> For the most-dominant military power in the world to "whoopsy" run out of weapons because of a low-stakes engagement isn't readily believable.
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.
>For the most-dominant military power in the world
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.
I was thinking about this too because some years ago, there was a ranking article that’s now unavailable by the U.S. News and World Report (more famous for its college and university rankings) that had listed Russia as the strongest military.[1] A lot of people were questioning or poking fun at the ranking because of how Russia was struggling with Ukraine. Also, a lot of people seem to confuse analysis with endorsement or validation. But really it’s important to note that a lot of stuff also has to do with how information is very sensitive and can influence a lot of people. If mainstream media can be believed, the U.S. is also struggling a lot with Iran right now, but you might not realize that if you mainly used Trump’s Truth social posts as your only source of info.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20220313151414/https://www.usnew...
Russia could still trigger a mass extinction and end civilization as we know it.
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.
Once proper defenses for cheap and slow suicide drones is created (fast small unmanned interceptors with bullets instead of missiles) this temporary drone threat phase of war will be mostly over. The ability to build $1000 drones in everybody's garage was an obvious but unhandled threat, surely it will be though.
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.
The "drill here and drill now" crowd doesn't understand the concept of managing limited expendable resources?? Say it ain't so!
US apologists thought this is Hollywood. That Iron man and Thor will fly down from the sky.
Instead we saw videos after videos of Iranian missiles rain down from the sky.
There is a reason distributed systems are resilient. Iran's military doctrine of decentralized mosaic has proven to be a masterclass in military organization.
Indeed fellow current events observer, this will portend the imminent collapse of the cowardly west and the grand rise of the stalwart and wise Ayatollahs of Iran (I was not paid by state actors to write this)
You seem well versed in the wiseness of the Ayatollahs. Fellow world events observer.
The ayatollahs are stupid for their restraint. I wouldn't have their patience. They only recently resorted to 2 for 1 and promised 10 for 1 on escalation. I would have gone 1k to 1 on the first day if it were me :)
What could possibly go wrong with Dr Strangelove?
That's the one glaring weakness of relying too heavily on missiles. They are expensive and difficult to manufacture. And they have a limited shelf life, making stockpiles also expensive
In previous conflicts the US military could get a lot done with bombs, but that's risky if you can't get air superiority and take out all enemy anti-air systems. Which is more difficult against an enemy who can shoot at your air bases and aircraft carriers. But those previous conflicts might have contributed to a false sense of security about required missile stockpiles
Doctrine never intended for these bombs to be used almost exclusively as means to wage wars. These are meant for strikes that need to be precise and carried in a short notice.
If you have 10 targets and use atacms in all 10, there's something wrong in the decision making process or the strategy.
The fault in the decision process was starting this war in the first place. Everything follows from that.
We all know Operation Epstein Fury has been an extremely successful employment of weapons of mass distraction.
We all know there's something very wrong with this administration and their decision making.
All things considered, it appears it's working as intended by the administration.
> something wrong
like waging a war while insisting they aren't really waging a war and it's just a special military operation and as a side effect having effectively no access to a lot of the resources/means normally used
>If you have 10 targets and use atacms in all 10, there's something wrong in the decision making process or the strategy.
but AI generated that target list so its all good!
"900 strikes on Iranian targets in the first 12 hours"
"1,000 targets were struck in the first 24 hours"
"2,000 targets in 96 hours"
keep shooting, Im sure those are all good targets and totally not a waste of ammo
Air superiority was established fairly early on in the conflict. Flying F-15 and F-16s now. Not even stealth and they drop more than just missles - they carry bombs. B-52s weren’t sent in to carpet bomb the area of that’s what you mean.
US could indiscriminately drop dumb bombs but you would have a higher civilian casualty rate.
> Flying F-15 and F-16s now.
Except not really. If they were willing to risk sending many aircraft deep into Iranian airspace with SDBs and JDAMs they wouldn't be running out of ballistic missiles.
There have been 60-70 F15 and F16s operating in Iran (could be more just found via public sources).
And when an F-15E was shot down they got spooked. They're relying heavily on missiles because it doesn't cause a multiday story in the news when one is shot down on its way to the target (and because they're incapable of thinking more than one move ahead, and because it's not their money...).
This is hilarious. Yeah. Air superiority. Last I heard they moved all their equipments to Jordan to stay out of range from Sijjeel and they are still getting hammered in Jordan.
Saw the video taken by the US service men. In movies you see US soldiers yelling "go go go" while in the battlefield we saw them scream "run run run".
Your confidence in claiming air superiority is commendable. Keep it up.
You can't really stockpile missiles, their explosives and fuel needs to be replaced with some interval, so having a massive stockpile doesn't make that much sense, because it's as you suggests expensive to maintain.
In the case of an war (like you know, a war-war) the US is perfectly capable of ramping up manufacturing to ungodly numbers (but it won't be cheap). I would however like to see what Ukraine does, if they get the go-ahead to start making Patriot missiles. They probably won't just do a run of 50 or 100 missiles and call it a day.
> In the case of an war (like you know, a war-war) the US is perfectly capable of ramping up manufacturing to ungodly numbers
Source - trust me bro. Have you seen the videos of Iran's underground missile cities. Tell me about missile stockpiles again.
I think you should avail yourself of this thing called the Internet to research before you beclown yourself.
US missile production is extremely, painfully slow. From Standard missiles used by the Navy to Patriot. From THAAD to PrSM. LRASM, Tomahawk, you name it, we have a Tiffany weapons arsenal. We're winning so much, we just put the F-15 back into production; a plane that entered service 50 years ago.
Historians used to mock the Nazis for continually developing wunderwaffe; while the Allies overwhelmed them with Sherman and T-34 tanks. Now we've become the Nazis (in so many more ways than one.)
>the US is perfectly capable of ramping up manufacturing to ungodly numbers
Evidence? Genuinely curious. I read that for every ship the US can build, China can build 200. Our drones come from China. Have we got a magic tomohawk cruise missile factory that can be dialed up to the rate that China can produce? We have the raw materials pipeline and know-how still?
You have the same issue with the conventional bombs and their guidance kits, which when delivered in contested areas are not usually cheaper.
The issue is general industrial capacity, not missiles specifically.
JDAM's are a lot cheaper. They are a guidance kit bolted on to a MK-82 gravity bomb. There are a lot of MK-82's in stock, as they have been made since the 1940's.
Problem is you put a crew and an expensive airplane at risk.
We are out of missiles because the current administration wants to minimize combat losses. Looking at the dollar cost; it seems like a bad idea. But is this war worth any of our soldiers / sailors / airman ? (no)
Also, you can jam JDAM (GPS) guidance. The Russians are masters at jamming and I'm fairly confident they've shared some systems with Iran.
The issue is restraint, an all out bombing campaign with no regard for civilians or international condemnation would do the job in a month
I think it takes a wilful ignorance of the history of industrialised warfare to believe this.
> That's the one glaring weakness of relying too heavily on missiles. They are expensive and difficult to manufacture. And they have a limited shelf life, making stockpiles also expensive
I don't think so. This observation completely misses the root cause, and it ain't missiles.
Armed forces size their stockpiles in terms of their short term needs focused on rapid reaction and deterrence. The goal is to be able to react to immediate threats and then shift the economy to a war economy to supply the effort in economically efficient ways.
What failed this time is that the trump administration was hoping to attack Iran without having to declare war, effectively starting a war without preparing for the war.
The results are obvious: the peace time stockpile was depleted at a time where the country was not prepared to replenish it. Trump shifter the us armed forces to deplete their stockpile while avoiding the responsibility of supporting them in their mission by taking care of supplies.
And so they ran out of ammo.
There are further compounding factors such as a lack of plan and lack of exit strategy. But placing your military in a state where they spend their ammo without any plan to ressuply it... You will have the same problem if you replace hellfire missiles with sticks and stones.
Those are interesting points. The US military is optimised for limited strike "special military operations", which it does all the time, and deterrence. Neither of those require a super deep arsenal, just enough to complete a limited intervention, or blunt an initial assault. Initiating a long deep ongoing offensive campaign is a whole other thing the US never planned for.
> Initiating a long deep ongoing offensive campaign is a whole other thing the US never planned for.
I don't know that that's the case. There are almost certainly plans for a long deep ongoing offensive campaign. But you can't do an ongoing campaign and keep saying it's a short term thing and expect logistics to work.
> Those are interesting points. The US military is optimised for limited strike "special military operations", which it does all the time, and deterrence.
I don't think so. The US military still has the same Gulf War kind of punch. It's the same armed forces that supported multiple large scale military engagements and outright invasions without requiring changes to it's economy.
But that requires preparation and planning.
Trump did nothing of the sort, and forced the us military into an untenable position. The same armed forces that could easily occupy both Afghanistan and Iraq can't even support a limited engagement with Iraq until they started running out of ammo. That tells you everything about the level of planning that went into this mess.
"...deplete their stockpile while avoiding the responsibility of supporting them in their mission by taking care of supplies."
And blames Biden for this mess. "Oh... the cupboards were bare when I came back...". If you KNEW you were running low on supplies, why start a war? There's enough general answers to this, all revolving around his immaturity, lack of intelligence and the cult around him - the truth is somewhere in the middle of all that...
This logic doesn't hold under closer scrutiny. The timeline to expand missile production is on the order of years. This isn't the 1940s anymore where you can convert every car factory into making tanks and missiles. The idea of a war economy is wildly outdated. Either you have enough stockpiled until your weapons manufacturers can scale their production, or you're just out of missiles. Being out after some weeks of a "military operation" is frankly a damning indictment of the US military's logistics and manufacturing.
> This logic doesn't hold under closer scrutiny. The timeline to expand missile production is on the order of years.
You're missing the whole point. The point is not that missiles are easy to build. The point is that military interventions planned not only to prop up logistics but also to accommodate for supply constraints. There is no plan on earth that consists of firing a constant barrage of expensive missiles, and instead you have armed forces planning around using dumb and cheap alternatives that are easier to source and provision.
And Trump did nothing of the sort. There was no plan, no exit strategy, nothing. Not even a war declaration to kickstart the country's logistics infrastructure. Of course ammo runs out if there is no plan to provision it.
> This isn't the 1940s anymore where you can convert every car factory into making tanks and missiles.
That's also another point you missed. Trump even failed to mobilize the infrastructure to supply with basic ordnance. There is no plan.
Pay attention to what you are saying yourself: how do you start a war when you don't even secure your own supply needs for the first weeks of the engagement?
There was no actual plan that could have been made short of one that spanned multiple administrations over at least a decade to spin up enough missile or interceptor manufacturing for such a thing.
It’s just silly to think that the US has the domestic manufacturing base left to do such a thing short of generational scale timelines. The line workers you need in those plants are in grade school today. Better start introducing machine shop again!
Trump could have decided day one of his admin he wanted to do this, told everyone, and held off until the last day of his presidency to fire the first shot. At best you’d get a couple more weeks of ammo.
It’s a pure fantasy to think US arms manufacturers - even given a blank check and nationalized - could get a supply chain going in under a few years. We do not even have the semi-skilled manufacturing talent to spin up such a base, much less the latent capabilities to easily pivot.
Sure there is no plan. Having one would not have helped much either. You can’t plan your way out of having spent three generations outsourcing your industrial base.
The WWII comparisons are laughable. Today the US would still be getting factories on-line by the same time the atomic bombs were dropped. We would have a whole cycle just learning how to build things again - much less actually build them.
To build ammo at a “all out war” scale you would need entirely different weaponry designed foremost to be rapidly built. You cannot rapidly scale up manufacturing of current designs. If we could, we already would have since there is effectively an unlimited decade out backlog of demand for just Patriot missiles and has been for close to half a decade already. The common rebuttal that a factory would need 30 years of increased demand to make the investment worthwhile proves the point.
Did the US just have the same fate as Russia where they where feared for their military until they used it?
It wouldn’t be the first war the USA loose against a smaller enemy. See Vietnam, Afghanistan, etc etc.
The USA has never been defeated. It's never been taken over by force and forced to submit to a foreign power. War getting a little too expensive or politically unpopular for their tastes is not really a loss, and it implies nothing about their true capabilities.
It's their relentless deindustrialization that will eventually do them in. The USA's industrial output back in WWII was staggering, its enemies had little hope of victory given the sheer number of materiel that would eventually get deployed. Since then they've been voluntarily giving up much of that industrial advantage out of greed.
> The USA has never been defeated.
Did the entity now known as the USA defeat the British in the mid-1770s or did it just get a little too expensive and more of a headache than it was worth for the British to hold on to them?
> The USA has never been defeated. It's never been taken over by force and forced to submit to a foreign power. War getting a little too expensive or politically unpopular for their tastes is not really a loss, and it implies nothing about their true capabilities.
It feels like semantics here. The US empire hasn't been defeated but its specific invasions have been.
But just knowing the US military is too weak to accomplish its objectives doesn't help much, because the US leadership is so mercurial it might decide to attack anyway. The deterrent effect only helps if you have rational leadership who is capable of evaluating the chance of failure.
Repelling such an invasion, while possible, is still a pyrrhic victory for whoever the US is attacking, because so much of their population will suffer in the invasion regardless.
> The US empire hasn't been defeated but its specific invasions have been.
> a pyrrhic victory for whoever the US is attacking
That's what I'm trying to say.
If you set out to achieve an objective, but the enemy prevents you from achieving that objective, you lost.
I wouldn't say they lost. They failed their strategic objectives, but they're still out there, intact and combat capable.
Losing is what happened to Germany after both World Wars.
If you start a war in someone else's country and they push you out...they won the war which means the US lost it. Your definition that the country has to be taken over to lose is a very different situation. If you can't accept we started a war, lost thousands of US lives and left without achieving any objective we set out as a loss you might need to reflect on the propaganda you've been fed and how it's affected you.
For some definition of "push you out".
The US inflicted an order of magnitude more casualties than the ~60k deaths they suffered in Vietnam. The US has proven its willingness to withstand much greater losses: ~300k deaths in WWII, ~200k deaths in its civil war.
They did a staggering amount of damage but were unable to secure a decisive military victory. So the war started to drag on, the casualties started to mount, costs started to pile up and the unpopularity of the war applied political pressure.
Writing this off as a simple "loss" doesn't seem to accurately describe what happened. I think they could have won, but the cost was too high so they pulled out. Engagement must not have been important enough to warrant another 200k-300k deaths.
Doesn't feel like the same loss you suffer when you fully commit to the task only to end up getting routed.
So your argument is that they could have won in an alternative reality where it was worth paying a much higher cost for victory, therefore they didn't lose?
I think you found a great way to never "lose" anything with this definition.
Going back to Clausewitz, war is a continuation of politics through other means. Moreover, victory is achieved by using force to compel one's opponent to carry out one's will.
> intact and combat capable
On its own, this claim is likely true. Nevertheless, this does not mean one's opponent is going to carry out one's will. Hence, one cannot declare victory. It follows that anything short of achieving one's goal is a loss. A loss doesn't have to be complete and utter destruction. It's fair to say that Argentina did not achieve its strategic objectives during the Falklands War, no?
> Losing is what happened to Germany after both World Wars.
Yes, but Germany is not as good of an example in this case as Japan during WWII. Japan would have likely accepted something short of unconditional surrender much sooner than August 1945, but the U.S. insisted on unconditional surrender. As such, the U.S. did not win until Japan agreed to unconditional surrender.
America simply "failed their strategic objectives" in Vietnam?
It's laughable to use such a silly euphemism to imply America was not defeated! The North Vietnamese won. Get over it.
How do you learn to cope so well? Did you attend the Dugin College of psychotic delusion or something?
> failed their strategic objective
copium
> It's their relentless deindustrialization that will eventually do them in
Agree, China has already won, at this point a lot of the world sees them as a more sane option than USA as well which is a nuts timeline
> China has already won, at this point a lot of the world sees them as a more sane option than USA
The rest of the world is finding China a more predictable and stable trading partner than the USA.
>The USA has never been defeated. It's never been taken over by force and forced to submit to a foreign power. War getting a little too expensive or politically unpopular for their tastes is not really a loss, and it implies nothing about their true capabilities.
Except for the capability to prevail in those conflicts.
On the other hand the US did prevail in Iraq, and often prevails in smaller interventions such as Kosovo, or various strikes on particular targets.
>Since then they've been voluntarily giving up much of that industrial advantage out of greed.
American workers just don't want to do those jobs any more, at least not enough of them, and the country won't tolerate enough immigration to make up the shortfall domestically. There just aren't tens of millions of Americans sitting around waiting to take up manufacturing jobs. If citizens prefer to do other jobs, then non citizens have to do them, whether that's in the USA or outside it.
> Except for the capability to prevail in those conflicts.
Doubt. The US suffered around 60k deaths in Vietnam before it pulled out, yet it has proven a willingness to withstand at least 5x more losses than that. WWII cost the US around 300k deaths, its civil war cost around 200k deaths.
I think they just didn't want to commit more american lives to whatever objectives it is that they had. They definitely had and still have the capability to do so, but they chose not to.
Civil War casualties were over 700K...
Are you pretending that political losses are not losses? Getting into a war you cannot fund, fuel, or staff and having to retreat is called "losing".
the modern USA territory was never taken over, but the US military had to pack and leave quickly in a few occasions. Just because Vietnamese couldn't fight back in the US, nor the Talibans, doesn't mean that the US wasn't defeated.
But even that, let's remember that the British invaded and occupied Washington, burned down White House and Capitol, etc etc.
Sorry, but this is a comic book understanding of victory and defeat. Not your fault, many people think this way post-WWII as they have come to see this conflict as a template for what “real” war looks like.
Tactical defeat is when you are prevented from meeting your objectives for a particular operation, such as securing a target area or destroying/degrading a target enemy force. Strategic defeat is when the enemy prevents you from achieving your broader objectives (typically political, as war is politics by other means). The US has experienced both of these in the last century.
Most active militaries have experienced both types of defeat at one time or another. It’s practically impossible to avoid losing sometimes if you overuse war as a tool of diplomacy.
> Not your fault, many people think this way post-WWII as they have come to see this conflict as a template for what “real” war looks like.
Yeah I certainly see it that way. I think saying the US got "defeated" by Vietnam drops some nuance.
WWII proves the US is perfectly willing to suffer at least 5x the casualties of Vietnam in order to achieve their objectives. They probably just didn't want to commit to that sort of cost and pulled out instead. Feels like a different failure mode compared to going all out and getting routed.
“They didn’t want to” is hiding some of the complexity behind it. Vietnam had turned into a political crisis at home; there were widespread protests and lots of people openly dodging the draft. Grunts would sometimes “frag” commanders who pushed them into overly risky missions. Running up the casualties would have created a real risk of a violent revolt at home and mutiny among the soldiers. The US as a society was likely incapable of winning the war, so it turned into a defeat.
There may have been a window earlier on when greater commitment could have won the war or frozen the conflict, via invasion of North Vietnam, but not once the public turned against it. But this came with a big risk of direct intervention from China or the Soviet Union, as happened in Korea. In Korea, Chinese intervention led to a stalemate.
Additionally, early success doesn't mean long term success. The US won in Afghanistan initially, then they got dragged in a conflict for 20 years and ultimately Taliban came back.
Exactly, perfect example of tactical victories followed by strategic defeat.
> WWII proves the US is perfectly willing to suffer at least 5x the casualties of Vietnam in order to achieve their objectives.
The US today isn't the US on the dawn of WWII, and this war is unlike WWII as a whole.
Domestic political support for the war is so low due to the huge costs (of the war itself and on the American pocketbook). Furthermore, due to the open and blatant corruption in the current administration, and the passing of economic policies that increase the struggle of everyday people while enriching the billionaire class, there has been a huge loss of trust in the US federal government in general.
Contrast this with the establishment of the Social Security act and WPA before WWII, which greatly increased the public's trust/confidence in the federal government to secure their welfare in the wake of the Great Depression, and made them willing to sacrifice for their country.
Finally, unlike WWII, this war didn't start with any attack by Iran on US territory, or attacks on closely allied countries. To the extent that allies have been attacked, it has been in response to US aggression, further undermining the public's will to commit American lives to further conflict.
Invading armies burnt the White House down twice, then just left and said “stop being so stupid”.
This was very quick though.
It turns out public money is more expensive these days. Debt is a more mainstreamly exposed problem.
https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtid=2&...
"The estimated cost of the war in Vietnam during the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations was $176 billion."
Adjusted for inflation, that is $1,192 billion in 2026 dollars.
"The longest war in American history had significant economic effects both domestically and internationally in terms of what was spent on the war and what expenses had to be cut."
https://www.thecollector.com/vietnam-war-economic-effects/
Iran has been preparing for this war for almost 50 years, and they have more leverage than Vietnamese or Talebans had.
They have been preparing for 50 years yet lost all their leadership, nuclear facilities, ballistic missile manufacturing ecosystem and air defenses in minutes to days.
The US is not doing amazing in this war but no need to give the Iranians too much credit. The Iranians are expanding a lot of resources of their own as much as this war drags on.
It is still very early to say how a country will fare considering that it ran out of water and was on a verge of economic breakdown and revolt before fighting a prolonged war with economic blockade of its main export.
According to the US administration Iran military was supposed to be obliterated, and still. Either way, they have figure out they have a much cheaper way to hold Trump by the balls, and let him dance to their tune. I believe Ukraine and Iran are showing that there is a new level of inflicting damage to your aggressor.
They are mainly using the known fact that there's no chance in hell that the US will invade Iran with ground forces. They also previously negotiated as if this war would never start, so they might make a mistake as this is Trump after all.
In any case, Iran is not in a prime position either, it has many economic assets that can be completely destroyed as it has no air defense and then leave them in a much worse situation, while the only real damage they can do to the US is by attacking their own neighbors
the US can make Iran look like Afghanistan and still loose the war.
Iran is a paper tiger.
I think that's an unfair assessment. Depleting a stockpile of a particular munition (since missile strikes are less unpopular than a full-scale deployment) because of overreliance shows a particular strain, not a pervasive weakness.
So this is all solved when US troops waltz into Tehran?
Any day now.
yesn't in case of Russia a lot of their military just "didn't work properly"/"was ineffective in a very fundamental way"
this wasn't the case for the US, their military did work and was effective in context of the specific think they where used for. It's just that the thing they where used for isn't effective in winning the kind of conflict the US did start.
while this is "just" the "non effective" part being some where else it is a very fundamental difference in the end
like to put it this way,
if weapons of mass destruction like nukes, bio weapons etc. would magically disappear an invasion and takeover of (part of mainland) Russia would be relatively viable (mainly by China, but others might want a slice, too).
on the other hand even without weapons of mass destruction trying to invade the mainland US still seems futile/to be a losing battle, no matter who tries it.
No, the opposite has happened with this war. Adversaries globally have seen the ability of the US and Israel to operate with near-impunity over Iran, and it has destroyed confidence in non-Western defence systems.
The big weakness is industrial capacity, but only China can exploit that at scale.
Apple and oranges comparison.
The Russo-Ukrainian war is a war of invasion.
The US-Iranian is more of an air superiority campaign.
If you want any take away lesson: don't attack countries that care about defending themselves. Not everyone is Iraq.
And don't underestimate the efficiency of asymmetric warfare.
North Korea has a bunch they're willing to sell. Russia is buying already so get 'em while they're hot.
I have been vaguely watching the Ukraine conflict over the past few years. From my distant and zero experience observations, it seems like missiles are extremely effective BUT also extremely limited. So you blow up that one building or SAM you targeted. Well done. What about the other 10,000 static targets? What about the guys with FPV drones and shoulder-launched anti-air now inside the rubble of the building you just destroyed? Send another XX-million USD missile to blow up the building you already blew up?
Feels like a determined adversary who is not easily cowed with a quick bit of "shock and awe" and armed with cheap, mobile winged/quad drones and man-portable guided anti-air/-tank missiles has totally changed the equation. Expensive limited missiles/planes/tanks/ships in smaller numbers seem kinda limited in their ability to get results in today's battlefield where there are FPV drones literally at every turn, and can be operated from literally a hole in the ground 15km away by people who aren't about to easily surrender.
It feels somewhat like the US doctrine has been to start with a "hit 'em hard" opening salvo of cruise/ballistic missiles and rockets etc and hope for immediate surrender. So far the lesson from Ukraine and Iran seems to be expect a big wave first attack or two and if you survive that initial push then suddenly the big super-power has no more cards left to play and it's down to men on the ground with hand-held weapons and drones. I wonder if people will look back at this era as a "WW1 moment" where the old ways of battle suddenly looked hopelessly out of date.
It depends on the specific nature of the conflict. Not every conflict is about control over land; Iran is a perfect example. Their missiles provide a credible threat against globally critical infrastructure, which gives them a way to retaliate without committing ground troops. And their drone strikes are using heavier one-way drones, not FPVs, which wouldn’t make a dent in oil infrastructure or tanker ships.
The current US force configuration was designed to fight quick wars against opponents who mostly can’t fight back. It’s a military built to play “global police,” and for a short while this was probably the correct configuration.
Building a military that stands ready to fight any kind of war is probably impossible—it would be too expensive. You need to look at the biggest threats and optimize for those conflicts. The problem that the US now faces is that rival nations have optimized for defense against its particular style of maneuver warfare with heavy air bombardment. Air defense (not missile defense) is better and cheaper than ever.
Russian missiles have been mostly useless in the Ukrainian war. They are overwhelmingly used against civilian targets as a means of intimidation.
This article seems strange to me talking about the lack of ATACMS mattering for a war against China. The publicly available range of the ATACMS is 300 km. Seems to me an ATACMS could not reach China from American bases in Japan, South Korea or the Philippines. The only place you could launch an ATACMS from to hit China would be Taiwan. But Taiwan is so small and likely so well covered by Chinese air defenses that I don't think ATACMS would be that effective there.
A more technical source:
https://www.militarytimes.com/industry/techwatch/2026/08/04/...
Iwould fire more long-range precision missiles but Iran out.
That's hard to believe. US with it's military spending should be able to join two large scale conflicts at the same time, not to have problem with a one minor conflict.
It’s easier to believe when missiles are the only strategy being used in the war…
The word you are looking for is "stragedy"
Hold on, there's strategy being used in the war?
It’s a clickbait article
Never underestimate how much damage a single high-ranked idiot can inflict on its own ranks.
never underestimate the monetary inefficiency of the military industrial complex
And useless, prolonged wars are good for business.
Paper tiger.
Venezuela thought the same thing. Keeping a full-scale deployment at arm's length, and 'only' targeting military targets with exhaustive use of precision missiles is poor strategy, but if a military victory were the US's only ambition the Iranian regime has no capability that could prevent its country from being turned into a smoldering parking lot.
Doctrine isn't the same as inability.
Venezuela was likely a palace coup disguised as a purely foreign intervention by both parties involved. There is a reason why instead of holding an election or having the opposition take over, they just handed the country to Maduro's very own vice president.
>the Iranian regime has no capability that could prevent its country from being turned into a smoldering parking lot.
This is a laughable amount of ignorance. The capability that Iran has to prevent this is physics
Iran is gigantic. Iran has 90 million people.
If you put together every long range precision munition the US has ever built, you could attack a single City and severely damage it.
People have zero sense of scale. To level cities the way we did in WW2 requires the level of industrial output that we had in WW2, because we have literally not made enough explosives to do so since
The US dropped 1.4 million tons of bombs on Germany alone in WW2
That's the equivalent of 3 million Tomahawk missiles. The US has built less than 10k total
>if a military victory were the US's only ambition the Iranian regime has no capability that could prevent its country from being turned into a smoldering parking lot.
I read this and I wonder, "are we back to 2003 and Iraq?"
Incredible how little memory Americans have. Absolutely none. You just have no grasps on reality.
Don’t worry, they can still carpet bomb with high explosive and nuclear always remains an option lest you forget.
The US does not have enough B52s and Mk 80s to carpet bomb a place the size of Iran.
We barely managed it during Vietnam using depleting surplus and losing many irreplaceable airframes.
"Carpet bombing Iran to rubble" literally is not an option
The US bombed North Vietnam into dust, but because they didn’t occupy it with ground forces they simply rebuilt and kept coming.
You can’t win a war with just air power.
In some ways yes, not in others.
That is a remarkably stupid thing to say about the US military.
Missiles (BIG EXPLOSION) look better when presented in video briefings to Trump and as propaganda on Fox news. It's all optics and style. No other goals.
It's easy to believe, it's hard to realize.
The conflict with Iran is only 'minor' in certain respects, it's a major air campaign otherwise, involving strategic bombing on par with the Iraq War 2 - or at least the initial period.
The US is bombing them from very far away places, the amount of logistical overhead is unthinkable.
These munitions cost a fortune in part because they are purchased in lower quantities, and yes, they have to be able to do a 10x-50x instant ramp up in order to be effective (aka capacity not inventory which is the strategic key).
It takes 2 years minimum to adjust an economy in that way and the US does not have good supply chains.
It's unlikely the US could hope to fight any kind of prolonged conflict with China 'in the area of Chinese territory' for very obvious reasons: they have the supply chains, 1 billion workers, and can turn them on a dime, and don't have 'far to go' to deploy weapons.
The US doesn't even have reliable ways of getting goods and materials into the theatre and has limited quantities of everything.
That said, there are still ways to defend Taiwan and/or to make an invasion futile - but 'broad conflict' ... nope.
> The US doesn't even have reliable ways of getting goods and materials into the theatre and has limited quantities of everything.
This is not true. US is known for the best logistics in the world.
US has 600 air refuelling aircraft and 40 naval supply ships.
US power is mostly strategic, it's 'Air Based' which gives the kind of instant leverage leaders like. It's 'Aircraft Carrier Based'.
The US doesn't have that same overwhelming ability otherwise.
You can't quite an Army overseas - it takes a different kind of logistics esp. in Pacific, one the US doesn't quite have the level of sophistication.
Don't get me wrong - 'it could' but would take a while to ramp up.
I believe GP was being sarcastic.
It's ok though - the US Forces do have 'the best logistics in the world' - that's not an unfair claim at all.
They are exceedingly exceptional.
But all of these systems have limits and characterizations.
US would be hard pressed to keep 500K people full supplied and engaged in Pacific. It would take a while to ramp that up.
I was not
Then I’d stop at claiming “best” is meaningless in a military context without defining what the mission is. If it is starting wars, I’d say it’s great. If it means achieving goals, then it’s kind of meh.
America could theretically sustain other cheaper losses, like a few more F15s going down - but Trump is rightfully terrified of the political fallout of American pilots being capturred and torture videos showing up on Telegram.
They are not cheaper losses, because production capacity for those things is very limited.
Missiles are always easier to replace then platforms of any kind.
But yes - a single, lone captive could cause political devastation.
Im no military planner so Im not gonna get invested in this debate haha - and obviously a human death is a huge loss - but presumably you could drop a lot of bombs for each lost fighter, so the bang/buck (literally) would be better than with missiles.
Planes aircrew high fixed/operating cost - lower unit costs on strikes.
Missiles, more expensive - depending on.
Missiles are not 'rocket science' - pun intended. They're expensive because of the overhead of military industrial complex.
Russia is making ballistic missiles 'China style' - super fast, super cheap. Basically - much bigger than ATACMs, longer range, a bit less precise but vicious. Similar to Iran.
That would be true if the money spent was actually optimized on output rather than expensive contractors, consultants, and third party profits. :(
"Minor" conflict? You really don't realize how much ressources Hesgeth has committed to this, and how much your president likes to make things go "boom".
See also: the number of strikes on boats in the Caribbean (with absolutely no result on drug trafficking).
For US, major conflict would be with China, perhaps with Russia. Not with Iran.
edit: this is the document I am talking about http://media.defense.gov/2022/Oct/27/2003103845/-1/-1/1/2022...
It seems like the US has priced itself out of those wars.
If I was an ex KGB man running the rump of an ex empire, I'd be thinking of ways of disarming the strongest military in NATO. "Sure go ahead invade Iran, we are so impressed with your leader we wouldn't dare do anything to dissuade you."
>The U.S. Army has used up
So not the US. There is also the Navy, Air Force etc
Borderline clickbait
This should be higher, the Army never had a lot of ATACMs to begin with as launching missiles at things is not really their job.
Doesn't make the points about this administration not having a real plan invalid though...
From what I've seen the US has never really put much effort behind surface-to-surface missiles in the first place because when you have a massive and well-funded air force that's a lot better tool for executing long-range fires. Not to say that losing those missiles won't hurt if we get into a war in the medium-term (or want to supply more firepower to our allies), especially in a more land-based theatre like eastern Europe.
How is this not hidden even after 9 hours? The article vs the title is a crystal clear case of clickbait (or as the kids say these days: engagement farming).
Anyone have insight into the overlap of techies and armchair military experts? Every thread like this ends up overflowing with comments like "Let me explain to you what's really happening..."
War is one of the most high tech and technologically interesting things humans do, and is often the first place that truly state of the art abilities are showcased.
It's not hard for me to understand why techies would be so interested.
That's fine but not entirely what I'm trying to understand. There is an aspect of it that connects back to the Qanon mentality of having insider information and a level of expertise beyond the society sanctioned experts. There are plenty of tech topics that come up here that do not get the same response, so "techies just like tech" isn't the full explanation.
It might actually be for the best to stress the system in this way. It's not practical to keep a military based only around "stockpiles" that you're scared to use up. Modern combat looks like long wars of attrition where two countries compete to see who can burn through more missiles so you need to keep the actual supply chain active.
Hopefully they're able to learn lessons from Ukraine as well and pivot towards cheaper missiles and autonomous vehicles
Probably needed an excuse to rotate our stock out.
If i was china wanting to invade taiwan, this is what i would buy.
> “U.S. has used…”
Missing the ‘has’ part for “present perfect tense”, e.g. “a past action with present relevance”.
In an ongoing war.
What are you talking about? The war is over. It's more over than any war in history. In fact, the POTUS has already ended the war 38 times. /s
We can just buy them from the Ukrainians.
How could someone even verify this claim?
What is there even to say about this? Where does one even begin?
Okay, let's start.
- A country, even as big as the US, is strictly, evidently, not exceptional.
- The US lost the majority of the wars it joined/started in the last 100 years and came home every time trying to sell it as a victory despite not achieving their war goals.
- You may have weapons or power of some kind, but every move you make costs you some kind of currency: time, material, energy, credibility, goodwill. You may have large amounts, but they're never infinite.
- Acts of raw destruction as mean towards a goal is often not ideal: change and control are "constructive" concepts, while bombs can only offer you guaranteed chaos. You MIGHT be able to steer that chaos afterwards, but it's not guaranteed and numbers do not simply improve your position here. (see: Iraq, etc.)
No - the Iran war is a total strategic failure, but the US is very obviously 'exceptional' - I'm not saying necessarily admirable, or more moral etc but it is hugely 'stand out' in terms of capabilities. That's just a fact of reality irrespective of all of the political and moral context.
- The US did not 'lose' the majority of the wars it started - it won most of them, and arguably failed to achieve strategic objectives in some.
- "Acts of raw destruction as mean towards a goal is often not ideal " - this is a misrepresentation of US doctrine for decades. Even in Vietnam the US did not pursue 'full war' and refused to do strategic bombing in North Vietnam for a decade. As soon as Nixon did (op: Linebacker) - basically, the US 'won' right away. They decimated N. Vietnamese ability in a very material way. Were that strategy to have been undertaken in 1967, the war would have had a completely different outcome, probably more like Korean detente.
- US is very careful in their campaigns, there are chains of authority, externalizations are always assessed. The rules of engagement may shift a but - but it's false to suggest it's 'arbitrarily destructive' in targeting, it's generally minimal.
If you want to see what 'destructive' is, just look at Russian engagement in Ukraine, or Assad in Syria, or Saudi in Yemen. They don't care what they hit, it's a totally different environment.
To this day Iran's Oil Infrastructure remains intact. Just let that sink in.
All of this is outside of any moral or whatever other consideration - it's just 'what it is'.
The 'important note' here is that 'Power Has Limits' and that's truly the defining characterization of this war. This is not 'America is not capable' is that 'capabilities have limits' - and they become very obvious in difficult ways if power is applied poorly.
The Generals 100% warned Trump of all of this - this conflict is not a military failure in that sense, this is predictable. It's the political apparatus pushing the boundaries. The Generals would have none of this.
> To this day Iran's Oil Infrastructure remains intact. Just let that sink in.
The US was going as far as issuing sanctions waivers to Russia to try and get oil to the market it was so worried about what the war in the middle east would do to prices. All the indications are they're desperate to preserve as much middle eastern oil infrastructure as possible, even to the point where they look like losers vis a vis Iran. No surprise if they aren't inviting tit for tat exchanges on oil infrastructure. And the Russia-Ukraine war had vaguely similar parallels, with Ukraine allowing transit of Russian gas through the country to Europe for ... I want to say at least 12 months. So clearly neither side was so lost in the battle that they thought disrupting the pipelines was a good idea.
That type of targeting discrimination seems to be fairly normal. Armies are only indiscriminate when they think that helps their war aims. Although what exactly the US war aims are in Iran is very much a guess, Trump was struggling to even lie consistently when he was trying to come up with one.
Yes, that's a fair assessment, but then general context is still one of very specific strategic targeting. And FYI it's not just about 'Oil Prices', the US has left many other strategic industries in place whereas by any other ugly consideration, they would just 'blow up whatever'.
I'm not sure how far the Administration would go but they are very strongly restricted by US Armed forces procedures and just norms.
>If you want to see what 'destructive' is, just look at Russian engagement in Ukraine, or Assad in Syria, or Saudi in Yemen. They don't care what they hit, it's a totally different environment.
Show us the difference with Vietnam (and Cambodia).
And the Caribbean.
The difference is deliberate and arbitrary attack of civilians at scale and total lack of concern - popularly, politically, operationally, and practically for casualties outside military targeting.
The notion one would even try to compare 'the Caribbean' - where USN is destroying drug running boats - which is arguably against some maritime laws but is nevertheless exceedingly acute, I think shows how wound up people are in the political context.
There is no relevant kinetic fallout in the Caribbean - it's an Elephant precisely stepping on a single ant.
Capture of Venezuelan Oil ... almost certainly illegal.
But that's a different thing
As for Vietnam - start by laying the context for why the N. Vietnamese imprisoned, tortured, killed 100's of thousands of political dissidents and civilians of all kinds, and continued that horrible repression for decades even to this day as they continue to crack down on mild dissent. The actual facts on both sides are actually ugly, but woefully misrepresented and the same utterly bizarre dual moral lens is applied ... a bit like in the Iranian situation as well.
Implied in the question is the despotism in plain site: why did N. Vietnam invade Cambodia? Against the will of those people? And murder and maraud in that territory?
The difference is between that, as a starting point, and strategic bombing of rural roadways (Ho Chi Min trail) etc., which ironically was in lieu of actually bombing North Vietnam which should have been done right from the onset, would have prevented a war, and saved 1/2 the population from a perennial nightmare and given the citizens some say in their future.
But it's also an example of the extent of the ability of superpowers to project power.
>where USN is destroying drug running boats
>which is arguably against some maritime laws
You get it completely backwards: the US Navy is "allegedly" destroying drug running boats, and it is completely, totally, "inarguably" against maritime laws - and laws of war (but there is no war, right?) and basic law principles in civilized countries.
>it's an Elephant precisely stepping on a single ant.
It is not a cute animal simile. It is US Navy sailors commiting 200+ summary executions. It is burning alive and drowning. It is widows and orphans.
"It is widows and orphans." - you lost the argument by trying to characterize these people as innocents, because it's such an awful position it undermines your own legitimacy.
These are 'Cártel de los Soles' etc they are thugs and killers, the source of untold violence and harm.
This the hysterical rhetorical position that I'm actually hinting at - contempt for a party (in this case the US) renders people intellectually incoherent - willing to defend the most vile actions such as mass murder by Hamas, Iranian regime, mass killings, torture and imprisonment, by North Vietnam etc..
The same people that overlook Stalin's literal genocide - for example, the German Centre Left Party, the Social Democrats, who used to 'retreat' in Russia, at one of Stalin's summer homes.
This 'USA always bad / actual terrorists are victims' nonsense is the psychological affliction at work here, in almost all these discussions.
It's the flip side of the 'USA good and justified in everything' nonsense.
One posture does not justify the other.
First - The US has a reasonable moral claim against stopping these parties, even if they are going too far by not using interdiction, and killing those who were floating at sea. The basic legitimacy remains even if the methods are not justified.
Second - The situation if anything demonstrates US exceptionalism, which is the argument here. This isn't about 'moral claims' - it's about if the US is actually an exceptional military force.
The OP indicated 'the US clearly not exceptional'.
This is completely delusional. Obviously, they are. It's not a moral assessment, which is much more complicated.
Contempt for the US turns people's brains to rubbish.
>The US did not 'lose' the majority of the wars it started - it won most of them, and arguably failed to achieve strategic objectives in some.
I mean if we look at all recent wars, Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam and now Iran we completely failed in our objectives. We spend billions, kill a lot of people and get a lot of our own people killed and didn't manage to instill democracy anywhere. How is that not losing the wars? It's complete failure to do what we set out to do 3 times now in recent history.
It's fair to say overall engagements were bad, but it's hard to argue that a military looses when it streamrolls the opponent, and then 'decides to leave'.
The US generally wins wars, but can fail on occupational and grander objectives, which are different things.
The US 'tied' in Korea, eventually 'won' in Vietnam but then quickly decided to leave - strategic failure), 'won' in Iraq but a grinding occupation left it a strategic quagmire but no total failure.
Middling intervention in Syria was effective in bringing down Assad and now there is a transition to 'something somewhat better'.
There was no fight to even win in Afghanistan as the Talibain was overthrown without direct intervention - the follow up was entirely occupational - and though it was a strategic failure, it wasn't a military defeat. The West just did not want to continue paying the cost of keeping the fighters at bay. That's a 'stupid set of decisions' which is different than 'losing'.
This is all different from Russian failure in Ukraine where it cannot meet it's military objectives.
Iran is shaping up to be a 'military tie' - because US is engaging from afar it' abilities are limited and is taking real losses ... and a pretty big strategic failure, having lost control over the Gulf, no 5th fleet presence in the Gulf, allies attacked, Iran emboldened. Bad.
Hi, the guy with the original claims here: You can really argue this one either way - If you look at Wikipedia, the field seems fairly even, but when you start looking into the details, things don't look quite as rosy: There's a few "wins" that are literally just a plane getting shot down or similar, there's a lot of revolutions they were involved in (some turning out good, some bad) But as you've observed: the big, memorable ones they lost. even the ones Wikipedia claims as wins/mixed bags are sometimes consequences of an earlier battle that they lost. For example, Korea: the division counts as a 'win', because it happened during WW2 and the US were part of the victors of WW2. Defending the south in the Korean war counts as 'mixed' and gets thrown in with the lost counteroffensive of taking the north. You can play the numbers however you like here, it feels like.
> Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. - Dwight D. Eisenhower 1953
Eisenhower would be considered a woke commie by today's administration
I have been referring to myself as a communist more and more.1
That fools running a country who turfed out military experience for loyalty were completely blind to what they were doing? I had no idea that running out of missiles was a distinct possibility until Spencer Ackerman started beating that drum in his newsletter around the start of the conflict. Forever Wars (along with the pieces he links to) has been an eye opening read.
US adversary countries have to love everything that is happening. If you’re China you win by doing nothing, just let the US administration pillage the country
It bodes well for Europeans when the Americans begin their invasion of Denmark, at the very least. Not great for a potential Russia-USA war and Taiwan wouldn't get as much support if the Chinese invade would also be difficult, though.
The title says "virtually all" but the first paragraph says "much". The actual stockpile is probably larger than this news report would make it seem. It would be convenient for Trump and his Russia-loving cronies if it would appear that the USA has no more weapons to support Ukraine with, of course.
Many advanced NATO weapons being difficult to produce and only being available in small quantities is something that has been discussed before, I don't think that's news. The rate at which they're being spammed without much result at Iran is, but that's hardly surprising given the current people in charge.
"Play stupid games, win stupid prizes", international relations edition.
America is not happy when it is not at war. There has to be an enemy. The old WOT had finally run out of steam; people are coming out of college who were born after 9/11. Venezuela (and Latin America generally) made a good enemy for a while, but they were too easily defeated. But Iran? America has wanted a rematch since Jimmy Carter.
(A bipartisan problem, mostly, but propped up by pro-war media. The only people against it are a few Democrats, almost all of whom are women)
Time to send in the ground troops. Nothing bad can happen. /s
One begins by looking at the sources which the article dies not substantiate.
This nation is sitting ducks? The only reason we don't have Red Dawn is nobody wants this nation idiots.
How is this information public knowledge?
Not sure why anyone has a taste for the kind of butch, chest-pounding performative foreign policy we have these days. Not only does it not work, it's dangerous to national security.
Can anyone verify this through secondary sources?
If you watch CSPAN/etc it has been verified during congressional questioning of the current head of the dept. of defense.
used? as if it's paper towel wipe up some dirt? this is so depressing.
USA people, do you all really love killing other human? or you have no control of your democratically elected government at all?
Didn't Americans kill something like 150 Iranian school girls and basically nothing came of it?
> nothing came of it?
they probably regretted as it "used all the missiles"
Does this mean that from now on bombings will happen with dumb bombs and that we can expect way more Iranian casualties? Otherwise this seems incorrect.
With stories like this you always have to ask “Who are the sources?”
“People who are familiar with this matter” is doing a lot of work.
This reeks of laundering lies.
A lot of the problem is with the current commander in chief's not very good strategy. Iran is huge and populous and would be very expensive to occupy with boots on the ground so no one really wants to go there. Trump thought he could just bomb their military assets and government and things would all be ok but the Iranians have been planning for that for ages and have everything distributed, duplicated and protected. A more normal leader might consult with allies who have been dealing with Iran for decades and make a coherent plan but he ignores them, tariffs them and threatens their territories. I'm not sure how it's supposed to work. He could launch 100% of the US's missiles at Iran and still not achive much.
Wild how it only took 2 years of a dementia ridden corpse king to fundamentally gut America's global power indefinitely
> A fourth person familiar with the matter said that while Central Command — which oversees U.S. forces in the Middle East — has nearly used up the land-based missiles it had before the war began, it has been able to reload from U.S. military supplies elsewhere in the world.
The title seems fairy inaccurate
It also says they declined to say how many the US has left. And saying “person familiar with the matter” is doing a lot of work. It could be anyone with no direct information. This is what laundering a bogus story looks like.
Exactly how many people do you think are allowed to communicate the status of weapon stockpiles? You are only ever going to get off-the-record comments or a top official letting details slip that should have remained secret.
I don’t think the title is inaccurate and robbing Peter to pay Paul isn’t the military flex Pete Hesgeth may think it is. Anyone who has ever slept under a too-small comforter knows how this will go.
Moving resources within an organization isn't exactly robbing.
The headline is inaccurate, as the article actually says that the US Army has used nearly all of its long-range precision missiles, referring to ATACMS and PCM.
First, those are short- to medium-range weapons.
Second, the USAF and USN hold most of the US's long-range precision weaponry, the only real exception being the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW), which is not yet fielded.
Goes to show every army does the same: they make, especially the lower echelons, largely correct predictions of future conflicts. Then they refuse to prepare for them.
The more things change.
its good to drain pool and refill with fresh water every now and again
> Analysts say such weapons – which cost over $1 million each – would also be important in any conflict with China.
Said without context, there are not very many places close to China where these could be fired from, so I'm not so sure how useful they would really be in any South China Sea hot wars
And we've advertised it to the entire world. And we've destroyed our economy. And we've further isolated ourselves from the world, culturally, politically, and economically.
Good job everyone with the voting. All those people voted for "let's make things universally worse for everyone except billionaires in America".
I have no idea if this is true or not. If it is it shows a new level of incompetence for Hegseth and the current administration and clear hypocrisy in their messaging of 'america first'. It was ridiculous that we started the war believing it will be over in a weekend, but this is a mistake the US has made many many times before so to say this administration is different is silly. Then Hegseth allowed vaccine mandates to go away because no military in history has ever be harmed by disease. Now we (possibly) have depleted strategic munitions with essentially no strategic gain? This is a teenager's view of how to run/use the military. No understanding of history. No understanding of history (medical reediness or basic military tactics of the danger choke points), no understanding of the present (understanding Iran's likely responses and resolve or how vulnerable our bases and allies in the region were and are) and no understanding of the future (depleting strategic stockpiles of munitions without understanding what 'strategic stockpiles' means). We are idiots for even remotely tolerating such utter incompetence.
It's a good job their allies will defend them then if their ammo is low - this isn't sarcasm, it's the point of NATO, but hey if Trump still wants to pull out of that alliance...
Same way Russia ran out of missiles 3 years ago?
The missles Russia is launching are made within the last few months. What stockpile they do have is being built up for (another) winter campaign
To no farking effect - Iran is still as bellicose as ever.
There are several conclulsions you can draw from all this:
1. The US has been strategically and militarily defeated by Iran and this has been clear since at least April to anyone who was paying attention and has achieved none of its objectives. More [1];
2. Continued use of so-called "stand off" weapons confirms that the US has been unable to achieve air supremacy over Iran and use gravity bombs. The article mentions this but doesn't really explain the implications; Reaper drones have been lost in large numbers. Air sorties are limited to also firing stand off weapons, mostly. One reason for this is an Iranian developed weapons system of loitering missiles that the US has designated as 358 and 359 missiles [2];
3. The US is spending an unprecedented amount of money on a war it has already lost that nobody wants. In some ways this mirrors the Nixon-Kissinger plan to bomb Cambodia until morale improves. Nobody wants to admit defeat. But wars are good for business. Some people are getting incredibly wealthy off all this. Munitions are the ultimate product. You use them once and then have to buy them again, often at $1M+ apiece;
4. This is the real story of American oil dependence over rewnewables. Nobody goes to war over a solar panel [3];
5. The article also mentions the drastically low inventory levels of missile interceptors (eg PAC-2, PAC-3, THAAD). This is in part why several US bases in the Gulf have been effectively destroyed and abandoned because the military cannot defend them. Iran is using very cheap weapon systems, particularly the Shahed drone, and can produce them in much higher numbers. Shooting down a $20k drone with a $1-4M missile does not scale;
6. This is going to rewrite Gulf politics as the promise of the American security-for-oil guarantee has shown to be a paper tiger. This is going to force a change for Gulf countries;
7. For all the complaining about the JCPOA, this administration has for absolutely no reason kicked the hornet's nest and the price of ending this war is going to be far, far higher. That will include (IMHO) an end to economic sanctions, unfreezing of Iranian assets, weakening of the petrodollar, compensation for Iran in the hundreds of billions and a concession that Iran can and will charge tolls for transit of the Strait of Hormuz in concert with Oman. Well done, everybody, the system works.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRAtD7iAgwY
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wMoKLuL8Jc
[3]: https://www.theenergymix.com/no-one-goes-to-war-over-a-solar...
What a fucking joke.
there is a lot of money to be made, building more of them :(
The article is about the Army (not the Navy or Air Force for example)
This is already the lifeline Europe is using to save its auto industry from the electric... the US is next. Just need to open up competitive bidding for the production of these components. Licensing patriot production to Ukraine will be a good start... S. Korea next
yeah, let's start all to produce more weapons. What could possible go wrong. What about this? The USA just go home, nobody is going to invade them.
Someone that wants peace shouldn't be happy that, let's say, China is well stocked while the US isn't when we consider China's position on Taiwan and the South China Sea. Russia having multiple production lines for artillery and drones while Europe has sent everything they had to Ukraine isn't good for the balance. And so on.
I'm not saying that you should support whatever is happening with Iran, but understand that if a country thinks no one can punish them if they start shit, then they may do it, and then you end up with war, not peace... the opposite of what you expect.
I don't like it, but "si vis pacem, para bellum": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Si_vis_pacem%2C_para_bellum
It's almost like the current decision makers are incompetent.
Trump is like Al Capone - just dumber.
There is not really any strategy here in place that makes sense from an US point of view. There is a strategy in place that may make sense for Netanyahu (e. g. remain in power) but this is not a US strategic point of view. Trump seems to be the most easily influenced roleplaying as "president". People need to follow the money trail here - that would explain the whole situation right now best.
The strategy was to get Epstein off of everyone’s mind. And if it cost over $40billion and counting then it was deemed worth it, because the president comes first, that how’s our president thinks, me first, and our politicians, party first, our lobby second and the oligarchs third.
Americans living in their bubble might be unable to see from a perspective, but from outside is quite apparent that American-Israeli conflict against Iran will long outlive both Trump and Netanjahu. Hopefully that was the last dumb thing and decision they made.
> American-Israeli conflict against Iran
Is it even a correct framing for the conflict ? Iran seems to have big issues with UAE and Saudi Arabia and repeatedly fired at them and got fired by them.
All the expensive planes are falling out of the sky too. It seems like some weird plan to unwind the US ever since Obama left office.
There’s no growth or hope. It’s all bad news, war, and rumors of war - and all reads like a bad WWE script.
Just seems like a coordinated effort to destroy from within since about ~2016 or at least act out this play of America in Decline
Whatever, would be way better if they celebrate collaboration and forward thinking again.
Mainly because it’s just so boring under Trump - this should have been a 4 year show
Its all drones and one F-15, its not like dozens of F-22s or F-35 are being shot out of the sky
Which expensive planes are falling out of the sky?
https://www.legion.org/information-center/news/security/2026...
Typical CNBC article. Lying as usual.
Only PrSM and ATACMS reserves are low.
This is good for Anduril. The future of war is cheap, massed, intelligent drones. Its strategically fortunate for us to burn through all of this expensive, obsolete crap.
I like how China and Russia are mentioned as adversaries that the US might be less likely to deter with their dwindling supply of long-range munition, but the country that so helpfully "received" (being bombed) all that supply and is the reason for the stockpile being minimal right now, isn't mentioned as an adversary that could take advantage of this.
Think Ukraine is the reason the US is low on missiles? Do the numbers actually support that? The numbers don’t seem to support that. From a very cursory search, offensive missiles seem to be around 2:1 Iran. And that’s just raw numbers; someone other than me who might do a little moral editorializing would point out the use in Ukraine was to fight off an illegal invasion while the most effective strike in Iran killed a hundred schoolgirls.
> Think Ukraine is the reason the US is low on missiles?
I wasn't intended to imply Ukraine is an adversary, AFAIK to the US, they aren't.
Edit: I realize my original comment was a bit ambiguous, I'm talking about Iran, I've now put "received" into quotes.
Ukraine will take advantage of low PrSM stock ... how?
The US only used long range precision missiles for the first 3 days of the war. Since then, its been almost all JDAMs. The interceptors got used a lot more but even with those we only went through about 5% of the stockpile. This is CNBC. If you trust them on topics like this, well...that's on you. Please remember that they don't have a single person on staff with any military experience or expertise.
PS Their source was probably the IRCG...
Sure. I bet the Military Times also used the IRCG as a source. https://www.militarytimes.com/industry/techwatch/2026/08/04/...
Probably Reuters too https://www.reuters.com/world/us-has-used-virtually-all-its-...
The CNBC article's source is "as reported by Reuters", and the Military Times article is just a reprint of the Reuters Article, if you look, immediately under the headline it states "By Reuters".
So there is only one news outlet reporting on it, Reuters, and the rest are just reporting on the reporting.
Hey, you did more validation than the guy I was responding to! Kudos.
Thanks, but I got downvoted, anyway. Oh well, the karma burn was worth it!
Instead you should trust this unsourced HackerNews comment!
Where is your 5% used quote from?
All the estimates for interceptors like patriots I've seen are north of 50% used so 5% certainly seems like an outlier
> Please remember that they don't have a single person on staff with any military experience or expertise.
Do you care to clarify this? This can't possibly be accurate across their entire staff.
Their source is Reuters and is literally the sub-headline. You did not read this article. Flagged.
" source was probably the IRCG"
Curious. What is your source on the 5%? Why is random chud on the internet a 'better' source.
> but even with those we only went through about 5% of the stockpile.
Source? In terms of VLS-packed high end interceptors, I'd imagine they're much deeper into the magazine than that. Quad-packed point defense missiles might be lower, but those aren't useful against theater ballistic missiles like Iran has been deploying.
> Their source was probably the IRCG...
That doesn't make much sense as disinformation. Iran stands to gain very little by lying like that, and judging by the exodus of US generals and admirals I'd wager to say that this was an internal point of disagreement in the US armed forces. A lot of assets earmarked for the Pacific theater have been expended with no quick replacements incoming.