Hacker News Reader

Comment by ycdxvjp | Hacker News Reader

The only take that made any sense to me about what's going on there - https://michael-hudson.com/2023/11/israel-as-a-landed-aircra...

View on HN

Name a conflict or intervention by the US in that region that has made use of US assets based in Israel. Hint: there aren't any. We instead use assets in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, etc. Using anything based in Israel would cause more problems than would be solved.

Israel isn't really an asset to the US, it is more of a liability that we tolerate.

Operating out of Israel would be an international relations nightmare for both the US and Israel. We’d not do it if we had any other options (and we’ve always had several, for relevant values of “always”)

We give them aid to prevent another attempt at conquest by neighbors. The other prong of that fork is that we also pay Egypt (check out the list of top US aid recipients over the last few decades) to keep them out of any war-coalition of Israel’s neighbors, significantly reducing any such move’s likelihood of success.

Why we do that, I’m not sure. I’ve not dug enough into the situation to have a solid answer. Anyone can think of some, but I’m not sure what the actual reasons are. I don’t think it’s anything like “to buy a base in the Levant” though.

Bullshit. Isreal has the urban warfare training school where US soldiers, especially spec ops, train in a 1-1 replica of a city. It’s literally one of the most important military training installations in the entire world and you bet your ass that American troops training there are “US assets based in isreal”

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2018-03-14/ty-article-ma...

The US has an early warning radar in the Negev not too far from Gaza aimed at Iran.

That may have made sense once, but we have landed carriers all throughout the ME since before the Gulf Wars. Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman. KSA, Kuwait, Iraq and Diego Garcia as needed. We're not going to ever use an Israeli base to attack Iran so unsure what purpose it serves tactically or strategically. Turkey/KSA are happy to support our projects in Syria.

These facilities are huge, each capable of supporting squadrons of US aircraft.

https://www.americansecurityproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2...

Not even complete. Cairo West isn't on there. https://www.google.com/maps/@30.116667,30.916667,5961m/data=...

See Taiwan as another “stationary aircraft carrier”

this is great. thanks for sharing

Reply on news.ycombinator.com