Comment by woooooo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by woooooo | Hacker News Reader

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Don't know why you're getting downvoted for a thoughtful comment.

I think you're overindexing on a prepared sneak attack with maximum ops velocity from Israel. They threw the best punch they had and it.. disrupted Iran. Didn't knock them out.

Longer term, Israel has 260 fighter-bombers and Iran is huge. Allied analysts after WW2 generally concluded that strategic bombing didn't really move the needle on German war production, and that was with 10s of thousands of bombers, although admittedly a lot less precision. Any long, flat building in Iran's gigantic, mountainous country could be building missiles. And new launcher locations won't be plotted out ahead of time for a high-tempo 72 hour operation, they'll be coming up continuously over the long haul. They don't need to be hypersonic once interceptors are exhausted.

How's Israel going to sustain that long term, especially if they take any amount of ongoing civilian losses at all? It stops being an abstract conversation about collateral damage to civilians pretty quickly once it's happening to them. 10/1 ratio is nowhere near good enough for the polity there.

A more relevant historical parallel was the Iran-Iraq war. Iraq, in the first 5 years of the war, had largely degraded Iranian air defenses and was able to carry out many thousands of airstrikes, at some points even using strategic bombers, many of them with precision weapons. That was enough to degrade Iranian industry, but not enough to destroy it, and by the late 80s Iran still won the war of attrition, and managed to develop their weapons industry.

By the end of the war Iran was using domestic surveillance drones to direct artillery, and was even experimenting with the first attack drones by fitting RPGs on their larger surveillance UAVs, had reverse engineered and started domestically producing TOW missiles, had started producing the Shahab-1 ballistic missile (a Scud clone), Silkworm-clone radar-guided antiship cruise missiles, etc..., all the while their air force was down to less than 100 hundred aircraft in various degrees of disrepair and with very few advanced munitions remaining.

The war ultimately ended in a stalemate, even after the US intervened in Praying Mantis.

> more relevant historical parallel was the Iran-Iraq war

This is a terrible analogy. Iran and Iraq share a land border. That makes armies relevant in a way they are not to Israel-Iran.

The attacks on Iranian industry had zero land attack component. Iran is a very large country and Iraq was not able to hold much Iranian territory, the distances involved mean that Iraq was just like Israel reliant on airpower for these strikes.

> How's Israel going to sustain that long term, especially if they take any amount of ongoing civilian losses at all?

Long term, no clue. The best strategy would be a system of regional alliances, but they've screwed that pooch with Gaza. Second best is setting red lines for Iranian missile production and stockpiles and intervening when those thresholds are breached.

Being extremely hasty with setting red lines and enforcing them is what got Israel into this situation. The "mow the lawn" strategy means perpetual conflict and they have to win every single time.

What right does Israel have to govern Iran's self defense capabilities? Iran's been attacked unprovoked by USA/Israel several times in the last 6-7 years, they're not the ones starting shooting wars.

Iran's supply chain is already fully domestic thanks to sanctions. Repeated strikes on that supply chain will only serve to harden it.

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