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Comment by themgt | Hacker News Reader

The real story is that the Patriot and other interceptor stockpiles Zelensky's asking for are now critically low, and tens of thousands of soft targets are hard to defend against cheap drones. This war is on course to set off a truly unprecedented global energy crisis within days, and the USA/allies don't currently appear to have any plan to fix it.

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> on course to set off a truly unprecedented global energy crisis within days

That's not exactly how oil supply works. There's plenty of stockpiles which take months to burn through and only some places depend on Iranian oil. China is their biggest buyer and it's around 13.4% of China's oil imports.

it's not just about iranian oil. The strait is blockaded. Plus refineries in Kuwait, KSA and Bahrain were targeted. And LNG facilities in Qatar - which stopped and restarting will take ~1 month at least. Leading to this

https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/eu-natural-gas

Gas in EU is cca 100% more expensive than a week ago.

EDIT: oh and kerosene 70% up, diesel 35% percent up

To add to your comment, ~20%-25% of global oil production passes through the AG (Iran is only ~4% of current global production) @ ~21mbpd. The longer that oil can’t get out (Saudi’s have a 5mbpd pipeline to red sea, but only 2mbpd loading capacity), the quicker it will erase the current oil glut and eat into inventories. Most of the discounted oil China has been buying from Iran/Russia has actually been going into inventory. The strait itself is a narrow channel, and the main risk is mines and underwater drones. Sinking a few tankers in the strait would cause a lot of headaches.

That's a fair point.

>the USA/allies don't currently appear to have any plan to fix it

Their plan is to bomb Iran into the stone age so it can't produce any more drones or missile launchers. It's questionable whether they can succeed though.

In any relevant dimension Iran is about 4X or 5X Iraq. Even Dubya knew you couldn't win in Iraq from the air.

it is not questionable - they will no succeed. if this is how you "succeed" we would have already "succeeded" long time ago

Strategic bombing has never achieved it's objectives.

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