US to deploy additional troops to the Middle East, officials say | Hacker News Reader

US to deploy additional troops to the Middle East, officials say

reuters.com

55 pointshandfuloflight33 comments

Open articleView on HN

But healthcare is far too big of an ask. Btw, they've been planning on this.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260304105404/https://www.indee...

Sorry, but the hospital ship is in Greenland, providing free health care to people who already have public healthcare.

https://apnews.com/article/greenland-trump-denmark-us-b2624b...

actually it is in Oregon. ] https://gcaptain.com/trumps-greenland-hospital-ship-arrives-...

Marine Traffic: https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ships/shipid:45... (IMO: 7390454)

Holy shit… what a poignant and succinct modern reminder of the tragedy of war.

A $15.66/hour, part-time, on-call job that requires extreme emotional composure? You've gotta be kidding me.

That's going to be good money once the crash happens.

A war with no objective, no timeline, not authorized by congress, inflicting massive damage to the national and world economy, and the executive going cap in hand begging for more borrowed money to run it.

It will go down in history as one of the most monumental avoidable disasters of all time.

It's so wild to me that the world invests in US treasuries to fund a country that spends like a drunken sailor on wars and stock buybacks, with no plan to ever pay down the debt, nor to invest in its domestic future via infrastructure or state capacity. "You need another $200B for a conflict with no purpose or need? Sure, here you go."

What, you mean this entire administration? Well, you’re right.

Trump's always admired Putin, and now just like Putin, he's also entered his own quagmire... Retreating isn't even a viable option, as far as I understand, an angry Iranian regime will keep disrupting the region, so now Trump's only option is to escalate.

Too bad the whole world has to sit and watch itself get fucked...

Retreating is a viable option for the US. The world will return to the status quo in a week or three, and he will look every bit the fool that he is.

Nobody wants to get involved when Iran is fighting back against US aggression. The world would get a lot more interested in doing so if it were just conducting unprovoked, unilateral piracy in the straight.

Withdrawal is a viable option for everyone but the man who started it.

Congress can end this any time by not paying for this shit.

I don't know, in my scenario, Iran will keep attacking the Middle Eastern countries, angering them enough to yell at Trump to fix the shit he's started. But maybe China could get them to stop...

But this is amateur geopolitics commentary (A great quote about Internet commentariat when the Russian invasion started was "Last week I was an epidemiologist, this week I'm a geopolitical expert!")

They won't. Their demands before restoration of the status quo are just internal messaging and posturing.

If Russia withdrew all its troops tomorrow, Ukraine wouldn't keep bombing Moscow.

Foreign Affairs suggests Iran would rather fight a protacted war with the US than repeated wars with Israel. And in either case, they would continue to attack US regional interests.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/how-americas-wa...

It’s really wild how thin his skin is and how the gop just allows every bit of it.

Congress lack of action kind of makes it authorized.

It's wild that people were forecasting this last night because troops were posting photos of lobster dinners.

It is a bit similar to Vietnam in that it is a step-wise increase of committed troops. Whoever is really planning this war, is now pushing for more and more "boots on the ground". It is almost as if Trump does not even have any other choice now. Reminds people of Putin - Putin is also stuck in the war against Ukraine.

Putin could have frozen the frontline a month or so in and declared victory. That probably would have been a smarter move there.

I'm not so sure in Iran.

What I don't understand is that the talk on this concerns marines going through the Strait of Hormuz to then annex the Iranian terminals on Kharg Island. Now, I know marines are kind of into doing water things, but the USA owns the GCC countries, and I think Iraq was conquered a little while ago. So why can't a different route be taken? Can't they just drive across the desert from the country known as Israel? Or from the Red Sea?

They're probably going to do an aerial insertion via helicopter (Ospreys technically), which doesn't require transiting Hormuz. These big amphibious assault ships are built for both maritime and aerial insertions.

They've very recently also been practicing static line drops at 800 feet.

Well, I think going to some small island is easier than organising land-based movement. If you look at the area in the last 25 years or so, ambushing a truck carrying cargo is much easier compared to, say, intercepting para-troopers if prior air raids leveled the ground. But I think this "invading Kharg" is a red herring; it seems primarily to try to persuade the US population that boots on the ground must happen. Or it is a probe for minimal involvement, but then the question is ... why would they only want to occupy a small island? Even assuming Iran would not do anything, what does that actually achieve? The USA withdrew from Afghanistan too, so everyone now knows one can try to wait it out. Meanwhile the energy prices will go up in many countries. It is not clear to me why I should have to pay more money due to Trump and his superrich buddies.

Well, marines are usually delivered to a target area by ship. You can get the marines to the coast of the Persian Gulf by air or by car or whatever, but how do you get them to Kharg Island? It has to be either air or ship. And if it's going to be ship, you have to get the landing ship there. If it's not already in the Gulf, then it has to come through Hormuz.

So he's going deploy ground troops to occupy Kharg island so he can stop the flow of oil through there. At the same time he's lifting sanctions on 140M barrels of Iranian oil on tankers. So uhhhh which is it? Do we want Iran to sell oil or not? The only constancy seems to be a desire to dig deeper into the hole.

If only they had given him a Nobel Peace Prize .....

America already proved 20 years back chasing WMDs that they dont need a Donald Trump to pull mindless shit. Its like a Leeroy Jenkins society.

That was never mindless if you look at it from the perspective of Cheney's friends at Halliburton. We'd be inclined to think the opposite really if US military absorbs all the risks and costs and they absorb the profits.

It is hard to predict the future, but to me it looks as if the USA already lost that war. Now, we can say "define losing", but in my opinion the strategy used by the USA is not clear here. Yes, they can shift constantly and willy-nilly define new goals, but everyone ends up being confused. In Iraq it was the lie that it is about weapons of mass destruction. They don't even seem to try for anything here now. The strategy used by Israel is clear - Netanyahu as ultra-right wing politician has the strategy of escalation. But this does not explain why the USA adopts this strategy 1:1.

The interesting thing is that Trump is now stuck in the war, just like Putin is in Ukraine. They start forever wars and have no real way out of it, at the least not a simple one. That means the next "logical" step is that there will be US ground troops; the private media is already starting to prepare the population aka "we must occupy Kharg" (or any other area). This is somewhat similar to Lyndon B. Johnson and Vietnam. Step-wise expansion of the agenda. So WHO is really doing the policy in the USA? Clearly it is not Trump - he constantly changes his opinion.

> The interesting thing is that Trump is now stuck in the war, just like Putin is in Ukraine.

Trump still has a small bit of time to take an off-ramp. US casualties have been in the single digits; there's not much national pride lost in walking away.

There may be lots of Trump's pride lost in pulling back, though, so yeah, he may be stuck in this war. The US is still better off than Russia, though, because we can get rid of Trump easier than they can get rid of Putin.

> So WHO is really doing the policy in the USA?

Events have their own momentum. Once you start the snowball rolling downhill, it's really hard to stop. Trump may not want to go to troops on the ground, but he's going to have to do that, or stop and pull back and eat his pride with Iran still unconquered (and angry). Since he will do almost anything rather than lose pride, he's trapped by the need to make this a win. In the same way, Iran is also trapped in the need to make this a win. (Not "need to win" - both sides need to make it appear to their people as a win, which is not quite the same thing.)

> US casualties have been in the single digits; there's not much national pride lost in walking away.

Fatalities are in double digits (13) though 6 are from a plane crash with no one claiming the Iranians caused it. Casualties are in the triple-digits, since it includes injured, not just killed.

But yes, the numbers are still small enough we can pull out without that influencing the decision (from a public opinion perspective) substantially.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com