Or perhaps they will learn they are outmatched, lack the resources and technological capabilities to compete, and deterrence will have been established.
What most countries don't have is, for lack of a better term, the resolve Iran has shown. Venezuela could have built drones and resisted just the same, but it's internally divided enough that it was possible to strike a deal with an inside faction and have a coup from within.
They also have a lot of leverage points in their geography, in the fact that the US is at a historical low point in its military capabilities.
US and Israel strategy seems to be to completely destruct Iran's economy, but the problem is that this is a game where they can also shoot back.
It's meant to avoid conflict altogether, say with China and Taiwan.
That doesn't work when your opponents pray for death and see martyrdom as victory.
This is genuinely how Shia extremists think. They have nothing to lose and will sacrifice everything and everyone for their cause. They don't care about Iran or Iranians or prosperity of the nation.
And frankly that's not how it looks to me.
In such a situation, lots of people would presumably leave the US to form a diaspora. Some of those of course, would have been MAGA people directly culpable in the former illegal power grab by trump.
The Sha was not a loved wise leader, he was also a brutal dictator who directed a Comprador elite at the expense of the majority of the persian people. Some of the Iranian exilees just want to go back to act as colonial administrator for the western world like they did before the revolution.
Even if you consider the Islamic Republic evil, you need to be careful before enthusiastically buying a narrative from one side, because a lot of times politics is just the eternal fight of evil against evil.
Shia is actually way more moderate and compatible with western values. Most terror attacks in the west actually are linked to wahabbism (a more radical sunni variant) than to Shia Islam.
does hearing it back like that make it seem absurd to you as well?
My argument is that Western strategic thought (with games being a codification thereof, rather than the source of) generally considers countries as mostly atomic actors that can be defeated - the history of European warfare being filled with "gentlemanly" surrenders followed up by peace treaties, with guerrilla warfare being a very rare exception.
On the other side, the reality in the East is that a state's collapse doesn't end the conflict, but just prolongs it. The army doesn't surrender, it goes home with its weapons and reconstitutes as insurgents. I can't actually think of a single proper surrender of an Eastern country ever, except for Japan in 1945.
It is actually several physical board games, the oldest of which is older than (and unrelated to) the computer game [0], as well as being a series of computer games that are basically digital board games.
[0] Well, except for the computer game based on it and its expansion, which, because of the other computer game, had the long-winded title "Avalon Hill's Advanced Civilization".
If you are atheist is becomes rational to surrender to the people that are invading your house and killing your friends at random?
Absolutely.
If there are invaders who are killing everybody around me and telling me that they'll stop and generally let me be if I surrender and agree to live in a democracy, I expect that I'll be very inclined to accept. Maybe afterwards, if I see it's not working out, I may still consider guerrilla resistance down the line, but I don't see the benefit of fighting and most likely dying just for the sake of defiance, and to then allow any survivors a chance to continue in their resistance for another decade or so, until eventually they might be able to start rebuilding a nation from the rabble.
In what world is surrender, keeping our lives and infrastructure, not a more rational approach?
EDIT: To be clear, while I occasionally have pacifistic thoughts on pretty spring days, I'm not arguing for pacifism here - fighting is absolutely rational when you have a clear path to victory, but if you don't, then I think it's just an absolute waste of human lives.
FDR made a big mistake announcing that he was going for unconditional surrender. This resulted in Germany fighting to the bitter end. Hitler dragged it on to the last few hours - he knew what was going to happen to him when the war ended.
But allies had to achieve clear military victory, because of WWI aftermath. Germany did not believed it lost, it believed it was betrayed and wanted do-over. No surrender thing was to prevent next round with WWIII as Germans feel like betrayed again.
They were correct.
> Germany did not believed it lost, it believed it was betrayed
The citizens were not that stupid. They knew by 1944 that they were going to lose. All they had to do was look up, and see the ever-growing endless streams of B-17s overhead. They knew what the Red Army was going to do to them. They knew payback was coming from the Allies.
Why does Hamas hold hostages in tunnels under their own civilian populations? Not because they think Israel will hesitate to bomb there, they know they won't.
It's because the death of their own population is a goal in itself.
For what definition of rational? Do you believe their killing of Americans and Israelis has or will benefit Iranians?
I mean, that is not what is happening or was happening tho. No one is saying they want to build democracy in Iran ... and Iranians would be dumb if they believed such claim. Because of Irans history itself, but also because if Israel history/ideology and because of how USA behaved last year.
And in addition, the only one who can surrender is the Iranian regime itself (not Iranians in general) and that regime would gain nothing in such deal (if such deal was offered).
Lots of smugness about the supposed irrationality of the adversaries considering that backdrop.
But the US has not acted rationally. It hasn't since January 2021.
Free democratic world loses, dictators around the globe win. Sad days for mankind.
It is not verified and probably a cover story for why he flew to Moscow to personally thank Putin.
Maybe one of these days we'll see a B-52 take off with JDAMs and not JASSMs but probably not, kind of scary to try and drop gravity bombs on a country that your stealth fighters can't fly over.
https://theaviationist.com/2026/03/23/b-52s-launching-from-r...
How many cheap-ass drones could you buy for the cost of one F35. 100k? A million?
If Iran launched 10000 Shaheds towards Isreal, you can be sure quite a few would get by.
Maybe Ukrainian drone interceptors can be made cheap enough to be good enough against massed Shaheds.
We are still early in the new paradigm, there will be significant developments.
The intercept cost is now not only the cost of the interceptor, but also the cost of the flying hours of the launching platform, and the risk of losing the launching platform.
If you equip even some of your Shaheds with AA missiles (cheap manpads with autonomous IR target acquisition and guidance), like is already happening in Ukraine, the feasibility of APKWS becomes problematic. The technology is developing fast these days.
But ground-based platforms work just fine and cheap enough to scale up the deployment to cover the big area.
The big advantage of APKWS over interceptor drones is the rocket engine, they are much faster and can catch Shaheds within much bigger radius or within much smaller timeframe than interceptor drones.
Second, it is rather short range, and that range is helped significantly by the speed and altitude of the launching platform. Launching from the ground upwards would significantly reduce its range, which is anyway just a few km.
Due to the short range, you will need a densely distributed significant numbers of them, and still be in danger of saturation attack (the attacker can saturate one route, you have to be ready for all possible routes). Having a carrier platform allows the missiles to be quickly brought where they are needed, so overall you need much less of them (still too much, as having enough carriers in air imposes limits as well).
You can have longer-range ground missiles, but then the costs rise. Also, I am not sure how feasible/robust is to laser designate air targets from the ground. I suspect it does not work over longer distances, i.e. you need a more sophisticated and costly guidance system/sensor suite on the missile.
The beauty of an anti-drone drone is that you have a much more robust human-assisted guidance, for cheap (camera and communication link). With advances to AI, even that human and communication link are becoming obsolete...
With rocket propelled missile you have much faster closing speed, and quite limited energy budget - essentially you have to make a correct decision fast and precisely, otherwise the missile is wasted. With a drone, everything is slower and easier to correct.
On the other hand the latest development with drone interceptors is rocket booster to quickly bring in within Shahed. So I guess there would be a convergence between APKWS and interceptor drones.
IR guided fire and forget is fine, but undoubtedly quite a bit costlier than the basic laser-guided one. If you want to use it against jet engined Shaheds while launching from the ground, you definitely need larger rocket motor, i.e. costlier interceptors. But that might be fine, the jet engined Shaheds are not as cheap as the basic ones anyway.
Actually, I am surprised they still use the Shahed platform for the jet engined drones. A Reaper-like platform with high aspect ratio wings would be much more aerodynamically efficient, allowing longer range/loiter time/larger payload. It is definitely more expensive airframe, but that jet engine might be the main cost factor anyway.
Re: IR seeker against plain Shaheds: does the basic weedwhacker Shahed have enough IR signature? (More precisely: does it have it if you did some basic precautions - cover the engine, some mixing of the ambient air with the exhaust.) The power level of that engine (= the whole source of IR energy) is quite low...
Shahed has sufficiently bright IR that even a basic seeker works. To keep the cost low no efforts were applied to minimize the signature.
It is fascinating how well designed Shahed was for its intended purpose of being the cheapest mass-produced platform that would saturate any advanced air defenses while hard to track launch site. However, with appearance of cheap mass-produced counter-measures it may no longer be optimal.
Why would the opening salvo be ICBMs?
Of course, China wants to be able to fight those F35s in the air - to mitigate the damage they can do to them (while the F35s still have airfield/carriers to land on) - also in order to make it easier to sink those carriers.
Still, you can bet that all US nearby airfields would be peppered very early in the conflict.
China also is not stupid, and no matter how much they posture, they won't invade Taiwan.
No one is invading China. Coupled or de-coupled is a completely irrelevant consideration. People think MAGA are crazy, but no one is suicidal. A war with China would be over in a matter of hours. And anyone who did not manage to get to Africa or extreme South America before the outbreak of hostilities would have a great chance of dying. The only question is will death be quick in a blast, or slow as you try to walk out of the US.
IADs not integrated by marginal operators =/= stealth radar didn't work aka, physics of stealth detection is basic, and parsimonious likelihood is US gave up strategic intangibles for VZ and IR side shows. Even if IADs wasn't integrated it would still be worthwhile for PRC to send out stealth radars knowing they'd get glassed because it's rounding error investment to get near F35s without luneburg. At the end of the day, these radars are networked/uplink to beidou3 for a reason, their primary function for PRC is to serve as cheap telemetry gathering nodes that gather strategic US ephemera like stealth profiles, ew, order of battle and beamed it back to CETC.