How many million graduate students do you need to give the US the military hegemony and political influence over allies and adversaries that the F-35 program provides ?
Looked at from a policy maker's viewpoint, things look very different.
Looked at from a policy maker's viewpoint, things look very different.
Everything is changing. Including our influence.
But I am sure of who I wouldn't put in charge of critical military operations.
You mean like when the Zionists openly stopped food from getting into Gaza, while the western governments were backing the Zuonists? Those people concerned with civilian casualties?
An enemy unconcerned with civilian casualties, give me a break.
We just failed to do all of those things quite visibly.
Iran made a choice not to escalate to destroying desalination capabilities and that's why a lot of Saudis and Emiratis are still alive. It's not because we protected them.
US Naval doctrine has been a paper tiger ever since that Millenium Challenge exercise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_of_evil#2002_State_of_the...
The sort of gear that could count atoms from Fukushima drifting across the oceans to end up in HVAC filters in middle North America.
1. Didn't read them and know that they expire in 10 years.
2. Think that 10 years is a long enough time in the future where whatever happens then doesn't matter to their current goals.
3. Would like to see a nuclear-capable Iran.
For what it's worth, January 2026 already passed 5 months ago.
> Would like to see a nuclear-capable Iran.
Postponing their nuclear programme with at least 10 years is absolutely worth doing. Because realistically you cannot, I repeat, cannot force them to stop it. If the regime wants to continue, it will and their facilities deep under the mountains are impenetrable.
> Or alternatively, in 2026 Iran would have been hooked on closer economic cooperation and trade, (relative) reformers would be in power, and the deal would have been renewed.
That's called imperialism. I believe it's no longer fashionable.
What do you mean culture and value system? You think isolation and nuclear weapons are parts of the Iranian culture????
And yes, Iran had multiple bouts of reformer presidents. Reformer within the limits of what the Supreme Leader would allow of course, but there is still a massive gulf of difference between them and the hardliners. A few years of visible economic development under reformers would have nudged things in the reconciliation direction.
Again, yanking the deal, even before the current strikes during negotiations, ensures that Iran will never fully trust the US. So realistically, what other choices do they have other than procure nuclear weapons for protection?
The topic is Iran. A theocracy with an unelected supreme leader with final say on political decisions and candidates for all elections in the otherwise relatively democratic system. Reformer in their context (hence the relative qualifier I used) is people like Ahmadinejad who are for rapprochement and trade with the world, but without too many concessions. We're not talking about socially progressive or "western" or anything of the like. They are infinitely better than the hardliners aligned with the IRGC who are against anything other than autarky and building more strategic security via stuff like nukes. The reformers got their way with the JCPOA, and were proven wrong by the orange moron destroying that. Since then the hardliners have been in power and they are not going anywhere now.
> people like Ahmadinejad
Oh, this guy:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad_and_Israel
- https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-23538717
Let's look at some of his policies:
- Holocaust denial
- Calling for the destruction of the state of Israel
- Provided funding, training and arms to Hezbollah and Hamas
- Condemned by the UK, Germany, Austria, and even the UN
- Condemned the Palestinian Authority for holding peace talks with Israel
- A nice quote of his: "In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country."
Thank you for explaining to all those who won't listen to me because I'm Israel and therefore biased, what a "reformed" Iran would look like. Now they can understand just how hateful the current "unreformed" Iran looks like.
Is Iran, ran by hateful men, but open to trade, integration, reform, inspections and having a lot to lose perfect? Of course it fucking isn't. But realistically it's the best we could have had.
Instead we have Iran ruled by even more hateful men. Men that saw their families blown up in front of them, and have nothing to lose. The economy is already shit, and they don't care about regular people, and as we saw in the recent protests, power structures are intact and they do not hesitate using them to enforce their rule. Men who were demonstrated multiple times that American promises don't mean anything. Those men also have a pretty clear path on how they'd be left alone - Kim's nuclear weapons / threat of destroying Seoul.
How is that any better? It isn't. It's drastically worse for everyone, from the common Iranian suffering under the regime to every single one of us that will have to live under the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons and worldwide economic disruption via Hormuz and direct sabotage.
> open to trade, integration, reform, inspections
The Iranians are as interested in reforming their society into American ideals, as Americans are interested in reforming American society into Iranian ideals.
Did you mean Ahmadinejad or Rouhani? The negotiations technically started under Ahmadinejad but Rouhani would be more reasonably considered a reformer, and is probably more relevant in the context of the JCPOA's lifecycle
How is that worse than the current situation? Iran is closer to nuclear capability now than in your counterfactual, yet those who disagree with you are the ones who want a nuclear-capable Iran?
The Just Cash Pallets Over Americans agreement, where Iran was rewarded for all the wrong things and the public kept in the dark.
Military power projection is the reason the US was able to destroy a significant portion of Iranian leadership, nuclear infrastructure, and weapons infrastructure with no retaliation from Iran back in the US nor any pushback from any of Irans allies.
Military hegemony has nothing to do with being a perfect police force that can stop anything from happening anywhere.
>but we still couldn't have stopped them with our vaunted carrier-based power projection, or with our exhausted ABM capabilities.
Who is “we”? Your account started posting nothing but anti-US stances and pro-China/Iran stances since this conflict began.
Military hegemony in the gulf region would mean being able to force Iran to stop attacking gulf targets, rather than negotiating a ceasefire because both sides are hurting. What we have is a multipolar situation, it's not arguable, it's right on the scoreboard.
A hegemon would be able to unilaterally open the straits.
Best for everyone to recognize it and act accordingly. It's got nothing to do with cheerleading, that stuff is for rubes.
First, Iran doesn't have allies, it has friends of convenience (Russia like the military cooperation but don't like the cheap oil competition, China love the cheap oil competition but don't care for the damage, etc).
Second, US bases and US allies (in the actual sense of the word) were attacked by Iran, successfully. US and all its allies were also impacted by the trivial closure of the Hormuz. US allies now will forever know that the US is not a reliable ally and can't protect them; stocks of crucial materiel were wasted on achieving nothing; and high oil prices will cost the US domestic politics dearly. US power projection whacked a few nutjobs from a regime full of them. Oh, and they're a theocracy that believes in martyrdom! And the new supreme leader is a strong proponent of nuclear weapons (unlike his predecessor and father), and saw half his family blown up in front of him.
> Military hegemony has nothing to do with being a perfect police force that can stop anything from happening anywhere.
Being unable to enforce your will on an enemy is not "hegemony". Iran will walk out of this conflict with their nuclear programme back on track, a revenge minded regime, and maybe even a toll on an international strait to fill up their coffers.
US does not have capability to destroy them. It can make lives of civilians hard, as it tried, but foreigners attacking civilians dont make regimes fall.
Iran didn't attack the desalination plants because that would amount to actual warcrimes - and they care about their public perception in the broader community of nations. Unlike, of course, Israel and the USA, who don't mind turning a few schools and hospitals to smithereens.
You might call this "assured non-mutual destruction", and of course it helps that the US is located away from Iran's immediate neighborhood, but destroying the lifelines of the GCC countries would assure an economic collapse globally that the world has never seen before. Imagine something on the lines of oil at $300 a barrel, zero fertilizer, zero semiconductors, zero plastics, the works. And Iran could just as easily turn Israel to glass, with a death by a thousand papercuts (or drones, whatever your flavor). Of course, all of this at a huge cost to itself.
Such as a Russian strategic bomber base thousands of miles from the front?
Ukraine has other long-range strike drones but haven't heard of more than a thousand miles range.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb
https://sofrep.com/news/deepstrike-campaign-drone-attacks-ag...
Spiderweb was a modern-day Doolittle Raid. It didn't scale, at least not immediately, but it still changed the tenor of the war. It put the Russians on notice that they weren't safe. Not that the Russians care, but most countries would. Imagine if someone attacked an Air Force base in the US with similar tactics and a similar outcome...
Sure it was a huge shock to Russia but clearly was a once-off, and required undercover Ukrainian operatives to assemble the smuggled drone parts near the Ukrainian or Kazakh borders, and Russian truckers to unwittingly move containers. All of that operation was revealed and probably can not be repeated; the operatives were evacuated.
> It put the Russians on notice that they weren't safe. Not that the Russians care, but most countries would.
Well there was no GSM jamming near sensitive Russian sites but there is now, and that seems to be annoying Russian civilians intensely, along with internet blocking.
The US war on Iran also demonstrates the problems of drones too: the US is currently able to wage a war 6000 miles away from its shores, because of the use of an awful lot of weapons systems that aren't drones. Iran is unable to dislodge that military, or even meaningfully impact its ability to carry out said war, not 100 miles away from its shores, despite a heavy use of drones to attempt to do so.
The war also demonstrates another big issue... the continued delusion of many civilian and military leaders that strategic bombing alone is sufficient to win a war despite this failing literally every single time it's been attempted in the past 100 years.
That used to be true, but I don't think that the case anymore. UA is now striking logistics ~150KM behind the contact line with drones. Regular artillery can't do that. Guided rockets maybe could, but they'd be more expensive and come in smaller quantities.
> US is currently able to wage a war 6000 miles away from its shores
For a rather restricted use of "wage a war". They did not stop Iranians from doing their thing. Bombing alone does not have a history of winning wars.
Even the fanciest self propelled artillery is getting destroyed by these little cheap buggers.
You make an incorrect conclusion which is unfortunately both quite popular and incorrect among westerners who read two and half editorials about Russo-Ukrainian war in some NYT/WAPO/whatever and think they now understand modern warfare. The reality of the situation is that drones are a very useful tool, but any side achieving actual air supremacy would result their fighters and bombers cruising over frontline and enemy towns on low altitudes taking out any high-value targets at whim. The situation would be similar to boots-on-the-ground phase of The Iraq War, resulting one of the sides to rapidly gaining ground and winning the war. Keep in mind that the cited "40k per-hour" price is quite cheap compared to per-hour operation cost of any kind of big ground force.
In fact, last thing US wants is to be in Russia's shoes unable to meaningfully advance into the territory of by all measures much weaker enemy.
Well, given that the Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed for months despite Iran's military supposedly being decimated, and the President of the United States is now threatening to bomb one of our closest Mideast allies (Oman), a reasonable person might ask where this military hegemony and political influence you're referring to is.
Every single European country that already ordered them had immediately afterwards long hard talks about completely cancelling those orders and most ended up at least loweing massively the ordered amount (I presume due to contractual requirements and some money already sent, nobody expected backstabbing crooks on the other side when they were signed).
At this point its trojan horse and much worse than having nothing - it gives illusion of certain (extremely expensive) capability, but only if you lick specific ass hard and frequently enough, peppered with a billion here and there flowing in the right hands. Even then, the other side may be licking harder and thats it. Its ridiculous, and intensively insulting to every decent human being.
It doesn’t matter what the reason, if you can’t do something you can’t do it.
Because personally, I'd still take Lebron on a basketball team even if he wasn't willing to dunk the ball that one time.
Yes, this is a terrible analogy for the war in Iran. Hugely unpopular, costing Americans vast sums of money daily, headed for possible catastrophe. Very much not a low-stakes "Lebron walks by" situation.
Better analogy with Lebron would be: championship game with a title on the line. He gets possession as time runs down and the team needs him to score or make a play that scores. It's not okay for him to then say he's fully capable of scoring but doesn't want to at just that moment for reasons.
NB: this is not to say the US military couldn't cause untold damage on the region. This is obvious, anybody can look at recent history to see that the US military is more than capable of destroying a country in the region.
Rather, this is an object lesson that war is politics by other means, and here we tried to do war without any politics and it has not gone well for us.
But to be clear, the comment I replied to was one in which you made an abstract point that it doesn't make a difference to someone if you can do something but in practice don't/aren't willing to and I think that this is obviously wrong (just because Lebron didn't dunk doesn't mean he can't or is a bad ball player). You don't like the Lebron analogy, that's fine. Let's use a war analogy: in 2025 Pakistan and India, two nuclear armed countries, exchanged significant fire. Neither was willing to use their nuclear arsenals. Should we now conclude from this that they can't use their nuclear arsenals and are therefore equivalent to being non-nuclear countries? I mean who cares if they have nuclear weapons which can (can't?) kill millions if this one time their political will wasn't there for them to use them in their defense?
> Rather, this is an object lesson that war is politics by other means, and here we tried to do war without any politics and it has not gone well for us.
Be careful not to trip over your rhetoric in an attempt do display profundity. If war is politics by other means, then doing war is always done with politics. This whole statement is word salad nonsense.
The stakes of a given situation matter to the disposition of the participants. Is this not obvious?
I'm really confused as to what your larger point is. Nobody disagrees that the US military can kill untold numbers of people and cause untold damage in Iran and the wider region. Was this the point you wanted to make? Yes, the US military is capable of killing everyone in the region, which would make the Strait "open" again.
> If war is politics by other means, then doing war is always done with politics.
The problem is doing so has not/does not appear to be on a path to achieve the stated political aims of the administration, inasmuch as they have been willing to articulate aims.
Anyway, you're being insulting and not making coherent points. Good evening/morning/afternoon.
(It’s ok, nobody in the administration has read him either. And before you accuse me of partisan hackery, the prior admin was just as incompetent.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/02/science/discovering-that-...
Its like saying russia could/can conquer whole Europe, if only X, Y and Z. That effectively means they can't, as we see playing out right now despite them trying desperately to achieve this very thing.
> last time I recall by taliban sheepherders
The strait is physically open but no insurance company will cover massive oil carriers because they are so easy to hit with small weaponry from the ridges of Iran.
And even if they had to pay a claim, it would cost the population less than the higher gas prices, since increasing supply lowers the market price for all supply, not just the incremental units.
Which even the morons who started this conflict know is suicidal because Iran has literally at least a million loyal fanatics (Basij, the same organisation doing unarmed meat waves against Iraq)!ready to die for the regime, and the terrain is in their favour.
So that's not military hegemony.
We are certainly not naive enough to think that Lockheed Martin does basic research.
All good questions 3 years ago. How many would rely on US weapons or their US relationship today?
And then there is the unimpressive show in the Middle East.
We haven't been able to produce a complete F-35 since Feb 2026 because we lack the necessary rare earths to do create their electronics.
Why? Because we stopped doing that work (and science) in the 90s and now China produces over 90% of rare earths on the planet and said the US can't have any for military purposes (its being negotiated).
There are zero under and post graduate programs that specialize in rare earth extraction and refining outside of China. None. And China has barred their scientists from collaborating with any colleagues from the US on the topic.
Sooooo, you're right, the F-35 program offers a lot, but can it do so "by itself" and does it provide that value in an economically viable way? Much less clear cut of an answer.
There has been two and a half decades of FUD billowing around the entire program, like the world's most expensive fart, so don't expect to know the truth until they fly the thing past Zamami Island in anger. But I personally will be mentally prepared for disappointment, with some bitter despair as digestif.
Hilarious to say this, given the very public and very significant failures of US foreign policy these past couple decades, not least of all the current special military operation.
Grad schools do more than research, they train people for these industries, for the shop floor.
For the privilege of spending enormous sums of treasure flying around dropping bombs on brown people what did we get?
I would have rather seen that spent on giving lunch to every school age child or paying graduate students a wage above poverty level. At least something useful would have been accomplished
Iraq has for the first time ever entered in the high category of HDI.
https://www.undp.org/arab-states/press-releases/iraqs-human-...
The regime is all kinds of bad, but you cannot change govts from without. Stability comes from people changing govts from within. Every time the US has changed a govt to support themselves it has ended badly.
This latest war has not unseated the IRGC, indeed it has entrenched it further. This is not surprising; they are the largest organised structure in the country. There are no other structures of comparable size or influence in the country.
Unfortunately the US military does not just project power. To justify its existence (far beyond the realm of self defence) it actively creates and enjoys conflicts. And increasingly those conflicts are showing the real limitations of military power projection.
By contrast the soft influence projected by technological leadership, USAid etc are much more influential. It's not surprising that support for these alternatives are the first target of a govt susceptible to being influenced. A trillion $ industry will not go quietly into the night.
Yes, of course, the US could deploy troops into Iran. They could topple the IRGC if desired. But it would be very expensive politically. (And I don't mean to the Republicans, but that also) but to the Military Industry. Because the electorate clearly indicated that after Afghanistan the appetite for foreign wars is dwindling. Another debacle in Iran (even more than the debacle it is now) would be disastrous.
I have no love for the Iranian regime. But no military intervention from outside has the ability to improve it. And the Iranian people will not support a US puppet govt - that influence was burned in 1956.
Govts change when people inside rise up to change them. Recent examples in Afghanistan, South Africa, Romania and even Iran (1979) show this over and over again.
Interestingly the Soviet Union fell because the satellite states broke away. Because the people in Poland, Hungary etc rose up. Not because of outside intervention.
This latest war in Iran follows a long tradition of US and UK meddling in the region, all of which is designed to get oil, not create stability. Indeed this latest foray has created instability in the supply of oil, and that is an unforgivable sin to the US public.
I think it’s extremely clear that the major contributor to instability in the Middle East over the past two decades has been the United States.
1953 was somewhat more than two decades ago.
Agreed, but I wouldn't call Israel a regime.
No. One was damaged by ground fire and landed at a US base.
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/f-35a-lands-after-taking-f...
You may be thinking of the F-15s shot down by Kuwaiti "friendly fire".
Yeah I guess the only thing we’ll give away for free these days is $100,000 bombs.
All of tech traces its roots to American academia.
American tech enthralls more of humanity than American military has ever fought.
Cars - Germany (Gottlieb Daimler, but he didn't patent it), Germany (Carl Benz which made the first patent).
Motorbikes - Germany (Gottlieb Daimler)
Train - invented in Germany
Radio transmission - UK (James Clark Maxwell described them theoretically), Germany (Heinrich Hertz created/used them first in experiments)
X-Ray - Germany (Gustav Röntgen)
Telephone - Germany (Philipp Reis, your Bell bought examples and reverse engineered them)
Bookpress with movable letters - Germany (Johannes Gensfleisch a.k.a. Gutenberg)
Lightbulb - Germany (Heinrich Göbel)
Periodic system of elements - Russia (Dimitri Mendelejew) and Germany (Justus Lothar Meyer)
Dynamo / Generator - Germany (Werner von Siemens)
Vaccination - UK (Edward Jenner)
Gliding plane - Germany (Otto Lilienthal)
Pain killer - Germany (Felix Hoffmann, Aspirin)
Relativity theory, Quantum theory - Albert Einstein, Planck,
TV - Germany (Manfred von Ardenne)
Cathod ray tube in TVs - Germany (Conrad Röntgen experimentally, Ferdinand Braun with horizontal and vertical directivity of the ray)
Computer - France (Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace) for mechanical ones and Germany (Konrad Zuse) for electric ones
Atomic fissure, used in plants and bombs - Germany (Otto Hahn)
Chip cards - Germany (Jürgen Dethloff, Helmut Gröttrup)
MP3 music compression - Germany (Fraunhofer Institut)
Electricity - actually already in ancient greek they used electrostatic charging of amber. And one century before Christ they had actual batteries in Bagdad! But then a plethorary of european scientists brought the work forward: UK (William Gilbert, Francis Hauksbee, Joseph Priestley, Henry Cavendish, Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday), Germany (Otto von Guericke, Ewald Jürgen Georg von Kleist, Georg Simon Ohm, Carl Friedrich Gauß), Italy (Luigi Galvani, Allesandro Volta), France (Charles du Fay, Charles Augustin de Coulomb, André-Marie Ampère), Netherlands (Pieter van Musschenbroek), Denmark (Hans Christian Ørsted).
I actually terminate this electricity list here. I could go on and on.
Also note that physical units named after their discoverer indicate some kind of importance of the relevant invention. So we have e.g. Volt, Ampere, Coulomb, Farad, Gauss, Watt, Ørsted, Tesla, Weber as units. None of them is based on USA's academia.
If we look at unit names outside of electricity we also find outdated ones like Röntgen or Curie. And still used ones like Plack constant, Newton, Pascal, Kelvin, Becquerel, Gray, Sievert. So where are the USA american ones if "all" of technology is supposed to stem from their academia?
IF we want to trace the roots, then perhaps we need to go back to antique greek philisophers. Because western academia itself traces itself there. But then again ... something like that existed also in ancient India and maybe China.
Enthralls as in we are stuck to our phones, typically running iOS, Android, consuming media, or using services with HQs in America.
Its minumum speed is worse than the f16, which make drone interception an issue (f16 are already a bit to fast for that according to Ukrainians), despite a pretty low takeoff speed. It should be capable of less, i'm pretty sure it's software limiters tbh, the wing design seems fine, even if the weight is a bit high (i mean, you don't need to be able to fly at 15 knot like a Rafale, but still).
It _still_ have cooling issues that brick it if you don't bring an external cooler after it landed (which is crazy to me, how did Lockeed not fix that? it's like half the reason why the availability rate is so low).
The availability rate is slow (as said earlier) but it is still more expensive than other jet yearly, despite 2/3rd of the flight hours.
F35 pilots now have less flight hours per year than recommended by NATO (a lot less) (which used to be below US standards btw), and while US f35 pilot still have more hours than their russian conterpart (~145 vs 120), it is very possible that smaller countries who made the mistake of buying them without an economy strong enough to bear the costs might fly their pilot less than 100 hours per year and complete the rest in sims (which, as demontrated by the russian, is a _very_ bad idea) (i'm afraid Greek pilots will suffer from this, which would be a shame)
On the "political influence", it's wrong. Selling the F35 cost the US influence in Norway (thank you wikileaks). In fact, each time the f35 lost a competition, political influence was expended to make the country still buy it. Imho, scientists and scientific conferences are a better way to get influence over allies and adversaries (Cas9 is probably the best example, without Doudna having an international recognition and the conference being hosted in the US, Charpentier might have gone to another RNA specialist)
[edit] to be clear, i think the f35 is a great plane for the US, and a good plane for rich countries who want to go on offensive wars, mainly due to its EW capacity that are second to none and its ability to penetrate enemy territory (which is second only to other US planes). I do also think that it still needs _massive_ improvements to be usable by regular, defensive armies, and the US expending political power to sell it to countries who don't want/need to attack their neighbors was a mistake. Also, not a good cold weather plane, which make it even worse for Norway and Canada.
Also i think its software impairs it, because the wing design seems almost perfect for its missions, and at least on paper, the reactor seems great too
The military isn't some limitless resource, and lead by incompetence, it is useless. There are no policy makers in this administration, they go on vibes and bad ones at that.
Even a guy named mad dog said that diplomacy was cheaper than bullets.
You’re right that it’s all policy making and that’s why you’re supposed to elect competent politicians and administrators.