I think the essence of the question you responded to is: The U.S. has a gigantic navy and couldn’t force safe passage through Hormuz. Why is this the case? Is the U.S. wasting its money given this?
The capability of the IRGC and Iranian regime to hide small to medium sized drone and missile launch equipment within civilian infrastructure (nevermind caves, bunkers, etc) within range of the strait exceeds the capability of the US forces to destroy or remove it.
As long as major shipping companies believe that the Iranians retain enough drone and missile capacity to hold the straight under threat, they're not going to sail through it.
The only possible way would be an extremely bloody and manpower intensive ground operation to hunt it down at the boots on the ground level.
America knew how to do this once. Berlin is still in a sense occupied by American troops in that we still have bases there, and through NATO subsidize their defense and way of life.
You simply can't kill your way out of political conflicts into perpetuity, unless you truly plan on annihilating everyone. That is part of what makes the alcoholic running the DoD so galling. His thesis on places like Fallujah is essentially there wasn't enough bloodshed. Americans would be vacationing in Baghdad if only there had been more violence.
Pretty much what I said in Jan/Feb of this year when the major, bloody nationwide protests of Iranians (est. 15,000 to 40,000 death toll killed by their own "government") kicked off domestically in Iran. Specifically, that the worst possible people were running the executive branch and DoD at this moment in history and that they would rush headlong into something foolish.
I recall Reza Pahlavi on Fox News engaging in the delusion that the current administration cared about the Iranian people. Where is he now?
I'm in Berlin for the weekend right now and enjoying my "NATO subsidized way of life".
Can you point me in the right direction where in Berlin i can find those American occupation troops? Seemed to have missed them so far. Would like to take some pictures with them.
This isn't a matter of an opinion or your cute reply, it's a basic fact. Look up American troops stationed in Germany. Ask yourself why European leaders are constantly falling over themselves to placate an American president they clearly despise. For someone who made it to Berlin you sound profoundly ignorant, I mean why don't you ask the Germans you are spending time with (if you make it out the front door) and see if any of them would feel more safe if the United States unilaterally withdrew from NATO. I mean it would be the most tiring conversation ever but whoever is spending time with you has surely already priced that in.
There are also 185k German Soldiers in Germany right now.
The reason the EU leaders placate the US President is that it worked getting past his first presidency and we are all part of the rollercoaster ride that is his second coming.
The US would never pull unilaterally from NATO, they just lost massive projection power into the middle east by losing the Iran war and Ramstein Air Base is strategically the most important asset the US has in Europe.
Even if it did happen NATO is still able to beat Russia, the biggest threat in the region without the US. UKs nuclear subs can kill 80% of the Russian population on their own as Russia has highly concentrated population centers and launching nukes right of their coast line, which is extremely long and impossible to fully protect wouldn't allow them to launch counter measures on time. Mutual destruction assured usually means both sides have no interest to pull each other into a all-in conflict.
Also stay feisty, refreshing.
Imo I just felt your reply was annoying. I enjoy spirited back and forth here but saying "I didn't see any troops here directions please" is just a low quality comment.
Your third paragraph also avoids the question. The reason they have to cope is they need the United States. This has been emphasized many times. The 50k troops are only the most obvious part of American integration into NATO. And frankly, as you sort of intimate, the least valuable.
The fact is Germany - like many European governments - could evade even their previous 2% commitments because the United States was seen as a blank check security guarantee. Now Germany and others are approaching 5%. In what world then was the previous arrangement not a subsidy?
I enjoy this site because of the quality of most of the comments. In this regard your reply stuck out in a negative light. To be perfectly honest, so does your latest one. But I appreciate you took no offense and at least offered an attempt to reply to the substantive points. Had I been able I would have edited out some of the tone in my comment, which was not necessary. Enjoy Berlin.
I take an authentic human voice over AI-generated slop any day.
Thank you for spending valuable time out of your day to have a little argument with me.
We are two humans talking to each other so we should be able to make mistakes, and be misunderstood, and if we wanted to, yell at each other, and still wish each other a good day afterwards.
You're not my enemy because you come to a different conclusion than I do, and I don’t need to convince you of anything.
Yes, the US would win if they used tactical nuclear weapons on civilians in Iran like they did in Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
The straight would be open, there would be no more resistance, and help is on its way would not be an empty promise.
Can't get murdered by the Iranian regime if you got murdered by the Trump regime. Technically, no more suffering. Practically, I hope we can agree that this is not a good solution to the problem the current US administration is trying to solve.
War in the end is just a different form of politics, it's an escalation ladder that is always won by the party who can one-up the other war party into submission.
Mutually assured nuclear destruction freezes the escalation ladder.
It's something both parties can't afford, and therefore, they consider solving their problem diplomatically, as it should be, instead of having an infinite stalemate while bleeding to death in human and other resources.
The thing with the 5% commitment is, I think we both can agree that yes, it's a kind of subsidy, the EU needs to do more on their own to be less reliant on American soldiers defending their freedom, and that the US taxpayer should not be paying for the defence of European countries is reasonable.
But the US bullying NATO into the 5% does not automatically translate into a stronger NATO.
And a strong NATO is also in the American interest because if Russia took over those countries, it would deny the US a market of 2 billion people to sell goods to .
So geostrategically, it makes zero sense what the current US administration is doing. The US needs the EU countries as much as the EU countries need the US.
NATO has so called STANAGs (Standard agreements) that make NATO forces interoperable. So smaller countries can pull the same weight in combat operations as their bigger neighbors.
Just throwing more money at the US defense industry to buy equipment is not translating into a better interoperability layer, which is the glue that holds NATO combat operations together.
An example. It's cool to have a bunch of F35a in Germany, great piece of technology, but if they get shot down by friendly fire because the interoperability layer between lets say polands airspace defense and Germanys Air force is not working properly, additional money is not going to help.
Had a good time with Germany winning their soccer match yesterday.
I appreciate the well wishes for my stay and likewise wish you only the best and thank you for the exchange.
Dagger base, etc. BND pretending to be blind to co-operation efforts and practically subservient to Cryptologic activity seeking NSA and others.
See also
https://www.electrospaces.net/2015/01/german-investigation-o...
And the drones/missile have much more range than 300km. The Shahed-136 drone have a 2000+km range, which is significantly more than the combat radius of carrierborne fighters, even if you add reasonable amounts of refuelling.
The problem in the end isn't that it was impossible to strike every possible hiding site without causing massive casualities. It just wasn't possible. The US failed to durably damage Iranian installations. The backup plan was to exploit air supremacy to interdict whatever was coming in and out of those installations - that also failed. This was an operational failure of US military doctrine, that is unrelated to the tolerance of casualties. It is simply that US military planners overestimated their abilities and made assumptions they couldn't cash. It wasn't a case of casualty avoidance or whatever.
It's also questionable whether a ground invasion of Iran would be feasible to begin with. The Operational Art of War has a great series on the logistics of such an operation, it would be extremely difficult and would most likely require the US to send the troops... through the Strait of Hormuz to begin with.
Iran is a big country ~100 million people. Aircraft carriers can launch planes to disable specific targets. They cant take out an entire country. They could have been more useful if the US was waging total war against Iran, but it isn't/wasnt.
Obviously this operation was a massive waste.
The world is deglobalizing, and while drones may not exert Blue water power projection, they now dominate littoral power projection.
Marine invasions may be impossible in drone combat without drone superiority, and right now, Joan superiority is not a thing that I think exists between two fully drone enabled armies
And note the US army is not a fully drone enabled army.