> Iran will probably in a better place than they are now, strategically speaking
How could that be? Are they getting an influx of $300 billion dollars or something?
How could that be? Are they getting an influx of $300 billion dollars or something?
By contrast, Iran’s only allies are its terrorist affiliates in Lebanon, Gaza, and the Houthis. Those guys can’t do much to help. China and Russia (see above though) are willing to do business with them but don’t really give a crap about Iran surviving.
Anyway, the US and Israel can keep degrading Iran’s military and “government” by dropping bombs (or better, drones) on them every week for a decade and it won’t really be a big deal for the former. Iran though will not be better off for it, I’m pretty confident. (Other than their surviving religious fanatics will be even more suicidally devout.)
I disagree. The huge problem here is that USAF is showing how they are doing things over and over again. For China it is a treasure trove of data and ideal place for testing of their gear to detect and later shoot down US stealth aircraft which USA is constantly threating to use against China.
Can they? https://www.csis.org/analysis/last-rounds-status-key-munitio... says
“In the 39 days of the air and missile campaign before the ceasefire, U.S. forces heavily used the seven munitions in Table 1. For four of them, the United States may have expended more than half of the prewar inventory”
According to that article, they expended ballpark a third of their inventory of expensive weapons systems such as Patriots or Tomahawk missiles, each with a production lead time of at least 3 years.
If so, they would run out of those expensive weapons in three more months.
I also suspect the US military is actively pursuing more cost-effective ways to blow things up, as Ukraine (and indeed Iran) has been doing. We don't have to use Patriots and Tomahawks all the time, unless we're shooting down something fast and dangerous with it. And again, Iran has a limited ability to pay for that type of thing, so I'm not that worried.
We can't. We built a system that creates a very small number of very expensive munitions and that can't be scaled up. We've been trying to scale up munitions production for years now with the Ukraine war. And it just isn't possible.
Not only does it take years to make any missile now. Our total capacity to make missiles is incredibly low. Like, we can make 600 Patriot missiles per year. We've expended twice that so far with Iran alone. We can make 100 THADD per year. We've expended 300 so far.
The US will run out of missiles way before Iran does. Iran could easily produce 2000 missiles per year and if it pushed it could make closer to 8000.
Iran will recover its missile stocks from the current war in a year. It will take the US until 2031 to do the same.
https://www.hudson.org/national-security-defense/war-above-w...