U.S. used 'virtually all' of its long-range precision missiles during Iran war
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
And then China gets frisky with Taiwan and the US will totally not abandon them and tell them to just give up pressured by the lack of firepower to defend them, the risks of China getting back into bidding oil in international markets and the mess the treasury would be in if China raises capital by selling bonds (they just told the fed to print more so Japan can buy yens without selling their US bonds, so they are at least very concerned about the possibility).
Sorry for the rant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactions_to_the_2026_Iran_war
What the fuck is wrong with the human species and its tendency for self-destructive leader-worship??
Starting wars has only been unequivocally negative for maybe the last 100 years. Not enough for an evolutionary change to manifest itself.
The fallout will come later, of course.
Iran is a true war, where the local elite didn't even partly defect, and it is already becoming an expensive quagmire with nothing of value gained.
Of course some politicians do mistake one for another. Putin in 2022 probably expected a swift coup by his crony Medvedchuk, who instead turned tail and ran. Instead he got a brutal war of attrition.
That basically sets up an equilibrium where you have a small number of people who can cause the deaths and suffering of millions. To escape it there'd need to be an economic sweet spot where armies couldn't cost effectively coerce small groups of people. But that seems unlikely because the economies of scale to outfit an army favour large groups. We've been lucky enough so far in the modern era that a strong army requires supporting a thriving economy.
And how well is it coercing Iranian government right now? It is proving itself not only ineffective, but also ludicrously inefficient in terms of money. And to think all that could have been accomplished by building diplomatic relationships, building schools, hospitals, colleges, and, ultimately, cultural and economic ties… When an empire needs to resort to military might, it’s usually in its final states - the US itself made the Soviet Union spend itself into oblivion, and now it’s falling on that very same trap.
The reality is that fighting China would be a proper all-out war, not whatever this spitting match with Iran is.
It's just going to be your typical meatgrinder and attrition warfare.
So we'll just grind each other into a halt? And what is the end state? What a BS.
I don't believe Russia really cares about the rest of the planet. At the same time, China doesn't care if Russia gets a bloody nose on Putin's little vanity project and realizes a nuclear war is bad for their mercantile economy.
[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/volodymyr-zelenskyy-china-ur...
So Russia is only able to prosecute their war with China's permission. When your foreign policy is decided by another power, that's the textbook definition of a vassal.
And I disagree that USSR and PRC were just "rival peers". Rival peers would be UK/US (at least until Suez), or UK/FR until the 90s. USSR and PRC actively fought each other and almost started a nuclear war; that's way beyond "peer rivalry", that's actual direct competition.
https://www.atomicarchive.com/almanac/test-sites/testing-chr...
Ecosystem resilience is based in the so called natural buffers. They are a product of the interactions between life beings. Imagine the life bar in a videogame. A natural buffer is like a 4-D life bar, where each character actualize their life bars at the same time. You lose some life and your friends will change their energy automatically to fix your health bar, Is paid with energy but also needs some "time currency".
With healthy buffers, even big impacts in an ecosystem are absorbed and the system returns to the initial situation again and again. But it has a coast in the buffer. The life bar gets shorter.
When the buffer is spent, the system is not 'elastic' anymore. At this moment the danger is extreme, but the warnings are subtle or none. Just further impacts, even tiny impacts, on the ecosystem cause a total, devastating and irrevocable collapse that may extend over several years and can't be stopped.
Is unclear if we had crossed this line yet.
The life has recovered from huge collapses at a planetary level five times yet, but it needed millions of years for that.
Just because we had luck before, does not mean that we will have luck forever.
And of those nuclear tests, 528 were above ground, and only 200-300 of them were probably true airbursts. And all of them were in areas like atolls, deserts, and Arctic tundra where nothing burns. Their climate impact was near zero because they caused no fires and no dust, and they were spread out over 35 years.
That is different from thousands of detonations in an afternoon causing raging fires all over the globe. Estimates are that it would generate around 150 billion kg of stratospheric soot. For comparison, yearly generation is around 7-8 billion kg of soot, generally confined to the troposphere and therefore rains out fairly quickly. A nuclear exchange would produce 20 years of soot and dump it into the stratosphere, above the rain.
The largest pulses of soot that we've ever observed are the 2019 Australian megafires and the Canadian 2023 fires. These were roughly less than or equal to 1 billion kg and produced measurable climate effects that lasted months.
A full nuclear exchange would likely produce -10C of global cooling in its immediate aftermath, which would be catastrophic to agriculture and civilization. It would stabilize on the order of decades, but there would be a lot fewer humans in the world.
We had some very close calls in the cold war.
Although for all the strategic thinking we’ve seen out of the “department of war” (that offers gender affirming testosterone shots and then runs out of missiles), I wouldn’t be shocked if you worked at the Pentagon, hahahaha.
https://latinamericanpost.com/americas/environment-en/a-sile...
Never say never.
We have thus far been supremely lucky that irrational actors have not acquired a nuclear bomb. But the reality is that throughout history most leaders have been irrational.
My country (America) is behaving increasingly irrationally. I've been hearing fringe conservatives calling for nuking the middle east since the early 2000s, but the rot has spread and became deeply religious.
Now I hear talk of the end times from the most powerful people in the country, actively building bunkers. Groups of Republicans openly talking about the US being allowed to take whatever we want from anyone we want through war (Venezuela, Iran, Greenland, Canada).
Almost all of our leadership has been replaced in every branch of government. SCOTUS is clearly compromised and bought. The legislative may as well be dead. Almost all executive agencies have been purged, what remains have had their heads swapped with sycophants. Something like half of the military generals have been turned over. The DoD was renamed to the DoW with cheers, as an alcoholic prison guard was put in charge and has started touting hypermacho religious warrior catchphrases and openly advocating for war crimes.
The other day we testimony from judges before legislature who refused to say if Presidents can run for three terms or that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. Under oath, just simply refused.
And that's before getting into how the President of the United States started a war to distract from his involvement in the highest profile sex trafficking ring in human history, and has continued to use his position to perform insider trading on oil prices repeatedly for weeks.
If you said any of this would be happening in 2005, I would have laughed at how "that would never happen in the US". And now it's just... reality. Like Russia. And it seems to have no end in sight. So what actually happens if Trump gets so deranged he hits the red button? And if not him, who will the loonies pick tomorrow - someone who actually believes in "the cause", who doesn't understand it's a grift?
And what are the external long term consequences of Trump's actions in countries like Iran and Venezuela and Ukraine? The US is not to be trusted anymore, every country has a clear signal to build their own nuclear arsenal ASAP. We have a river of blood behind us, so are we just expecting to get lucky that no one in Iran, for instance, who gets to a position of power leverages an irrational hate for the US and just... Does it in a religious or hate-driven Armageddon?
Cough, cough. Who is currently in the White House?
One thing about tRump, is that he is more blatantly obvious about the "bully" side of America. He is not the first bully; just the first un-subtle American bully.
What I find disturbing is the others who enable him. I've long despised the Repugnant Party for their anti-worker ideology but under tRump 2.0 they've gone to a new low that I never thought possible. As much as I despise tRump, the other Repugnant members of congress (the odd rare exception) are absolutely disgraceful.
And then is there is the feckless Democrats...
I fear I've lost so much faith in the goodwill of many people. At the same time, I know that so many people are good. But there numbers of truly bad people are much larger than I thought.
I genuinely don't believe the US can be fixed anymore. We're on a slip-and-slide and far too much damage has been done to stop it. There aren't even adults left at the table to try.
The fact that these actions barely seem to register with the US public at large truly blows my mind. That over 35% of the population are completely fine with this stuff is frightening. The fact that none of the constitutional checks and balances are effective in preventing this abuse of office is alarming.
Most literally don't even know, because what little information filters down to them, is all radical right-wing propaganda from Fox or worse. The country has been drowning in it for decades.
Are you openly saying the president and the secretary of war are lying when they say they have done "massive" bombings of Iran?
In short, Trump is not a source.
Although "massive" is a subjective word. Nothing can be as massive as WW2 carpet bombing.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/08/03/politics/us-military-iran...
Of course I only mean if the war was necessary to fight at all, I don't believe it was.
That's what the US tried to do. The problem is that they were unable to degrade the Iranian missile systems enough that they could drop gravity bombs with impunity. This also means that they had to pull the aircraft that they would use to do bombing runs back to bases in Jordan and Israel because anything on the tarmac in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE is very vulnerable to Iranian drone and missile strikes. All of this means that they're forcing the US to choose between pulling out of the region or accepting losses of personnel and airframes (that likely cannot be replaced in a timely manner) at a level that the post-Vietnam US military has never had to face.
I suspect an all-out war between the US and China would go the same way as this one, if not worse. The US military in its modern form has focused on procuring very complex, advanced, and featureful weapons in tiny numbers. The problem is that this means that the US is incapable of fighting a sustained campaign against an adversary that can withstand attacks from American weapons and has a higher production capacity.
The number of airplanes built in the US during WWII is greater than all the airplanes NOT in that category. Obviously we can't maintain that level of industry during peacetime, but we've fallen so far below that level and are so low on weapons that if another major war starts we won't even be able to rapidly scale up.
The reason we don't have industrial capacity dedicated to this war is because everyone knows we're fighting it for no reason, there's no plan, it stops and starts every 4 days, so on.
Simple consequences of having actual stupid people leading our government.
If the US got into a war that anyone actually cared about, it would almost certainly snap into action at incredible speed.
I'm gonna push back on "nobody cares." The United States is somewhat unique in that our doctrine calls for wars to be fought on distant shores, and that the main role of our military is to ensure that our ideology (liberal democracy) is protected across the world.
That's why we entered WWII, it's why we keep carrier groups around the world, and it's why Iran/Ukraine/Taiwan are so critical. The threat of an American response and the visible follow-through is a significant factor in deterring anyone who's even considering a war.
Yes, Trump is unspeakably stupid, he's managed to make the worst possible decision at every step of this nightmare, but the truth is that a conflict like this has only been getting more likely since the GOP killed the nuclear deal.
We need weapons for Ukraine. We need weapons for Iran. And, God forbid, but we need weapons for Taiwan.
The US entered World War II in the pacific after Pearl Harbor and in Europe after Germany declared war.
Before those 2 events, there was still a strong isolationist contingent in the US.
Yes, there were isolationists, but there weren't enough to change the fact that fascist/communist victories in Europe would be bad for America. The neoliberal thing where we support liberal democracies is an evolution of the Monroe doctrine, because we've recognized for a long time that the best path forward for America is free trade and interdependency with other like-minded countries.
We had friendly relations and supported many counties that weren’t liberal democracies before the war. We were friendly with Japan before they started expanding and threatening free trade/access to Asia.
the strait has been open for oil trade just a few months ago, what happened and whose fault is it ???
this is pure propaganda and is completely false statement, not grounded in reality. US has no problem protecting despotic autocracies like the Pinochet's junta in Chile or Saudi Arabian theocratic monarchy (a birthplace of islamic wahhabism).
The actual goal of military is to protect the status of USD as a global reserve currency and ensure all important nations are its vassals, fully subordinate to the US government.
The underlying reason is America is printing trillions of dollars out of thin air, not backed by anything, other than the threat from US military, so vassal states keep recycling their earned surplus currency into USD bonds and treasuries
No, it is not false. Geopolitics is about lesser evils and raw needs, not perfect ideological consistency. Any country stupid enough to care about that would not last very long, and so none of them do.
The US has spent an extraordinary amount of money protecting freedom of navigation, discouraging conquests, and in many cases halting genocide. I'm not providing citations, if you're confident enough in your opinions to call what I said "pure propaganda" surely you can name them.
> The actual goal of military is to protect the status of USD as a global reserve currency and ensure all important nations are its vassals, fully subordinate to the US government.
The goal of the military is to achieve American objectives by force, like every other military.
> The underlying reason is America is printing trillions of dollars out of thin air, not backed by anything, other than the threat from US military, so vassal states keep recycling their earned surplus currency into USD bonds and treasuries
...you know, good luck with that, I'm done here.
I am fully aware that SK and Taiwan were ruled brutally for many years. It doesn't change my statement.
How is US defending liberal democracy?
So far they've killed 3,000+ Iranians. 110k+ causalities in IRAQ and Afghanistan.. don't even get me started on Vietnam.
Iran was funding terror attacks on Israel (and has been for decades) which for all its many faults is a liberal democracy which grants citizenship to millions of Palestinians who get to vote. Trump is a moron who picked a fight he could not possibly win, but fundamentally this was not a war that got declared out of the blue.
Iraq II was an unjustifiable experiment in nation-building, but Iraq I was a military intervention to protect Kuwait (a constitutional monarchy) from an invading dictatorship.
The US also intervened in Kosovo, Grenada, Panama, and Korea. You look those up and tell me how they went.
It is very, very trendy to pretend like the US is an evil empire. It is not. I'm not in the mood to have lots of people reply to me going "but what about!" because it's not productive and I don't feel like it's constructive conversation.
Believe whatever you want. If you care about actually being right, please go and at least read the Wikipedia pages about these conflicts. In war, armies go to KILL people. There are rarely good or bad guys, just evils of greater or lesser degree.
Iran had a democratically elected government that the US helped overthrow and that is why the current regime is in power.
Before Iraq 1 it was the most modern middle eastern state, US deliberately destroyed civilian infrastructure. This was after propping up Saddam as a dictator for two decades as they fought Iran, also selling chemical weapons precursors to Iraq while knowing they would create those weapons.
Iraq 2 was a lot more than that. Prime example of blowback as it led to ISIS.
US carpet bombed north korea and killed 20% of its population, looked the other way as south Korea executed civilians. Then it turned into a military dictatorship for decades. This is not the win you think it is even if turned out okay decades later.
While the US, or more correctly the UN, has done some peace keeping missions with decent results it pales in comparison to the chaos the US has created. From overthrowing democracies, installing and supporting dictators and terrorist groups, ignoring and fueling genocides, etc.
Americas superpower is its ability to ignore its own hypocrisy, and you certainly embody that with a hefty sprinkle of willful ignorance.
I'm fully aware of how SK and Taiwan were military dictatorships, and how the US supported a coup in Iran. I'm not saying the US has never done horrible things, or even that the US doesn't have blood on its hands. I'm saying that geopolitics is a terrible thing, war is a terrible thing, but considering how this stuff normally works for powerful countries the US is remarkably restrained (or at least it was, until this second Trump term) and the Pax Americana seems to work out pretty well for most people around the world.
> Before Iraq 1 it was the most modern middle eastern state, US deliberately destroyed civilian infrastructure. This was after propping up Saddam as a dictator for two decades as they fought Iran, also selling chemical weapons precursors to Iraq while knowing they would create those weapons.
So what would be less hypocritical in your opinion? Should the US have intervened earlier to remove Saddam? Should the US have ignored its other allies and allowed Iran to do as it pleased with impunity? Should it have issued an embargo, preventing "the most modern middle eastern state" from ever achieving that title? Should it have ignored the appeals from Kuwaitis to intervene to protect their homes?
The US did not and does not habitually target civilian infrastructure, only dual-use stuff.
> Prime example of blowback as it led to ISIS.
ISIS is an outgrowth of al-Qaeda, which was founded in Pakistan as an outgrowth of the Mujahideen who were US-sponsored rebels in Afghanistan against the Soviet-backed government. They were also sponsored by China, Pakistan, the UK, Iran, and the Arab world. This was half a century ago. ISIS then got big as part of the Syrian revolution which was... not sponsored by the US, and was brutally put down by Russia.
But please, tell me more about how this is all America's fault. Clearly nobody else has any agency, right?
> While the US, or more correctly the UN, has done some peace keeping missions with decent results it pales in comparison to the chaos the US has created
No, the US has intervened outside of the UN with good results too. Funny you mention the UN while saying that hypocrisy is a uniquely American superpower - do you think that the other member states of the UN are bastions of morality?
We're not going to agree on this. I think that compared to similarly-sized and powerful countries like China or the USSR, the US has not acted that poorly.
This is why the US military is partnered with all the Middle East democracies, like the one in Bahrain, or the one in UAE, or the one in Qatar…
Would you prefer democracy be delivered to those countries by force? If not, then accept the lesser evil.
Just don't pretend you can convince us that you are actually doing the former when all we see is you doing the later. We are not retarded. You are the retard for thinking we will fall for your rhetorics.
Every single manufacturer in the US stated plainly that they did not feel safe scaling up production, because the demand was always going to be temporary, and they didn't want to be left with unusable factories.
A competent admin could have worked with them to arrange for financial help to temporarily expand and not leave them hanging.
That's what happens when "The free market is the only one allowed to make resource distribution choices" hits reality. Sometimes all rational actors making rational choices will leave you fucked.
Ethanol did not have that fear, as the infrastructure for it shares a lot with other industries, and we scaled that production quickly.
It's just more examples of, again, the way the free market will respond to changes in demand is not always a good thing, and sometimes you do have to nudge the market or buoy producers to keep things running well and quickly respond.
The admin could also have, you know, not stolen the critical stockpile of PPE, given it to a business spun up by his family, and let them sell it for personal profit.
But one incredible bright spot was production for the mRNA vaccines, which was technical enough that Trump couldn't get his tiny little paws on it, and the US then produced enough to vaccinate large chunks of the world.
[0] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2026/05/11/by-one-m... (no paywall: https://archive.ph/X9zzc)
China has tons of weapons and resources. But it would remain to be seen if they can actually fight when every single person along the entire chain is a total day one rookie.
Nothing to do with "validity." Your lived experience (or whoever's you're defending) is valid.
You should do some reading from the people who fought in GWOT and are now volunteering in Ukraine. Obviously combat experience is better than no combat experience, but we absolutely should not assume much beyond that.
You don't need to fight China to get experience fighting. The skills and experience translate. Plus America is getting direct experience with Chinese and Russian made systems.
Even the simple act of organizing and deploying the military is incredibly valuable as I've already explained to you in another post.
“Especially American foreign fighters. It’s not Afghanistan. It’s not Iraq. You’re taking the side of Vietnam versus the U.S. over here. You are the underdog, and with no air superiority or anything. And so they just assume they were being used as cannon fodder. But that’s just the way this war is. It’s a nightmare.”
Yes, obviously having experience deploying the military, or driving cars, or fixing tanks, or evacuating casualties, is all far better than no experience doing those things.
Do you think someone is disagreeing with you on this point?
> The claim above is that neither side has experience that's all that relevant to the type of conflict we'd expect in a China/US conflict.
This is a factually incorrect statement. I'm not sure why you're confused about what you are agreeing or disagreeing with at this point.
Here's a question:
When someone says that you have no experience being a professional baseball player, do you say "errrhhmm ackshually, I brush my teeth every morning just like an MLB player does. I put on my pants every morning. I have even held a baseball bat!"
Obviously a phrase like of "limited relevant experience" is constrained to a semantically meaningful set of things
This doesn't make any sense. I've already explained to you the value of combined arms operations and combat experience. Here's a link for you to read through to help improve your understanding: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49174680
A smash and grab in Venezuela is not Iran and Iran is not China.
The closest analog we have to war with China is Ukraine/Russia. All evidence from NATO exercises and investigations is that Ukr/Rus conflict has virtually no relevance to OEF, OIF, or The Caracas Kidnapping.
Iran is a little taste of what's going in Ukr/Rus, but obviously China would be able to wield the same type of war at orders of magnitude greater intensity.
My comment was quite specific on my claim. You have provided zero evidence against it, and instead are just doing this weird presumptive ad hominem thing?
If you were paying attention to what's actually going on in modern battlefields, you'd know that in fact you're right: "dropping bombs and evading AA fire" is actually of limited applicability! Great examples! There are no bombs being dropped. Virtually no humans are being shot at with anti-aircraft fire. That's what I'm pointing out.
Militaries need to train in order to test systems, test weapons, gain experience, and be able to generally perform better and accomplish any given objective. In the modern era, militaries need to engage in what is called Combined Arms exercises. These exercises, as the name alludes to, coordinate activities across different branches of the military. So it might be the army coordinating with the navy to attack a target or capture some piece of land or objective. Maybe the army is on the ground directing fire from naval ships off the coast, or it could be the Air Force providing drone coverage as special forces achieve some mission.
Coordinating these activities during peace time is a key function of successful militaries. It is incredibly important to align these activities to be effective. Because of this, not only do you have militaries that work on combined arms and other trainings internally, but in the case of NATO, or perhaps the US with alliances in the Pacific we also engage in combined arms exercises with other militaries to further enhance and integrate those capabilities so that when it comes time to fight, forces have been trained how to respond and can do so more effectively. A great example of this is KATUSA - Korean Augmentation to the United States Army where Korean soldiers are actually assigned to and reporting to American military command and train alongside the United States.
The reason Venezuela is important, for example, is because it was an exercise demonstrating combined arms coordination and execution. It shows what the US military is actually capable when air, sea, and land forces engage to accomplish some objective.
So why is this important re: Iran (and Ukraine certainly). Because it's combined arms activities except that it's the real thing. Real equipment failures might happen, real lessons are learned, you are actually getting shot at. Lives are at stake. The military is actually battle tested, even if the opponent is hopelessly outmatched.
So when you write something like this:
> All evidence from NATO exercises and investigations is that Ukr/Rus conflict has virtually no relevance to OEF, OIF, or The Caracas Criminal Apprehension.
Those exercises, the lessons learned from the wars such as OEF, OIF, and even how Ukraine is today using and testing American military equipment in battle, matter a whole lot. And that's one of Xi Jingping's primary concerns with his military. They have done 0 of this. They've never really been shot at. They haven't tested their equipment in any sort of real battle. For the software-minded, it's like they've always been in development and haven't even touched a preview environment, let alone production. And worrying enough the US has demonstrated the capability to bypass and/or destroy Chinese and Russian military equipment including air defense and radar arrays - this is worrisome for those countries. If it comes time for a real war, well the only evidence you have so far is your state of the art equipment or close enough to it was absolutely fucking useless when it came to operations involving the US. Whooops.
They may start a war and find out they made a lot of bad assumptions and didn't train well enough and then what?
I'd encourage you to think about this a little more than you are here.
Unfortunately it turns out different wars are very different.
You’re acting like I’ve argued that I would prefer China over the US. That’s absolutely not true, and partially for the reasons you mention. However, we should absolutely not rest on our more expansive direct experience in very different combat to presume anything.
We especially shouldn’t presume that when Iran, as a China-lite adversary, is teaching us lessons that we apparently have been unwilling to learn indirectly in Ukraine.
By the way, Mr Military Strategy Buff, “combined arms” is not (necessarily) multiple branches working together. It’s multiple functions working together. Aviation, armor, artillery, infantry, etc. Nothing to do with different branches.
They didn't have more combat experience than Ukraine though, never mind the additional problems that the Russian military faced at the time of the invasion which are too numerous to list here but include corruption, lack of equipment, a lack of understanding of the will of the Ukrainian people, and more.
Fast forward to 2026 and I'd argue there are probably only 4-5 militaries in the world who have any meaningful combat experience: the United States, Israel, Ukraine, Russia, and Iran to a lesser extent and perhaps the United Kingdom though they're falling more and more behind in that respect.
> We especially shouldn’t presume that when Iran, as a China-lite adversary, is teaching us lessons that we apparently have been unwilling to learn indirectly in Ukraine.
You're just wrong. We're learning lessons in Ukraine, actively testing western and US-specific equipment, and more. We had real-time experience in deploying our capabilities in logistics and intelligence too. Today we're actively seeing how American combat systems perform in real combat operations against an enemy deploying combat systems developed by our adversaries in Iran and throughout the Middle East. You might not be learning anything, but don't presume your ignorance extends to the Pentagon.
> By the way, Mr Military Strategy Buff, “combined arms” is not (necessarily) multiple branches working together. It’s multiple functions working together. Aviation, armor, artillery, infantry, etc. Nothing to do with different branches.
The branches are just where those capabilities generally rest. For example the Air Force does not employ artillery or infantry, those are functions of the army. My point was demonstrated.
Uh yes they did
> never mind the additional problems that the Russian military faced at the time of the invasion which are too numerous to list here but include corruption, lack of equipment, a lack of understanding of the will of the Ukrainian people, and more.
In other words, there are other relevant variables than just combat experience...?
> You're just wrong...
"We're actively learning lessons in Ukraine" → Yet somehow our Patriot batteries were taken offline by Shaheds lmao. Sure, obviously we're learning some lessons. But so are our enemies. And what cost to each party? Iran learns lessons "for free" while it defends itself. China learns lessons for free because it's uninvolved. The US learns lessons because it's risking lives and equipment for a war with, so far, deeply negative strategic value.
The degree of single-dimensional thinking you're exhibiting is frankly bizarre.
> The branches are just where those capabilities generally rest... My point was demonstrated.
No lol. It's extremely discrediting actually.
Not really
> In other words, there are other relevant variables than just combat experience...?
Yes? Nobody argued otherwise.
> "We're actively learning lessons in Ukraine" → Yet somehow our Patriot batteries were taken offline by Shaheds lmao.
Learning a lesson second-hand is different than learning a lesson first-hand. The fact that Iran was able to perhaps attack some equipment or position shows us where we are weak and gives us, albeit unfortunate, an opportunity to learn a lesson and improve.
> But so are our enemies. And what cost to each party? Iran learns lessons "for free" while it defends itself.
No Iran doesn't learn lessons for free unless everyone else is too. Of course enemies are going to learn and adapt too, but we're smarter, stronger, our civilization is a lot better at war, have more money, and better equipment and so when we learn lessons they're more effective and important.
> China learns lessons for free because it's uninvolved. The US learns lessons because it's risking lives and equipment for a war with, so far, deeply negative strategic value.
Again you're just confusing your mistaken view of the Iran war here as I mentioned in my OP.
Happy to answer any questions you have though
It's clear you're quite emotionally wrapped up in this topic for some reason.
In the US at least and western militaries as far as I'm aware, combined arms operations are coordinated between branches. The Air Force doesn't have infantry, they call the Army to coordinate and so on. That coordination and ability to execute is extremely important. Trying to suggest that what I wrote wasn't correct is being needlessly argumentative and is a poor reflection on your ability to discuss this issue.
The only reason we don't have $6 gas right now is because of a ton of financially engineering. I don't know how anyone could convince the American public that $10 gas and war time rations is worth defending Taiwan.
I see you are not in California.
I've been trying to understand why gas is still comparatively cheap given the war and the best I've landed on so far is that the spread between feedstock (crude oil) and output (diesel, gas, jet fuel, etc) widened in large part die to flooding the market with strategic oil reserves.
We keep crude prices low, which is what many indicators track, while we couldn't keep final product prices low as easily because we can't quickly increase refinery capacity.
How did they financially suppress fuel prices?
With the reduction in demand, prices didn't skyrocket. This is what OPEC does (cut supply to increase prices), but on the demand side.
If you google for the "oil price today" you will find something like $75. However, if you look closely, it's the price of oil futures for September. Futures are not oil, they are contracts. If you need to buy oil in September and you expect the price to be higher than $75 you can buy such a contract and guarantee your price to be $75 now. However, you can also buy such a contract even if you don't need to buy oil ever, hoping its price will go up and you can sell it at profit (you can also do it on margin i.e. only put enough money to cover daily price change). And a whole lot of people do exactly this (likewise, they also can sell these contracts even though they don't have a drop of oil to sell).
Normally, the large volume of these speculative contracts cancel each other before the expiration date and no oil changes hands. However, because most of these traders don't have oil or the ability to take delivery on oil, a "squeeze" is possible. Say, you bought $75 oil futures for September today, hoping to sell them at premium sometime before today and the last trading day at the end of August. As that day approaches you see that the price is still $75 or even lower. Oil spot price (the actual price) can be anything (it was about $100 last week), maybe $100, maybe $200 but nobody is buying futures at this price, because someone is selling them at $68. If you had a refinery with storage to take few thousand barrels, you'd be happy as you got a great deal on oil. However, if you are just a dude at a computer in a NYC apartment, you are now in big trouble - you have to pay $75K for each contract you hold and take delivery on 1000 barrels of oil. Either or both might be impossible for you so, instead, you just sell yours at $67.99 and take $7K loss on each contract, which 10x less money than you'd have to pay for the oil you can't take delivery on. This is a "long squeeze", as more people find themselves in such a situation they sell at lower and lower price causing the futures price to tank even more.
Someone causing a long squeeze is, obviously, taking a loss as some legitimate buyers will buy the cheap futures and take delivery but because of the sheer volume of the speculators, a long squeeze is not nearly as expensive as a direct undercutting the spot price and can be maintained for a long time with relatively small capital.
I wish people would take a short stop here and contemplate a bit on this sentence.
The Ukraine war is 4+ years old, and they are still making significant improvements on their tactics. This is with support and advice from experienced militaries like US and France.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Liberation_Army#Eng...
I guess one could litigate the definition of "battle", but come on.
That said, they have been tempted by the juiciest prey right off their coast.
Ukraine wasn't really wearing the war crown either and they managed to redefine the face of war to the point where countries with trillion dollar militaries are taking notes.
Your jab isn't totally unwarranted, China like most countries has no battle tested military. But your correct premise suggests a conclusion which just isn't there. If I say "China hasn't lost a war in decades, while the US is successfully losing to an enemy that's been strangled from all sides for decades" the premise is true but the conclusion is still up for being written.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m pro-American all the way. I just am not sure which is better: to defer and not be in war or to be in war and lose due to economics vs brute firepower/manpower/superiority.
I don't think soldiers survive any meaningful amount of combat to get experience in combat. Pooping without WC is what they get good at which you can do in exerciss too.
Logistics and support staff might get experience maybe ...
While we're going to have lots of officers who've been to war for a while yet, turnover eventually evens the playing field.
The people who would be doing the actual fighting in a war today have never been to war.
And as we've seen in Ukraine, warfare is always evolving, making some subset of past war experience less valuable.
Its the difference between having a CEO who was a competent engineer for years before becoming the CEO, and having a CEO who went to business school and played software dev tycoon for 10 years before walking in the door to be CEO on the first day of their first real job.
An invasion of Taiwan would entail a large naval component, though, and China really has zero experience in naval warfare even if you accept my assertion that there would be some value in having admirals trained by admirals trained by admirals with experience in a proper war.
How I wish for a world where the same could be said for every other army!
Looks a lot like the US went into this war assuming it's a rerun of the Iraq war where they could build a mountain of supplies in Saudi Arabia where they were effectively unreachable for the enemy, and take advantage or the friendly skies just across Iraq's border to support their air superiority, and keep the long and lengthening logistics lines protected.
It wasn't a rerun. They can't stock up and just stay beyond Iran's border to be safe, now everything they care about has to stay far, far away, out of drone or missile reach. Any supply lines can be hit far behind the front line so they were non-existent.
Yes but with the caveat that they wanted the lowest risk to US service members during the bombing. This means using up the fire and forget stuff rather than the guided munitions attached to planes. They have good air superiority, but poor logistical options to do that.
The traditional way to do this is to park two carrier groups within 500 miles of the target and convey tonnes of cheap munitions to the targets (as in iraq, Libya & kosovo) the problem for the US is that it means parking a carrier within drone range. You'd then establish a land base and move forward. Again all of the logistics of doing that are vulnerable to drone.
So this is the route they chose.
Until the US have something to counter drones cheaply, then they'll get stuck like this.
They would have known going into this war the plan was fundamentally flawed before we even committed to firing a single munition.
Maybe they could have been part of the landing but I'm sure as hell glad they didn't follow through with an invasion. The geography, supply line issues, and drone warfare would have been an absolute nightmare.
These Marine amphibious assault carriers are highly vulnerable to swarm tactics by fast Iranian assault boats. Iran has a few thousand of them which can be deployed fast.
You need a full strike group to support the assault. And that means those ships are in range of Iranian mass-drone strikes and missiles. And Iran has a lot of hidden missile cities that they are yet to reveal.
There is no way to achieve territorial supremacy without tens of thousands of casualties. It will make Vietnam look like a papercut.
I think the reason China has no reason to be threatened is the US outsourced most of it's manufacturing to them, meaning China now has more skills, know-how, and manufacturing infrastructure to redirect to wartime production.
That was truly a brilliant move by US business leaders and the 90s political elite. Besides creating the military vulnerability, it also helped get Donald Trump election, who they all love dearly.
1. The U.S. produces a massive share of global manufactured goods, ranking second globally behind China in total value added.
2. Only low skilled jobs were shipped overseas. Lower-value consumer goods like clothing and basic electronics are heavily outsourced, whereas complex machinery, aerospace equipment, chemicals, and medical devices are largely built domestically
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/0222_ma...
During war with China, the US is not going to suffer due to lack of cheap toys or clothes from China.
I figure it would probably be like the US backing Ukraine's defense against Russia but backing Taiwan's defense against China. It would probably be quite hard for China to take Taiwan. There's a lot of sea in between and you can see how well Russia's navy has done against Ukraine's drones and missiles.
The best US strategy is to just arm Taiwan to the teeth by selling weapons to make the invasion as risky as possible. But China can (and this is their smart play, IMO) is to just win Taiwan over politically over the long term.
That was their plan until Xi became ruler for life and decided that he wanted Taiwan sooner rather than later.
Yeah, that is certainly the smart play and one China is almost guaranteed to win in the long run. But that won't secure Xi as the leader that reunited the nation. He might prefer the option where he gets a chance at glory to the smart one.
https://www.npr.org/2026/06/11/g-s1-127478/taiwan-opposition...
There’s a small port on the east side of Taiwan which could be used to supply some of the bare necessities. I don’t know if USA would fully enter a war but I do think they might do freedom of navigation exercises east of the island. Would China dear hit a US military vessel with missiles and escalate the conflict. I don’t think so.
There is no part of TW that is not within PRC land base munition range, every inch can be hit within 7 minutes. Of course PRC would hit US ships in blockade scenario which is by definition war. If USN doesn't blockade, then FONAP does nothing, anything supply ship to west TW would be trivially sunk, NVM legally any ship during PRC TW blockade scenario is running PRC blockade (read: entering sovereign One China waters) and can be treated as hostile. US either tries to blockade (goto war with PRC who will run blockade / test US resolve), and if turns hot, risk its westpac / global replenishment chains (including CENTCOM/CONUS) being blown up, or CONUS hits. Just hitting USN replenishment ships, which are exquisitely vulnerable (has to spend hours in port) means USN becomes single deployment assets, i.e CSG in high tempo operations will exhaust fuel (escorts), munitions in days. USN expeditionary model simply isn't viable vs peer who can cripple US logistics tail within ~10000km radius of PRC. Or US does functionally nothing, i.e. FONAP in TW blockade scenario is theatrics.
Well but war will be like this now. Like for ICBMs, with PGMs it's use it or lose it, so lots of ordnance is fired off at the outset (onset?) of hostilities.
Taiwan is no West Berlin and everyone knows it.
Washington will have to decide whether the U.S. is willing to pay slightly more and rely on domestic Intel, Samsung, and TSMC fabs, or risk a military defeat and potentially millions of American lives if the situation escalates to intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The choice is obvious. Real life is not a Hollywood action movie. Also, anyone who thinks South Korea or other Asian allies would automatically go to war with China is delusional. So U.S. would be left alone. U.S. has never faced an opponent like China so a country that is also the world's leading manufacturing power. Nazi Germany was nowhere near as economically and industrially formidable as China is today, and the U.S. fought it alongside most of Europe and the Soviet Union.
If anything happens, Taiwan will probably give up. They are mostly posturing, and China may not even need to invade. they could simply impose a blockade.
Bombing things may seem normal to the U.S., but as Sun Tzu argued, the best victories are achieved without fighting, once swords are clashing, that's a strategic failure.
It will take years to get to the level of skill TSMC in Taiwan has.
I don't think Washington should spend money and lives on defending Taiwan. My point is that TSMC is a very valuable manufacturer of chips so it will be a big loss in skill and technology for the "West".
Ultimately the destiny of Taiwan should be whatever the people of Taiwan wish but alas the world does not work that way.
The only thing Beijing can not control is what Taiwan does and invading an island is always difficult. Also Taiwan needs a nuclear arsenal just as Israel has; Japan too, Canada and the EU as well. The days where the big countries abuse the smaller ones are over - we all can see this past the point of Putin starting his genocide against Ukraine. His next step of escalation will be mass mobilization; that's why his propaganda department already now calls the "special military operation" (which it never was) a war (which it always was from the get-go, but now he wants to send more of his slaves to die for him and his oligarch-bros).
The one thing we have learned in recent wars is highend hardware can shoot down subsonic munitions reliably, highend missiles can penetrate high end defense reliably. AKA PRC is uniquely positioned to blunt most of US fires (subsonic munitions) while having tons of highend fires vs US defense. But really PRC doesn't even need highend fires for TW scenario, see their subsonic cruse missile / drone gigafactory (like proper not ghetto tier) that can churn 1000s per day, i.e. even with pure subsonics PRC can fully saturate entire US posture/basing structure in 1IC/2IC.
US in westpac has been thoroughly functionally cooked for years. It just took Iran performance for sensible people to realize how cooked. Not just how not up to task i.e. force balance, but how US tech stack uniquely vulnerable to PRC, who TBF has spend past 10 years of modernization strictly on this issue. NVM PRC can now conventionally hit CONUS as recognized by recent Pentagon China Power report, something PLA watchers have known for years, meanwhile said report still assumes PRC highend missile stockpiles is about size of Irans which is kek territory if not delulu.
TLDR people should stop hopiuming about PRC and evaluate consequences of commodity precision fire for mid tier operators. What Iran can do today, most of Americans can do in 10-15 years, i.e. we are entering a world where CONUS is vulnerable due to tech again (remember US project almost extinguished to wooden British boats). CONUS isolation/security as much man made as god/geographic given. It relies on US expeditionary model containing everyone ability to project fires to their shores. Once that's done, entire US defense model post war breaks. All of which is to say, forget Iran, anticipate Monroe wars in the future.
Reasonably sure given US RoE vs Iran has been extremely permissive, even more permissiveness just means depleting highend munitions faster for same marginal effect. reality is US simply doesn't have the standoff stockpiles - US can go Vietnam / close air but then you'd be dealing with more down pilots and peanut gallery unavoidable. Given that VS PRC is forgone, ROE has nothing to do with fundamental US techstack/stockpile (mis)allocation. If US cannot defeat high end hypersonics at scale then expeditionary model with exquisite tooth/tail logistics cannot survive to reach theatre to deliver standoff munitions, and given most US standoff munitions subsonic, even if they could deliver theoretically they face near 100% interception rate. US would also have to retool basically entire delivery systems around supersonic munitions, which are more expensive, larger, i.e. reduced fire bandwidth. These are geometric not RoE constraints.
Also, if the US doesn't fight for taiwan, will they fight for the phillipines? Malasia? South korea?
1. All but about 10 countries in the world recognize Taiwan as an independent nation. This always seems to get in people's feelings when I point this out but I'm sorry, the One China policy is the official policy of the US and virtually every country on Earth [1];
2. US military policy is that the US is the only country allowed to be a global superpower (aka "hegemon"). Taiwan is a key link in containment, known as the island-chain strategy [2]. If Taiwan falls into China's sphere of influence then that strategy falls apart. And that's really why this Cold War 2.0 narrative has been manufactured;
3. The level of hypocrisy here is insane. Every allegation is a confession. For one thing, China has shown no imperial ambitions. This gets the inevitable "But Tibet!" rejoinder. It was 1950. Let it go. Also, 90% of the people in Tibet prior to annexation were slaves. They have euphemistically been called "serfs" in Western coverage (when it's mentioned at all) but these "serfs" could be traded like property. You know, like slaves. Also, Tibet and the Dalai Lama is a CIA project [3]; If you find yourself on the same side as the CIA, it's probably time to be asking some questions;
4. In the event of a direct military conflict with China, what are the goals? What is the theory of victory between two nuclear powers? The US has been militarily defeated by Iran. Do you think they'd fare better against China? Really? For one thing, China has a virtual monopoly of rare earths, which are essential for all these missile systems and radars we've depleted; and
5. There's no credible fear of a military invasion of Taiwan. Or even a blockade. China's position is simply to leave the question unanswered, which is typically called strategic ambiguity in policy circles. That's the US position as well, officially. China believes the question will resolve all on its own at some point. That may take decades. There's no reason to do anything, particularly when most of the world already recognizes Taiwan as Chinese territory.
Also, China simply does not have the military to invade Taiwan over 100 miles of open ocean. This would likely require half a million to more than a million troops. The amphibious capability simply doesn't exist. Nor does maintaining the supply lines to maintain that. This is also the issue with any invasion of Iran, btw. It's impossible.
So why are we spending so much time drumming up fear of something that doesn't benefit China at all and is impossible to carry out? That question should lead you to the true motive: American imperial interests and the continued sale of arms.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_China
This is usually the point the economy is flipped around into a war-based economy where all output is directed to military equipment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...
The costs of medicare, medicaid and CHIP to tax payers are about what most Europeans pay in tax for universal health care, but then they also need to pay for health insurance for themselves.
As for controlling Hormuz, the US military absolutely could control Hormuz. I'm confident it's quite capable of it. It's that the US public wouldn't support the immense cost in lives and treasure it would take to do it, and maintain that control. No other military could even try, but the the USA could. It's not a matter of lack of military capacity.
Iran military is trying alright.
Complexity.
There are too many parties. There are too many bespoke party-party contract. There are too many new middle-parties being created, with their own contracts. There are too many systems. There's too much tech debt.
That's a reason improvements to the US healthcare system have generally been via HHS/CMS imposing standardization mandates ('or no Medicare payments').
But providers, facilities, and insurers (most operating on low margins) can't be collectively more meta-efficient without simplifying the system.
Single payer / Medicare for all is a critical start not because of coverage, but because of simplicity.
There are so many intractable problems with the current system simply by virtue that changing anything about them requires 100s of parties to update 10,000s of party-party contracts and interfaces.
That's the biggest source of waste in the current system: constant duplicative re-engineering.
Health insurance company margins are meaningless. All the large insurers are actually "pay-viders", meaning they own huge (and growing) chunks of the physicians (providers) they pay out.
Go read STAT's Colossus investigative series on the myriad ways UnitedHealth Group abuses this structure. All the other pay-viders do the same.
Pay-viders can "generate x% profit" for any value of x. They control all the relevant levers, which also by coincidence eliminates any incentive in the entire system to reduce costs.
They are required by law to only make a certain value of x, and so, surprise surprise, they all make x!
Where do you think that money comes from?
You could just delete united healthcare and save bucketloads of money. They don’t actually do anything anyone wants, other than extract money as a middleman.
I never understood these kinds of arguments and they always come from those defending US military might.
Either they can do it or they cannot, if "the US public wouldn't support the immense cost in lives and treasure it would take to do it" is true, which it appears to be, then the US Military cannot control Hormuz.
So it means we aren't fighting in Iran the way we would in defending a hypothetical invasion of the lower 48 states, great.
But does it mean we'd fight any differently in the South China Sea, a Russian incursion into Poland, etc. Unclear, and presidential whim based.
Of course, other Presidents have been willing to put in some sort of effort to make to make a case. And usually have some of theory of victory or purpose. And generally avoid making weird random claims about invading NATO allies.
The entire 25+ year GWOT era has resulted in 7k American military personnel dying.
Vietnam that number was closer to 60K in 8 years, when US population was also 33% lower.
Dramatically different impact on society.
Sending marines to take an island in Hormuz or a carrier under fire in the South China Sea might look a lot closer to Vietnam than GWOT in a hurry.
All the money in the military has gotten us, almost certainly, the ability to conquer virtually any plot of land anywhere on the planet at any time.
But that does not (thankfully) intrinsically generate the political resolve required to do so.
Democracy and markets are beautiful things. It's fantastic that it can constrain even a military as mighty as the US and a commander in chief as braindead as Trump.
I've seen the same logical fallacy used everywhere; including people hyping Russia and China.
They don't though
People always say this, but I suspect Americans are more unhealthy in general and actually need more healthcare per person.
We have a development pattern where people barely walk, but less walk or cycle to work.
I don't see how they could manage that without a full-scale invasion and control of Iran. It's far too easy for Iran to launch drones/torpedoes from small watercraft or from nearby land. I expect they could control Hormuz for a while, but it would be very expensive and I'd expect the logistics to break down fairly quickly if the economics doesn't stop it first.
I suppose "could" here is a bit of a stretch. Like technically, yes, you could if you whipped up your country into enough of a frenzy to support it. Hell, Iraq happened (twice), so I suppose it has historical precedent. And yes, a full-scale invasion of a fully committed US military should absolutely be able to conquer and hold Iran. But I can't imagine any circumstance where that's possibly going to happen in today's reality (outside of an Iranian terrorist event on USA soil, for instance).
I doubt that - Iran is very large and would require something like conscription in the US to get anywhere near the required amount of troops. The US doesn't have a great track record with conquering and occupying other countries.
This is like saying "I could easily afford a Ferrari. It's just that I wouldn't be able to make the interest payments on the loan". Military conquest is more than just guns.
The military might be capable of a ground invasion and succeeding. It would be Pyrrhic. Even if Iran was a genuine nuclear threat (I am not convinced at this point that Iran would launch a nuke at anyone if they had it), is it worth 500k dead Americans?
There was never a path to victory that didn't involve ground troops. We aren't losing in Iran because of military incompetence, but policy incompetence. Previous administrations did not do this because the cost was well understood.
There has never existed a military who could win this conflict without ground invasion. This was understood when this administration started it.
My point is these two things are inseparable, and to conflate them is simply Call of Duty-esque military fantasy. It's a feel good war story that doesn't actually reflect the reality of actually winning a war.
If the US military does not have the ability to hold, occupy, and install allied regime change, then the US military cannot win a war with Iran. You cannot separate the short term wins from the long term objectives. No one looks at Imperial Japan and says "they easily bombed pearl harbor, but due to policy failures they couldn't keep control of the South West Pacific theatre.
The US winning WW2 wasn't just dropping the nukes and high fives. There was rebuilding the Japanese nation, aligned to the US, becoming a long term ally.
This is no different than Afghanistan. Future humans aren't going to look back and say "the US easily controlled Afghanistan for 12 years, and then just returned to the Taliban". The lessons learned will be the US failed to hold Afghanistan and the Taliban returned to power and it was a military failure.
No matter how you dress it up, I can't afford the ferrari.
The USA and its allies could sustain the Afghanistan occupation indefinitely, but chose not to(prematurely, in my opinion).
In Afghanistan, the west chose to lose, but victory was possible. We were(we, I was there in 2010) winning hearts and minds of the younger generation but abandoned them. Another Donald victory.
Iran is an impossible situation.
You can't win a war purely through air superiority and bombs. That's not a new lesson but it's one the administration failed to learn through history and is apparently now failing to learn through practice).
Maritime insurers are understandably conservative. If the ship stays trapped it continues to pay premiums (insurance company wins). If it risks passage it risks a $10M payout (insurance company loses). If there's risk of a single missile the insurers won't allow the ships through. How can an insurance company thousands of miles away stop a ship? "If you risk the passage you're not covered by insurance"
Pretty sure Iran has spent the last 30 years ensuring that they can mount gorilla attacks indefinitely in the face of overwhelming invasion.
That has been their deterrent strategy for decades. Intelligence analysts out front should have told ya.
(A massive invasion would also not open the strait.)
This is a lesson that conservative administrations have refused to learn for decades. I hope Curtis Lemay is experiencing a toasty afterlife for all of the suffering he has caused humanity due to a zealous conviction that aerial bombing campaigns win wars, and his lasting legacy in conservative war strategy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell#Post-war_advoca...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomber_Mafia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_hawk
Big picture, I'd categorize the problem as human nature and "sounds too good to be false".
Notably, one of the largest "Liberal hawks", LBJ, often disagreed head on with Curtis LeMay because LeMay was too insane in his villainous disregard for human life. LeMay's dehumanization of the citizens of foreign nations was on par with Nazism, imo.
I'll give you that Obama and Biden are a black mark on leftwing politics in terms of aerial bombing as they continued the status quo instead of enacting positive change. But the both-sidesism is a bit too much here.
If "aerial bombing as an effective strategy" still means "you can win wars just by dropping enough bombs", I'll disagree. Because that use of "conservative" (simplistic maximum macho force) is equally applicable to Army leaders who want to occupy every square inch of the enemy's territory, or to Navy leaders who want to sink everything associated with the enemy and establish a water-tight blockade.
There's nothing liberal about a political leader reining in a nut case like LeMay. George Wallace quickly regretted his selection of LeMay as his '68 running mate. Or look at America's military actions during President Reagan's terms - for all the big talk and military build-ups, actual military actions were very carefully limited.
But in a very different sense of the word "Conservative", aerial bombing is often extremely Conservative. That sense is minimizing political commitment to a conflict. A leader (with effective air superiority) can drop some bombs or launch some missiles, talk tough about having "delivered a message" - then quietly drop the whole thing, having risked fairly little, and without giving the impression of having failed or retreated. From the PoV of a political leader managing risks, putting boots on the ground would be far less conservative.
Based on this paragraph, I think we are in agreement?
My point is basically that conservative leadership, both within and outside of the military, has sought (and implemented!) simple solutions to complex problems that end up backfiring immensely. In this case, the problem is “enemy country bad”, and the solution is “bomb them submission”. I’m not sure we need to go into details on how that’s a terrible idea?
That’s not to say that liberals don’t put forth simple solutions to complex problems, it’s just that conservatives have successfully implemented obstructionist strategy starting with Newt Gingrich in the 90s, and the closest we’ve come to anything on the national level to liberal policy has been the ACA, which was so hamstrung that it was nearly unrecognizable when compared to the Romneycare it was modeled after. It’s also the stated goal of Project 2025 to roll back nearly all of the progressive policy wins of the Obama and Trump 1 eras (the latter wins coming only via judicial decisions, not executive or legislative).
Boats in the water and boots on the ground can be popular. But it needs a credible story, told by credible sources.
US would lose a land war with Iran. They’d lose it spectacularly too.
In Afghanistan, there are some mountains, but they are in the middle. The Taliban fucked off into the mountains and they couldn't do jack.
Iran on the other hand is a plateau fortress lined by mountains on all (accessible to US/western allies) sides. A land invasion of Iran means no supply lines and no way out. The words "one does not simply" come to mind. It is essentially the ultimate meat grinder unless you can win decisively in days, which is impossible because the entire apparatus you are trying to destroy is distributed within aforementioned mountains and operates with decentralised/autonomous command that has been preparing for this exact eventuality (being invaded by an opponent with vastly more firepower and overwhelming air superiority) for the last 40 years. Not to mention absolute fucking hellscape it will be for troops on the ground with FPV drones and Shahed flying into clusters of US marines and being broadcast on Telegram.
A land invasion of Iran is empire suicide. You can't win, you can't go home and you are left with just pouring an infinite amount of resources and lives into the most asymmetric and geographically hostile theatre of all time.
But the commitment does not exist at present. No one wanted this apart from a few hawks and the Israeli security establishment.
Yeah it's stupid, though with this administration stupid seems to be the flavor they prefer.
2. Running out of munitions is bad but it's the least bad possible problem. We know how to solve it, just pay for higher volume munition purchases. There's no suggestion the missiles don't work well. They actually are quite effective! We just spent the minimum on expendable purchases and bought new carrier groups instead.
Restocking at much much much higher volume than we just spent will cost $50-100 billion, which is not cheap, but is not THAT expensive compared to any other government program (it's like... 2% of our COVID spending). And it's actual effective reindustrialization unlike other uses of the money.
> the reason
>The missiles are principally the Army’s surface-to-surface weapons, known as Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) and Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM). The U.S. has used “virtually all” of these weapons, according to two of the sources.
That quite a bit less of an issue than the headline implies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_States_F-15E_rescu...
Is the general public willing to accept downed planes, captured crews, and botched rescue attempts as the new normal?
One can look at a map of strikes and draw the line on our range, the northeast half of the country is mostly untouched.
Likely son of Ayatollah wanted to get rid of his weak father and Putin wanted the US to stop supplying weapons to Ukraine. So Putin asked Krasnov to get rid of Ayatollah and empty the stockpile of weapons.
Trump always delivers for Russia.
1. https://www.nbcnews.com/world/russia/trump-eases-russian-oil...
2. https://newrepublic.com/post/213566/trump-hoarding-billions-...
Once this misadventure is over, Israel goes to be the dominant power in the area, controlling the energy resources, with Arabs on the leash, US out of the area, and all potential regional rivals destroyed or neutered. note they are now shifting their aggressive propaganda against Turkey.
Here's a point that I ran across: these long range missiles are there to take out air defences and such (along with stealth sorties), which allows you go go in with 'regular' ordinance and non-stealth aircraft—of which there is much higher quantities and availability—in later phases.
In the early phases of the conflict you use stand-off munitions to reduce the chances of people being captured or killed.
Because Trump doesn't really have approval for this escapade (from either Congress or public opinion) these 'fancy' munitions are the ones primary being used to reduce the risk of casualties.
Now, trying to reduce casualties is not a bad thing per se, but the trade-off is that the fancy stuff is more expensive and takes longer to (re-)build-up. And what if there are other conflicts that flare up where these munitions would be useful? If they're not available do you start using piloted aircraft?
I heard the commander in chief is not only acing cognitive tests and winning golf championships, left and right, due to TALENT.
They also are completely vindicated of all accusations, the most powerful man in the history of the world and taken very seriously by some of the stupidest, weakest people to ever exist.
When you have all that going for you and a comfortably filled diaper, what on earth could go wrong!?
Not ATACMS. SEAD is an Air Force/Navy activity.
Hopefully, the same can be said to Russia war of aggression and both conflicts stop killing civilians and destroying their infrastructure.
But I do not see, that either conflict stops because an aggressor runs out of ammunition.
When I get a $150,000 bill for a 15-minute hand-reconstruction surgery, how much of that bill is the total margin vs self cost? And how much of that is warranted / acceptable?
When a single Tomahawk missile bills the taxpayer $3,600,000, how much of that bill is the total margin? When I say "total margin", I mean not just the margin of the company that builds the Tomahawk itself, but the margins of all the components that were used in it -- every last bolt and every ounce of aluminum.
There's the cost that the employees pocket, and then there's the share that the shareholders pocket, right? Doesn't "margin" represent the latter?
It’s not like you get to the end of the chain and trade a fistful of dollars with the ingot of aluminum itself.
But isn't there a conceptual difference between the "owners" of the Tomahawk factory vs. the people who are actually putting the missiles together?
Those workers are often organized and unionized. They exert tremendous political influence to, say, require the factories to employ unionized labor and extract above market wages. Surely the differential between union and market wage should factor into your margin calculation?
The factory owners are only too happy to oblige. If you have a cost-plus contract with the government (so a contract that guarantees a certain margin), then the only way to get more absolute profit is to have higher costs. Defense procurement is best thought of as being totally price insensitive. In fact, almost everyone in the chain benefits from higher costs: the workers, the suppliers, the corporations, the military leadership, the politicians, and their constituents. The only people hurt are those future casualties of a less capable national defense, mainly soldiers.
I worked in aerospace and know a bit about this. Say you want to make a missile. Well, you better have the paperwork for literally every component to show that the metal used in all of it originates from a foundry in one of a tiny handful of countries.
It is funny to see the same story every time. It's all burdensome regulation by the nanny state until something goes very very wrong and the public wants answers NOW, at which point it's incompetent government getting led by the nose by monied interest groups and their public relations departments.
Contracts are announced daily during the week. https://www.war.gov/news/contracts/
I provided the Wikipedia link to explain this contract structure because most people working outside defense have never heard of it. I didn't hear of it myself until talking to someone awarding defense research contracts, where these kinds of contracts are the norm. The Tomahawk missile contracts are not cost-plus, as you have said.
Most of these companies are public and you can find their stats.
A Tomahawk missile is $3.6 million because it uses specialty components, all made in small batches using very expensive American specialist labor. It's also staggeringly more capable than a drone, or a shahed. Those extra capabilities are enormously expensive, because they are hyper niche.
A single American Artillery Shell is $3000.
Meanwhile, your $150k surgery bill example is completely different. It's a fake number, made up to cause a process to generate an actual, intended price somewhere. Your insurer and the hospital play some insane game of chicken where the insurance promises only to pay a percentage of what they are billed and so the hospital submits a fake number to get what they actually want (or nowadays the system is even more byzantine)
I wanna know what they've been doing with our trillions of dollars, because it sure as heck wasn't making an effective military.
But I don’t understand the fixation of US in middle east theatre. With the abundance of onshore oil through fracking revolution, presumably US doesn’t need to police the Middle East. The president himself said US doesn’t need their oil.
So what is this conflict all about? Is there bigger geopolitical price tag attached to victory in Iran? Or US is just besieged by corruption to the extent campaign finding from Israel lobby as they say dictated much of the foreign policy than national interest?
It’s just baffling and public seems largely fine with this with the lack of widespread protest that this should have caused (vaguely remember living across the bridge from Michigan all the protests there post Iraq war).
Get ready for the mother of all tax increases.
I think at least three might be at play here.
Guess who I'm talking about.
FTFY. Times are changin'
The US has stocks and production, but EU and china, trumps favorite economical targets, do not.
No proof to offer, but it fits with his other move when it come to economy.
They simply can't admit to themselves what they did, the guilt alone would be paralyzing.
They're the only country that actually benefits from all these misguided Middle Eastern adventures, and it's not like it's just one, there's a pattern and it's always the same
Iran has funded terrorism and religious extremism in the region leading to massive death tolls in many of them. Not to mention Iranians themselves.
Oil funds predominantly along with theft and ransoms according to the EU near ISIS's peak [1]. This was while the US was still directly fighting ISIS in Afghanistan and Iraq.
1: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/IDAN/2017/6038...
You need to be a bit more specific with exactly what you mean by “religious” extremism, you seem to be conflating things that are in many ways opposite
> With the abundance of onshore oil through fracking revolution
Fracking isn't free of consequences, and while the current US gov doesn't care about them, people are directly affected and are rightfully pissed about it.
Bombing/invading foreign countries to get the oil is obviously not the right approach, but relying on fracking isn't a clean solution either.
Whether they succeed at it or not is an open question, but it seems clear that’s what it was about. Take operation midnight hammer last July. That was clearly only about the nuclear issue.
The whole "Death to America" and USA is the "Great Satan" make them a much more morally easy target given they have practically no ability to fight back.
From what I can tell, it's as much extremism of "democracy", religion, and a version of "manifest destiny" as anything else
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clean_Break:_A_New_Strategy_...
The TikTok deal happened because too many young people were being exposed to anti Zionist content. It’s illegal to criticize Israel in many regions of the US, but not illegal to criticize the US. It’s illegal to boycott Israeli companies in many states, but not US companies. This war on Iran hurts everybody because of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, except for Israel who now has a severely diminished adversary to their regional dominance. It’s not even a secret, Israeli’s boast about this on social media and have a whole hit list of countries they want the US to attack. Turkey is next on the list so expect to start seeing more seemingly random antagonistic rhetoric from the US about Turkey.
In 2004, the FBI investigated Chalabi after U.S. intelligence sources revealed that he was working as a double agent for Iran.[2] Perle was also involved in efforts to develop alternative intelligence estimates to help justify the decision to go to war in Iraq. He and other neoconservative leaders claimed that the intelligence community had grossly underestimated threats to the national security of the U.S.[2] Thus, they established two secret offices in the Pentagon after September 11 – the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group and the Office of Special Plans.[2] Nonetheless, Perle helped manage and hire neoconservative affiliated staff for both these organizations that created their own policies and intelligence reports by dodging existing government entities.[2] Perle's reasoning for implementing the Office of Special Plans was essentially to "bring in people with fresh eyes to review the intelligence that the CIA and other agencies had collected."[2] In an interview with CNN on September 16, 2001, Perle announced "Even if we cannot prove to the standards that we enjoy in our own civil society that they were involved, we do know, for example, that Saddam Hussein has ties to Osama Bin Laden ..."[17] Flynt Leverett, a senior staff member of the Bush National Security Council states: "There were constant efforts to pressure the intelligence community to provide assessments that would support their views. If they couldn't get what they wanted out of the intelligence community, they simply created their own intelligence."[2] Moreover, Perle allegedly gave several speeches and talks throughout Europe trying to promote the war effort abroad. He allegedly told the British House of Commons that the U.S. would attack Iraq even if UN weapons inspectors didn't find anything.[2] Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell announced that Perle was "making remarks as if he were an official inside the U.S. government."[2] In countries like Germany, France, Britain, and Japan, people perceived him as a government authority whose knowledge and clout on U.S. policy appeared legitimate.[2]
1. After the midterms, we'll get a read on how much AIPAC is still able to buy congressmen.
2. Before Trump obeyed Israel and bombed Iran, we had the illusion of being invincible. But now, we are faced with the brut reality that we cannot guarantee the flow of oil through the Hormuz straight, nor almost anywhere else in that whole hemisphere. Even to Europe: Ask Putin how much drones have changed the game.
This really eliminates any remaining motivations to keep pricing oil in USD. Which removes most of the motivations for the world to keep financing our deficit.
At this point our best option is to just leave the region, and try to transition to renewables absolutely as fast as we can. Oh, and raise taxes on everybody, because demand for our bonds is going to crater.
An optimist would say:
America doesn't like Iran because it's a theocratic dictatorship that funds terrorist groups throughout the region, supplies drones to Russia, fires missiles at the only democracy in the region (Israel) and is pursuing nuclear weapons.
As energy markets are global, middle east politics impacts America's vital national interests, and prices consumers pay at the pump, even if America is a net exporter of oil.
Iran had a series of nationwide protests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025%E2%80%932026_Iranian_prot... indicating there was widespread popular support for a new, less theocratic government.
Trump thought they could go in with a surgical strike, knock out the theocratic leaders and the nuclear facilities, enabling the protesters to overthrow the remains of the government, while the army steps back like we saw in the 2011 Egyptian revolution. Then they'd turn into a peace-loving democracy, and Trump would go down in history as having defeated one of America's long-term antagonists, making him a winner and a tough guy, and really showing Obama how it's done.
A cynic would say:
Trump wanted a distraction from the Epstein files (which this war has 100% delivered) and/or a country that wanted this war to happen has the Epstein evidence to blackmail him with.
Having deliberately installed loyal incompetents in leadership positions, even though military planners were 100% aware the Strait of Hormuz would get closed, and that their drones are an order of magnitude cheaper than our drone interceptors, that knowledge was dismissed by the executive.
Being able to make oil prices rise and fall by tweeting is an easy way to make money if you're exempt from the justice system.
Having the war drag on might not be good for Republican performance in the midterm elections - but Trump can't run for a third term, so he doesn't much care if the party is left in a shambles.
You have to understand that the US is an arms dealer empire. We now spend >$1T/year on the military and a huge chunk of it is basically looting government coffers. Pretty much all post-WW2 moves by the US can be boiled down to selling weapons to somebody, sometimes both sides.
There is no pie anywhere in the world that the US doesn't have a finger in in some way unless they can't (eg China can't be bullied in this way). Global trade is a complex web. And even though the US is a net energy exporter now, there are second-order effects if, in the mind of US administrations, other countries start denying oil to allies, for example.
[1]: https://www.theenergymix.com/no-one-goes-to-war-over-a-solar...
We usually don't act until the number of reasons to act reaches a threshold. We were slow to get into World War 2 as well. We wanted to act against Iran, but it was never the right time. Now with Russia, China, Venezuela and Cuba threatening war with their neighbors, the cost of not acting is too great if this network solidifies their cooperation against the US. Communists have been getting propped up all over the place, which is what we were seeing before World War 2, as communists believed they needed to achieve total global domination since they could not coexist with capitalism.
Iran has attempted to assassinate the US president multiple times as well as Netanyahu and carried out many assassinations around the world which it denied even when caught undeniably.
Russia got nukes, China got nukes, North Korea got nukes. There was every indication that Iran was aiming for nukes as well. You can't treat them like other countries that have nuclear programs, because most of those countries don't comingle with such bad actors. Similar to the communist party that wanted to control the world, Iran also has a radical group that wants to bring about the apocalypse to resurrect their prophet.
Russia also attacked Ukraine, Iran attacked Israel, but Venezuela was also going to attack its neighbor and Cuba was expanding its interference inside the US. You don't hear much about it, but it was important. It lines up with one of China's strategies to soak up US attention with crises to open up a window to take Taiwan.
If you are asking what actual information the US is acting on and what the underlying reasoning is, THIS is actually the reason. The details are vast and this is a massive abbreviation and some I haven't even mentioned even though they're relevant. People will link you to random junk, but every country has thinktanks and policymakers who get together and decide what is important for the country to act on. Who decide what the threats are and where a country's energies are best spent. These are the actual reasons. It's not simply "Israel" this or "Israel" that.
Indeed, you left out the time cube.
The evangelical Christians who are among the largest of the Republican Party's voting blocs believe that the biblical "end times" are nigh, but Jesus Christ won't return to bring peace and prosperity until the middle east is destroyed by war[0][2][3] (often called armageddon[1]).
And, as Peter Medawar (quite correctly) observed[4] some years ago:
The USA is so enormous, and so numerous are its schools, colleges and
religious seminaries, many devoted to special religious beliefs ranging from
the unorthodox to the dotty, that we can hardly wonder at its yielding a more
bounteous harvest of gobbledygook than the rest of the world put together.
[0] https://www.tomorrowsworld.org/booklets/the-middle-east-in-p...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armageddon
[2] https://harvest.org/resources/gregs-blog/post/israel-iran-bi...
[3] https://theconversation.com/as-iran-war-expands-some-conserv...
Suspicious me likens it to the supposed "water shortage deception" at Midway in WW2 https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2024/december/bat...
Slightly concerned that there could be an unreported tit-for-tat. China "allegedly" arming/equipping Iran to perhaps the USA coverty planting unbalancing arms and equipment to Taiwan. The Ukraine (and Iran?) theater has shown how drone warfare has changed the game. A nation without a navy can now inexpensively counter a nation with one (ongoing 2-for-2 at the moment).
Wow, yeah, you'd need to have morons at the top of the chain of command and subordinates afraid to speak out in order for something like that to happen. Nothing like the US government today at all.
Are you trolling
From a military standpoint, yes. You have to have your head buried in the sand to think we didn’t have significant loss of military assets in the region.
That's why even in the nuclear Navy, as crazy as they are about reactor safety, they would train and preach continuously that "safety of ship" is more important than reactor safety, because the reactor is not safe if the ship is not safe.
None of that seems like it jibes with your description.
So again - the execution shows significant tactical competence. But the strategic direction is absolutely disastrous.
strategic failure - iran shrugged it off and now are causing massive damage to world economy with no end in sight.
The US has been consistently tactically excellent. Strategically this is a blundering loss.
If you strategically aim your awesome unmatched powers the wrong way you can still lose.
Our ability to defend our allies in the region is non existent, and we lost almost all of our radar capabilities which will take a decade minimum to rebuild. That’s assuming hostilities end tomorrow.
The real question is whether political objectives are achieved. In Iran, those were vaguely defined to begin with, but depending on the moment and mood of the President they were:
1. Prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon now or in the foreseeable future (Not Achieved)
2. Remove Iran’s theocratic anti-American regime (Not Achieved)
3. Maintain international access to key shipping routes (Negative Achieved, much worse than pre-war status quo)
So after spending billions of dollars, depleting stockpiles of our most modern precision weapons against a vastly inferior military technologically, losing 18 American lives and resulting in both global economic disruption and to our Gulf allies, the war has failed to accomplish any objectives and left everyone in a worse position than before the war except the IRGC.
These costs are continuing since there is no end in sight and it seems the US is running out of some of the equipment it has used.
Iran gained straight of hormuz. It gained chuckpaz and confidence too. It is now itching to play major regional power
As is, the US can stand-off and torment Iran for a very, very long time.
$31 trillion economy. $94,000 GDP per capita (nearly 3x Japan for reference). The US can spend $100 billion annually on bombing Iran for the next decade entirely without harming its economy in a meaningful way.
The US doesn't have to let off. Iran is pinned, massively eroded, and the US is only losing money. Iran has lost all of its proxies, its military is entirely broken (and fully capable of waging a guerrilla conflict), its navy is gone, its airforce is gone, its military manufacturing is substantially eroded, and Russia is boiling. The reason the US is going back and forth on peace, is for the same exact same reason it's in the US interest to bleed Russia. It's this: let's pretend we want peace, while we endlessly grind Iran down.
And the reasons for bombing Iran are...?
You could argue they'd never use their power unless attacked, but I don't think you can be certain of that. It comes down to if you can accept that a non-rational actor can be allowed to have this power (or nuclear weapons for that matter).
Now that the cat is out of the bag it would be a terrible idea not to finish the job and make sure Iran doesn't have this power ever again.
At the time of the Iraq war the US was holding all the cards. It had a perfected playbook, the optimal technology, and support from the population. In the Iran war the old playbook is ineffective, the technology is too expensive to keep it up, and the popular support for a war demanded by another country isn't there.
And yes... you have the current crop of leaders who couldn't lead their way out of a wet paper bag.
What in your view makes these ones proven and other ones not proven?
Meanwhile Iran is in rough shape
You must see the difference between us being unhappy that gas is more expensive, versus somebody living in Iran worrying that their entire government and country is in chaos.
Obviously this war is bad for a bunch of reasons, but the US is completely fine at home relatively.
With the exception of total wars, the domestic standard of living has very little to do with how well or not a foreign war is going.
How good Americans are living is a non-sequitur with regards to the war objectives set by the political and military leaders in Washington and Tehran. War, being politics by other means, has to be measured by political objectives. The average American didn't even notice when America relinquished control of Afghanistan to the Taliban, amd yet it was a clear-cut failure to achieve GW's stated goals.
A gross understatement.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=E...
Zoom in on this year and you'll see it's below $3 a gallon in January and February, then by the end of March it's over $4 and mostly above after that. That's a 33% increase. That's a substantial and sustained hike in a short time.
Right now, the US is half-heartedly trying to bomb Iran into submission, something that in the entire history of aerial warfare has worked exactly once (and even that one time is debatable).
The title of TFA confirms the attempt is wholehearted: It's just not working as well as it did in Venezuela (where leadership was captured, rather than killed).
Venezuela worked because it had much clearer and more limited goals (capture Maduro, vs regime change spark a revolution hammer out an agreement on nukes who knows what) and boots were put on the ground to accomplish those goals. Venezuela was not bombed into submission. Like I said, that has happened exactly once ever (or maybe not even), and that one time involved weapons that nobody is willing to use again (and rightfully so).
It's absolutely a strategic failure to enter into a war without sufficient munitions or logistical capability to sustain the war.
It’s not as if the US, a few years ago, said it needed way more long-range precision weapons in 2026, and didn’t get them, despite promises to the contrary.
Someone higher up the chain of command: "Fire the missiles, or I'll replace you with someone who will"
Venezuela was a raid, not a full on war. And it was so lopsided it was like putting Michael Jordan against a 10-year-old and based on that performance determining that Jordan is the GOAT. It demonstrated that against a remarkably unprepared and unready opponent the US can do well, which tells you nothing about the US's capabilities in actual warfare against a peer, near peer, or just damned determined opponents.
> Russia tried at Hostomel, didn't go so well.
That was not a comparable action to the Maduro raid. The raid was an in-and-out operation, with no need to control any territory for a significant period. Hostomel was a battle over control of territory.
The US military is quite powerful.
Donald Trump is a moron.
Pete Hegseth is also a moron whose only qualification is that he looks like what the moron Donald Trump imagines someone playing his role would look like in the movies/TV.
Iraqi invasion was 23 years ago. Again, almost everyone who was part of the initial invasion is out of service. I wouldn't call the occupation of either Afghanistan or Iraq "extremely competent." More like the exact opposite.
Shame the wonder weapon didn't surface in Ukraine nor in Iran nor in Yemen where it was desperately needed.
But we hear about the wonder weapon and how wonderful it was on TV. Must be really true :).
Hey now! Let's not forget that half of congress is also complicit.
This is a concerning statement, as it implies it'd be impossible for the United States to lose an engagement regardless of any and all evidence.
As much as I want to believe mainstream media, what is verifiable opinion vs state sponsored media and propaganda?
Or are we not supposed to think and assume all headlines are real?
Let’s stop pretending that the only reason Iran isn’t glass at the moment is because of the good will of the US.
Unbelievable.
Not committing a crime against humanity is not “good will”.
The article didn't mention anything about US strategic or tactical nuclear weapons, though that must be a fantasy of yours (along with the Chimp in the Whitehouse).
You feel better?
The US's stockpile of conventional precision munitions and the US's nuclear arsenal are two very different things. The depth of one has little to do with the other.
The US hasn't run out of precision conventional munitions, but it is running low. There's no reason this should come as a surprise. The US has been fighting a medium intensity air war for months without making any move to ramp up production of those munitions.
The reason Iran isn't glass is because doing otherwise would be a global catastrophe, and even the assholes in charge don't want to go down as the worst mass murderers in human history.
Russia kept saying its the second most powerful military in the world and now it's the second most powerful military in Ukraine. You can't just keep saying words and then think they're true because you keep repeating them.
There's no secret US weapons factories hidden away somewhere, the inadequacy of the US industrial base to maintain production for long term war have been known for decades and were in some sense even an intentional shift after the end of the Cold War.
The thing which has changed is the nuclear threat is almost just, losing interest? Yes any one of a handful of nations could launch a strike that would kill tens of millions and start a war that would kill billions but... why? A teenager could build in their garage that can take down a ship or a particular room in a building a thousand miles away so what's the point of vaporizing civilians? It is exclusively a weapon for genocide now and it seems like mutually assured destruction is an ending doctrine it's a weapon for a madman and there are just so many easier options to accomplish any goal.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20220313151414/https://www.usnew...
The funniest thing I've seen with the Ukraine war (if it's not AI) is an old prop plane with it's canopy removed and the dude in the rear seat shooting down a drone with his automatic rifle. We're going to get Top Gun: RC Mini Edition in the next armed conflict and it's going to seem like a video game.
It will then become just another threat, and one that is managed well enough to no longer be a david v. goliath kind of weapon.
The Midway water shortage deception was a way to gain a tactical, followed by strategic advantage.
Running out of missiles is an "incovenient truth" for the zionist pro-war crowd. History is littered with innumerable examples of political leaders not adequately considering ground-truth military and logistical realities (Confederates fighting in Pennsylvania, Germans invading Russia, etc.).
That the US decided to expend it's precision weapon stockpile on a conflict of choice with no ground or dumb bombing campaign to fallback on is a mystery for later generations. It is not unbelievable that Iran is capable of blocking a dumb bombing campaign indefinitely, or that the viable targets for such a campaign are politically untenable.
There is no mystery. A dumb bombing campaign requires air superiority, and Iran actually has reasonable anti-air defense. They're not a bunch of guys running around with AK-74s.
The US absolutely can achieve that. But it _will_ result in aircraft losses, and it requires detailed planning. Both of these are not acceptable anymore.
To help put that in perspective versus Iraq: Iran's GDP today is a ~7x stronger than Iraq's was (in 2003) relative to the US GDP at each time. In other words, bigger economy, better-equipped military.
Plus having ~2x the population, and ~3x the land area.
I would argue that you are right with Ukraine vs Russia since the former has sunk so many of latter's assets. But that has not been the case with US vs Iran.
Sadly, I find it very believable. To build them costs lots of time and money. To use them, not so much. Going low tech might risk more casualties in some cases - and so all the political problems that follow along from that.
We've also seen plenty of wishful thinking from the civilian leaders of the military. I'm sure that in their minds, each strike they launch is surely the one that will finally break Iran, better hit them with the good stuff, shock and awe.
They've also been purging all kinds of top military officers, presumably over culture war issues and insufficient sycophancy.
The cretins in charge of the country think the problem is that the soldiers don't have enough testosterone and have too much facial hair, and these people are capable of this next-level deception of the enemy? I don't think so.
Their idea of an army is the movie "300" - on oiled up, violent homoerotic phantasy. Soon, that's what's going to be actually left.
In previous conflicts the US military could get a lot done with bombs, but that's risky if you can't get air superiority and take out all enemy anti-air systems. Which is more difficult against an enemy who can shoot at your air bases and aircraft carriers. But those previous conflicts might have contributed to a false sense of security about required missile stockpiles
The issue is general industrial capacity, not missiles specifically.
Problem is you put a crew and an expensive airplane at risk.
We are out of missiles because the current administration wants to minimize combat losses. Looking at the dollar cost; it seems like a bad idea. But is this war worth any of our soldiers / sailors / airman ? (no)
If you have 10 targets and use atacms in all 10, there's something wrong in the decision making process or the strategy.
like waging a war while insisting they aren't really waging a war and it's just a special military operation and as a side effect having effectively no access to a lot of the resources/means normally used
but AI generated that target list so its all good!
"900 strikes on Iranian targets in the first 12 hours"
"1,000 targets were struck in the first 24 hours"
"2,000 targets in 96 hours"
keep shooting, Im sure those are all good targets and totally not a waste of ammo
I don't think so. This observation completely misses the root cause, and it ain't missiles.
Armed forces size their stockpiles in terms of their short term needs focused on rapid reaction and deterrence. The goal is to be able to react to immediate threats and then shift the economy to a war economy to supply the effort in economically efficient ways.
What failed this time is that the trump administration was hoping to attack Iran without having to declare war, effectively starting a war without preparing for the war.
The results are obvious: the peace time stockpile was depleted at a time where the country was not prepared to replenish it. Trump shifter the us armed forces to deplete their stockpile while avoiding the responsibility of supporting them in their mission by taking care of supplies.
And so they ran out of ammo.
There are further compounding factors such as a lack of plan and lack of exit strategy. But placing your military in a state where they spend their ammo without any plan to ressuply it... You will have the same problem if you replace hellfire missiles with sticks and stones.
You're missing the whole point. The point is not that missiles are easy to build. The point is that military interventions planned not only to prop up logistics but also to accommodate for supply constraints. There is no plan on earth that consists of firing a constant barrage of expensive missiles, and instead you have armed forces planning around using dumb and cheap alternatives that are easier to source and provision.
And Trump did nothing of the sort. There was no plan, no exit strategy, nothing. Not even a war declaration to kickstart the country's logistics infrastructure. Of course ammo runs out if there is no plan to provision it.
> This isn't the 1940s anymore where you can convert every car factory into making tanks and missiles.
That's also another point you missed. Trump even failed to mobilize the infrastructure to supply with basic ordnance. There is no plan.
Pay attention to what you are saying yourself: how do you start a war when you don't even secure your own supply needs for the first weeks of the engagement?
It’s just silly to think that the US has the domestic manufacturing base left to do such a thing short of generational scale timelines. The line workers you need in those plants are in grade school today. Better start introducing machine shop again!
Trump could have decided day one of his admin he wanted to do this, told everyone, and held off until the last day of his presidency to fire the first shot. At best you’d get a couple more weeks of ammo.
It’s a pure fantasy to think US arms manufacturers - even given a blank check and nationalized - could get a supply chain going in under a few years. We do not even have the semi-skilled manufacturing talent to spin up such a base, much less the latent capabilities to easily pivot.
Sure there is no plan. Having one would not have helped much either. You can’t plan your way out of having spent three generations outsourcing your industrial base.
The WWII comparisons are laughable. Today the US would still be getting factories on-line by the same time the atomic bombs were dropped. We would have a whole cycle just learning how to build things again - much less actually build them.
To build ammo at a “all out war” scale you would need entirely different weaponry designed foremost to be rapidly built. You cannot rapidly scale up manufacturing of current designs. If we could, we already would have since there is effectively an unlimited decade out backlog of demand for just Patriot missiles and has been for close to half a decade already. The common rebuttal that a factory would need 30 years of increased demand to make the investment worthwhile proves the point.
I don't think so. The US military still has the same Gulf War kind of punch. It's the same armed forces that supported multiple large scale military engagements and outright invasions without requiring changes to it's economy.
But that requires preparation and planning.
Trump did nothing of the sort, and forced the us military into an untenable position. The same armed forces that could easily occupy both Afghanistan and Iraq can't even support a limited engagement with Iraq until they started running out of ammo. That tells you everything about the level of planning that went into this mess.
I don't know that that's the case. There are almost certainly plans for a long deep ongoing offensive campaign. But you can't do an ongoing campaign and keep saying it's a short term thing and expect logistics to work.
And blames Biden for this mess. "Oh... the cupboards were bare when I came back...". If you KNEW you were running low on supplies, why start a war? There's enough general answers to this, all revolving around his immaturity, lack of intelligence and the cult around him - the truth is somewhere in the middle of all that...
US could indiscriminately drop dumb bombs but you would have a higher civilian casualty rate.
Except not really. If they were willing to risk sending many aircraft deep into Iranian airspace with SDBs and JDAMs they wouldn't be running out of ballistic missiles.
Saw the video taken by the US service men. In movies you see US soldiers yelling "go go go" while in the battlefield we saw them scream "run run run".
Your confidence in claiming air superiority is commendable. Keep it up.
If you follow world news from non-western-propaganda-sources, you would know, the fighter jets shoot without entering Iranian airspace to stay clear of Iranian home made anti air defense and heat seeking tech along with potential russian and Chinese air defense.
Entering Iranian airspace has been costly for US as witnessed by the famous shootdowns of multiple jets over the course of last several months.
I thought you wanted explanation of how air superiority is acheived.
Apparently you think it can be acheived without logistics and refueling.
What is the need of evidence when you have magic by your side. So no - those fighter jets were not shot down. Magic saved them. You were right all along.
A maximally preopositioned/prepared/postured US + Israel suckering punching Iran was able to briefing maintain air superiority through select regions, but the minute Iran reorganized and hit CENTCOM basing, US lost sortie generation rate to maintain air superiority. Land basing / sustainment ~70% of theatre sortie generation, US carriers / long range bombers good supplementary door kickers, but they can't sustain enough fires generation to suppress Iran, hence US forced to burn standoff stockpile - because shit tier air defense network + theater level precision strike complex (missiles) allows even crippled Iran to deny US air superiority and ability to prosecute cheap dump bomb war. Reminder to get even to the temporary air superiority (which was only established on select areas) US+Israel had to expend mass amounts of high end munitions, and push high tempo logistics to shape battlefield, can't do that anymore without land basing, and US logistically incapable for sustaining / surging 6-8 carriers to backfill sortie.
Now highend standoff munitions are functional substitute for air superiority for hitting targets, not whole tactic replacement, i.e. no CAS, hence it's an expensive fallback, but only if there is enough munitions to sustain, which currently there isn't.
The way I see it you are inferring “US abandoned air superiority” from losses and reduced sortie generation. That may be your assessment, but it isn’t demonstrated by the evidence you’ve cited.
[1] https://www.centcom.mil/MEDIA/PUBLIC-RELEASES/Article/445196... [2] https://www.centcom.mil/MEDIA/
Your article just demonstrate operations continued, but we now know with hindsight those operations are standoff operations i.e. they're not air superiority operations. Or else Hegseth would be bragging about #s of JDAMs dropped along with energy drinks consumed instead of articles about "virtually all" of high end precision strike being depleted.
My assessment comports with reality - Iranian attrition made US abandon air space control, aka air superiority bombing campaign which US force structure can sustain indefinitely for standoff war which US can't sustain for more than a few months. Being able to standoff strike Iran =/= air superiority, overflying Iran enmass and dropping cheap bombs is air superiority. US is not overflying Iran enmass, and it's not because detente, it's because US can't operationally justify/sustain it. US can't operationally sustain air superiority because CENTCOM land based force multipliers are too vulnerable, and without force multipliers you're left with carrier aviation, that itself Iran pushed to standoff range and hence can only deliver stand off munitions.
>You still haven’t shown evidence that Iran denied US control of the air. You’re inferring that from force preservation and munitions usage.
The evidence is drumroll, US no longer overflying Iran, when in every other war in recent memory US had not just air superiority but air supremacy. The evidence is also US expending high % of global interceptors, which means US is functionally not capable of defending CENTCOM land basing. If US cannot defend CENTCOM land basing, US can not operate force multipliers, i.e. tankers, awacs at scale/tempo to sustain air control. Keep in mind Iran is 5x the size of Iraq and during Iraq US had more carriers and regional coalition assets to sustain a longer / broader air campaign. Taken together signs point to Iran's continued ability to generate fires, or rather US inability to defend against Iranian fires + inability to blunt Iranian fires to make CENTOM land basing viable.
The TLDR is US does not have enough stand off munition to defang Iran from hitting CENTCOM and not enough interceptors in CENTOM to blunt Iranian fires. Ergo US does not have the force posture for air supremacy anymore, and the only time it did was when it had ample standoff munitions, ample interceptors that could keep Iranian fires comprehensively suppressed. Now it has neither, so it is not in a state of reestablish air superiority let along supremacy, unless there is global stockpiles to try again, but ineffectively shifting more earth while Iranian drones and TELs chill in hardened tunnels is something something insanity doing same thing expecting different results, expect keep doing same thing undermines US global posture.
Every analysis is inference - evidence is US stopped overflight/airspace control efforts because we can infer from operational behavior and how it relates to stockpile levels and expenditures that US cannot maintain air superiority posture. Standoff strikes is definitionally NOT air superiority strikes, mounting news of US keep draining standoff stock pile to hit Iran is not reflection US has superiority but more evidence US does not. CENTCOM CONTINUING CONDUCTING STRIKES =/= AIR SUPERIORITY, WHICH DEFINITIONALLY HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ABILITY TO CONDUCT STRIKES. Go to pedantic layer and draw from formal DoD definitions (counterair operations manual), US operationally at "air parity" (below air superiority/supremacy), one can argue US has stockpiles reestablish superiority/supremacy but US operational behavior right now suggest theatre is at parity.
Interceptor stocks is not strained. It's functionally finished. US unlikely move more to CENTCOM without breaking US global security architecture, everything that can reasonably be repositioned has been. The fact that Iran fires getting through regularly = what is there is not enough. This last reply, feel free to disagree.
In the case of an war (like you know, a war-war) the US is perfectly capable of ramping up manufacturing to ungodly numbers (but it won't be cheap). I would however like to see what Ukraine does, if they get the go-ahead to start making Patriot missiles. They probably won't just do a run of 50 or 100 missiles and call it a day.
Evidence? Genuinely curious. I read that for every ship the US can build, China can build 200. Our drones come from China. Have we got a magic tomohawk cruise missile factory that can be dialed up to the rate that China can produce? We have the raw materials pipeline and know-how still?
US missile production is extremely, painfully slow. From Standard missiles used by the Navy to Patriot. From THAAD to PrSM. LRASM, Tomahawk, you name it, we have a Tiffany weapons arsenal. We're winning so much, we just put the F-15 back into production; a plane that entered service 50 years ago.
Historians used to mock the Nazis for continually developing wunderwaffe; while the Allies overwhelmed them with Sherman and T-34 tanks. Now we've become the Nazis (in so many more ways than one.)
Please don't post snark on HN, no matter how right you are or feel you are. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
How about you find a better job than policing speech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech
Do you wear the police uniform as well while you are about it.
We want this to be a place where difficult topics can be discussed and all points of view can be expressed, and we work hard to keep it that way. If you’re not interested in bothering making your points thoughtfully, there’s the whole rest of the internet for you to explore.
"ungodly numbers", false & violates economics - thoughtful to you.
"source - trust me bro. <Followed by verifiable reasons>" - you found snarky.
Talk about hypocrisy. Is truth too hurtful for you.
Where we hang out to explore is none of your concern. If you don't like truths, remain here and keep doing what you are doing.
Who knows, I never had any incentive to put up a similiar page, but now I may have one, where falsehood and hypocritical policing will be dealt with appropriately.
If you can't handle uncomfortable truths, you probably never built anything let alone lecture on what constitutes solid points.
The US is not doing amazing in this war but no need to give the Iranians too much credit. The Iranians are expanding a lot of resources of their own as much as this war drags on.
It is still very early to say how a country will fare considering that it ran out of water and was on a verge of economic breakdown and revolt before fighting a prolonged war with economic blockade of its main export.
In any case, Iran is not in a prime position either, it has many economic assets that can be completely destroyed as it has no air defense and then leave them in a much worse situation, while the only real damage they can do to the US is by attacking their own neighbors
"The estimated cost of the war in Vietnam during the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations was $176 billion."
Adjusted for inflation, that is $1,192 billion in 2026 dollars.
"The longest war in American history had significant economic effects both domestically and internationally in terms of what was spent on the war and what expenses had to be cut."
It's their relentless deindustrialization that will eventually do them in. The USA's industrial output back in WWII was staggering, its enemies had little hope of victory given the sheer number of materiel that would eventually get deployed. Since then they've been voluntarily giving up much of that industrial advantage out of greed.
Losing is what happened to Germany after both World Wars.
It's laughable to use such a silly euphemism to imply America was not defeated! The North Vietnamese won. Get over it.
copium
> It's their relentless deindustrialization that will eventually do them in
Agree, China has already won, at this point a lot of the world sees them as a more sane option than USA as well which is a nuts timeline
The rest of the world is finding China a more predictable and stable trading partner than the USA.
The US inflicted an order of magnitude more casualties than the ~60k deaths they suffered in Vietnam. The US has proven its willingness to withstand much greater losses: ~300k deaths in WWII, ~200k deaths in its civil war.
They did a staggering amount of damage but were unable to secure a decisive military victory. So the war started to drag on, the casualties started to mount, costs started to pile up and the unpopularity of the war applied political pressure.
Writing this off as a simple "loss" doesn't seem to accurately describe what happened. I think they could have won, but the cost was too high so they pulled out. Engagement must not have been important enough to warrant another 200k-300k deaths.
Doesn't feel like the same loss you suffer when you fully commit to the task only to end up getting routed.
> intact and combat capable
On its own, this claim is likely true. Nevertheless, this does not mean one's opponent is going to carry out one's will. Hence, one cannot declare victory. It follows that anything short of achieving one's goal is a loss. A loss doesn't have to be complete and utter destruction. It's fair to say that Argentina did not achieve its strategic objectives during the Falklands War, no?
> Losing is what happened to Germany after both World Wars.
Yes, but Germany is not as good of an example in this case as Japan during WWII. Japan would have likely accepted something short of unconditional surrender much sooner than August 1945, but the U.S. insisted on unconditional surrender. As such, the U.S. did not win until Japan agreed to unconditional surrender.
Except for the capability to prevail in those conflicts.
On the other hand the US did prevail in Iraq, and often prevails in smaller interventions such as Kosovo, or various strikes on particular targets.
>Since then they've been voluntarily giving up much of that industrial advantage out of greed.
American workers just don't want to do those jobs any more, at least not enough of them, and the country won't tolerate enough immigration to make up the shortfall domestically. There just aren't tens of millions of Americans sitting around waiting to take up manufacturing jobs. If citizens prefer to do other jobs, then non citizens have to do them, whether that's in the USA or outside it.
Doubt. The US suffered around 60k deaths in Vietnam before it pulled out, yet it has proven a willingness to withstand at least 5x more losses than that. WWII cost the US around 300k deaths, its civil war cost around 200k deaths.
I think they just didn't want to commit more american lives to whatever objectives it is that they had. They definitely had and still have the capability to do so, but they chose not to.
But even that, let's remember that the British invaded and occupied Washington, burned down White House and Capitol, etc etc.
Tactical defeat is when you are prevented from meeting your objectives for a particular operation, such as securing a target area or destroying/degrading a target enemy force. Strategic defeat is when the enemy prevents you from achieving your broader objectives (typically political, as war is politics by other means). The US has experienced both of these in the last century.
Most active militaries have experienced both types of defeat at one time or another. It’s practically impossible to avoid losing sometimes if you overuse war as a tool of diplomacy.
Yeah I certainly see it that way. I think saying the US got "defeated" by Vietnam drops some nuance.
WWII proves the US is perfectly willing to suffer at least 5x the casualties of Vietnam in order to achieve their objectives. They probably just didn't want to commit to that sort of cost and pulled out instead. Feels like a different failure mode compared to going all out and getting routed.
There may have been a window earlier on when greater commitment could have won the war or frozen the conflict, via invasion of North Vietnam, but not once the public turned against it. But this came with a big risk of direct intervention from China or the Soviet Union, as happened in Korea. In Korea, Chinese intervention led to a stalemate.
The US today isn't the US on the dawn of WWII, and this war is unlike WWII as a whole.
Domestic political support for the war is so low due to the huge costs (of the war itself and on the American pocketbook). Furthermore, due to the open and blatant corruption in the current administration, and the passing of economic policies that increase the struggle of everyday people while enriching the billionaire class, there has been a huge loss of trust in the US federal government in general.
Contrast this with the establishment of the Social Security act and WPA before WWII, which greatly increased the public's trust/confidence in the federal government to secure their welfare in the wake of the Great Depression, and made them willing to sacrifice for their country.
Finally, unlike WWII, this war didn't start with any attack by Iran on US territory, or attacks on closely allied countries. To the extent that allies have been attacked, it has been in response to US aggression, further undermining the public's will to commit American lives to further conflict.
It feels like semantics here. The US empire hasn't been defeated but its specific invasions have been.
But just knowing the US military is too weak to accomplish its objectives doesn't help much, because the US leadership is so mercurial it might decide to attack anyway. The deterrent effect only helps if you have rational leadership who is capable of evaluating the chance of failure.
Repelling such an invasion, while possible, is still a pyrrhic victory for whoever the US is attacking, because so much of their population will suffer in the invasion regardless.
> a pyrrhic victory for whoever the US is attacking
That's what I'm trying to say.
Did the entity now known as the USA defeat the British in the mid-1770s or did it just get a little too expensive and more of a headache than it was worth for the British to hold on to them?
Wars are not contests of hypothetical maximum destructive capacity. They are attempts to obtain political goals at an acceptable cost. It was a strategic and political defeat, even though it was not an unconditional military surrender.
The Russo-Ukrainian war is a war of invasion.
The US-Iranian is more of an air superiority campaign.
If you want any take away lesson: don't attack countries that care about defending themselves. Not everyone is Iraq.
And don't underestimate the efficiency of asymmetric warfare.
Any day now.
The big weakness is industrial capacity, but only China can exploit that at scale.
this wasn't the case for the US, their military did work and was effective in context of the specific think they where used for. It's just that the thing they where used for isn't effective in winning the kind of conflict the US did start.
while this is "just" the "non effective" part being some where else it is a very fundamental difference in the end
like to put it this way,
if weapons of mass destruction like nukes, bio weapons etc. would magically disappear an invasion and takeover of (part of mainland) Russia would be relatively viable (mainly by China, but others might want a slice, too).
on the other hand even without weapons of mass destruction trying to invade the mainland US still seems futile/to be a losing battle, no matter who tries it.
I have been vaguely watching the Ukraine conflict over the past few years. From my distant and zero experience observations, it seems like missiles are extremely effective BUT also extremely limited. So you blow up that one building or SAM you targeted. Well done. What about the other 10,000 static targets? What about the guys with FPV drones and shoulder-launched anti-air now inside the rubble of the building you just destroyed? Send another XX-million USD missile to blow up the building you already blew up?
Feels like a determined adversary who is not easily cowed with a quick bit of "shock and awe" and armed with cheap, mobile winged/quad drones and man-portable guided anti-air/-tank missiles has totally changed the equation. Expensive limited missiles/planes/tanks/ships in smaller numbers seem kinda limited in their ability to get results in today's battlefield where there are FPV drones literally at every turn, and can be operated from literally a hole in the ground 15km away by people who aren't about to easily surrender.
It feels somewhat like the US doctrine has been to start with a "hit 'em hard" opening salvo of cruise/ballistic missiles and rockets etc and hope for immediate surrender. So far the lesson from Ukraine and Iran seems to be expect a big wave first attack or two and if you survive that initial push then suddenly the big super-power has no more cards left to play and it's down to men on the ground with hand-held weapons and drones. I wonder if people will look back at this era as a "WW1 moment" where the old ways of battle suddenly looked hopelessly out of date.
The current US force configuration was designed to fight quick wars against opponents who mostly can’t fight back. It’s a military built to play “global police,” and for a short while this was probably the correct configuration.
Building a military that stands ready to fight any kind of war is probably impossible—it would be too expensive. You need to look at the biggest threats and optimize for those conflicts. The problem that the US now faces is that rival nations have optimized for defense against its particular style of maneuver warfare with heavy air bombardment. Air defense (not missile defense) is better and cheaper than ever.
Instead we saw videos after videos of Iranian missiles rain down from the sky.
There is a reason distributed systems are resilient. Iran's military doctrine of decentralized mosaic has proven to be a masterclass in military organization.
The ayatollahs are stupid for their restraint. I wouldn't have their patience. They only recently resorted to 2 for 1 and promised 10 for 1 on escalation. I would have gone 1k to 1 on the first day if it were me :)
What was the article about. Oh yeah, "all of its long-range precision missiles" gone.
Iran claims they only used their old stock till now. Not looking so good for your "expensive military".
So yeah. Judging by the current state, I would have gone all out against the "paper tiger" military whose bases in the middle east have been destroyed as we speak using just the old stock.
We have
* Established that US zero ability or will to protect it's 'allies' in region beyond Israel.
* Permanently ceded de facto control over the straits of Hormuz to Iran
* Significantly strengthened the hardliners in the Iranian regime and cleared the way for them to have absolute power by eliminating all moderates
* Spiked inflation at home and doubled down on pissing off pretty much every single country except Russia by heaping sky rocketing energy costs on them
* Exploded the myth of US military superiority with US warplanes unable to approach Iran and the carrier groups unable to go anywhere near the straits.
And to think we got this in exchange for spending more on our military than the next few countries combined, and the military is asking for 1.5 Trillion more to continue to fight this war.
All of this to get to a point where we are negotiating a deal which is worse than what we already had with the JCPOA.
I think we will look back on this as the US version of the Suez crisis, the beginning of the end of the US empire.
You can’t win a war with just air power.
We barely managed it during Vietnam using depleting surplus and losing many irreplaceable airframes.
"Carpet bombing Iran to rubble" literally is not an option
Doctrine isn't the same as inability.
I read this and I wonder, "are we back to 2003 and Iraq?"
Incredible how little memory Americans have. Absolutely none. You just have no grasps on reality.
This is a laughable amount of ignorance. The capability that Iran has to prevent this is physics
Iran is gigantic. Iran has 90 million people.
If you put together every long range precision munition the US has ever built, you could attack a single City and severely damage it.
People have zero sense of scale. To level cities the way we did in WW2 requires the level of industrial output that we had in WW2, because we have literally not made enough explosives to do so since
The US dropped 1.4 million tons of bombs on Germany alone in WW2
That's the equivalent of 3 million Tomahawk missiles. The US has built less than 10k total
Missiles are always easier to replace then platforms of any kind.
But yes - a single, lone captive could cause political devastation.
Missiles, more expensive - depending on.
Missiles are not 'rocket science' - pun intended. They're expensive because of the overhead of military industrial complex.
Russia is making ballistic missiles 'China style' - super fast, super cheap. Basically - much bigger than ATACMs, longer range, a bit less precise but vicious. Similar to Iran.
The conflict with Iran is only 'minor' in certain respects, it's a major air campaign otherwise, involving strategic bombing on par with the Iraq War 2 - or at least the initial period.
The US is bombing them from very far away places, the amount of logistical overhead is unthinkable.
These munitions cost a fortune in part because they are purchased in lower quantities, and yes, they have to be able to do a 10x-50x instant ramp up in order to be effective (aka capacity not inventory which is the strategic key).
It takes 2 years minimum to adjust an economy in that way and the US does not have good supply chains.
It's unlikely the US could hope to fight any kind of prolonged conflict with China 'in the area of Chinese territory' for very obvious reasons: they have the supply chains, 1 billion workers, and can turn them on a dime, and don't have 'far to go' to deploy weapons.
The US doesn't even have reliable ways of getting goods and materials into the theatre and has limited quantities of everything.
That said, there are still ways to defend Taiwan and/or to make an invasion futile - but 'broad conflict' ... nope.
This is not true. US is known for the best logistics in the world.
US power is mostly strategic, it's 'Air Based' which gives the kind of instant leverage leaders like. It's 'Aircraft Carrier Based'.
The US doesn't have that same overwhelming ability otherwise.
You can't quite an Army overseas - it takes a different kind of logistics esp. in Pacific, one the US doesn't quite have the level of sophistication.
Don't get me wrong - 'it could' but would take a while to ramp up.
US also has a large strategic-sealift force: dozens of RO/RO ships, commercial shipping agreements and prepositioned Army equipment in the Pacific and Indian Ocean.
It can move man and materiel anywhere it pleases and fast.
They are exceedingly exceptional.
But all of these systems have limits and characterizations.
US would be hard pressed to keep 500K people full supplied and engaged in Pacific. It would take a while to ramp that up.
See also: the number of strikes on boats in the Caribbean (with absolutely no result on drug trafficking).
edit: this is the document I am talking about http://media.defense.gov/2022/Oct/27/2003103845/-1/-1/1/2022...
Great video about this article from a political science / game theory professor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-ewrIenEbo
So not the US. There is also the Navy, Air Force etc
Borderline clickbait
Doesn't make the points about this administration not having a real plan invalid though...
It's called the Army tactical missile system FFS. It was literally built for them. It's rocket artillery!
We built only 3500 of the missiles total. We stopped investing in rocket artillery because they get very close to IRBMs, and those were banned until recently.
The Marines had some, but not anymore (IIRC). Other branches have zero. The replacement, PrSM is not in any serious production yet.
Other long range precision strike munitions include:
Tomahawk: 10k total production through all US history. We only fired 800ish total in all of the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. We have so far fired over 1000 in Iran. The immense "Shock and Awe" that the world drooled over during the Gulf War involved fewer than 300 Tomahawks.
AGM-158 JASSM: This is our bread and butter Air launched cruise missile (There isn't an air launched version of Tomahawk!). They only cost about $800k each! Lockheed claims they can someday build 1000 a year. We built 10k total. We fired 1100 in Iran so far and only have 1500 left.
AGM-86 ALCM: A 70s era cruise missile. We built 1800. We supposedly only have a few hundred remaining as nuclear tipped cruise missiles.
Donald Trump has fired over 2500 of our missiles in Iran, for no benefit, which represents a massive draw down of our long range precision munitions.
These numbers are literally public information.
What exploded last week in Poland, a NATO country, was a fully armed Russian equivalent of JASSM. Poland has maybe few dozen of JASSM and even fewer F16... ohh and last year Poland pointlessly wrecked one of its F16, the only platform capable of launching JASSM it posses. Russia is watching really closely these shenanigans.
https://www.militarytimes.com/industry/techwatch/2026/08/04/...
Hopefully they're able to learn lessons from Ukraine as well and pivot towards cheaper missiles and autonomous vehicles
Missing the ‘has’ part for “present perfect tense”, e.g. “a past action with present relevance”.
In an ongoing war.
It's not hard for me to understand why techies would be so interested.
The more things change.
The title says "virtually all" but the first paragraph says "much". The actual stockpile is probably larger than this news report would make it seem. It would be convenient for Trump and his Russia-loving cronies if it would appear that the USA has no more weapons to support Ukraine with, of course.
Many advanced NATO weapons being difficult to produce and only being available in small quantities is something that has been discussed before, I don't think that's news. The rate at which they're being spammed without much result at Iran is, but that's hardly surprising given the current people in charge.
- A country, even as big as the US, is strictly, evidently, not exceptional.
- The US lost the majority of the wars it joined/started in the last 100 years and came home every time trying to sell it as a victory despite not achieving their war goals.
- You may have weapons or power of some kind, but every move you make costs you some kind of currency: time, material, energy, credibility, goodwill. You may have large amounts, but they're never infinite.
- Acts of raw destruction as mean towards a goal is often not ideal: change and control are "constructive" concepts, while bombs can only offer you guaranteed chaos. You MIGHT be able to steer that chaos afterwards, but it's not guaranteed and numbers do not simply improve your position here. (see: Iraq, etc.)
- The US did not 'lose' the majority of the wars it started - it won most of them, and arguably failed to achieve strategic objectives in some.
- "Acts of raw destruction as mean towards a goal is often not ideal " - this is a misrepresentation of US doctrine for decades. Even in Vietnam the US did not pursue 'full war' and refused to do strategic bombing in North Vietnam for a decade. As soon as Nixon did (op: Linebacker) - basically, the US 'won' right away. They decimated N. Vietnamese ability in a very material way. Were that strategy to have been undertaken in 1967, the war would have had a completely different outcome, probably more like Korean detente.
- US is very careful in their campaigns, there are chains of authority, externalizations are always assessed. The rules of engagement may shift a but - but it's false to suggest it's 'arbitrarily destructive' in targeting, it's generally minimal.
If you want to see what 'destructive' is, just look at Russian engagement in Ukraine, or Assad in Syria, or Saudi in Yemen. They don't care what they hit, it's a totally different environment.
To this day Iran's Oil Infrastructure remains intact. Just let that sink in.
All of this is outside of any moral or whatever other consideration - it's just 'what it is'.
The 'important note' here is that 'Power Has Limits' and that's truly the defining characterization of this war. This is not 'America is not capable' is that 'capabilities have limits' - and they become very obvious in difficult ways if power is applied poorly.
The Generals 100% warned Trump of all of this - this conflict is not a military failure in that sense, this is predictable. It's the political apparatus pushing the boundaries. The Generals would have none of this.
Show us the difference with Vietnam (and Cambodia).
And the Caribbean.
The notion one would even try to compare 'the Caribbean' - where USN is destroying drug running boats - which is arguably against some maritime laws but is nevertheless exceedingly acute, I think shows how wound up people are in the political context.
There is no relevant kinetic fallout in the Caribbean - it's an Elephant precisely stepping on a single ant.
Capture of Venezuelan Oil ... almost certainly illegal.
But that's a different thing
As for Vietnam - start by laying the context for why the N. Vietnamese imprisoned, tortured, killed 100's of thousands of political dissidents and civilians of all kinds, and continued that horrible repression for decades even to this day as they continue to crack down on mild dissent. The actual facts on both sides are actually ugly, but woefully misrepresented and the same utterly bizarre dual moral lens is applied ... a bit like in the Iranian situation as well.
Implied in the question is the despotism in plain site: why did N. Vietnam invade Cambodia? Against the will of those people? And murder and maraud in that territory?
The difference is between that, as a starting point, and strategic bombing of rural roadways (Ho Chi Min trail) etc., which ironically was in lieu of actually bombing North Vietnam which should have been done right from the onset, would have prevented a war, and saved 1/2 the population from a perennial nightmare and given the citizens some say in their future.
But it's also an example of the extent of the ability of superpowers to project power.
>which is arguably against some maritime laws
You get it completely backwards: the US Navy is "allegedly" destroying drug running boats, and it is completely, totally, "inarguably" against maritime laws - and laws of war (but there is no war, right?) and basic law principles in civilized countries.
>it's an Elephant precisely stepping on a single ant.
It is not a cute animal simile. It is US Navy sailors commiting 200+ summary executions. It is burning alive and drowning. It is widows and orphans.
These are 'Cártel de los Soles' etc they are thugs and killers, the source of untold violence and harm.
This the hysterical rhetorical position that I'm actually hinting at - contempt for a party (in this case the US) renders people intellectually incoherent - willing to defend the most vile actions such as mass murder by Hamas, Iranian regime, mass killings, torture and imprisonment, by North Vietnam etc..
The same people that overlook Stalin's literal genocide - for example, the German Centre Left Party, the Social Democrats, who used to 'retreat' in Russia, at one of Stalin's summer homes.
This 'USA always bad / actual terrorists are victims' nonsense is the psychological affliction at work here, in almost all these discussions.
It's the flip side of the 'USA good and justified in everything' nonsense.
One posture does not justify the other.
First - The US has a reasonable moral claim against stopping these parties, even if they are going too far by not using interdiction, and killing those who were floating at sea. The basic legitimacy remains even if the methods are not justified.
Second - The situation if anything demonstrates US exceptionalism, which is the argument here. This isn't about 'moral claims' - it's about if the US is actually an exceptional military force.
The OP indicated 'the US clearly not exceptional'.
This is completely delusional. Obviously, they are. It's not a moral assessment, which is much more complicated.
Contempt for the US turns people's brains to rubbish.
Do you have any proof the people killed on those boats are thugs and killers, and not just mules, or fishermen?
And how does your righteousness squares with the same US government releasing Juan Orlando Hernández?
>willing to defend the most vile actions such as mass murder by Hamas, Iranian regime, mass killings, torture and imprisonment, by North Vietnam etc..
Absolutely nobody is defending these. The US is just completely failing at stopping those "vile actions" and piling up more death and misery to just end up at the same point or worse.
...it's not contempt, but man, the US is just not that special. It's just one of us. calm down.
Or, coming from another direction: you are verbally thrashing in an HN thread because you heard something you didn't like, you think countries don't do this on the regular, including with weapons if they feel it's worth the effort?
The US was going as far as issuing sanctions waivers to Russia to try and get oil to the market it was so worried about what the war in the middle east would do to prices. All the indications are they're desperate to preserve as much middle eastern oil infrastructure as possible, even to the point where they look like losers vis a vis Iran. No surprise if they aren't inviting tit for tat exchanges on oil infrastructure. And the Russia-Ukraine war had vaguely similar parallels, with Ukraine allowing transit of Russian gas through the country to Europe for ... I want to say at least 12 months. So clearly neither side was so lost in the battle that they thought disrupting the pipelines was a good idea.
That type of targeting discrimination seems to be fairly normal. Armies are only indiscriminate when they think that helps their war aims. Although what exactly the US war aims are in Iran is very much a guess, Trump was struggling to even lie consistently when he was trying to come up with one.
I'm not sure how far the Administration would go but they are very strongly restricted by US Armed forces procedures and just norms.
I mean if we look at all recent wars, Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam and now Iran we completely failed in our objectives. We spend billions, kill a lot of people and get a lot of our own people killed and didn't manage to instill democracy anywhere. How is that not losing the wars? It's complete failure to do what we set out to do 3 times now in recent history.
The US generally wins wars, but can fail on occupational and grander objectives, which are different things.
The US 'tied' in Korea, eventually 'won' in Vietnam but then quickly decided to leave - strategic failure), 'won' in Iraq but a grinding occupation left it a strategic quagmire but no total failure.
Middling intervention in Syria was effective in bringing down Assad and now there is a transition to 'something somewhat better'.
There was no fight to even win in Afghanistan as the Talibain was overthrown without direct intervention - the follow up was entirely occupational - and though it was a strategic failure, it wasn't a military defeat. The West just did not want to continue paying the cost of keeping the fighters at bay. That's a 'stupid set of decisions' which is different than 'losing'.
This is all different from Russian failure in Ukraine where it cannot meet it's military objectives.
Iran is shaping up to be a 'military tie' - because US is engaging from afar it' abilities are limited and is taking real losses ... and a pretty big strategic failure, having lost control over the Gulf, no 5th fleet presence in the Gulf, allies attacked, Iran emboldened. Bad.
America is not happy when it is not at war. There has to be an enemy. The old WOT had finally run out of steam; people are coming out of college who were born after 9/11. Venezuela (and Latin America generally) made a good enemy for a while, but they were too easily defeated. But Iran? America has wanted a rematch since Jimmy Carter.
(A bipartisan problem, mostly, but propped up by pro-war media. The only people against it are a few Democrats, almost all of whom are women)
First, those are short- to medium-range weapons.
Second, the USAF and USN hold most of the US's long-range precision weaponry, the only real exception being the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW), which is not yet fielded.
Said without context, there are not very many places close to China where these could be fired from, so I'm not so sure how useful they would really be in any South China Sea hot wars
The title seems fairy inaccurate
“People who are familiar with this matter” is doing a lot of work.
This reeks of laundering lies.
Good job everyone with the voting. All those people voted for "let's make things universally worse for everyone except billionaires in America".
I'm not saying that you should support whatever is happening with Iran, but understand that if a country thinks no one can punish them if they start shit, then they may do it, and then you end up with war, not peace... the opposite of what you expect.
I don't like it, but "si vis pacem, para bellum": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Si_vis_pacem%2C_para_bellum
There is not really any strategy here in place that makes sense from an US point of view. There is a strategy in place that may make sense for Netanyahu (e. g. remain in power) but this is not a US strategic point of view. Trump seems to be the most easily influenced roleplaying as "president". People need to follow the money trail here - that would explain the whole situation right now best.
USA people, do you all really love killing other human? or you have no control of your democratically elected government at all?
they probably regretted as it "used all the missiles"
And I went up there, I said, "Shrink, I want to kill. I mean, I wanna, I wanna
kill. Kill. I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and guts and
veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, kill, kill, kill." And
I started jumpin' up and down yelling, "Kill! Kill!" and he started jumpin' up
and down with me and we was both jumping up and down yelling, "Kill! Kill!"
And the Sargent came over, pinned a medal on me, sent me down the hall, said,
"You're our boy."[0]
>you have no control of your democratically elected government at all?
Yes. We do[1].
[0] https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/arloguthrie/alicesrestaurant...
[1] https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/full-text
Is it even a correct framing for the conflict ? Iran seems to have big issues with UAE and Saudi Arabia and repeatedly fired at them and got fired by them.
1. The US has been strategically and militarily defeated by Iran and this has been clear since at least April to anyone who was paying attention and has achieved none of its objectives. More [1];
2. Continued use of so-called "stand off" weapons confirms that the US has been unable to achieve air supremacy over Iran and use gravity bombs. The article mentions this but doesn't really explain the implications; Reaper drones have been lost in large numbers. Air sorties are limited to also firing stand off weapons, mostly. One reason for this is an Iranian developed weapons system of loitering missiles that the US has designated as 358 and 359 missiles [2];
3. The US is spending an unprecedented amount of money on a war it has already lost that nobody wants. In some ways this mirrors the Nixon-Kissinger plan to bomb Cambodia until morale improves. Nobody wants to admit defeat. But wars are good for business. Some people are getting incredibly wealthy off all this. Munitions are the ultimate product. You use them once and then have to buy them again, often at $1M+ apiece;
4. This is the real story of American oil dependence over rewnewables. Nobody goes to war over a solar panel [3];
5. The article also mentions the drastically low inventory levels of missile interceptors (eg PAC-2, PAC-3, THAAD). This is in part why several US bases in the Gulf have been effectively destroyed and abandoned because the military cannot defend them. Iran is using very cheap weapon systems, particularly the Shahed drone, and can produce them in much higher numbers. Shooting down a $20k drone with a $1-4M missile does not scale;
6. This is going to rewrite Gulf politics as the promise of the American security-for-oil guarantee has shown to be a paper tiger. This is going to force a change for Gulf countries;
7. For all the complaining about the JCPOA, this administration has for absolutely no reason kicked the hornet's nest and the price of ending this war is going to be far, far higher. That will include (IMHO) an end to economic sanctions, unfreezing of Iranian assets, weakening of the petrodollar, compensation for Iran in the hundreds of billions and a concession that Iran can and will charge tolls for transit of the Strait of Hormuz in concert with Oman. Well done, everybody, the system works.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRAtD7iAgwY
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wMoKLuL8Jc
[3]: https://www.theenergymix.com/no-one-goes-to-war-over-a-solar...
There’s no growth or hope. It’s all bad news, war, and rumors of war - and all reads like a bad WWE script.
Just seems like a coordinated effort to destroy from within since about ~2016 or at least act out this play of America in Decline
Whatever, would be way better if they celebrate collaboration and forward thinking again.
Mainly because it’s just so boring under Trump - this should have been a 4 year show
Only PrSM and ATACMS reserves are low.
I wasn't intended to imply Ukraine is an adversary, AFAIK to the US, they aren't.
Edit: I realize my original comment was a bit ambiguous, I'm talking about Iran, I've now put "received" into quotes.
PS Their source was probably the IRCG...
Source? In terms of VLS-packed high end interceptors, I'd imagine they're much deeper into the magazine than that. Quad-packed point defense missiles might be lower, but those aren't useful against theater ballistic missiles like Iran has been deploying.
> Their source was probably the IRCG...
That doesn't make much sense as disinformation. Iran stands to gain very little by lying like that, and judging by the exodus of US generals and admirals I'd wager to say that this was an internal point of disagreement in the US armed forces. A lot of assets earmarked for the Pacific theater have been expended with no quick replacements incoming.
All the estimates for interceptors like patriots I've seen are north of 50% used so 5% certainly seems like an outlier
Curious. What is your source on the 5%? Why is random chud on the internet a 'better' source.
Probably Reuters too https://www.reuters.com/world/us-has-used-virtually-all-its-...
So there is only one news outlet reporting on it, Reuters, and the rest are just reporting on the reporting.
Do you care to clarify this? This can't possibly be accurate across their entire staff.