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.

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.

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?

The reality is that fighting China would be a proper all-out war, not whatever this spitting match with Iran is.

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.

It's not hard for me to understand why techies would be so interested.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clean_Break:_A_New_Strategy_...

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.

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)

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).

This is usually the point the economy is flipped around into a war-based economy where all output is directed to military equipment.

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.

It’s also about the price of oil being dictated by global markets. Oil companies love to sell expensive oil. If there’s a crunch, Exxon won’t be desperate to increase supply in order to bring the price back down. Instead they’ll take massive profits on thin supply. (Similar dynamic in memory markets recently.) Meaning if there is a Gulf crunch, gas prices skyrocket regardless of how much oil the US stores in the ground. And gas price is just about the only politically meaningful economic metric in the United States.

The only reason why the US has been dealing with the effects rather than the cause for so long is best illustrated by the mess we have now.

I guess we can be a little thankful this is bogging down because next on the list is Russia and the little proxy war between the US and China going on in Ukraine.

> 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.

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.).

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.

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.

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.

The big weakness is industrial capacity, but only China can exploit that at scale.

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.

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. Giventhat 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 muntiions, 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.

Doesn't make the points about this administration not having a real plan invalid though...

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.

Taiwan is no West Berlin and everyone knows it.

  > the reason

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

If you have 10 targets and use atacms in all 10, there's something wrong in the decision making process or the strategy.

US could indiscriminately drop dumb bombs but you would have a higher civilian casualty rate.

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.

The issue is general industrial capacity, not missiles specifically.

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.

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.

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...

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.

Are you openly saying the president and the secretary of war are lying when they say they have done "massive" bombings of Iran?

Doctrine isn't the same as inability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactions_to_the_2026_Iran_war

This is not true. US is known for the best logistics in the world.

Never say never.

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.

Missiles are always easier to replace then platforms of any kind.

But yes - a single, lone captive could cause political devastation.

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.

edit: this is the document I am talking about http://media.defense.gov/2022/Oct/27/2003103845/-1/-1/1/2022...

- 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.

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?

Although "massive" is a subjective word. Nothing can be as massive as WW2 carpet bombing.

What the fuck is wrong with the human species and its tendency for self-destructive leader-worship??

It's just going to be your typical meatgrinder and attrition warfare.

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.

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?

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

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.)

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?

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...

Any day now.

1. https://www.nbcnews.com/world/russia/trump-eases-russian-oil...

2. https://newrepublic.com/post/213566/trump-hoarding-billions-...

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!

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.

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.

Where do you think that money comes from?

You could just delete united healthcare and save bucketloads of money.

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.

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).

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.

   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

You can’t win a war with just air power.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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 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.

It’s not like you get to the end of the chain and trade a fistful of dollars with the ingot of aluminum itself.

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.

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.

Someone higher up the chain of command: "Fire the missiles, or I'll replace you with someone who will"

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.

To help put that in perspective: 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, a tougher opponent by default. Also more population, more land-area, etc.

But even that, let's remember that the British invaded and occupied Washington, burned down White House and Capitol, etc etc.

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.

That was their plan until Xi became ruler for life and decided that he wanted Taiwan sooner rather than later.

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.

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?

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.

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 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).

Not committing a crime against humanity is not “good will”.

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 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.

What in your view makes these ones proven and other ones not proven?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In short, Trump is not a source.

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.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK611301/

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.

But isn't there a conceptual difference between the "owners" of the Tomahawk factory vs. the people who are actually putting the missiles together?

But the commitment does not exist at present. No one wanted this apart from a few hawks and the Israeli security establishment.

You feel better?

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.

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 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.

Show us the difference with Vietnam (and Cambodia).

And the Caribbean.

Cough, cough. Who is currently in the White House?

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.

Starting wars has only been unequivocally negative for maybe the last 100 years. Not enough for an evolutionary change to manifest itself.

So we'll just grind each other into a halt? And what is the end state? What a BS.

"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."

https://www.thecollector.com/vietnam-war-economic-effects/

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 ...

> a pyrrhic victory for whoever the US is attacking

That's what I'm trying to say.

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'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

they probably regretted as it "used all the missiles"

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.

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.

https://www.atomicarchive.com/almanac/test-sites/testing-chr...

I'm not sure how far the Administration would go but they are very strongly restricted by US Armed forces procedures and just norms.

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.

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.

Losing is what happened to Germany after both World Wars.

I wish people would take a short stop here and contemplate a bit on this sentence.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The fallout will come later, of course.

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...

https://www.npr.org/2026/06/11/g-s1-127478/taiwan-opposition...

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.

And the reasons for bombing Iran are...?

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.

Iran gained straight of hormuz. It gained chuckpaz and confidence too. It is now itching to play major regional power

[0] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2026/05/11/by-one-m... (no paywall: https://archive.ph/X9zzc)

> 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.

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's laughable to use such a silly euphemism to imply America was not defeated! The North Vietnamese won. Get over it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

strategic failure - iran shrugged it off and now are causing massive damage to world economy with no end in sight.

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.

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.

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

Meanwhile Iran is in rough shape

None of that seems like it jibes with your description.

Are you trolling

I see you are not in California.

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.

>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.

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

The rest of the world is finding China a more predictable and stable trading partner than the USA.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

So again - the execution shows significant tactical competence. But the strategic direction is absolutely disastrous.

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.

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.

Nothing to do with "validity." Your lived experience (or whoever's you're defending) is valid.