Summarizer

Assuming the scenario happened the first bombing runs would be over after 2h and would continue for the next 48h until amphibious assault fast response finishes landing, by which time it’s safe to assume there isn’t much left to defend (though rubble makes a horrible war zone for the attacking side). Cuba simply isn’t Iran. They’re a blockaded island with not much military experience. Iran is a huge mountainous country preparing for war for the last 40 years with first hand experience of getting blown up from above and from the inside by USA allies and surviving just fine.

The real thought experiment is ~600m people in central/south American within ~6000km, i.e. IRBM range of US gulf coast, where ~50% of US oil refinery and LNG plant production are. Now that Iran has validated mid tier power can cobble together precision strike complex, it's only going to be matter of time before relatively wealthier countries realize only way out of M/Donroe is to build conventional strike against US strategic infra. This stuff going to get commoditized sooner than later with competing mega constellation ISR. It's pretty clear building up conventional airforce/navy etc will simply get overmatched vs US projection and only credible deterrence is PRC style rocket force. There's a fuckload of places to hide 8x8 missile launchers in the Americas. E: 50% of PRODUCTION, not plants, as in a few plants responsible for 50% of US refinery / LNG production.

> ...also, Germany has 84,000,000 people, so definitely not half of Iran. I think OP meant land mass not people with the country comparison.

They also write that Iran is "2/3 of Russia", when surface-wise it's not even one tenth, so I doubt that they meant that...

German geography makes it much easier to invade (most of the country except for the far south is a relatively flat plain). And it still wasn't much fun for the troops who had to do it in 1944 and 1945 even against a significantly weakened force fighting on multiple fronts at once

Don't forget the coastal geography. Iran's coastline in the Persian gulf is longer than California's coastline, and they can do drone attacks anywhere in the Gulf, not just the narrow strait portion that everyone seems to focus on. Cuba allying with Iran is pure fantasy though. There's no logistical connection between the two nations. It would be as irrelevant as Greenland allying with Antarctica.

> It's nice to wave away policing Hormuz, by simply asserting it can't be done. Is this accurate, however? There have been plenty of analyses pretty much all concluding the same thing. How do you propose to do it? In normal times there were > 150 per day travelling through the gulf. Remember the coastline of Iran along the Gulf is about 2000km, all allowing them to launch strikes against ships (and they don't need to be sophisticated). So would you put a warship with every cargo ship? Occupy the whole coast? I don't see any feasible solution to police it.

I don’t think air dominance will hold up for long if a plane costs billions and a drone a couple thousand. Any interceptor rocket the US uses will set them back millions versus literal peanuts on the other side. Add that Iran is basically a mountain fortress and they’ll run out of money very quickly; disregarding that prolonging the war will be __very__ unpopular in the US. They really got themselves into an unwinnable bind

Iran is a large country, just getting to Tehran with large-enough force is logistically enormous task. Complicated by the fact that the logistic convoys can nowadays be trivially decimated by FPVs. Air superiority is not going to help you much against small dispersed resistance groups with FPVs (ideally fiber optics, so not detectable by emissions from afar). There is a chance that there will be similar democratization with AA (you will need proper AA missiles, the physics of reaching a fast jet flying high simply demands it), but the distributed passive targeting is made much simpler with current commodity computing and optics. Achieving AA Denial is difficult, but forcing the attacker to use standoff munitions instead of gravity bombs/close-in air support not so much: shifting the risk of losing an aircraft from 1 in 100000 to 1 in 100 will do it.

and nor does it result in victory without the follow up of a ground assault. I'm legit baffled by the US engaging in a war that suffers exactly the same negative properties as the Saudi's war in Yemen. You don't even have to learn from history, the Saudi/Yemeni conflict is still active today. Air campaigns alone are entirely insufficient, especially if your enemy has mountains.

> Iran has much weaker capabilities and is fighting a much stronger enemy. I mean yes thats true, but you also have to look at the capacity to renew what they are using to fight the war. Iran appears to have a large supply of drones, enough to overwhelm US defences. Each drone is ~$50k and takes a few weeks to build, the anti-dorne missle (depending on what one it is) costs $4m and take longer. If trump does decide to take Kharg island, then to stop the troops from being slamai sliced they'll need an efficient, cheap anti drone system, which I don't think the US has (apart from the Phalanx, but there arent enough of those) To stop the drone threat, they'd have to clear roughly a 1500km circle. no small feat. the bigger issue is that the goal if this war is poorly defined. It was supposedly to do a hit and run, and gain a captive client. Had they listened to any of the intelligence, rather than the ego, they would have known this would have happened. that has failed, now what, what do they need to achieve? There is no point committing troops if they are there for show. (there was no real point in this war either, well for the US at least.)

This is delusional. Iran has thousands of ASM on the coastline. They need 1 to make it through to take out a tanker. Even the best anti missile systems we have aren’t 99.99% reliable. It was always a losing proposition. Iran has always been able to close the strait. What I don’t get is why we need to take Kharg island. Can’t we just blockade ships selling Iranian oil?

I think the collective take might be too focused on the kinetic picture to see the underlying issue(s). 1) we want Iranian oil flowing and being bought elsewhere for the economy and to avoid hard decisions in Beijing, and as we’ve recently heard ad nausea money is fungible so… if one hasn’t thought to invade, dominate and occupy mountainous terrain filled with holy people, then ‘open’ means money to The Baddies. 2) it’ll only take a few wrecks to create navigation hazards, tankers are huge and that strait is shallow and narrow. The cleanup crews are slower, they also need massive ships. 3) let’s take a 0.01% reliability of missile attacks… drones, rpgs, suicide attacks, artillery, kamikaze plane attacks, mines, and trebuchets are also out there. So, again, unless we’re invading… fuhgeddabout 100% And, fatally: 4) it’s not the missiles, it’s the threat, and who is insuring the massive money-boats. If your insurance company thought your car would, 0.01% of the time, be blown up resulting in a total wreck and complete loss of cargo and future revenue, your policy would not be what it is. You insure your oil boat for trips, and if not you don’t move it. Trump doesn’t decide this, BigBoat Insurance brokers decide this, with their wallets and vibes. 0.01% x An Oil Tanker (slow, giant, vulnerable, + oil leak cleanup and ecosystem damage, loss of life) x totally foreseeable circumstances = a ‘closed’ straight on demand. Unless, again, the plan is invado-conquering.

Seems like USN can still do whatever it was made for from this large standoff distance, also seems like it wasn't made for chasing individual nondescript trucks in a hundreds-miles-long mountainous shoreline.

A medium-strength world power that it Iran only figured out how to make anti-ship missiles only 25 years ago. They sure got their hands on Chinese ones a bit before that, but that quantity just didn't amount to strait-blocking capability.

Yeah I don’t find this article particularly insightful. If we don’t have troops on the ground to prevent attacks in the straight, it would be always be vulnerable despite superiority. Shit if we don’t control the land, they could drop a bunch jet skis with bombs in the water in the middle of the night. The straight is only 21 miles wide at some points

The article is reflecting on the observed reality that US Navy operations in this war are taking Iran’s littoral combat power into account by operating its ships further from the Iranian coast…why can’t you imagine that they are operating this way under Trump?

Why might the US be using air power to strike targets which are inland in Iran? What characteristics of a submarine might be considerably problematic to doing that? Would these problems perhaps also effect a defensive mission to prevent air strikes on ships in the Strait of Hormuz?

I'm just going to throw some napkin pointers and rough guesstimate-arithmetics here. -At the very minimum you would have to search and secure 130 000 square kilometers in a mountainous region, in a hostile country where you have no popular support, and where most of the male population has had somewhere around two years of military training. To be sure that Iranians couldn't lob anti-ship missiles into the strait, you'd probably need to double or triple that area. -And that's because of anti-ship missiles, with distances ranging from few hundred kilometers to thousand or more. And only one missile needs to get through to cause a mass casualty event onboard of a warship involving hundreds of people. So, assuming that troops get to the shore, then there's the slight peculiarity of modern warfighting. Drones. Cheap and plentiful, with FPV drones having the range varying from 30 to 60+km, you can be assured that visitors stay on shore or island(s) will be filled with plenty of activities such as listening to never ending buzzing of drones or trying to find cover from those drones. As good as US electronic warfare efforts might be, wire-guided FPV drones don't really care. So unless the US incursion is going to be anything but a short 30 minute visit to a largely meaningless Tump island we're probably going to be looking at hundreds of casualties if we are extremely lucky. If they really want to open and "secure" the Strait, I think we're going to be looking at Russo-Ukrainian war-tier butcher's bill. And since that would be perfectly fine for Israel, I think that's exactly what we'll be getting. I hope I'm wrong though.

Why can’t we bomb the missile bunkers that guard the strait?

I think both missiles and drones can launch from trucks.

is china helping ukraine also? The real "force multiplier" is basically the same as it was 100 years ago: fancy advanced tech works great to clear large, unoccupied spaces with no terrain costs; it still won't go into a jungle, climbmountains or fight in the streats. Whats compounding existing reality, is how cheap it is to use commercial tech from any of these manufacturing hubs, china included, and turn it into a small but persistent offensive weapon. So now Americas got billions of dollars worth of ammo up agains millions of dollars worth of fodder, and that won't clear the way to controlling a large, well defended plot of land. America's leaders are drunk and high on their own propaganda, even while Ukraine has demonstrated just how useless the old, bulky and costly tech is.

to quote: "in the Persian Gulf today, the Navy grasps the reality of the circumstances, recognizing that it simply can’t sail into the strait without risk getting blown to smithereens by Iran’s missiles. Today, its carriers are stationed well outside the Gulf and the ranges of Iranian missiles."

Americans have been sold an image of the US being an omnipotent presence, due to its Navy. It is a legitimate question to wonder why a relatively weak, long embargoed country has the power to control the waters when the US has spent a pretty penny on all these warplanes and aircraft carriers. If little Iran can prevent the US from being able to establish security in a little straight, it (ideally) shatters that image and causes some soul searching for what US taxpayers are buying with the military.

The situation is massively favourable to Iran, from a strategic point of view. The Gulf is narrow, bordered by Iran all the way and with mountains and rugged terrain nearby, which is very convenient to hide rockets. What a carrier brings is completely irrelevant in this configuration.

In pure amoral military terms, the US military has barely suffered a scratch in this war, losing only a few soldiers and pieces of equipment. It has failed to subdue Iran, so in that sense so far at least it has not achieved a victory. However, it has also not suffered a defeat. If the Iranian government ends the war still in power and with the ability to keep the Strait of Hormuz closed whenever they want to, I will consider that a a US defeat. However, the defeat would not have been caused by any serious damage that Iran has done to the US military, it would have been caused by the combination of Iranian resilience to damage and its geographic advantage of being right next to the Strait of Hormuz.

>That is not to say Iran is winning. Remember this is not a sports game, and no one needs to win. It is possible, and likely, for everyone to lose (be in a worse position than prior). As of right now, Iran looks likely to end the war with permanent control of the strait of Hormutz. They'll tax the gulf countries in perpetuity. Gulf countries can't reasonably afford to go to war with Iran over this either, and it's even less likely that they could prevail in such a conflict. Gulf countries can't even afford to go to war with Iran now, with the US actively fighting there. Iran can suffer terrible short-term and medium-term economic consequences while still establishing a whole new kind of dominance over the region.

"Cruise missile carriers" are what the Burke class destroyers are. It's also what Russia built their navy around. How'd that work out? The US carriers have been involved in every naval action since WWII. They're hardly unused. But attacking a country of 90 million people and a high level of military sophistication AND who's been expecting the attack and planning for it for many years was always going to be a tall order.

In this instance, a flight of B-52's could wipe the concrete shielded missiles off the face of the Earth. Start off with F18s to secure the skies, then B52s to pound the missiles, then the Navy could stroll back in. It's just that no one has had the gumption to do it until now.

The US military did exactly that two weeks ago: https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5789279-strait-hormuz-oil... If it was as effective as you presume, the strait would have been open by now.

isn't it obvious? some rearranged concrete, maybe mixed with missile parts does not change anything unless you know you have eliminated ALL threads which you would never know and probably never achieve anyway

Your analysis of the war seems to hinge on a lack of "gumption", which is coincidentally the exact same thing I've heard conservative old boomers say about Vietnam. So I would say you're about equal in terms of adding to the discussion. It is, unfortunately, divorced from reality. The critical thing about hidden missiles that you seem to be missing is: you can't bomb them if you don't know where they are. We've already seen a 4 week bombing campaign that has included everything from a children's school to a chemotherapy company to bunkers under Tehran, so I don't think there's a lack of "bloodlust" or "gumption" from any of the so-called leaders at the DoD. Rather, it seems that they simply - don't know where the missiles and drones are. Which as I pointed out earlier, makes it rather hard to bomb them.

There is no party even capable of doing it. The Gulf coastline is almost 1000 miles long, there would have to be a gigantic occupation of an area the size of a small country, at the same time as there would be 'all out war' with Iran, which would be backed by China and to a lesser extent Russia, and whereupon an invasion would provide them with millions of determined fighters. We're talking 'Gulf War' scale of operation against a much bigger, more capable country, and of forces willing to fight. And the US doesn't even have anywhere to do it from . Assuming a Gulf country would host an invasion force - extremely unlikely - there's no magical way for US to cross the Gulf with large numbers of forces, as we can't get capitol ships in there in the first place. There's no amphibious capability at the scale necessary on the Arabian Sea. Literally just the logistics of large scale landings is almost impossible. That leaves the Kuwait / Iran border, and maybe something a bit wider. And then fight through the mountains across the Gulf? The thought is absurd, it's a 'major campaign theatre' - of which US forces were theoretically capable of fighting in two at once, but that's not pragmatic. That's 'wartime economy' kind of thing. It's possible but unlikely that 10K marines and paratroopers are going to be able to do much, because it's very risky and likely won't accomplish much.

> The Gulf coastline is almost 1000 miles long, there would have to be a gigantic occupation of an area the size of a small country If you want to secure even 5 miles inland over 1000 miles, that's 50,000 square miles, or an area bigger than more than half the countries on earth, including North and South Korea, Iran is the 18th largest country in the world

> If you want to secure even 5 miles inland over 1000 miles, that's 50,000 square miles If you want to secure the entire Strait, sure. My understanding is you'd only seek to hold the area around the Musandam Peninsula, along with a couple of the islands near it.

The entire gulf is at risk. Iran can interdict and cause problems from almost anywhere. Granted it may not have to be 'the whole thing' but something like it.

> entire gulf is at risk. Iran can interdict and cause problems from almost anywhere Sure, but its effect is far more dilute. In the Strait–in particular, around the Musandam Peninsula–it has unique geostrategic leverage.

Much further than that. At least 200nm using drone ISR to cue Shaheeds, 500nm with satellite ISR. (With a 90kg warhead.) There are also many fishing vessels in the region, originating from a number of countries (e.g. Oman, Iran, Pakistan) which can report sightings of VLCCs. Once you have sighted the ship it is an undergrad project to implement target classification and recognition using off the shelf algorithms. It doesn't need a fast GPU because naval engagements are very slow, a cheap mobile phone can do it.

at a range where short-range anti-ship missiles can reach ships from Iranian territory.

So, the entire gulf? Actual short-range weapons can't cross the strait. The ones that can don't care much about the difference on the rest of the place.

With the strait being that narrow, missiles aren't even needed. Just artillery is enough. That's the main problem here. Forcible reopening is possible but it involves a lot of airpower, not ships. Make anything unable to approach Iranian shoreline and stay alive, to man even a tiniest rubber boat - including emptying all cities on the coast of people.

Because as the article explains the US ships cannot even approach the straits due to the threat of anti-ship missiles.

Since 1979, every US president has known that the US can send a couple of aircraft carriers and bomb the shit out of Iran. And yet none did. Because they listened to their security chiefs and advisors who would tell them, Iran is a highly complex multiethnic geographically complex country. If you can contain it with diplomacy, that’s preferable. When listening to “experts” becomes taboo, there will be consequences. The inhabitants of the Iranian plateau have been the subject of the ire of the military superpower of their era quite a few times. Alexander the Great conquered them and set their capital and their sacred books on fire and yet a mere 70 years later his Hellenic dynasty was gone. They were conquered by the Arabs and were forced to give up their religion but somehow, unlike Egypt and Syria/Lebanon and many other ancient places, these guys somehow kept their language and distinct culture intact. They were decimated (maybe even worse ) by Genghis Khan and followed quickly by Tamerlane and yet, it was their Turco-Mongol rulers who ended up adopting their language and culture. The inhabitants of this land have deep memory of knowing how to suffer, to endure and to survive. It wasn’t that long ago that from Constantinople to New Delhi, the language of the Imperial Court was Persian.

> probably depopulate critical areas around the coasts while ships transit. (looks at map) the city of Bandar Abbas, population ~500k? It's already being hit as it contains the Iranian Navy HQ, but actually depopulating it is a much bigger project.

Depopulation won't stop the IRGC from digging up a Shahed buried in the sand and launching it. The range is so great you would have to pacify the entire east of Iran, an absolutely impossible task.

Carpet bombing doesn't cover a large area. Besides which there is nowhere to stage so an enormous campaign that isn't also in reach of one way drones. The vast areas in the East are where you can strike shipping. You would only strike the West if your intention was to kill Iranians rather than end the war.

You can't deny access to a coast that large with carpet bombing, especially in a mountainous terrain. It has never worked. You'd need tens to hundreds of thousands of boots on the ground to do that. If you wanted to try it with bombs, it would take continual re-dropping of hundreds of thousands of bombs every few hours to cover (1600km * 8km) to keep people out, even assuming they have 0 shelter or cover.

TLDR: not going to put the navy within range of shore attacks + have not yet been able to degrade the Iranian strike capabilites.