Summarizer

> If anything, this war demonstrates the tyranny and tentacles of the modern state. The well seems forever poisoned once power is lost to despots. Didn’t we just see in Syria that’s not the case. It is supremely hard to nation build a large failing state no matter who’s attempting it. Having the guns to challenge the internal security forces seems like a necessary first step.

> Worst outcome is the US attacks Cuba, Cuba allies with Iran, it turns out that Cuba has been stocking up on Iranian drones, and Cuba becomes a forward base for drone and missile attacks on the southern US. If this happens and Cuba decides to launch drones/missiles against the US homeland, it's not an exaggeration to say that Cuba is flattened and invaded that same afternoon. After 9/11, there's no world in which any attack on the US homeland, however small or local, is met with anything other than overwhelming retribution. Having difficulty projecting force from the air with fighter bombers launched from air craft carriers and refueling caravans from the Indian Ocean or Mediterranean Sea against a determined enemy that has been preparing for this eventuality since 1979 is one thing. Being able to fly non-stop B-52 and B-2 sorties from home air bases with single-digit-hour flight times is a different thing entirely.

> After 9/11, there's no world in which any attack on the US homeland, however small or local, is met with anything other than overwhelming retribution. Yes remember when they invaded Saudi Arabia? That taught everyone an important lesson on the consequences of terrorism on American soil.

The hijackers were Saudi nationals, but the operation was in no way sponsored by the Saudi state, which is a staunch US ally. Which is why the US proceeded to (attempt to) flatten Afghanistan instead.

There wasn’t anything to flatten in Afghanistan. They were coming off a 20 yr civil war.

Proxy war. And that's an awful lot of years and billions spent on flattening nothing, don't you think?

> Which is why the US proceeded to (attempt to) flatten Afghanistan instead. It seems to have made things better for the Taliban.

It is a very different taliban

What was 9/11 if not military actions on USA own soils? Like, sure it can be labelled terrorism rather than "conventional military intervention", but psyops apart, on practical level that’s typical asymmetric/guerrilla warfare.

> 9/11 was not a military action against the USA that's a surprising thing to hear. where do you draw the line between terrorism and war? I see a distinction without much of a difference.

> There are gun nut americans who truly believe gun owners would contribute an effective resistance to a modern invading army because they own an ar15. It would depend on their patience. The insurgency in Iraq was eventually suppressed (American COIN manuals were updated). The insurgency (?) in Afghanistan outlasted the patience of the invaders. So how long do the 'gun nutters' want to keep at it compared to the opposing force? Further, it's worth asking how effective, on average, is violent disobedience. Generally speaking a movement has about double the odds of success by not using violence: * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44096650-civil-resistanc...

Yes absolutely they would and insurgencies are not the same thing as two nations fighting each other. America has twice as many gun owners as there are people in Afghanistan, a large chunk of them have combat experience.

No, it is not. Russia was attacked by Ukraine multiple times and nukes are still not used. India, Pakistan and China are in various stages of conflicts with each other for decades and all of them are nuke-enabled super-powers. There are three points of having nukes: 1. Deter other countries with nukes from using them against you, or your military ally. 2. Prevent total annihilation in the war. You can lose the war, but not too much. 3. Burn the world to ashes. Very few countries can do it. It effectively forces the whole world to make sure that this scenario does not happen. So you can be sure that scenario where Ukraine conquers Russia and completely destroys it - will be prevented by the very Ukraine supporters. They don't want to live in the nuclear post-apocalypse, because there are scenarios where Russia fires every single nuclear missile on every major city on the Earth. As Putin framed it: We will go to heaven as martyrs, and they will simply drop dead. America lost several wars, recently they lost Afghanistan war and right now they're losing Iran war. They won't invoke nukes to overturn the table, they'll accept the lose.

America has lost every war in the recent past.

Has anyone “won” a war in the recent past? In the old fashioned sense that they conquered something and used the newly acquired resources to make their own citizens lives better? The problem with the post ww2 world is that the old definition of winning a war no longer holds. You just don’t see wars of conquest very often and they don’t seem to work when they happen. The closest I can think to winning off hand is a few of the colonial civil wars. Vietnam for instance won in the sense that they outlasted the US and have a nominally communist government but it is not an outpost of the Soviet Union and it’s a major trading and tourist partner of the US. Iraq is not led by a belligerent to the US dictator and Afghanistan isn’t home to training camps for terrorists dedicated to attacking the US (yet). These were all extremely stupid, expensive and inhumane military actions. But the US never went into them to hold territory. So “there until we got tired of it” is as close to winning as it was ever going to be.

Azerbaijan invaded Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023 and now all their enemies are gone (disarmed and Armenians expelled) which presumably makes their citizens better off once they move into the empty territory.

The Gulf War was a decisive victory, if you consider that recent.

It hasn’t. There hasn’t been a war in centuries where America didn’t obliterate its opponent. It loses politically because its people don’t want war, but it’s defeated militarily everyone it’s engaged with.

If you can not win a war because your population is unwilling to bear the cost, then you are still unable to win (that is in fact a very typical way for a war to end). Nobody is disputing the fact that the US spends more money on arms than anyone else and has the shiniest of toys as a result, but "winning" in war is about effecting the outcomes that you want , not about whether your weapon systems are superior. The US military has clearly failed to deliver the outcome that Americans wanted in many recent conflicts (Vietnam, Taliban); counting those wars as "lost" makes a lot of sense.

Americans sure love their war crimes! Indiscriminately killing civilians is how they've gotten past, present and future terrorist attacks. I can't imagine the parents of the children they keep on killing (or maiming, or otherwise) standing by and watching. People wouldn't necessarily need to wait for their country's army to do something when they've got nothing significant left to lose.

Why, that's why you don't do genocide half-heartedly, you need to go all in, roll up your sleeves and really get down to work! Can't get a swarm of radicalized people if there is no people left to get radicalized.

People way underestimate what kind of mental fortitude you have to have to fight an overwhelming enemy. That's not something a tourism oriented country like Cuba has. At least I massively doubt that. It lacks the ideology to fight such a war, since you have to be ready to die. That's why Yemen and Vietnam won, while Venezuela folded. This is also why US "culture" is so much more powerful as a weapon than the aircraft carriers.

The willingness to fight until the end, whatever the cost, is not something you rate a priori. The thing with war is that once you have it for a certain amount of time, you create a generation of people whose kids died, wife died, neighbors and family died, you have nothing to loose anymore. There is a critical mass of casualties upon which you effectively create a population whose sole purpose, for generations, will be to resist and harm you, and that is not dependent on culture or whatever "tourism orientation" a country is labeled.

I don’t know if you are hiding a reasonable point underneath a misuse of the term “ideology”, but the idea that the fine differences between the Cuban and Vietnamese flavors of Marxist-Leninist ideology are critical differences on this point seems unconvincing without some argument clearly articulating the relevant ideological differences an how they produce the described divergence in capacity.

USA “flattened” and invaded Afghanistan but decades after Taliban is just back again. I don’t know, maybe it’s time for USA to just stop getting involved in wars.

For any country, really; wars cannot be won anymore unless you exterminate its inhabitants completely. At best you can force a regime change, but as Afghanistan showed, that's fragile and tenuous at best if it's not fully backed by the population.

You haven't really made an argument of your own. You've just made a claim and presented no evidence. "Simple as that" is neither argument nor evidence nor rationale. This is no better than the people who fall back on "war is hell" to justify when they've fucked up and caused the deaths and suffering of a bunch of civilians for no good purpose. You could at least say something like "we have to bomb the people so they can be free" or "don't you know the Iranians were seconds away from nuking new York, because they have no regard for their own survival". We should "deprecate" offensive wars of choice based on lies because the opportunity cost is enormous (what could we have bought with the 200+ billion they're already looking to spend here?). Every time we do this we create more terrorists (see the blowback incidents weve already had from this war), which results in more egregious government overreach on the domestic population (see patriot act and the experience of commercial flight in today's world). And those are just some of the basic reasons. I don't have time to write them all.

The problem for a would be attacker is that the US still has enough military power to give almost any country on the planet a very bad day every day for as long as the US cares to. Historically, the way to win against the US is to survive long enough for the US to get bored and leave. The last time that happened, it took us 2 decades to get bored.

Afghanistan took only 18 years. For the 20 years war you are probably talking about: I wouldn't call significant civil unrest in opposition of the war "getting bored"

Downvoting a description of a technical solution for smaller nations based on actual evidence from existing conflicts is silly. You might not like the politics you perceive from someone using particular vocabulary, but the proof is there. The USA's supremacy has been challenged in a meaningful way (along with every other major military power). The strategies of the large powers will have to evolve.

USA is good at bombing places. It just so happen that it usually looses the wars after that and usually creates a lot more probpems for itself in the long run. Taliban is back in power, having stronger grap on power then before. Meanwhile, everybody knows what happens to those who cooperate with USA - they get abandoned and betrayed.

> it's not an exaggeration to say that Cuba is flattened and invaded that same afternoon But it is, the US is no position to flatten anything. Afghanistan? Lost Vietnam? Lost Ukraine? Lost Iran? will be lost And these are heavily embargoed 3rd world countries. In the first days of the Israeli-US war in Iran (a country under decades of embargo by the way) the US, Israel and vassals lost 60+ planes (plus who knows what else they are not reporting. Trump is not coming out of this, if he makes the grave mistake of sending troops to their demise this administration is done.

Russia is the aggressor, Iran is a defender. That’s a huge difference.

> Also 90,000,000 people doesn't mean 90,000,000 soldiers, especially when a large part of them hate their own regime. You know what engenders nationalism? Attack on your way of life and the murder of someone you know by said attack.

> If the enemy does the same kind of mindless killing to the civilians, then I would have different ideas. You mean like bombing a school and killing about 150 schoolgirls? The USA had a lot of local support and goodwill in Afghanistan, and turned it into support for the Taliban, because they kept killing civilians in their attempts to beat the Taliban with bombs, because they wanted to limit the unpopular ground troop deloyments. The chance that the same will happen in Iran is precisely 100%

Was it true for Japan and Germany post WWII? Or between European nations after the same said war? On the other hand, until a couple of years ago, Iranians and Israeli never directly exchanged even a bullet between them and yet Iran was dedicated to the destruction of Israel, so YMMV.

The threat of Japanese people all waging guerrilla warfare was considered real enough that the US decided to keep the Japanese Emperor as figurehead (even though the US had enough power to sentence or even execute him for war crimes), just so that the Emperor could order his people to surrender and obey US forces. Something the current US regime might have forgotten.

First, new leadership is MORE hardline. Second, Khamenei in fact presided over Iran who exercised restrain in their responses to attacks and was willing to enter international agreements. And followed them to reasonable level. They did cause destabilization by proxis, they were still regime they were. But like, what Iran regime learned was that restraint makes them look weak and makes them be bombed every couple of months. And that negotiation and international agreements mean nothing. Third, frankly, as evil regime was, American history and role in Iran was destructive one. You cant take down elected president, put cruel monarchy in power and then play victim when revolution happens. And yes, who ends up winning bloody revolution does not tend to be nice pro-democratic side either. It tends to be the side willing to kill and risk more.

Had Israel treated Palestinians better and remained within their territorial limits afforded by UN that may not have come to pass. Recall Iran was one of the very few ME countries that supported the UN charter for creation of Israel. Israel then became the long arm of the forces that wanted to turn Iran into a vassal. Not surprised why they did not like it much.

Yes, hence the continued US occupation after WWII, among other countermeasures. Israel has been killing iranians for quite some time. Here are some notable examples from the last twenty years or so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassinations_of_Iranian_nucl...

Israel didn't take responsibility for those until October 7th. Now clandestine operations happen all the time, like the Iranian bombing on Jewish center in Argentina in 1994: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMIA_bombing While I understand why Israel would want to target Iranian nuclear scientists, I find it much harder to comprehend why Iran would go out of their way to bomb a Jewish community center in South America.

Germans were salty about being bombed and Germany destroyed. They were also occupied for years and also victory forces made sure the victory was absolute - no peace agreement but armies everywhere. There were other aspects too - like nazi doing a lot of destruction of the Germany by themselves. Germans back then seen the whole thing as a tragedy for Germany and Germans. The rebuild phase where allies put a lot of effort and money into rebuilding Germany did a lot to ensure good result there. And you still see fascists being popular in Germany, especially in former easter block. It is just that everyone else is still traumatized by the past, school system make sure everyone knows past and nazi propagation is literally illegal.

Saddam was immensely unpopular. The Taliban was immensely unpopular. It doesn't mean that people like America- or Israel. Every country has it's own elite who have their agenda independent from whatever the White House wants.

> will literally force Western allies to police that straight with their navies If it can't be done by the US navy, it can't be done by Western navies either. What will actually happen is the Eastern countries (including Australia for this purpose!) will just pay the toll. Much cheaper than a military operation. Iran has already achieved an important objective: getting un-sanctioned. All this "message" stuff? That's not coming in the public messaging. > If you look at what's happening, Russia has been forced to withdraw from the world stage as it is bled dry by the Ukraine war. It first pulled back from Syria, and it (Assad) fell. It pulled out of Cuba, out of Venezuela, all troops and aircraft and support. Russia has ceased to be a world power, it's literally done. It's become nothing but a regional power, incapable of projecting any power on the world stage. This has certainly happened, but Russia can stop at any time. It's their Afghanistan (again) or Vietnam. Your analysis also completely leaves out the EU and rNATO role. > It's been buying oil from places like Venezuela, and Iran. It was extending soft power into Cuba. The US cannot tolerate this, and back to the start, I suspect that this is also a secondary message being given. A message to China. "Don't do this". Intercepting international trade on the seas is just piracy. China may get the message but they're under no obligation to respect it.

> It's nice to wave away policing Hormuz, by simply asserting it can't be done. > Is this accurate, however? Note that as long as there is a risk (even 1 to 20, maybe 1 to 100) that your tanker will be attacked, you just won't sail. (The logic of commercial shipping.) Hence, blocking Hormuz does not mean total blockage, just a credible threat. How do you propose to stop such a threat? Adding warships to the mix, to shoot down incoming drones, simply adds those warships to the risked assets. What happens if a couple of escorts are hit/sunk? We were not able to stop Houtis. What makes you think we can stop Iranians? I do not understand this whole "Cripple China" thing. What do you think will happen if China decides that US is REALLY GOING AFTER IT NOW? Maybe it will be enough for them to just stop shipping crap to US. What will the US do if suddenly the shop shelves become empty, CCCP-style?

Ufff, just to be clear: Are you saying that invading and conquering Iran won't be much more difficult than doing the same for Afghanistan? I want some of the good stuff you are using!

In chapter 11 of All Quiet on the Western Front Paul and his unit find an abandoned food cache in the middle of no mans land. Instead of secreting away the food back to their lines where they will have to share it, they decide to just cook and eat it right then and there. But a spotter plane from the allies sees the smoke and then begins shelling their position. Cue a terrifying, if hilarious, scene where the soldiers try and cook pancakes as shells explode around them. Paul, as the last to leave, takes his pancakes on a plate and dashes out, timing his escape between bursts, and just barely making it back to the German trenches. Its a rare comic scene in an otherwise horrific and very real look at WW1. The scene in the book is just so familiar to the lines in Ukraine these days, nearly a hundred years later. Instead of spotter planes near the dawn of aviation, we have satellites and drones (similarly quite new in the role). Instead of just shells and fuzing experts, we have FPV drones and much more sophisticated shells. Instead of buddies from the same towns all huddled together in cold muddy holes, we have deracinated units spread far and wide in laying in fear of thermal imaging. This results in a no mans land again, but a dozen kilometers wide instead of a few hundred meters wide, and somehow more psychologically damaging. My point is that absent any tech that will miraculously be invented and deployed widely in the new few weeks, the Iran war, if it should be a ground one, is going to be just like Ukraine is today, which is somehow a worse version of trench warfare . Even casual Victoria II players know that WW1 is essentially the final boss of the game. And the 'lesson' of Vicky II is essentialy: Do not fight WW1, it ruins Everything . To be clear: The US is choosing to fight a worse version of WW1 without even a stated (or likely even known) condition of victory. We're about to send many thousands boys to suffer and die for not 'literally nothing', but actually literally nothing.

It depends a lot on the kind of campaign that is fought. The US had complete air superiority in Iraq and Afghanistan and while it helped it is unclear how it would play out in a drone-heavy battlefield. In Afghanistan for example the assault on Shah-i-Kot Valley and the ineffectiveness of air support is instructive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Anaconda#TF_Rakkasan It's worth noting that the US lost both those wars - the Taliban rules again in Afghanistan and Iran is more influential in Iraq after the fall of Saddam than it was before, eg: https://www.cfr.org/articles/how-much-influence-does-iran-ha...

> The problem in Ukraine is that anti-air defenses control the skies... <snip> ...US forces can fly relatively cheap bomb trucks anywhere and drop ordinance on anything. Stealth aircraft and NATO doctrine apparently work. In Ukraine, neither side has access to the air weaponry (in capabilities or volume) that the US does - so the battlefield has evolved into one of drone superiority. So yes, the US could (logistics willing) pummel Iran with B52s, B2s, and the like, maybe largely unopposed. However, this would only achieve so much: "winning" would be very different, especially when it's likely to turn into into a grinding resistance/insurgency ground war. A better analogy than Ukraine may be the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, only Iran has far more trained fighters and weaponry from the start. Or Vietnam, of course. Maybe the US could "win", but it would depend on the strength of the political will to continue losing soldiers and spending huge amounts of money; and it would certainty be seen as a "forever war". And of course (as noted elsewhere) the US' more recent forays into Iraq and Afghanistan show how difficult regime change by force is.

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.

That was standard practice for much of recorded history. Surrender now or we will kill you all. Alexander the Great did it to Tyre and Sidon. The Romans did it to Jerusalem. The Israelis did it to Gaza. The orange madman and his henchmen have made it very clear that they don't give a shit about the rules of warfare.

> destroying much of Iran's military and leadership Good at hitting targets, terrible at achieving goals. Same as Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc. Were the Taliban destroyed by killing their upper echelons several times over? In terms of resilience, the Iranians are similar, arguably much more so.

> Were the Taliban destroyed by killing their upper echelons several times over? Of course not, because that wasn't the goal and would be impossible, because we were recreating the conditions that led to the Taliban taking control in the first place (corrupt and amoral warlords oppressing the populace). Afghanistan's strategic location and suitability for poppy farming and generating dark money flows is why we went in. It was the staging ground for the plans to overthrow "Iraq [...] Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan" ( https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2003/9/22/us-plans-to-attack-... ). We're still involved in active conflicts in most of those countries.

Given you compare the cost of a US operation to open the straits to the Vietnam War, it seems prudent to mention that the outcome of the Vietnam war, according to Wikipedia, was a North Vietnam victory.

> I don't see any compelling evidence that the US couldn't open the straits if it really wanted to, it's just that the cost in lives and hardware would be unlike anything the US has seen since Vietnam, maybe even the second world war The US invaded Iraq and toppled its government; Iraqi militias are still firing drones and missiles at US bases. Tankers and oil infra are much softer targets… all it takes is hitting one or two tankers and folks will stop shipping.

You can't. Iran only needs to be credible in their threats to make crossing the strait too risky. And for that you only need a few missiles, drones and mines every so often. Asymetric warfare is a hell of a hole to dig oneself into, ain't it?

Do the Iranians have to win against a Navy ship or an oil tanker? Asymmetric warfare suggests they would ignore the well fortified ship and wreak havoc on commercial shipping to get the same result. The Strait of Hormuz is so shallow and narrow that they only really need to sink two or three tankers to shut the whole thing down.

All large ships in the US Navy have automated weapons for killing swarms of small surface craft. They added that capability a few decades ago because they were regularly attacked by swarms of suicide speed boats packed with explosives. No one tries that anymore. Surface drones are effectively indistinguishable from that threat. Easier than avoiding torpedos, which are also long-range drones.

Interestingly, the problem the existing weapons had is that they had terrible engagement characteristics for things that were close and fast at sea level. CIWS wasn’t built for that. It wasn’t in the original threat model. They were designed for low planes and cruise missiles. The boat swarms would close the distance fast, and the US Navy was reluctant to engage potentially stupid but non-hostile targets. By the time the threat was clear the defensive weapon systems were outside their design parameters. The alternative was killing everyone a long way out even if they weren’t a clear threat. Not an issue today, they have loads of weapons purpose-engineered for that threat. But they had to learn that lesson the hard way.

Cheap and covert, Operation Spiderweb changed the game

I think this strategy is effective for Ukraine and Iran because they fight an enemy that is superior in terms of weapon capabilities. If you are the big boy with the bigger gun you don't necessarily need that. PS: I will take that back when someone manages to hit a carrier with a low cost drone boat.

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

Clandestine power projection. Neat!

Operation Spiderweb was not a power projection exercise though, it was an espionage mission. This is like arguing you don't need a military because you'll just have 1 spy turn the enemies own weapons on them. Sure...its not that it can't work, but there's more then a few issues with the strategic plan.

“during WWII, the US Navy… winning the U-boat war in the Atlantic” Sounds like typical US revisionist history. They developed ASDIC? HF/DF? Hedgehog? Even the depth charge? No, that was all the British. I would say technological development plus the Enigma decrypts were the biggest factor.

Yes. "When whole squadrons of very long-range aircraft were operating out of bases in the Shetlands, Northern Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland (and, after mid-1943, the Azores), and when the Bay of Biscay could be patrolled all through the night by aircraft equipped with centimetric radar, Leigh Lights, depth charges, acoustic torpedoes, even rockets, Doenitz’s submarines knew no rest." [0] [0] Kennedy, Paul. Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned The Tide in the Second World War, from the chapter 'How to Get Convoys Safely Across the Atlantic'

UKR = entire country of +40m is on the battlefront so they can do total war mobilized homefront distributed system... so can Iran. But it's very different for force projecting security guarantor US - can't convince paying protectorates to pivot total war defense posture in peacetime, that's what they bribe US not to do. And ultimately whatever model of distributed lethality / survivability (which US planning foresaw) is less relevant that US global commitments requires high end hardware that has to be rotated / propositioned selectively, and sustainable only in limited numbers vs adversaries mobilized on total war. But the fundamental problem is US adversaries are catching up on precision strike complex. Iran isn't asymmetric warfare, but restoration of symmetry. It's not so much US getting weaker as adversaries getting stronger, and without monopoly over mass precision strike (which naval / air superiority / supremacy is only delivery platform), US expeditionary mode simply on the losing side of many local attrition scenarios. Ultimately all US adversaries will gain commoditized local precision strike (even deadlier if bundled with high end ISR), at varying scales due to proliferation requiring persistence across global theatres US simply doesn't have numbers/logistics for. TLDR: US expeditionary model is bunch of goons with rifles in trucks, driving around neighbourhood where everyone had knives that could not get in range. The second everyone else buys guns, then rifles, the expeditionary model breaks.

You can lose a game of chess to a guy with fewer and less powerful pieces than you if you play like a moron. The US has been playing the Iran situation like a gigantic moron.

Maybe I am misinformed, but I was under the impression that the US was so capable it is not even playing the same game as a country like Iran. As in they could brute force solutions due to superior technology and infrastructure, because that is how much more the US spends on it.

Brute forcing things is the kind of thinking that leads to the moron losing the game of chess. And is basically the approach the U.S. took in Vietnam.

> And is basically the approach the U.S. took in Vietnam. And just like the Vietnamese, Iran doesn’t have to win against the US. They only have to not lose. They control the straight, and at $1 per barrel toll, they’ll be making $1 Billion a week. Trump owned himself. This is going to suck.

Well, regardless of technology, the space of things you can accomplish without risking your own troops' lives is very small. (Unless you're willing to go nuclear, which has the pesky downside of ending the world.) To put it in perspective - in Vietnam, opposition forces lost over a million troops and continued to fight viciously. The US lost around 50,000 and gave up and left. Democratic countries simply lack the stomach for this kind of thing (which is a good thing, really).

More to the point, if your military is only good when enemies attack you the way you want them to, you don't have a good military.

Nonsense. Every military is built to counter certain types of enemies. Nations that win predict correctly, nations that lose predict incorrectly. History is littered with examples.

We win battles and lose wars. Haven't won a war since WW2 and arguably Russia would have won without us.

Sure, they will find out it is a good military. No doubt about that. What the US has found out repeatedly but fails to acknowledge is that the opposition proves to be a match. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Somalia have shown just how deep reserves of human resilience and arsenal of guerrilla tactics they have. This doesn't fit the US's mindset about how war is to be waged. Meanwhile, the American public wants a quick skirmish and a bold "We WON" claim .. it has no appetite for body bags coming home and the price of oil rising. Which is why if China makes a move on Taiwan, the US can do nothing.

> Pretty sure anyone who fights the US military finds out pretty fast it’s a good military. I am not sure about that. Iraq, Afghanistan, to name the new ones and Vietnam to name an old one. Sure you can take an easy/undisciplined target like Maduro. But many armies in the world can also do that. Another thing that has to be recognized: alternative warfare (ie: terrorism) is a legitimate form of warfare regardless of its morality. You can't, in my opinion, claim military supremacy while not being able to contain these other risks. Another upcoming one: cyber-warfare.

It's not the first time that overwhelming force fails to deliver results for the US when they get bogged down in an asymmetric war. The Korean and Vietnam wars last century still involved air carriers parked off the coast of Korea and Vietnam. But in the end, those wars turned into messy grinds. And even with extensive navy and air support resulted in eventual withdrawal/cease fires on unfavorable terms. Vietnam especially was painful. Asymmetric war fare against a determined enemy is just hard and it always has been. Cheap drones and missiles are part of wars like that now. You can stash them all over the place and dig in. The Russians learned that the hard way in Afghanistan. As did the British before them. And more recently the US of course. The withdrawal from Afghanistan rivaled that of the one in Vietnam. Complete with chaotic scenes of people desperately trying to get out. That's only a few years ago. In the Gulf, the Houthis still pose a threat after years of determined efforts to take them out. In the same way, it took the Israeli's very long to neutralize Hamas in Gaza. And that's a few tens of miles away from their capital. Same with Hezbollah on their northern border. In Iraq, IEDs kept grinding away at the US forces long after victory was declared. And that was with massive amounts of boots on the ground and the country fully defeated and occupied. Iran of course has been supplying weaponry for proxy wars like this for decades. Iran is much bigger than Iraq or Afghanistan and much better prepared for a land/guerilla war on their own territory. The country was built on asymmetric warfare like this and has had decades to prepare and dig in and lots of experience via the various proxy wars I mentioned. The unfortunate reality is that that straight is only going to open when Iran decides that is in their interest.

> either involves ground troops or leaving without opening the strait. These options are not mutually exclusive. > That is not to say Iran is winning. They are though, the US administration has already lost it's patience, their strategic objectives (whatever they might have been have clearly not materialized), the talk about talks may very well be the administration preparing to make a bunch of concessions proclaim victory and walk away. As it's possible for both parties to lose, a party can win all the battles and lose the war.

> at an unknown cost We know the cost. We've conducted that type of warfare before. It's incredibly destructive and barbaric and requires huge amounts of human sacrifice to positively take control of territory after you've finished battering it with high explosives from every available angle. It looks really bad on TV. > cruise missile carriers You don't get very large payloads this way. It's fine if you want to pierce the armor of another ship or if you want to launch an "assassination missile" at a single unit but not awesome if you want to replace the capabilities of carriers and battleships and the literal BFGs they carry. > If you build ships good for real wars you tend to get into wars. It was meant to be a deterrent against other nation states and one particular form of naval warfare. In the modern world of terrorist cells and asymmetric warfare this may be a moot point.

But sir, how do we stop an old guy on the bow of a rusty fishing boat firing a $50 rpg at the oil tanker?

In the movie Thirteen Days, JFK mentions a book titled March of Folly by Barbara Tuchmann. I bought the book on that tip and it has an interesting chapter on Vietnam. I don't think adding a chapter on this "special operation" would even be worth it as it would just be repetitive.

The US no longer uses its army for defense. Nobody in their immediate region dares attack them, they're too powerful ("Godzilla", in the words of John Mearsheimer). All the wars that the US has fought since WWII are nothing to do with defense. Just look at the Wikipedia article on "power projection": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_projection The leader image is ... a US aircraft carrier (the USS Nimitz). That's what the US uses its military power for, to influence events in lands far, far away from its territory. But, now, tell me which one of the many wars that the US has fought in after WWII did not end in disaster. Afghanistan? Iraq? Korea? There was a meme doing the rounds the other day: "Name a character who can defeat Captain America". The answer being "Captain Vietnam". The US has faced humiliating defeat after humiliating defeat while bringing death and destruction and immeasurable misery to millions around the world. That is what HN users seem to have an "anti" sentiment for. If you watch the news you'll be able to tell that this goes far beyond HN. The whole of US society seems to be extremely tired with those "forever wars", those senseless excursions to faraway lands, that not only do not secure US interests but turn world opinion more and more against the US. Even the US' closest allies now fear the US: vide Greenland. Anyone with more than a video game or comic book understanding of how the real world works would do well to be concerned. Edit: also from EU, btw. Greek but living in the UK.

As an American, I think a better metric for outcomes of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq is: were we trading with the before the war and are we trading with them one generation after the war ? The same is even true of WWII, a more important marker afterward is that we spent the rest of the 20th century trading prosperously with Japan and Germany. Korea: the south became an economic powerhouse with whom we now trade for critical computer components and is a generally reliable ally in the region. Vietnam: we now trade with them happily and enjoy generally productive relations, largely because they fought us for less than two decades but fought China for centuries and centuries. Iraq: we aren't yet a generation past, but the government they have now is better than what they had under Saddam Hussein, even if it was almost immediately subverted by Iran. And jury is out on Iran because that hot war just started. Afghanistan: we aren't yet a generation past, but very likely the most clear failure in this list. I remember thinking in high school (during the active phase of the war): "if we actually want to make a difference, we'd have to stay a century or more, and we don't have the will to do that the way the British or Russians tried to, and even they ultimately failed to make any local changes." Europeans also need to realize that everyday Americans don't actually care about Europe very much and never truly have . It took the Lusitania to get us into World War I, Pearl Harbor (and Hitler's declaration of war) to get us into World War II, and the credible threat of the Soviet Union to keep us in Europe for decades after the war. The husk of Russia at the center of the Soviet skeleton isn't a credible threat to America, and the American reversion to the mean of isolationism began as the Cold War ended. That reversion completed sometime between 2010 and 2015. There is a new credible threat, but that is China, and even to well informed Americans Europe is slipping from their attention. Most people in Trump's government probably don't care that much about reopening Hormuz quickly. Gas prices are only truly spiking in U.S. states where local environmental regulations have obstructed access to domestic and regional supply, and the largest of those states (i.e. California, New York) have broken against Republicans in every Presidential election (9 of them in a row) since the end of the Cold War.

> Vietnam: we now trade with them happily and enjoy generally productive relations Yes, but .. what was the actual objective again?

> As an American, I think a better metric for outcomes of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq is: were we trading with the before the war and are we trading with them one generation after the war? At least you're honest. Personally I can't believe someone would think it's OK to invade someone else's county and massacre civilians on the scale of Vietnam or Korea in order to establish profitable trading relations.

Also Millennium Challenge 2002 (MC02) was a major war game exercise conducted by the United States Armed Forces under United States Joint Forces Command in mid-2002: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002 Red, commanded by retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper, adopted an asymmetric strategy. In particular, Red utilized old methods to evade Blue's sophisticated electronic surveillance network: Van Riper simulated using motorcycle messengers to transmit orders to front-line troops and World-War-II-style light signals to launch airplanes without radio communications in the model. Red received an ultimatum from Blue, essentially a surrender document, demanding a response within 24 hours. Thus warned of Blue's approach, Red used a fleet of small boats to determine the position of Blue's fleet by the second day of the exercise. In a preemptive strike, Red launched a massive salvo of cruise missiles that overwhelmed the Blue forces' electronic sensors and destroyed sixteen warships: one aircraft carrier, ten cruisers and five of Blue's six amphibious ships. An equivalent success in a real conflict would have resulted in the deaths of over 20,000 service personnel. Soon after the cruise missile offensive, another significant portion of Blue's navy was "sunk" by an armada of small Red boats, which carried out both conventional and suicide attacks that capitalized on Blue's inability to detect them as well as expected.

wasn't one of the controversies, that the simulation didn't account for the fact that Red's boats couldn't actually/launch carry the cruise missiles that were used to sink these ships? be that as it may, the lesson still stands

But van Riper's attack didn't count, for reasons such as and therefore.

intresting.. looks like that USA also wont go well on the taiwan strait..whats the last time USA pick a enemy of it's own size and won?

Iran's deep investment in asymmetric warfare is paying serious dividends. You wouldn't expect a nation that's being bombed day and night, essentially at will, to still hold so many cards. Not only is the US completely incapable of strong-arming the straight open, but the rate of missile and drone attacks out of Iran and its proxies has been accelerating the last few days, as has the rate of successful hits.

I kinda expected scorched earth from Iran, or any oil producing state tbh, didn’t Saddam do this retreating from Kuwait?

Which is why taking out the political leadership is the better tactic. You don't need to fight armies - just make it suicide to command them. Decapitation strikes work. "What if you had a time machine and could go back to kill Hitler?" Well yeah, no need to fight all of Germany. Would the Ukraine war still be going without Putin at the helm? The logical conclusion of drone war is take out whoever controls the drones.

But that approach has demonstrably not worked in this instance because Iran has been planning for this exact scenario.

: Stupidly, yes, with carpet bombing. Practically, no, that would be horrible. Could that work? It didn’t end well in Vietnam, which is about a fifth of the land area, and, in 1970, half the current population of Iran. Also, they’ll pack a bigger punch, but I think the USA has way fewer bombers now.

> Depopulation won't stop the IRGC from digging up a Shahed buried in the sand Carpet bombing. You don’t get to bury things in the sand, much less unbury them. It’s an old tactic—shaping movement with artillery—except done with remote pieces. > range is so great you would have to pacify the entire east of Iran West. Also, I don’t think so. Just critical zones. Worst case, only U.S. escorted and Iran toll-paying ships get through. (Worst case for the world. Not the belligerents. Which…that might be the solution.)

Carpet bombing didn't even break Vietnam. It didn't break WWII Germany either.

Nor did WW2 England. Look, Churchill had like 24 approval rate after Dunkerque, and the 'british Hitler' had 18%. Bombing London moved those percentages _very_ fast. 'do nothing, win' people have a point most of the time.

> and Ukraine haven’t surrendered Different goals. Carpet bombing to deny Iran access to its coast is maneouvre warfare. It’s tactical. Carpet bombing to force Kyiv to capitulate is strategic bombing. It has never worked.