BahRamYou
2d ago
Well, I fully expected the US to win, but I thought it would take a lot longer than this! Maybe I missed the discussion on this from the past 2 years. The saying among neocons during the 2000s was "everyone wants to go to Baghdad, but only real men want to go to Tehran"- even the hardline hawks expected that a war with Iran would be tough.
And I'm certainly not saying the US is immune to nukes, or should seek out such a war. Just that, if it does happen, the losses would be a lot less than people might expect based on cold war thinking. And we've just seen that the US has immense power to devastate a country in the opening hours of a war, before it even has a chance to launch its missiles.
Are we in a new age of hyperpower?
OK, this war in Iran is only 2 days old, and as we all know "truth is the first casualty of war." So this is very much a hot take, and we'll need a lot more time and thoughtful analysis to see how this plays out.
But right now, as an American watching the news, I'm feeling a bit drunk on national power. I can only imagine how Trump and other leaders must be feeling, let alone the actual soldiers who drop the bombs. Already this year we've fought and- it seems- won two wars! The first one with absolutely no losses, and this one also seems quite low casualty. This was done purely with American military (and help from Israel), no NATO help necessary. Iran has spent the last 40 years building up a gigantic military, and now it all just looks like an absolute joke. All their leadership is dead within the first day, and the US has massive air superiority over most of the country. It's now basically just a choice of what targets we want to bomb.
I took this chance to go check back in on Venezuela. I couldn't find many good sources there, but so far it seems... basically fine? There's no civil war or hardline Maduro loyalists fighting to the death. The new president has taken over with basically no issues, and she seems to be cooperating quite well with the US. Lots of Venezuelans are happy that this happened. Of course there are still many problems with the country, but it's fair to chalk that war up as a win.
But what about China? We're supposed to be in a new "multipolar" age, right? The US can't just go throwing its weight around wherever it wants because there are other powers to stop us. Iran was heavily involved in selling oil to China, and was a military ally of them through the Shanghai Cooperative Organization. Well, so far all China has done is say mean things about us. They can't even say it openly, they have to do it in phone calls to Russia. So apparently they're not much of a counter at all.
I think we've reached a tipping point where US air power just crushes all of its adversaries with no counter. It's not any one weapon, but a combination of factors- more satellites, better human intelligence, more stealth aircraft, better radar, more JDAMs and stand off munitions, cyberattacks, and now AI to help us identify targets. The US can completely devastate most countries, even large ones like Iran, without putting a single boot on the ground, unless we want to send special forces to arrest someone like we did to Maduro. And we've got 100 next-gen stealth bombers currently in production, plus... whatever the hell the F47 next-gen fighter can do, so I expect this dominance to increase over the next decade.
But what about nukes? Soviet nukes held the US in check throughout the cold war, surely those also put a break on US imperial ambitions? Well, to some extent they still do, but the US has made some very impressive progress in missile defense lately. THAAD is now hitting its targets with an impressively high success rate, and was recently used to help defend Israel against Iran's missile barage. The main limiting factor there is just building more interceptors, and Trump is pushing for massive funding there as part of his Golden Dome project. That also opens up some intriguing options in space- and, oh hey, would you look at that, the US also has SpaceX utterly dominating LEO launch, and it will likely get even more dominant there if/when Starship becomes practical. Meanwhile China has a relatively small nuclear arsenal, and Russia's is just leftover Soviet junk that might not even work anymore. I think we are rapidly reaching a point where the US has overwhelming nuclear dominance.
The question then becomes- what do we do with this power? Trump used to always preach the merits of isolationism, and he made a big splash early in the Republican primary by being the only candidate who strongly denounced the Iraq war. He clashed heavily with Marco Rubio over that issue. But now he has Rubio as his Secretary of State, and he seems to have rapidly "evolved" to favor military interventions. But, being Trump, he still makes speeches about "taking Venezuela's oil" and other me-first boasting. So far no such boasts about Iran, but I can only assume there will be some.
My guess? He keeps doing this. Cuba is an obvious target, they're pretty much falling apart already. Next would be Panama, where he always talked about wanting the Canal back. After that... I have no idea. Colombia? Mexico? Somalia? Cambodia? He could potentially attack all of those places, if each one is as fast and decisive as this current Iran war seems. I... don't think Trump would actually invade Greenland, or attack China, but... who can say? If he chose to do those things, who could stop him?
BahRamYou
4d ago
No idea about that particular drone, but there sure is a lot of buzz around Iran right now. Trump has said he's "not happy" with Iran, and betting markets have shown a huge spike in the odds that the US strikes Iran by the end of February. As in, by tomorrow.
BahRamYou
4d ago
But where will you get your recommended dose of crazy autistic neckbeard condescension?
BahRamYou
4d ago
Did you feel like the employees there are/were heavily using AI in their regular job to become more efficient now? Do they have have agentic AIs that can totally replace some people's jobs?
BahRamYou
4d ago
Could be a lot of things. It definitely sounds a lot better to say that they made massive layoffs because of AI then because "we had too many useless employees doing nothing" or "our stock was way down so we had to try something drastic." But given that they're a fairly mature software service company, I can actually see them being a prime use case for AI making their employees more efficient.
Why do you think we need to do central planning? I don't see how that helps anyone.
The US military is no longer just a hammer. It's very much a smart hammer, honed by 20 years of the global war on terror and cyber/intel development. That helps a lot if you need to find insurgents, or shoot down an ICBM.
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