RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13hr ago
Ideas like Elan, Warrior Spirit, and Bushido seem to be total bullshit in modern war
Whenever there was rough material parity, the Japanese usually won. They often won while outnumbered. The Allies never achieved a feat like the Malaya campaign where they steamrolled a Japanese force that outnumbered or outgunned them. You see battles like Guadalcanal and it's always the same story. Allies: 60,000+ men. Japan: 36,200 men. Not exactly an impressive feat of arms, winning with more men!
Warrior spirit and elan really is important. What happened in Korea? The Chinese soldiers really wanted to win and that apparently is enough to compensate for having no armour, airpower, motorized supply, just being a light infantry force... They put North Korea back on the map with elan.
Sufficient firepower can overwhelm warrior spirit of course, supplies are obviously needed... At the end of the day it doesn't matter how you win so long as you do.
But look at Afghanistan! What did the Taliban have, exactly? Money? Weapons? Training? Numbers? Or was it just elan and will to win, determination and confidence in their values? I doubt 1 in 10 of our soldiers would tolerate fighting like the Taliban did, without medivac, without armour, without sophisticated training, without airpower, without all our advanced technology.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
17hr ago
The Gulf Arabs are absolutely in the petrostate trap. They don't make things, they just function as a shady tax haven and cheap-energy zone for certain industries. They have ambitions in AI, not in making AI models but buying GPUs made by industrious countries, hosting AI models made by clever companies, exploiting their cheap energy.
The Gulf buys US weapons, they buy Chinese weapons, they buy (or attempt to buy) US protection. Who makes the actual oil equipment and drills? Halliburton, Baker Hughes, Samsung... The Saudis have some Chinese made ballistic missiles waiting for Pakistani nuclear bombs they think they paid for.
Iran makes their own oil equipment. Iran's MAPNA Group makes gas power plants at world standards. They are trying to export technology, not just oil. Their oil industry has problems, as you would expect given sanctions. But it is their oil industry and not imported oil industry.
Iran makes things, they build their own missiles, drones and weapons. They develop their own strategies to take advantage of their enemies' weaknesses. Their proxies do a good job.
The UAE's proxies in Sudan haven't covered themselves in glory and they're merely fighting Sudan, not exactly a tough opponent. The Saudi army has all this fancy US gear. And how do they perform against the Houthis? They got wrecked by the Houthis.
Iran is far superior to the Gulf Monarchies in governance. They may be an enemy of the US but they are not stupid. There's a huge power gap between Iran and Turkey and Pakistan at the top end of the Islamic world, then there are the Gulf monarchies and below them assorted Arab riff-raff. The Gulf states don't know how to fight or do anything correctly. Their manifest impotence in this war is obvious, America has to do all the fighting for them.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
20hr ago
Kulak clearly says that the US will fuck it up somehow, that the actual plan will be way more shambolic and half-cocked and sure to fail.
I agree. Also, Azerbaijan is probably weak to drones/missiles. They don't want to lose their oil do they? Wouldn't it make more sense for them to profit off the price spike than potentially get wrecked?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
21hr ago
I don't think the Iranians have any intention of 'playing ball.' They're very angry. The guy in charge just had his father, wife, kids get blown up by US/Israel. I don't think he gives a damn, he is out for blood.
The people who might've been doing the 'friendly regime' are eating bombs and perhaps changing their political stance. Why would some random person in Tehran think more positively about Israel or America after getting their apartment blown up or coated in a thick layer of toxic petrochemicals from all the oil fires?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
21hr ago
There's already been a good deal of bombing of oil infrastructure. Take a breath of fresh air in Tehran, you can smell it. Haifa too. Oil infrastructure in Oman got bombed.
Much easier and safer to just counter-blockade from afar I think.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
I can't understand what the point is of seizing Kharg island. The US could just bomb it to leave it unusable for as long as they want? Or just steal the tankers at sea? It's not like it would be hard to blow up some oil storage terminals.
Landing troops there would just make them a juicy target and difficult to resupply. Iran can launch all kinds of things from inland at them.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Killing civilians is part of the nature of war, that's the risk taken on when starting a war, just like how losing soldiers is inevitable.
I didn't say 'you must only hit confirmed military targets'. I say that this innate risk must be taken into account, wars must not be whitewashed as squeaky-clean 'precision strikes' against just the buddies. There is no 'sci fi precision' killing just combatants, there is no 'literally every single casualty is military' outside a propaganda reel.
I don't think even Hegseth would disagree with me here, if he were being honest.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
The US has hit Iran with thousands of bombs and the general level of precision is terrifying sci-fi absurdity. There's Iranian doctors purportedly reporting that literally every single casualty they've seen is non-civilian.
Really? The US military kills lots of civilians in all prior wars, even up to the very end of the Afghan war they were accidentally hitting random people with suspicious tubes in their truck.
Suddenly they've developed incredible accuracy and precision, in the last couple of years? Under the watch of Hegseth 'slash and burn, oohrah, real manly warfare no legal bullshit', just as they cut the office who's supposed to be preventing this? And they can manage this precision in a country with much more sophisticated air defences than Afghanistan or post-invasion Iraq, where ISR drones can and are being shot down?
How can this be? AI? Israel makes great use of AI and they killed lots of civilians in Gaza in some combination of neglect and malice.
Killing civilians is part of the nature of war, that's the risk taken on when starting a war, just like how losing soldiers is inevitable.
Focusing all your attention on the single incident that might possibly have been the US hitting a civilian target
It's not going to be just a single incident, come on. Weapons miss, intelligence is faulty, fog of war is fog of war.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
The Iranians weren't blocking the Straits of Hormuz until after the war began.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
there's being on American's shit list, and there's 'bombing the Strait of Hormuz and being treated as a rogue state by everyone'.
That's not what is happening. China is still getting about 50% of what they were getting, directly from Iran. Western aligned countries are not getting oil through the straits.
It's a more or less selective blockade. Just like the Houthis in the Red Sea, which again the US really struggled to partially reopen...
Assassination has never worked, not once in the entire history of warfare. Nobody fought a war and it was decided by an assassination. That's why we have large militaries instead of ninjas and spies and missiles that would be much cheaper. The Israelis don't seem to appreciate this, they tried assassinations against Hamas for a few years... doesn't work. Hamas is still there, just as before despite considerable effort to destroy them. For some reason they keep trying it and people keep thinking it will work, despite literally no empirical evidence whatsoever and great evidence to the contrary. If assassinations work, then you're really dealing with some kind of gang or a very low-tier organization, not a real country. To destroy Hamas the Israelis needed to invade and conquer Gaza, kill Hamas from the bottom up, not just rain down bombs here and there.
If Iran blew up Trump and Jared and Vance and Hegseth and another 20 four star generals, that wouldn't impair the US a jot. They have plenty more generals, plenty more politicians. It'd be quite embarrassing but the entire army, navy and air force is still there, the nuclear forces remain, the wealth creating industries are there, the energy is there, the population is there, the food is there. The US would not have a civil war because some officials got blown up. Americans would instead double down and lash out aggressively.
To really break America, you'd need to crush the entire US military including the nuclear forces, you have to massacre millions and millions of Americans, bomb out cities, induce famine, starve off energy... And all that can only really be done by a huge nuclear attack or a ground invasion. Same with Iran, albeit scaled down.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
What about delivering on prosperity? Has Carney actually lowered cost of living, made things more affordable?
In Australia I see a certain symmetry. We have a similarly boring, albeit less qualified, centre-left Labor leader in Albanese. He was elected on a platform of lowering electricity prices and improving cost of living, promptly failed to do that (prices went in the other direction), got re-elected anyway. I was sympathetic to Dutton (former leader of the centre-right Liberal Party) and his more ambitious nuclear energy plan but the country rejected him totally. I guess Dutton wasn't charismatic enough, too Trump-coded.
The Liberal Party seems to be totally disintegrating, the more immigration-restrictionist One Nation is demolishing them in polling.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Why do you keep saying this? The USAF is almost certainly using Falco right now, it was operationally deployed and successfully used on wartime targets in the same theater last year!
You seem to have this idea that a countermeasure is magically 100% effective against all threats of that type and lets you operate with impunity against enemies armed with that weapon. But no countermeasure is 100% effective. Even if they were, the truth is that if you have 20 rockets and your enemy has 21, you are going to get hit regardless of how good your tech works. It also does not mean the tech is useless (the enemy hit you once instead of 21 times!)
It doesn't need to be 100% effective, it needs to enable the campaign to achieve its key political goals. One of those goals is almost certainly to enable energy exports through the straits of Hormuz, it requires US Arab allies to not get punished by Iran and threatened with de-desalination, de-energization. I am not imposing excessively high standards on the US military. The Trump administration and the strategic situation is imposing these excessively high standards with the choice of campaign. They did a really poor job justifying and explaining and gathering support for the war, so the standards for success are higher than they would've been.
Another strategic goal is 'regime change in Iran' which is clearly not going as planned. The leadership change we have seen is not the kind the US was looking for! A key part of regime change would be crushing Iran's ability to strike back, by taking away their leverage on the Gulf and on Israel. They will be most likely to concede if they have no cards left. So while it sure is hard to defend against air attacks, that's what the US and gang has to do. It sure is hard to attack and destroy hardened and dispersed underground missile facilities, yet the nature of the campaign requires this. Even that may well not be sufficient.
Ukraine may well be shooting drones with machineguns. The Apache can shoot at them with the 30mm. But nevertheless, they are getting through and that is endangering the campaign objectives. Nevermind mines now entering the equation. The Littoral Combat Ship now has a chance to show its qualities...
It's an asymmetric war. Iran's goals are innately easier to meet than the US goals. This war is going worse for America than either Gulf War because of the much greater disruption to energy production and energy flows. Perhaps that will change. If it does then the US will be in a much better situation. Lower reported US casualties is not such a big deal. Again it's not an even playing ground, US casualty tolerance attacking a country on the other side of the world without much clear reason (was it Israel, nukes, were they gonna conquer the whole Middle East?) is going to be much lower than Iran's casualty tolerance of soldiers defending their homeland from the 'Epstein Alliance.'
It's certainly possible that the US burn rate of interceptors was more than calculated, but also the US shifting munitions from theater to theater isn't particularly unusual, I don't think.
South Korea paid a great deal politically and economically in Chinese retaliation for those missiles and sensors to be placed there. South Korea is more important than blowing up Iran. They produce the memory needed for AI, the memory China desperately wants but can't have. They have a serious defence industry, they can produce ships. They are highly dependent on energy imports from the Gulf. Slapping them in the face with this war may well have really serious strategic effects if they perceive that the US is unreliable and considers them a second-rate ally.
Cruise missiles? Four, maybe five digits.
10,000 cruise missiles is not that much. Russia used something like 5000 in Ukraine thus far. Iran is roughly Ukraine-sized, larger in population. Depleting these stores of munitions while China is looming doesn't make much sense.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
This was literally my claim, which you rejected.
No, you were making an extremely silly and irrelevant demand to know 'how much' better fusion rockets would be after another extremely silly and pedantic point of saying that cars and horses do not use the rocket equation. I was the one who said that the physics had already been worked out, in general terms. You asked this:
This is true. How much better? What are the numbers that we can plug into the rocket equation in order to compare to the other numbers that we can plug into the rocket equation? It is only then that we can really get a sense for the scale of how much better future technologies can be.
We don't have fusion, let alone fusion rockets. We have designs, many of which may be totally unworkable since we don't have fusion and don't know how heavy the reactor will be, what net energy is yielded or what kind of constraints there will be. That is precisely why asking for these specific details is dumb. I already explained this but you didn't understand it.
I don't understand your somewhat patronizing approach of asking about concept-based performance. I don't need to cite a specific fusion design to know that fusion designs can provide much more capable rocketry. That's inherent given the nature of fusion vs chemical rocketry. We already know this. There is plenty of variance between designs and some may just not end up being workable.
We do know for sure is that the basic physics of fusion power provide vastly more energy per unit of fuel. Once we develop fusion power, we will have a much better idea of how to go about this since we will know if we're using tokamaks or lighter Helion-style approaches, if magnetic nozzles are practical, how heavy the radiation shielding needs to be.
What we DO know is that most fusion systems provide much better specific impulse and exhaust velocity than chemical rockets can. Thus, in general, fusion designs are much more suitable for exploration and colonization of the outer solar system. Asking for specific details on specific systems we cannot produce or test is not smart. Those details don't exist in the real world.
This is baseline, expected knowledge for an educated layman. You claim to be an engineer or technical in some respect. You seriously need to develop reading comprehension. It is a vital skill you will need in your work, presuming you actually are an engineer and not just LARPing for internet smart guy points.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
You're shifting the goalpost from claiming that "the message hasn't filtered through" to claiming that things have not been moving fast enough for your liking
You brought up these lasers and cheap, effective anti-drone weapons. If these weapons are so great, why don't we see them in action? If they're not mature, then the sensible thing to do is not to start a war of choice against a power with a huge drone and missile arsenal. Again, that brings us back to my main point about the wise planners being sidelined by the actual policymakers.
Trump doesn't understand any of this stuff. He said the Iranians Tomahawked their own school, he's not capable of gauging what might even be believable as a lie, let alone what is actually going on in the real world.
If they had all their ducks in a row, we wouldn't be seeing any videos of them taking losses during a major regional war
Losses is one thing, bases and strategic radars being destroyed is another. Russia quite clearly did not have their ducks in a row for the invasion of Ukraine, for what it's worth. The initial plan failed and Russia switched strategy to a war of attrition.
But why aren't these systems you brought up deployed and defending? If they're worth bringing up, then they ought to be adding value.
The first thing that should've been considered in a regime change operation in Iran is what the actual goal is. Trump wants to appoint a leader (with what ground troops?), Rubio wants to blow up the navy and the missile production facilities, Bibi seems to want to make a chaotic mess. Trump has been saying the war is over but the US has won and needs to win more, it's an incoherent mess.
The second thing that should've been considered is preventing Iran closing the straits of Hormuz. There should've been US ships actually there, physically escorting freighters. They should be using these cheap effective anti-drone and anti-missile weapons to great effect. Not sitting back hundreds of kilometres, implicitly showing the straits of Hormuz aren't under US control. But that hasn't been done because the US navy is rightly concerned about air and missile attack sinking their ships. Which is why this war shouldn't have been started.
Have you done any baseline research to see if the US has, in the past, moved any munitions from different theaters before to fight in a war after the war started?
An administration whose military strategy and political ideology explicitly called for a refocus away from Middle Eastern wars shouldn't be sacrificing more important theaters for the sake of a Middle East war.
Have you considered that if the US prepositioned all of its valuable THAAD ammunition in the theatre prior to the initiation of hostilities and it got destroyed during the Iranian's large opening salvo people would be using that as evidence of US stupidity and incompetence instead?
If the US can't manage to decentralize and safely store munitions (or produce munitions at scale) then it has no business launching a massive bombing offensive. Prepositioning stores to survive ballistic missile waves is pretty obvious stuff that the US should already know how to do, there should be lots of planning for this.
why would China bother to do that?
China's goal is to annex Taiwan. Taiwan doesn't want to starve. Thus it may attempt to besiege the island via airpower, targeting food and energy imports to secure submission. They want the island for political and strategic reasons not economic reasons, China has plenty of wealth already.
China would much prefer a quick blitz but they'd take a pyrrhic victory to a destabilizing defeat. They'd do just what Putin did, double down if the blitz fails. I expect a blitz to fail, amphibious operations are hard... Power is zero-sum, beating America and taking Taiwan might well let them achieve hegemony in East Asia. Colby worried about just that. America also inflicting considerable pain on its Asian allies is very unhelpful here for coalition building.
I don't care what your profession is. The point I am making is extremely simple and straightforward and you still have not understood it.
The physics has already been worked out! We do not need to go over it. It is totally pointless nitpicking.
My claim was that we already had pretty decent published literature on various not-yet-existing propulsive methods, that this literature uses the standard physics and the standard methods of analysis and standardized performance metrics.
Read my comments again, understand them. You will find this is not a line of argument that helps you! My point is not 'Mini-Mag Orion is the One True Path to the outer solar system' that requires a specific technical justification but a general point that using a massively more efficient power source is superior for long-range spaceflight, even though it will take a long time to develop such rocketry.
This really does not require incredible reading comprehension to understand, I am quite surprised that a self-declared aerospace engineer cannot grasp it. I highly doubt you are a real aerospace engineer, since if you were you'd know that a fair range of fusion designs are vastly superior to conventional rockets, something that is so obvious laymen would know it. So there really wouldn't be any point of making this silly argument.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
If in 1947 Nazi Germany somehow reconquered continental Europe then the US 'winning' WW2 is rather irrelevant and minimal even if American troops marched through Berlin and went home with a peace treaty. The political goal was a failure.
In truth, we call it all off now, Iran will probably finish arming themselves and nuke a civilian population, likely Israel
So the line of argument is this:
Israel and America start bombing Iran in a predictably ineffective campaign to incite regime change - Israelis hardest hit since the Iranians might nuke Israel in retaliation. So the bombing must continue and intensify, perhaps followed up by a ground invasion since bombing alone isn't going to work!
Saddam Hussein launched a full ground invasion of Iran. He gassed Iranian civilians as part of a terror bombing campaign (with the support of much of the international community, including the US). The war lasted 8 years. The Iranians did not later acquire nukes and did not nuke Baghdad, they did not even gas the Iraqis back. Iraq was not even a nuclear power so there were no especially strong reasons not to nuke Iraq.
Why would Iran nuke Israel now when it didn't nuke Iraq? Israel has hundreds of nukes and would doubtless fire back.
And what is the proposed plan to finish the job? Destabilize the region more by bombing Iran harder, having Iran bomb the Gulf harder? Bombing alone has proven ineffective at achieving regime change. A ground invasion of an extremely mountainous country of 90 million? The US military would be fighting alone and would almost certainly get bogged down as China floods Iran with arms and aid. Meanwhile Iran would've suffered enormous casualties and be, if anything, more inclined to pursue nuclear weapons. Clearly their conventional forces are not sufficient to deter foreign attack! An enormous, bloody, ruinously expensive, strategically disastrous clusterfuck.
What the US really needs is smart leaders who appreciate what can and cannot be done with military power, who can judge the risks and benefits clearly, who have the wisdom to ignore the latest dossier of Israeli 'intelligence' about WMDs.
Leaving the job 'half done' is the best case scenario here. The US is not militarily or politically strong enough to launch a successful ground invasion. Nothing short of a ground invasion is going to achieve the kind of regime America is looking for. Probably not even that. You can't bomb people into becoming pro-Israeli.
I think that's kind of treasonous?
It is not treasonous for Americans to pursue American interests by enforcing constitutional constraints on waging war. I am not American for what its worth.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
the Navy's been testing improved ammo for the 5-inch gun, we've deployed lasers and we've used laser-guided rockets (which pretty much fix the cost curve for Shahed-type weapons). Similarly the large-scale production ramp up is (at least supposedly) underway.
So far as I can see, US lasers have mostly been shooting down US drones from other departments on the Mexican border. They are not visibly defending key installations in the Middle East where they're actually needed, substituting for expensive ballistic missile interceptors.
If the US military had all their ducks in a row, we wouldn't be seeing videos from soldiers of drones and missiles coming down on their bases, this stuff should have been sorted out before starting a war of choice. There should've been some destroyers sitting in the Gulf of Hormuz lasering down incoming missiles and small boats. But there aren't.
The large-scale ramp up doesn't just need to be 'underway', it needs to be yielding results. A few days into a war, there should be absolutely no talk about rebasing THAAD from Korea because there should already be enough munitions to fight that war. The US should also be able to outproduce Russia in shells outright, that is a baseline expectation for industrial warfare given the size of the US economy.
If the US ramps up said production to 1,000 Tomahawks a year (stated goal) then it can just blow up their port infrastructure and call it a day.
I don't think 3 Tomahawks a day would be sufficient to shut down all of China's naval production, assuming 80% penetration rate. Even if Chinese shipbuilding is suppressed, they can still drown Taiwan with their own missiles and drones. To win the US would need to suppress all of China's war industry, including arms production well inland.
We'll see how this works on Iran. So far it hasn't worked on Ukraine.
Taiwan is a special case in that it's an island. Ukraine and Iran are/were energy exporters, Ukraine is a food exporter. Taiwan is the opposite, a huge and almost totally dependent on imports importer. China is merely a large importer of oil and food-secure in calories. If they rationalize consumption by killing herds, ration, halt most of their export industries, they can manage with what overland imports they retain access to. They only import 21% of their energy, not 95% like Taiwan.
China has enough domestic oil production for military usage and military-adjacent chemicals, only the civilian sector takes a hit.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
What are you even saying? Instead of taking the experts at their word, we should debate the physics of fusion rocketry as amateurs (a technology that doesn't even exist yet)? The whole point of having experts is to establish facts so I don't have to.
What are you even disagreeing with me about? Do you think fusion rockets can't reach the outer planets, can't provide significantly more utility than chemical rockets? If so, then you're wrong. If not, then you're wasting time nitpicking.
I don't know why they added the vortex, another 'can steamroll if you get the right techs' unit like the arclight. I guess it's weak to light units? Seems like it can get oppressive at times with that dps.
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