Shrike
6hr ago
There's basically two types of weapons for an air war like this- the high end and the low end.
No, there's three types: Exquisite, Medium, and Upper Medium.
(If it's not clear, I am just making a joke. I don't listen to Trump very often but I think it's very interesting and sometimes very funny when he talks about military stuff, because I'm often fairly convinced he regurgitates exactly what he was told by the brass when they are trying to explain things to him. For instance I would be very unsurprised if he was in a meeting with some general who described JDAMs as "medium, upper medium quality" weapons and Trump just ran with that.)
Shrike
6hr ago
Australia, for example, is younger than America and has been more institutionally resilient over the past few decades of populist headwinds than Europe has largely been.
I suspect Australia and Europe are under different pressures though, are they not?
The real reason the US is falling faster towards institutional dysfunction and is more prosaic: its institutions are not well designed.
I am inclined both ways on this question. The US' institutions have arguably survived longer than the ones in most of Europe! If you think institutions have a natural lifespan it's logically possible that they are both stronger than most European ones and that they are just now reaching a point of decay after most of Europe's crashed and burned. But I digress: the Constitution as originally written envisioned a very strong Congress. (BurdensomeCount fingers the strong US Supreme Court but that's actually much more debatable an institution, at least when it comes to original intent.)
I'll just incorporate by reference an older comment I made with my thesis that a lot of Trump's supposed puncturing of norms is due to wielding the accumulated powers of the executive (often delegated by Congress) in the one hand and the inherent, original, sometimes neglected powers of the executive on the other. But what I don't really discuss in that comment is why Congress seems so dysfunctional.
There is a simple (although I think incomplete) theory as to why this might be the case: Congress has not grown with the nation. The House has been capped at 435 members for more than 100 years. This has not kept pace with either population growth or the growth of the government. Put it simply, in this theory, Congress is overworked and isolated - they aren't capable of conducting proper oversight of the massive, sprawling bureaucracy, and they are a smaller, more elite portion of the population. The one thing George Washington cared about was that the ratio of representatives to citizens not exceed 1:30,000, and we blew past 1:300,000 around 1940. Today we're at a worse than 1:760,000 ratio.
This seems like an odd thing to finger as a major problem, but network effects are very real. Of course, increasing the size of the House to, say, FOUR THOUSAND would also have implications for network effects: FOUR THOUSAND or FORTY THOUSAND representatives are, perhaps, too unwieldy to come to consensus on anything. So, to add some extra ammo to your argument: however well designed America's institutions were or weren't originally, we should not expect them to function the same, distorted as they are.
Unfortunately, for all of that, it does not seem that a leaner ratio (In Australia that ratio is about 1:125,000, on a quick Google, and something like a blessed 1:75,000 in the UK) is actually effective at getting the cultural or legal outcomes that I prize. A pity!
Shrike
8hr ago
If you are paying the same price no matter the bodycount, why bother reducing it?
Well, I mean, collateral damage isn't ideal and, all things being equal, it's good to kill fewer noncombatants.
But also, it's not equal - smaller precision-guided weapons are much more effective and efficient than large, inaccurate ones.
Shrike
14hr ago
Trump enjoys the feeling of using secretive and powerful toys in the open.
I'm sure that's true, but
- I doubt Trump is personally instructing US pilots to go to war reserve mode, and
- There are that we know of probably at least one, maybe three classified aircraft with operational capability right now that he hasn't paraded in front of cameras (the RQ-180 stealth recon aircraft, the SR-72 high-speed recon aircraft, and the Penetrating Stand-in Electronic Attack aircraft).
Shrike
14hr ago
I can't think of any example where a nuclear-armed nation has deliberately aided a non-armed nation's nuclear weapons development programs
My understanding is that Pakistan is widely considered to be the Saudis nuclear weapons program, and there's decent reason to believe Israel assisted with South Africa's development of nuclear weapons.
Shrike
14hr ago
The Lusitania was attacked, and that was a national tragedy and an affront to American sovereignty
And this was due to a coordinated propaganda effort to get the United States into the war; Lusitania was carrying munitions which as I understand it made it a pretty uncontroversial target and the controversy had more to do with the fact that the Germans did not give the passengers the chance to get into lifeboats before sinking her.
Pearl Harbor was a "day that will live in infamy," it was a bad thing that Japan did that, despite the United States taking explicitly anti-Japanese policy positions in the Pacific prior Pearl Harbor.
Well yeah - it's always bad when you are attacked. Do you expect politicians to give a neutral account of their actions?
I would argue that your reply to omw is basically wrong - for instance, Laos was an ostensibly neutral country during the Vietnam War; the North Vietnamese used that neutral territory to move munitions (secretly, because it was supposedly neutral), and as a result the US bombed Laos (secretly, because it was supposedly neutral). As precedential evidence goes it supports the theory that states that violate their neutrality become fair game.
Similarly, if memory serves, MacArthur wanted to attack China during the Korean War, and, as I understand it, what stopped this was prudential judgments about expanding the war, not concerns about international law.
The reason proxy wars don't always degenerate to large armed conflict is because the relevant powers fighting the proxy war think the proxy war is a better way to engage in the contest than escalating to armed conflict, not because they cannot or "are not allowed."
Shrike
16hr ago
Trump and Hesgeth are taking the approach of actually using our more powerful tools instead of holding them in reserve for a peer conflict.
I actually am skeptical this is entirely true. There are wheels within wheels of military operational security, and while the US military likes to test and refine new weapons in combat, there are ways to do that without disclosing all of their capabilities.
For instance, you can confine your theater ballistic missiles to a lower-than-maximum launch range. Or, for another example, tactical aircraft radars have a "war reserve mode." It's quite plausible to me that, given the low air threat that Iran poses, that all of our latest and greatest aircraft are buzzing around using the exact same radar modes they do routinely overseas. Stuff like this lets you test tactics and operational planning without telling adversaries what precisely you are capable of.
I believe this is just convenience, not because of some iron rule of civilization - if you are aiding one side (even with simply intelligence or war material) then you have violated the duty of neutrality. I'm sure you can marshal many counter-examples in international practice - for instance, Hitler cited US violations of neutrality in his speech declaring war on the United States.
Shrike
17hr ago
At this point I think that the US doctrine should change to using many dumb bombs.
Smart bombs like JDAMs are so much more effective for hitting most targets that I think it would actually cost us significantly more to do this, or we would have to accept a massive reduction in combat effectiveness.
Shrike
1d ago
This is all irrelevant to the technical point I am making about mass bombardment capabilities. If you're following this thread as a whole you will see that I am skeptical about the efficacy of using mass bombardment by itself for regime change. That's a separate question from whether or not the USAF can still manage "WWII scale" bombing.
Why does this matter? If you get the facts wrong on little things like "US offensive munitions stockpiles" you can more easily misunderstand how a tactical situation will play out, which can cause you to misunderstand a strategic situation, which can cause you to misapprehend the geopolitical situation.
These things are hard enough to understand even if you do have a security clearance and are kinda autistic about them (I don't have a security clearance and uhhhh I throw myself at the mercy of the Motte on the second question) and one of the things I appreciate about the Motte is that people on here are willing to correct me or call me out if I am getting something wrong. Please forgive me if I come across as pedantic, but I find this stuff interesting.
Shrike
1d ago
At worst they rot in prison like Jimmy Lai.
This isn't exactly an attractive outcome.
Americans surely love to imagine the Chinese as brutal and hard-willed as they are but we simply aren’t.
What's the per capita rate of execution in China compared to America?
Shrike
1d ago
Have they displayed some record of competence that suggests I should and wait and see what strategic genius unfolds?
I think there's good evidence that a broad effort to strengthen America's hand relative to China is succeeding, rather slowly. I would count this as strategic competence at play. The counter-Trump view is that this is despite his efforts, not because of it.
I also think it's likely that the Trump administration is screwing with reporters on purpose ("lying") which is going to make things look very chaotic to external observers and provides little to no insight as to whether or not the administration actually knows what it is doing. (The counter-Trump view here, I think, would be "jokes on you, I'm only pretending to be retarded" is not very convincing.)
Shrike
1d ago
The post I linked to is talking about JDAMs, which the US has hundreds of thousands of.
Although you have to be careful with public statements and photes, yes, there's reason to believe the US is using JDAMs in its Iran campaign. There's even signs that B-1s have switched to JDAMs from standoff munitions with strategic bombers, which indicates a willingness to commit very valuable assets to comparatively close-range work.
The way modern air warfare works is that you "kick in the door" with bespoke standoff munitions to degrade enemy C&C and surface-to-air weapons. Then you hit them with cheaper weapons, like JDAMs and SDBs (Small Diameter Bombs). This is why US officials have been talking about recently when they have been talking about switching to cheaper, more plentiful munitions.
Shrike
1d ago
That scale simply isn't possible today.
This is not really true. US tactical strike aircraft can carry larger bomb loads than strategic bombers in World War Two, and they do so with much more efficient and effective weapons, of which the US has hundreds of thousands.
Shrike
1d ago
What makes you think that it failing in Iran isn’t due to specific characteristics of Iran rather than some universal strategic truth?
I am open to the idea that Taiwan might be different, but traditionally coercive bombing campaigns by themselves have had limited success achieving regime change. Operation Allied Force is the typical example of a successful bombing campaign, but NATO was preparing for a potential ground campaign, and Yugoslavia threw in the towel on the same day as a JCOS meeting specifically about pivoting to a ground invasion, leading some to conclude that it was the preparations for a ground offensive that tipped the scales. But even this did not lead directly to regime change, although it set the stage: Milošević was overthrown by his own people at a later date.
You can even see similar arguments about Japan, even after nuclear weapons were used against them, there were those inside the Japanese government of the opinion that the Japanese should continue resisting, and some argue it was the Soviet success on the ground that ended up tipping the scales.
That's not to say that air operations never succeed - for instance, Operation Preying Mantis or Operation El Dorado Canyon. But these were retaliatory, punitive strikes, not regime change operations.
Furthermore (unlike Belgium) Taiwan is preparing for this sort of coercive action to be taken against them. I have real questions about the resiliency of the Taiwanese people in the face of adversity and the effectiveness of their efforts to prepare, but it's not as if they have not taken steps to harden themselves materially and psychologically against an attack by the mainland.
It is also worth noting that the parallels between Iran and Taiwan extend beyond just "might get bombed." Iran's mountainous terrain and underground fortifications are often cited as an advantage; Taiwan has both. And while Taiwan is isolated due to its status as an island nation, Iran is relatively isolated geographically as well (in the sense that they are not going to be receiving regular resupply from China or Russia, unlike, say, Ukraine) and more vulnerable to ground attack, since it shares a border with potential adversaries. Iran is much larger than Taiwan, and much more populated, which is a massive advantage, although their domestic military technology stack might lag Taiwan's.
It is also worth noting that "Epic Fury With Chinese Characteristics" might be less effective and face steeper resistance than Epic Fury. Because of the comparatively long flight time, Chinese ballistic missiles in particular will likely be inferior to American air-delivered guided munitions as a way to hit mobile targets (such as missile launchers) and Ukraine has been able to contest Russian air dominance with systems like the Patriot, which is also in Taiwan's inventory, although it is possible China might be more capable than Russia in performing SEAD/DEAD, and Taiwan less capable than Ukraine in preserving their assets. And unlike Iran, Taiwan has a superpower patron (the United States) that has deployed a tripwire force on the ground, enabling it to "wave the bloody flag" in the event of an attack. In the event of such an attack, if it has not already occurred, Taiwan will likely be able to follow the Ukraine model of integrating closely with US intelligence apparatus, while Iran's ability to integrate with China and Russia's inferior intelligence capabilities is likely less efficient.
If the Islamic Revolution is overthrown then the IRGC are penniless and prosecuted at best and hunted and slaughtered at worst, probably the latter. If the Taiwanese elite accept Chinese rule relatively quickly…they get to go back to being rich in Taipei, or at worst exile themselves to America if they love democracy.
I don't actually think that the fate of Taiwanese leadership is all that rosy if China takes control of Taiwan. Presumably they noticed what happened to Hong Kong and will respond accordingly.
Shrike
1d ago
Shrike
1d ago
Launching an unprovoked nuclear attack and failing is something that I don't have much precedent to go on, but I doubt enamors one with any existing nuclear powers.
"What's the proportionate response here? Drop a box labeled 'this could have been a nuclear weapon' on them?"
Shrike
1d ago
Missile defenses shredded by cheap drones that can be mass produced by the million by China will rightly create visions of entire hundred billion dollar carrier fleets destroyed by a hundred million dollars of Chinese drones in a massed attack.
I am begging you to think through the implications of "missile defense doesn't work" for China when their most obvious path to seizing Taiwan by force is "successfully defending a few hundred transports against tens of thousands of missiles and guided bombs."
Shrike
1d ago
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.
Perhaps. Perhaps it's something like a punitive expedition, aimed at reducing Iran's warfighting capability. This is basically what Senator Murphy is describing. Obviously he has an incentive here to attack the administration, and the administration may have an incentive to deceive him, so take this with a grain of salt. But if the goal of the administration is, basically, the blow up the Iranian military, then it might succeed.
I'm not sure this goal is incoherent. If the US has a relatively longer internal timeline for a Pacific war, removing Iran from the playing field will let us shift assets to the Pacific over the longer term. A defanged Iran will be easier for its neighbors to deal with over a longer period of time. However, this does not mean it is the optimal strategy, either.
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.
This is almost certainly true - the Trump administration has spent less time, I think, this time around justifying almost anything they are doing. On the whole I don't think this is good!
Another strategic goal is 'regime change in Iran' which is clearly not going as planned.
Senator Murphy explicitly says this isn't a goal, interestingly enough.
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.
So earlier you said it was foolish that the United States didn't relocate the THAAD assets earlier. Now you're saying they shouldn't relocate them at all? Which is it?
Depleting these stores of munitions while China is looming doesn't make much sense.
This is specifically the failure mode I suggested for this war.
10,000 cruise missiles is not that much.
A few different ways to look at this number are "100 missiles per Chinese large surface warfare vessel or amphibious warfare vessel" or "4 cruise missiles per Chinese combat aircraft" or "2 missiles per PLAN VLS cell" - it's a lot of missiles. Do I wish we had ten times as many? Sure.
Something that I think is somewhat poorly understood (when it comes to US magazine stockpiles) is that Chinese ships (especially on the low end: frigates, corvettes, missile boats) will likely be vulnerable to guided bombs. Glide bombs like the JDAM-ER in particular have pretty good range, and the Air Force has been rolling out a seekerhead for them specifically designed to hit ships. If the Chinese are unable to maintain air superiority, even higher end ships might be at risk from glide bombs because they can't see over the horizon, and that makes them potentially vulnerable to pop-up attacks from low-flying tactical aircraft. It's unclear to me, of course, to what degree the Chinese have integrated a cooperative engagement capability. If the Chinese can handoff tracks from airborne early warning aircraft to their ships, they'll have a much more mature air defense capability. If they can't, and the US is able to contest the air, then the ability for the US to tap their "six digit" stockpiles becomes a lot more relevant.
On the flip side, the anti-ship capability of a lot of the current US cruise missile inventory is pretty marginal. The JASSM can likely be used as one in a pinch, but a lot of these weapons were designed as ground-attack.
Shrike
2d ago
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?
We...do? Here's Falco, and here's a picture of HELIOS in action, and, as a bonus, here's footage of the UAE shooting down drones with the 30mm on an Apache.
Obviously the Apache is not new technology at all and 30mm is pretty cheap, which goes to show you how meh drones can be against an enemy whose ability to fly defensive counter-air isn't really in question. I believe Ukraine has been shooting them down with cropdusters and machine-guns.
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.
Munitions fail all the time, and sometimes in really nasty ways. You can get on YouTube and watch videos of airplanes shooting themselves down and interceptor missiles falling back on the launch vehicle. It seems pretty plausible to me because of the specific circumstances of the strike that it was a US weapon, but "military accidentally shoots their own side" incidents do happen.
Losses is one thing, bases and strategic radars being destroyed is another.
Bases being "destroyed" (hit by missiles) isn't really a big deal in and of itself; troops can sleep in tents. In terms of high-value targets being hit, I've seen basically solid evidence of a single fixed strategic radar being destroyed (it's always very difficult to protect fixed targets) as well as a satcom array. It's unclear to me if any THAADs actually got tagged - I'm not convinced the circulating picture of the damaged THAAD radar is accurate and the satellite photos don't confirm the batteries actually got hit - but if they are, it's hardly surprising that Iran (with hundreds or thousands of ballistic missiles) could hit some strategic targets. That's what happens in war: you take losses. The US military lost eight attack aircraft in 2012 to an attack by the Taliban on Camp Bastion, and the Taliban were a much less well-equipped threat than the Iranians.
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.
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!)
The first thing that should've been considered in a regime change operation in Iran is what the actual goal is.
Maybe, or maybe the US plays coy about their real goals for a number of reasons and they are succeeding despite what Trump's habit of indulging in rambling tangents would get you to think, or perhaps the war is going much more poorly than is actually known. Who can say? The people who can can't be trusted to speak truthfully.
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.
"Preventing Iran from closing the straits of Hormuz" is not something you do in an afternoon. Air and missile attack are obviously a serious concern, but mine and torpedo attack is perhaps an even more serious one. US doctrine in these scenarios is going to be to degrade the Iranian defensive network with airstrikes over time, not rush a convoy through.
If China goes to war with Taiwan, you almost certainly won't see them escorting neutral shipping through the strait, either, and that implies nothing about how poorly or how well China is doing.
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.
Yes, maybe not. I'm not sure this is the best course of action.
I also do think it's not exactly right to assess the progress of the war, as a war, by looking only at the losses of one side. You've been stacking up US losses to indicate that the US is doing poorly. But the (lack of) US losses indicate that the air campaign is going well. If we compare this to the Persian Gulf War, the US bombing campaign began January 17. Over the next ten days, though January 27, the US lost 11 aircraft, 10 of them to enemy fire, and had 10 pilots captured. (I assume there were other non-American coalition air losses but I can't find a decent source for it.) Where are the American pilots captured by Iran? So far it appears that that Iranian air defenses are performing much more poorly than the Iraqi air defenses in the Persian Gulf War, despite Iran having a much larger population than Iraq and also having decades to prepare against a US air war. The US could certainly still take losses, but it's notable that the Iranians haven't been able to parade any US pilots on TV yet.
(And it's also worth noting that Iraq managed to hit Israel and Saudi Arabia with ballistic missiles! But this did not change the outcome of the war.)
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.
One cool way to decentralize munitions, if you have the world's largest strategic airlift fleet, is to leave them in other theaters and tap those reserves when needed. 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.
I also did a little write up some time ago explaining that the US is actually capable of producing munitions at scale. US munitions shortages revolve around bespoke interceptors. But if you look at guided bombs, US stockpiles are likely at six-digits. Cruise missiles? Four, maybe five digits. Air-to-air missiles? Likely five digits.
Even in surface-to-air missiles, the US has five-digit numbers, it's just that there are a lot of ballistic missiles out there and many of our lower-performance missiles are optimized for air targets, not ballistic missiles.
Thus it may attempt to besiege the island via airpower, targeting food and energy imports to secure submission.
Yes.
They'd do just what Putin did, double down if the blitz fails.
As I've discussed before on here, a decadal land war and sea war are very different things. As Elbridge Colby put it, "[t]he maritime domain's relative lack of concealment and cover matters because human beings are not, it hardly needs to be stressed, built to swim long distances, let alone fly." Certainly China could attempt this, but I think if they fail in their blitz their odds for winning an overall conflict are much lower than if they succeed.
Shrike
2d ago
Correct, and in fact I believe they have started testing those types of weapons.
This was an interesting claim, so I clicked. The post says "America after 100 million deportations" which is a bit shy of the
150 million nonwhites in the States. It's also a bit more than the estimated10ish illegal immigrants. One must imagine the white supremacist DHS poster to be mathematically challenged.More options
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