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Would you, personally, be in favor of a ground invasion involving 400,000–500,000 US troops? How many US killed in action do you think we should be willing to commit to? 5,000? 30,000? 50,000?
Personally I wouldn't support a ground invasion at all. If I were the boss, I would be willing to commit troops to special operations and direct action missions that would provide outsized impacts that we couldn't achieve from long range strikes - but it's not clear to me that there are many targets that require that. What exactly would be the purpose of an invasion?
Also, there aren't 500,000 currently deployable ground troops in the entire US military. There may be that many troops in total, but to get most of those units ready to deploy would take months, and then months and months more to ship them overseas a few at a time. For more context, at the peak of the Iraq war we had 170,000 troops on the ground, and less than 5,000 were killed over the course of 8 years. I'm not sure you're really calibrated on this.
I chose the invasion force numbers based on Gen. Eric Shineski's testimony before congress in 2003, when he estimated that it would take between 200,000 and 300,000 troops to control Iraq. Rumsfeld and Wolfoqitz eviscerated him for this, as they knew that such numbers likely wouldn't fly with the public, whom they were trying to convince that a more nimble operation would be successful. They ended up sending about 150,000 troops for the initial invasion, but those numbers were augmented by 50,000 troops from other countries. I don't know how many troops Israel would be willing to send, but I think it's safe to say that we can't expect much help from elsewhere.
In the end, I don't know why you're bringing up actual troop numbers in Iraq at all, since that's obviously not a war we want to emulate. If we assume that Shineski's estimates were correct, and account for the fact that Iran has double the population and several times the land area, 500,000 seems like a reasonable estimate for what it would take to control the country. I brought up the casualty numbers not because I think any of those numbers are likely, but because we don't know what kind of numbers would be likely. We lost 5,000 in Iraq, but 50,000 in Vietnam and 30,000 in Korea.
I brought all this up because on the one hand you talk about how we weren't willing to fully commit in Vietnam but on the other talk about how this is a fight we can "easily win", and your reply makes it clear that you don't want to commit any ground troops. Well, which is it? Do you want to win, or are you willing to walk away if the air campaign doesn't achieve the objectives (which, it should be said, aren't clear right now). To my knowledge, and correct me if I'm wrong, there has never been an instance where a government has been toppled due to air power alone. Libya fell due to a counterinsurgency, and again, I'm not sure that's an example we want to follow here. What do we do after we've bombed every legitimate target and the regime is still in power? Walk away? If so, that's fine, but it's also evidence that "we really didn't want to win". We may not have 500,000 troops at the ready, but we're certainly able to commit that many if necessary. We've committed more when the population was a lot lower.
I think this is the key point. He was talking about invading and occupying the country. I don't think anyone, even the most rabid war hawks, is suggesting we should occupy the whole of Iran. From what I've seen, most of the usual hawks don't want troops on the ground at all.
As I've said before, the aim seems to be to destroy the ability of the IRGC to wage war in the hope that the Artesh or some insurgent group can move in and take control. And in the case that no such group succeeds, we can still be happy with destroying as much of the IRGC military infrastructure as we can. The risk to us seems to be primarily from the economic effects of shutting down shipping lanes, which I think is most likely worth the cost.
Iran is a problem because of:
Neither of these have to do with their conventional capabilities, which nobody was talking about until recently. They were already conventionally weak and destroying these capabilities further doesn't accomplish anything, except to possibly exacerbate the existing problems. If you want those problems to go away, you have to either negotiate or control the country. Trump didn't want to negotiate, and due to his recent actions the Iranians aren't going to be willing to negotiate either, so that option is off the table. We already hit their nuclear sites last summer, and Trump said that anyone claiming that it didn't solve the nuclear issue was reporting fake news. 8 months later and they're back to being two weeks away from a bomb. They aren't going to install a new government without some kind of occupation, and they aren't going to be able to get to the nuclear sites without boots on the ground occupying and destroying them. There's no precedent for a country capitulating due to bombing alone, except maybe Japan in 1945 if you only count the mainland. And even then we had total air and naval superiority and still had to both use nukes and send an occupying force of more than 400,000 for a country that's smaller than Iran. I have no idea what Trump thinks is magically going to happen.
How can you say that when you don't know what the cost is yet? Should Americans pay $7/gallon for gas for a year for this? Will Iranian insurgent groups periodically drone oil tankers in the Gulf for the foreseeable future? How long will it take global shipping to recover? How much money are you personally willing to lose because of this war?
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So far we've seen no attempt at any action against the regime. I think the IRGC has successfully neutered all the opposition; there's no armed rival to take control. And the hard-line regime may be deep enough that you simply can't kill enough of them to find anyone willing to make a deal; if you keep killing you may just reduce the nation to ungoverned chaos.
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