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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 (which is a fine criticism, but not the same thing.) It's worth noting that current known operational lasers in the US inventory are going to be either dazzlers or targeted mostly at subsonic weapons, not ballistic missiles. Nevertheless, on a quick Google, it looks at least one ship with an ODIN dazzler (USS Spruance), deployed with the Lincoln as we speak.
"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" is not a reasonable criticism of any military in the world. It wasn't reasonable when people made this criticism of Russia, and it's not reasonable when they make it of the United States, and it won't be if they make it of China.
It is - the US has successfully used the Falco laser-guided rocket, as I mentioned earlier, against "one-way attack drones" (slow cruise missiles). We also reverse-engineered the Shahed and shot it back at Iran. It's unclear to me how it's coming on the more bespoke ammunition (as far as I know the exact numbers there are classified).
Really? 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? 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?
I agree with this, with the caveat that I don't actually care about shells quite as much as I care about cruise missiles.
This is a really cool vision for a novel. Imagine trying to navigate the hellscape that remains of Taiwan in 2081, as PLA missiles, rockets, and killdrones rain down over the island, fired at random after the US destruction of the Chinese satellite ISR network. The Chinese have been issuing demands to surrender for the past 50 years, unaware that there is no government left to speak for the island. The only justice is death, the only law is the sword!
But I have to ask: why would China bother to do that? It has old liquid-fueled silo-based nuclear weapons with marginal deterrence value, it could just use those instead. In fact, it could probably do that tomorrow, skip the entire risk of regional war. Just obliterate the major cities and helicopter in some guys in MOPP gear to plant the flag.
"China chooses to crash their economy during the critical period of their transition to a greyer society, permanently altering their progress curve for the worse, to take Taiwan, the economic value of which they utterly destroyed with a period of prolonged bombardment after it refused to surrender" does not exactly sound like a win for China. I suppose it is possible that this is what happens anyway, but this is very obviously not ideal for them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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