This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
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.
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.
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!)
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.
"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.
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.)
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.
Yes.
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.
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.'
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.
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.
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.
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!
Senator Murphy explicitly says this isn't a goal, interestingly enough.
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?
This is specifically the failure mode I suggested for this war.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link