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I am very certain that the US military considered the possibility that Iran, known for threatening to close the straits of Hormuz for decades, might close the straights of Hormuz. I think the stuff about insurance was in response to rising insurance premiums - there's really no point in saying anything publicly about that ahead of time.
Trump has also been on the production thing for some time now.
Unlikely, CSIS has done public simulations of Taiwan blockades, and some of the players are or were in said cabal.
It's very unclear to me the extent to which this damage is real. A lot of reported hits on THAAD locations doesn't necessarily mean much given that it's a semi-mobile system. We'll see how it shakes out.
If it turns out that "the missile will always get through" – which is obviously true given enough missile mass – then that's bad for the power that needs successful missile defense to win a war in Taiwan. And that power is not the United States. China cannot win a war over Taiwan if their ships get sunk by missile salvos. If the US and Chinese Navies sink each other in a Taiwan fight, the status quo is maintained and the US wins.
But is the US military actually involved in decision-making, or is it more people like Hegseth and Laura Loomer? CSIS and RAND are serious about strategy. Are their reports actually read by the decisionmakers? The serious strategists have been saying for years that the US needs more cost-efficient SHORAD and anti-drone weapons and large-scale production of munitions yet the message doesn't seem to have filtered through.
If the US and Chinese Navies sink eachother in a Taiwan fight, the Chinese build a new navy much faster and win. They also bomb Taiwan's ports and energy infrastructure to threaten or actually inflict intolerable suffering on the island.
How are big, slow, flammable cargo ships supposed to get through to a port if the Chinese decide to sink them with missiles or just wreck the ports? These are the east coast ports not needed for invasion... How is Taiwan supposed to produce its own food without fertilizer, without power for food processing and refrigeration, without fuel for food distribution? How are the fuel storages and food storages supposed to survive bombing? All of those things go away if the Chinese decide to hit them with their huge arsenal of missiles and drones. The world's biggest drone producer is not going to have a shortage of drones.
That's where I disagree with the CSIS wargames, they assume a very rosy picture:
How are inventories going to be sustained and distributed under a constant bombing campaign? Hardening fuel storage is good but what about the engine rooms and pumping machinery needed to get the fuel out of storage? That's tricky to harden, needs ventilation...
And what are the chances this conflict is over within nine months? This would be a great power war and they last for years and years. China's greatest strength is in industrial power and manpower, they would prefer a quick victory but will accept attritional, industrial warfare too.
Yes.
This isn't true at all, as you'd know if you've been reading my posts - 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.
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.
Possibly! But it's not exactly an EZ win for the United States, either, which means people are paying attention.
We'll see how this works on Iran. So far it hasn't worked on Ukraine.
A war with China over Taiwan? If they launch an invasion and the war is still going on after nine months, it means the invasion failed. I would say it depends on a lot of factors, as a flat-out invasion is not the only outcome, nor does its failure terminate the war, but consider that if it lasts over a longer term the Chinese inability to sustain their domestic consumption of oil will start to increasingly hurt them, and all of the stuff you've said about inflicting hurt on Taiwan will start to work against China writ large.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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