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What he misses is that it's not just Iran that's been preparing for this conflict for 40 years- the US has been also. Other than Russia snd maybe China, I don't think there's a single other country that the US has spent more time wargaming and thinking about how to defeat.
In particular, their favorite tactic of "mass swarms of cheap drones and missiles across short distances" is not some brilliant new innovation. The US (and Israel) has had plenty of time to work out how to beat it. In particular, it relies on them having a functional command/control to launch those attacks all at once with coordination. But since they lost all their C3 on like, day 2 of this war, all they've been able to do is launch small numbers at random, mostly unimportant targets.
Its also very easy for the US to bomb any obvious lanch sites or weapons caches, so they're rapidly running out of weapons even without firing them. Especially the big expensive antiship missiles and fast attack boats that were their biggest threat. Pretty soon, all they'll have left is small numbers of crappy drones that can be easily be shot down by gunfire or even lasers. At that point, the Strait reopens, and their regime will have no leverage and no funding.
He's right, of course, that if the US gives up now it would be a disaster. But for me, the implication of that is clear- we just have to win. No half measures.
Except they can keep building more?
Even if they lose the ability to shit up Qatar/Saudi/etc oil fields with SRBM/MRBMs , all they need to make insurance shit their pants over straight crossings is a handful of shaheeds (cheap, can literally be hand assembled in a garage) and 1910-tech level sea mines.
Yes, the USA could station a permanent CSG with the only job of "shoot down shaheeds and protect the de-mining ships" but that would be WAY more expensive than hand-assembling shaheeds and the median US voter is going to be very tired of "okay we just need another quick $100 billion to keep the CSG on station and fully stacked on patriots, THAADs, and APWKS"
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Hell, it led to the (in) famous "Millenium Challenge" exercise.
Yes, exactly. And the Naval Gazing article about that is excellent. In a nutshell, the Iranian missile boats that were supposedly a dire threat to our navy were already badly outclassed even in 2002, unlikely to hit their targets and essentially helpless to any air attack. Which is... pretty much what we've seen so far. The USN has not lost a single ship, while the Iranians missile boats are getting wrecked. As far as I know they haven't done anything at all, their only real success at sea is using drones to hit tanker ships.
It probably also helps that the USN made sure not to get teleported right off the coast this tine.
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Which is, it turns out, sufficient.
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$250 million to learn not to park warships in the Persian Gulf was money well spent.
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