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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   25222 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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Things are happening, and are going to happen in even more spectacular way.

President Trump is weighing a military operation to extract nearly 1,000 pounds of uranium from Iran, a complex and risky mission that would likely put American forces inside the country for days or longer.

Yes, you can do in the real life dungeon crawl from fantasy fiction and gaming, first time since Vietnam tunnel warfare. Yes it would be awesome.(to monitor from far away now, ofc.)

Of course it is disinfo, of course the real boots on the grounds will arrive somewhere else in completely unexpected place. No way would Commander-in-Chief announce his plans to the enemy in the open. This couldn't happen.

I highly doubt that the covert ops community is leaky enough to leak this plan if it were real. There are very obvious and direct consequences to the soldiers involved, I just can't believe that would happen.

That said, there's probably a lot of alpha in finding a way to track the prediction market accounts of actual soldiers, who won't be shy about cashing in. It's likely that in turn global intelligence agencies are keyed into such accounts...which then raises the possibility of using prediction markets to head fake.

It wouldn't be like Vietnam tunnel warfare because you're not chasing enemies through tunnels. The enemies are on the surface; they'd be killed and the US military would set up a defensive perimeter and then send in the engineers to start digging.

But I agree this is unlikely at this point.

I think the US military has enough firepower to keep ground forces away from the engineering zone, but how are they going to stop drones and missiles?

The US can shoot down drones and ballistic missiles too, at least at the rate Iran can currently fire them.

That is probably true for a carrier group, but I don't think the US can airlift destroyers to the middle of Iran.

My understanding is that so far, they have used high-flying jets to attack Iran with impunity. I would expect that helicopters might be more vulnerable. Also, we don't know yet how many short range missiles and drones Iran can launch in the middle of their country.

The US can shoot down drones and ballistic missiles relatively effectively at existing installations with reliable supply chains and stockpiles of air defense munitions. A dig site in the middle of Iran is going to require flying in all the air defense equipment, all the necessary ammunition, all supplies for the security force, supplies for the engineers, excavating equipment, replacement equipment when the initial stuff gets damaged... And then at the end you have to fly everything out again (you can ditch the heavy equipment, but not the soldiers or engineers or uranium).

The US military has immense operational competence, but this would be an incredibly delicate operation with numerous vulnerabilities.

Yes, all of that seems difficult but something the US can do.

The US seems to be able to shoot down most of them. Not all of them. This is an important distinction that doesn't seem well reported anywhere.

They don't need to shoot down all of them to carry out an operation. Losses greater than zero are acceptable.

I was speaking more generally regarding the whole war, but in this specific instance "losses greater than zero" very quickly complicate things and expand the operation. Unless the HEU is secretly stored closer to the border than publicly indicated, you're looking at 200+ miles of contested airspace, transporting in and out. Every piece of essential equipment or personnel you lose now needs a backup, which balloons the size of the operation, makes it harder to transport and protect, and increases the number of targets that can be hit. So you need more protection, which increases the footprint to be transported and protected, etc.

The US has air superiority. But yes, it would be a big operation. I believe the US certainly has the capability to do it, though.

And if the recent public speculation that the material was moved to Ishafan is true, the stuff is just in intact tunnels covered with soil and not really deeply buried.

The US has air superiority.

I think it's really telling that the US has achieved air superiority over Iran instantly, while Russia has as of yet never achieved that level of superiority over Ukraine.

I believe the US certainly has the capability to do it, though.

It's probably not impossible, I'm just saying that when considering scale redundancies and protection need to be included in that calculus.

As someone who was very against the starting this war and still wishes it never happened. This seems like a good idea to get some benefit. Boots on the ground seizing the Uranium and physically destroying the enrichment facilities would actually provide some benefit to the war and make Iran think twice about re-starting their nuclear program.

I will grant you that the US military has been extremely competent on an operational level so far, but this seems a mission straight from hell.

Iranian enrichment facilities are deep underground. You will not capture them with working elevators. Expect to dig through tens of meters of rubble (if you are lucky) or concrete (if you are not). Of course, the WSJ piece is overly optimistic when it expects that the UF6 will still be in cylinders by the time you get there. At the very least, I would expect it to be blown all over the place. Though I would actually expect the regime to find a a few hundred tons of a cheap substance to mix it in. Obviously not D-UF6, as that would undo the enrichment work, but something which is easily separable within a month or so. I imagine even mixing it with sand would be annoying, perhaps requiring you to heat 100 tons of sand to get it to sublime. Though I am sure that the Iranians have found something nastier. Plus whatever traps you can imagine.

The people on the surface defending the site will not have a better time than your engineers. I mean, obviously you could turn anything within artillery range into Gaza and kill another 50k civilians in the process, but then you might as well nuke their site and call it a day. To interdict infantry from getting into range you would need a continuous bombardment of a sort which would make WW1's Western Front like a skirmish (though admittedly in a much smaller area). For a week or however long your engineers need.

And your excavators can't exactly hide underground, so you need a plan to protect them from every single drone, shell or rocket Iran might try to hit them with.

Nor is it very feasible to just bring your own depleted uranium to undo their enrichment process and leaving it on site. The problem here is that of half the separation work is going from 0.7% to 2% or so. So to undo most of the separation work of 400kg 60% U-235, you would need to ship in 24 tons of depleted uranium in the same chemical form, then mix it really well.

This shows the larger problem: even if it is feasible to airlift HEU out, what are you going to do about the 10% enriched uranium? This already has 85% of the separation work required for 60% HEU in it, but it is also 6 times less portable. Iran could trivially undo the last 15% of separation work and leave you having to scrape up 2.4 tons instead of 400kg.

physically destroying the enrichment facilities would actually provide some benefit to the war and make Iran think twice about re-starting their nuclear program.

Only if you can do so without paying too high a price. If you end up with Iran killing 100 soldiers and capturing another 20 while also spending a couple of dozen billions, Iran might decide that you are welcome back any time.

Trump is a Stalker fan since Putin recommended it to him and he wants the US military to get to experience the Zone by having to extract valuable items from a set of irradiated inland ruins and underground laboratories whilst under fire from various factions of local militaries, paramilitaires and international mercenairies.

What he's not counted upon is another local faction of brainwashed fanatics that worship atom and apocalypse.

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