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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.
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.
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.
no, the US doesn't have air superiority over Iran and rarely, if ever, flies into Iranian territory due to the risk of their planes being shot down
if it had air superiority, you would see the US regularly flying into Iranian territory to use far cheaper and more destructive bombs, but they rarely if ever do that because they would lose even more planes than their 1 plane loss every day and a half or so
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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.
It's probably not impossible, I'm just saying that when considering scale redundancies and protection need to be included in that calculus.
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