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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   24155 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 30, 2026

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maybe the coastline near Bandar Abbas. If this succeeds the US will (after doing minesweeping and patrolling the coast for hidden marine drones and such) declare the strait open, and the next move will belong to the P&I cartel.

This is a pipe dream. Iran has bunkerized anti-ship missiles all along the coast, not only around Bandar Abbas. Same is true for "covert bases" for mine layers (small warehouses in fishing harbors) - you can place seafloor mines from fishing boats/speed boats, after all, at night or in heavy traffic.

Also, with the state of US naval assets and the... current disposition of allied navies, minesweeping of the straight would take forever. If the IRGC gets significant numbers of mines out (and they do seem to have the capability), clearing them would take many months.

And then, once all this is done, the first tanker making a run for it might learn that Iran now actually has integrated rudimentary radar guidance into their shaheds or their 1000+km range ballistic missiles. Locating a tanker on open water using radar is not exactly difficult - its rudimentary WWII tech, radio hobbyist without further technological background can do it.

At which point the cartel will concede that, yes, the straight is actually still closed. Even if that drone/missile was shot down, because everybody knows that sooner or later one will slip through.

This is a pipe dream. Iran has bunkerized anti-ship missiles all along the coast, not only around Bandar Abbas.

Yeah, I've seen the AI videos of them. This "Iran is militarily invincible" stuff is less credible than the invincibility of the Republican Guard in the Iraq war.

I mean it's possible that I've been reading propaganda. But what's your explanation why the carriers were inside the Persian Gulf during Operation Iraqi Freedom, but this time they're so far offshore they need to run aerial refueling operations for most strike aircraft to make it back?

It's gotta be anti-ship missiles, right?

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