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The US military hasn't dumpstered anything at all. No strategic goals have been achieved. No political objectives have been achieved. The straits of Hormuz have not been secured, nor have Iran's missile and drone capabilities been severely degraded. Their attack rate over the last 30 days before this ceasefire was fairly stable.
The US has the military capabilities a 15 year old gamer would seek: prioritizing K/D and cool explosions and 'ownage' moments like blowing up leaders in sneak attacks. Hegseth exemplifies this dimwitted outlook, obsessing about lethality and violence and devastation: 'back to the stone age'.
The US does not have the military capabilities of a serious power pursuing serious strategic objectives like territorial control, waging industrial wars over long spans of time to outlast and crush enemies. That's mutually exclusive with maxxing out K/D and all these flashy, ludicrously expensive and rare wonderweapons the US likes to focus on.
You don't need to kill your enemies to beat them. Killing helps but disorganized, shambolic killing isn't the key thing. The key thing is to defeat your enemy's plan, not just blow up their soldiers. Iran's plan, using their drone and missile forces to choke the straits, choke energy exports over the course of a long war that saps US political will remains intact while the US is going through plans at a rate of knots.
Trump crows about blowing up the Iranian air force and navy. Who cares? Is the Iranian air force the lynchpin of their plans, like the German luftwaffe in WW2? No. Their conventional navy also is not a big part of their plan. Destroying random bridges or power plants - not going to help.
What a curious choice of cut-off! Sort of like counting Muslim terrorist casualties starting in 2002, isn't it? Very convenient how it lets you ignore the 90% dropoff from the first week of the war.
Don't worry. I'm sure Iran-senpai is just hiding his power level! He's baiting out Trump's secret moves before he unleashes his ultimate technique, which is... ????
Rose Tico-ass logic.
Yes, their conventional forces have been dumpstered, their missile and drone options brutally degraded, they can't pay their people and the industrial base to rearm is a smoking crater.
All according to keikaku (keikaku means plan). Iran is definitely winning.
Oh, so the US has done no damage after the first weak of the war, in your view? All subsequent bombing has been ineffectual at further reducing their strike rate, after that huge 90% success? Maybe you're just not aware that the Iranian plan is to fight a long war, which necessitates not shooting their load in the first few weeks.
And the grand idea of what you're saying is that Iran's been totally smashed but the US navy is just too cowardly to secure the straits of Hormuz? They need to do a blockade out of Iran's strike range... for some reason. All those drones and missiles have been brutally degraded... But not so degraded that America can actually protect its bases in the Gulf. Not so degraded that American troops can quit hiding in hotels. Not so degraded that America can actually protect the oil facilities of its allies, protect the basis of the petrodollar.
Fantasy. After losing the last few Middle East wars against vastly inferior opponents, I would've thought the hubris bubble might've been pricked a little but noooooo...
They literally tried to. That's what a 90% drop off means.
Iran is doing Houthi stuff. They don't "control" the Strait, they're an unacceptable insurance risk.
Yeah, America needs to play like I do when I'm mopping up single player Starcraft. Zero losses, because I like the aesthetic, and because the world is full of people rooting for Iran to win and America to lose.
So no, you don't put a carrier where a cheap drone might do millions in damage and kill a sailor. You do shoot down the overwhelming majority of the "irregular militia" levels of attacks Iran launches. If one missile got through and blew up an empty truck every two weeks you'd still be right here sneering.
This is just fundamentally unserious. Those wars were smashing successes. It was turning the peoples who lived there into Minnesotans that we failed at.
I say this again and again and again and Americans still don't understand that wars CANNOT be a smashing success just by blowing things up. They have to achieve the political goal. War is politics!
Whether that's opening the straits, securing territory, installing a friendly regime, the goals are all-important. Blowing things up is only good in as far as it achieves those goals. If you fail at achieving your goals, you lose the war.
That's not a thing. US missile defence consists of firing enormously expensive interceptors at cheap missiles and the cheap missiles still getting through, destroying enormously expensive air defence radars to the point that US soldiers are hiding in random hotels, to the point that the 5th fleet HQ is gone and US warships are slinking back in the Indian Ocean - unable to achieve their goal of securing the straits of Hormuz.
The US is losing the war, not least because Americans do not understand what war is fundamentally about and are very bad at it, due to this ignorance.
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The US has dramatically increased the availability of options for this conflict and future action.
If we want to leave and leave it to a coalition of local nations to ransack Iran? Much more feasible now.
If we want the regime to have very real tradeoffs between keeping the country functioning and rebuilding vs. missiles, drones, and rebuilding the military? It's a serious problem. The regime may be done from this alone, just not in a time horizon that the US needs for this specific moment.
Want to ground invade? Soften them up.
The amount and variety of stuff that we have destroyed is immense, the economy is in shambles... just because we haven't destroyed all the missile launchers doesn't mean that all those bombs were dropped on nothing.
If there's one thing this conflict has proven beyond doubt, it's the utter incompetence of Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia. The Houthis are more than a match for Saudi Arabia, they're no match for Iran. Kuwait's biggest accomplishment was shooting down some friendly aircraft, they're hopeless. Oman and Qatar already were trying to cut a deal.
They're not ransacking, these loser countries are the ones who get ransacked.
You dramatically overrate US airpower. They routinely bomb 'nothing'. Scudhunting didn't work well in 2003, a good amount of US bombs would've been dropped on decoys in Iran too. You just can't tell from the air whether something is a real launcher or an inflatable decoy with some IR mimicking an engine.
Note also that this is why they keep on firing their missiles and drones. Because the air campaign isn't working. A country planning for and expecting a US air campaign for decades, with weeks and months to observe the US military buildup... is going to make extensive use of decoys and concealment.
Come on. We've been told the regime is done for for years now, they've been saying they were about to be overthrown by the biannual protests. Remember also that this isn't America, they don't feel the need to make constructing or rebuilding anything 10x more costly and delayed than it needs to be.
The US dropped far more bombs on North Vietnam, to no avail. Bombing does not work like people imagine, it's not capable of achieving any serious goal alone. Certainly not the anemic sortie rate the US has been managing.
The Saudi coalition ended that war primarily because the Biden administration pressured them to (threatening continuing arms sales), not because of the Houthis. IIRC they weren't doing particularly well even before then, but the Houthis were at least accused of using hospitals as bases in the same sorts of tactics Hamas uses, and the NGO international response was largely the similar in its condemnation.
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No argument from me that the other countries are idiots and would only make a mess - balkanizing Iran and running around pillaging would be a humanitarian disaster and is therefore a suboptimal outcome but it would get the job done.
No doubt that at times we've bombed inflatable decoys, but we've bombed plenty of infrastructure - both military and otherwise. Large factories and supply depots are static targets that are well within our ability to have targeted in advance. Even empty buildings need to be rebuilt.
The regime is economically hurting, that's one of the reasons we are in there now. Things that get destroyed now are going to be much harder to replace.
I don't remember seeing "the regime is done" for years. I have seen some credible argumentation that the situation is much, much rockier for them now.
Remember that is an isolated country that is about to be more isolated than it has ever been.
This seems like a whole parallel universe away from where we are. Who is running around in a balkanized Iran? Who is the victim here? The Gulf depends on desalination. UAE is a city in desert, food is imported. They are the Big Losers if this war goes badly, or just continues on its course. Iran can ruin them and they can't do much of anything. Arab troops aren't going to march out and invade Iran, they lack the motivation to fight Muslims for America and are no match for Iranians in battle.
Nobody is invading Iran, pro-Iranian militias are largely in control of Iraq.
Iran can get aid from both Russia and China by land routes, China is supposedly going to start sending MANPADS shortly, prompting more threats from Trump.
You seem to assume that Iran is a pushover, that the war is in a state of damage control, where humanitarian concerns are in play. Like deciding how much to kick someone who's already in the foetal position. In terms of power, nukes aside, Iran considers themselves to be in a strong position!
After seeing naked hostility from 'back to the stone ages' Trump/Hegseth, who is going to rise against the regime now? They'll instantly get tarred as Mossad traitors and face a very gruesome fate.
Iran can attack UAE's desalination infrastructure, but UAE can't return the favor? Iran's fresh water supply was on the rocks in the headlines just a few months back before any attacks. Or is this another case of "[western-opposed nation] can do [war crime], and [western-aligned nation] will resign itself to death for moral superiority rather than respond in kind"? UAE could certainly drop some air-dropped naval mines in Iran's harbors and commercial channels to cut its commercial shipping, for example, and probably could strike the critically-low dams near Tehran, since air defenses seem to be down at the moment.
That they haven't chosen to escalate isn't always an indicator of inability.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/04/07/1135235/desalination-technology-water/
For drinking water, Iran is much less dependent on desalinization than most of their PG neighbors. Yes they can both shoot at each other's desalinization plants which means Iran loses some agricuture and indsutry capacity but thirst in other nations.
Iran also has major single points of failure in its water supplies.
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UAE certainly can try to strike Iranian water facilities... but Iran is a big country! UAE is a small country. UAE is overwhelmingly dependent on desalination, Iran is not. Iran enjoys escalation dominance.
Secondly, UAE is a paper tiger, they're not capable of serious fighting innately, because of what their country is. It's a cluster of hypercommercialized slave city states, not a real country. No real nationalism, no real seriousness, no sacrifice for a cause, no strong institutions.
They're likely incapable of reaching Tehran with their 4th gen jets, flown by second-rate Arab pilots.
They're barely capable of defending their own country. Brutalizing Filipino workers or funding civil war in Sudan is more their speed, not fighting those who can fight back.
Nothing is made in UAE, they just provide services and extract oil. They can't fight a 'makes things' country.
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