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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12795 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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air wars can be and historically were very efficient.

When has a country of this size been bombed to submission in purely an air war? Also what is the point of this? A monstrous humanitarian crisis for what? Besides, if Iran collapses there is a big risk they bomb their neighbours oil infrastructure and that there are surviving groups that fire drones at ships for years.

and won easily or something like that.

In other words, Trump has failed at that strategy as his war is not going well. 39% of Americans support the war, 54% oppose it. Those numbers will get worse as the oil crisis gets worse. Saddam didn't block Saudi oil.

Also the propaganda isn't as strong this time as this isn't a televised war, it is a war on social media.

When has a country of this size been bombed to submission in purely an air war?

Come on, are you going to play this game of "your analogy is not perfect copy of my situation so it is not valid"? If such a thing hypothetically existed then what, will you update your example request to a country of this size but which is also mountainous, speaks Farsi and it happened during last ten years? Okay, it never happened, you are correct and you win this battle of analogies.

Plus again: just hold your horses, I was literally reacting to a claim that

  • More bombing. Not only a horrific humanitarian crisis to bomb a country to submission but air wars are inefficient.

I put it as a quote in my original post. I did not claim that air war in "country the size of Iran" is always efficient or this specific air campaign is efficient. I posit that the claim about inefficient air war is a myth. That is all.

Come on, are you going to play this game of "your analogy is not perfect copy of my situation so it is not valid"?

Actually having a ground invasion or otherwise supporting ground forces is a pretty big difference. It isn't some minor detail used to casually dismiss the argument.

Serbia

The air campaign against Serbia was largely ineffective. Milosevic didn't fold because he was getting bombed, he folded because the Russians cut him loose.

The US didn't have any ground troops, no. But they were supporting the Kosovo Liberation Army, which had 25,000 troops fighting in a country with 0.6% the land area and 2% the population of Iran. If there were an Iranian Liberation Army with a million troops, I'd agree with you that an air campaign would probably be successful.

Lets, say it works as well as Serbia worked despite Serbia having 1/16th the population and was fighting a ground war. It still took one year. Doing it with air power alone against a bigger country is a far more ambitious objective. Are people willing to accept a year-long oil crisis plus months more to ramp production up again?

The fallacy at the heart of the war was the idea that the US could send some missiles and achieve what the US failed to achieve against Yemen in 11 years within two weeks. The air war option could easily fail and even in an optimistic scenario it is a slow and expensive option.

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