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US carries out fresh strikes against Iran after tanker struck in Hormuz, escalating hostilities
So how about that ceasefire? Despite proclamations that we had it sorted out this time, definitely for real, things are popping off in the Gulf again. Yesterday, Iran struck a tanker that wasn't abiding by their prescribed route through the Strait of Hormuz, and today the US struck at targets in Iran in retaliation (Trump also once again promised to destroy Iran in a threatening Truth).
Unclear if we're still giving them $300b.
Iran's strength is worrying, IMO. They hold the strongest hand of cards. We won't get any accurate information on the damage done (aided by Russian satellites) to US bases and forces, but I suspect it's significant, given how unafraid and bold Iran has seemed lately.
I think conceptualizing the situation as Iran being strong is the way to think about it, holding the best hand is much better, but mixing up these two confuses some things.
Iran is a homeless man with a gun outside of a guy's office building. Threatening? Sure. But it is a homeless man with a gun. The man in the office can go buy some body-armor and a shotgun, he can hire some thugs to beat the guy up, and so on. He doesn't because he's worried about inconvenience and cost and other people in the building bitching at him.
Iran's calculus as it has been for the last several decades is to find a way to ride the annoying line and not trigger an actual response. Yes they can be a physical threat (especially with Russian and Chinese intelligence) but fundamentally they continue to only exist because the U.S. cares about civilian casualties what happens afterwards, nagging third parties.
As a politically entity the U.S. can be defeated and that's the goal, but it is a mistake to lose track of the force disparity.
Appealing to some theoretical maximum effort is irrelevant - if you are not willing to endure the pain and costs necessary to achieve victory, then you are not able to achieve victory.
This has been a perennial failure of the US' post-CW cabinet wars, where the US government has repeatedly half-assed military endeavors out of a combination of blithe faith in its conventional supremacy to quickly secure victory and an unwillingness/inability to convince the general public to support military action on a scale necessary to succeed. The current war with Iran is perhaps the apotheosis of this: the administration clearly expected the Iranian government to be overawed (or perhaps simply collapse) in the face of sheer US strike dominance, and didn't give any question to thoughts like "what if this country of 90m people, led by religious fanatics, doesn't immediately surrender" and "is there some asymmetry of effort that might partially offset the massive disparity in capabilities"? Even in operations like Iraq and Afghanistan, we were still half-assing it, because while we put in more effort in absolute terms, we still acted like these were fundamentally sideshows, not major national endeavors requiring sacrifice and commitment from the citizenry.
The trouble is that this kind of failure will keep happening because it never really blows back hard on the US. The US can just walk away from the fallout and a certain kind of tough guy can tell themselves "we totally could have fucked them up if we wanted, plus look at our KDR." Not helped by the fact that there is a cult of brutality that holds the core problem with US military operations is that we aren't reckless and bloodthirsty enough.
I think the most interesting questions are downstream of this: American adversaries don't seem to think we can be realistically defeated by force of arms, so what do they do in response?
I think this relates to other projects we talk about here like the role of foreign botnets in agenda setting in U.S. politics. It isn't really clear to me what extent that's a paranoid conspiracy theory vs. an actual thing in truth (it seems likely to be latter but I would like to know more).
You are right that the difference is practically immense between ability and will but it has felt to me in the last few months most people have forgotten those are two different things, even if the will is going to be more practically predictive.
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The US can't beat them militarily. How would they? Use nukes? A small scale invasion would fail. A massive invasion isn't practical at all.
Yes they could destroy all power stations etc, but Iran would retain the capability of levelling all the sensitive areas of the US allies in the region, and would do it.
Iran succeeds because the U.S. and Israel (despite propaganda to the contrary) fight with two hands tied behind their back.
If we fought like Russia fought, or even worse like a country in WWII we'd "win" pretty quickly.
Iran does not have a peer military, it has an ineffective organized military and essentially a very well organized insurgency and excellent doctrine that takes advantage of Western militaries primary weakness (political will).
The U.S. has the ability to stab Iran in the gut and step back and wait for it to bleed out, Iran knows this and therefore made sure that their combat model is making as much trouble while they bleed out as possible. They've also given themselves a very large helmet so they can't just be shot in the head (IDK the metaphor fails).
So we don't.
Making this further complicated is the fact that we don't actually hate the Iranian's, and figure that leaving them in a good state is better for us later.
Make no mistake, Iran knows our exact strategic posture and how to take advantage of it but that doesn't mean that we can't just do something different if we want to. That's what got us into this, Trump called Iran on some of the threats and went to town, but now he has to clean up and go home before the midterms.
That's not Iran being "strong" it's masterful use of the cards they have.
A question - why hasn't Iran pushed a major terrorist attack on US soil? They could probably pull it off, but they don't because they know that if they do and they miscalculate how bad it is then America will actually come for them for real.
That only ends one way.
How, exactly? How would the US really hurt Iran without Gulf allies being hurt really bad too? Most of their missile and drone capacity remains.
One of America's war aims is to leave the Iranian people in a better position after the war than before. Likewise modern Western armies have an incredibly strong taboo against civilian damage, to the point where we made a missile that acts as a fucking blender so it can kill literally one guy.
This level of restraint is basically a new invention, and most non-American armies don't bother (see: Russia). It's the equivalent of besieging a city and allowing food in "so that the civilians don't starve."
It's incredibly stupid but has been at times sustainable because the U.S. is that powerful and because most of our adversaries understand that the primary move is to use propaganda pieces to perpetuate fighting warfare in this way.
Loosen restrictions and things open up immediately.
The Iranians can't do much if 16 million people in the Tehran metro area are starving to death. Now that's pretty abhorrent but this is how wars were fought throughout history and America has the ability to make it so.
Without drifting that far into awful behavior you can still force evacuation of cities, destroy critical infrastructure and all kinds of other stuff we are very very voluntarily not doing and a good chunk of which is totally valid even with this restrictive mode of warfare.
I ask for the third time: How do you do this nasty stuff to win the war without millions of US ally citizens suffering the same fate? How do you stop the countless hidden/hardened Iranian missile/drone sites from being used against Gulf desalination plants, power plants, etc etc?
How is that relevant?
First you have to suppose that the disruptive threats are still possible in an actual war. Iran will not be able to manage the resupply required to keep things going very long if the country falls apart. An army requires logistics which is why attacking logistics is the first job of any military. We aren't really doing that now. If the Iranians have to choose between feeding and watering their population or warfare then the war won't last long, you'd get some insurgency afterwards but the organized military response would be over very quickly.
That also presupposes we care. Most of the negative impact seems to be on the gulf states, who are enemies if you'd ask the average American for most of the last 50 years. Suddenly lots of people think Saudi Arabia is an ally and while that's true to some extent it's certainly a wild swing for both the left and the right.
Outside of the gulf states it's the Europeans who are refusing to help with the problem, that's pretty easy not to care about, and again you can shut down the gulf disruption pretty fast by just tanking the country.
Of course nobody wants to leave millions of Iranian starving and homeless, and nobody wants to turn the entire country into a misery factory or something that requires an occupation for another couple of decades.
That doesn't mean we can't.
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From Iran's POV, why should they make a deal now when a better deal might be offered later? There is every incentive to threaten and shoot ships for tolls until they can get nuclear deterrence, an isolated Israel, and war reparations.
That's what I'm saying. They have the upper hand and can't be forced into submission.
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