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How about this way: "achieved pre-war military objectives".
Shakes' gloating and showboating about K/D ratios or "displays of dominance" is maddeningly juvenile. The problem with Americans is that they usually have no sound theory of victory, and don't believe they need one, on account of Shakes-style belief in their technological, material, financial (and frankly, ontological) superiority that makes all wars "cheap". Even if you're out of interceptors, even if you had to withdraw THAAD from Korea? who cares? Presumably there'll be more, and better ones, the best even. Some day.
Once upon a time American Air Force grilled Mao Zedong's son to death in Tongchang, like a helpless rat, along with two hundred thousand of his compatriots if not more, and who knows how many Norks. Gods of war, raining death from the sky all day long, or whatever Hegseth says. Did this result in you winning the Korean war? Perhaps the propaganda says so. It doesn't talk a lot about the Korean war. But the map says there's a North Korea today, holding the spot he died.
Resolve is not "saving face". Interpreting it as such is saving face. In plain terms, we just observe the fact that the enemy has resolve to bank on the possibility of victory, because he has a plausible theory of one, and that so far he's been acting rationally by not surrendering and not accepting vacuous deals from Kushner&Witkoff that would have failed to improve his dire security situation long-term.
Are we still doing this?
You're nearly out of interceptors in 5 months of low-intensity war in the Middle East. The denial of this amounts to a theory of conspiracy about countless independent reports. All punditry about how the US could realistically intervene over Taiwan requires ludicrous lemmas such as that Chinese production of standoff munitions is comparable in scale to IRGC's (there are such reports yes, CSIS basically claims this, which goes to show how bad the situation is if we need such lies). Trump doesn't want to "swap focus" to Taiwan, he wants his "friend" Xi to wait until he's out of office. Luckily for him Xi has too much going on to add a disruptive amphibious invasion to his schedule, so likely we have many more years of ambiguity and possibility to save face. But no, the US won't prioritize Taiwan over the Middle East regardless. Makes no sense. So Iran's calculus is independent of that.
I personally don't believe we're actually "out of interceptors" because I suspect the U.S. military has a standing policy of understating its capacity and overstating its weaknesses.
I do believe China can build them faster and may have larger stockpiles.
You mean they're lying in the congressional reports where they describe the number of munitions they buy? It's public record, we can see how many are purchased.
And why would the US want to lie and seem like their air defences are weaker than they actually are to embolden (not deter) US enemies? This doesn't seem like a very Trumpian move either, meekness is not what I associate with Trump.
I would imagine not letting the enemies know exactly how much ammo they have to tank before you run out is probably something the MIC would think up. Procurement is famously opaque. I'm not confident on this point but it seems like such an obvious thing to keep strategically ambiguous that it's difficult for me to imagine we aren't obscuring the stockpiles in some way.
The opacity is more in how they end up spending enormous numbers of money on a tiny number of missiles (plus black budget spending on secret weapons and research). But all publicly revealed weapons are listed:
https://www.asafm.army.mil/Portals/72/Documents/BudgetMaterial/2025/Base%20Budget/Procurement/Missile-Procurement-Army.pdf
So if you go to page 41 of the link, it says how many patriot PAC-3s they buy (230 a year at $4 million per missile). Not that many once you account for tests and training and exports.
Now they don't say exactly how many they've got left but it's not that hard to estimate (by intelligence agency standards), given that there's video evidence of them being shot away. There's a defined upper limit on how many they could have, unless they lie on these reports. They've also been starting to issue orders for PAC-2s again to supplement the PAC-3s. So there are clear signs of pressure, plus this is something that wargames have warned of for many years.
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