241–250 of 737 posts
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Or they'll use a pair of binoculars (or a drone with a camera) to ignore the decoys and shoot at the actual ship...
The horizon at sea level is about 3 miles. The strait of Hormuz is 35+ miles wide. Any mechanism used to get around this would be detectable and could be attacked with relatively inexpensive ordinance.
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The level of ordinance is enough evidence that there is significant outside support. RPG-7s do not grow on trees in Somalia. I hazard to guess an RPG on the black market is also a great expense to anyone who isn't being given one by one of these groups connected to the arms trade in effort to advance their goals or position in some way.
Well why do you think they want to raid these ships? To buy more RPG-7s, of course! But seriously, if they were being funded by other groups, why pirate in the first place?
1. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/Reagan_s...
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Iterating on a rocket design is not like making a tweak to a line of code. It needs production line changes, manufacturing, testing, (repeat X times) where the process takes weeks, months or even years untill desired results can be achieved. And their manudacturing sites have been reduced to rubble, so that slows things down too.
As I said I'm only a software engineer but didn't Ukraine revolutionize the rules of asymetric warfare by drone iteration? Your statement rings true but I wonder if there are aspiring rocket engineers that really want to test their totally unproven new ideas without the constraint of a military hierarchy in peacetime.
You also have a lot more tries with cheap drones since the target is lower value, so you have hundreds of data points on how each iteration performs vs hitting a naval ship which is an extremely rare event, so it's hard to see whether your iteration on a rocket actually succeeded.
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It's worth remembering that the Iranians have as yet never claimed that the strait is mined. They have said that it may be. A lot of reporting misses this and assumes (perhaps deliberately) that the presence of mines is a fact. But of course Iran doesn't need mines to enforce the blockade. They have drones and missiles that can be operated safely from 100's of kilometres away. They have anti-ship sea-skimming missile…
I think the question is about bitcoin mining power and now actual mines
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The level of ordinance is enough evidence that there is significant outside support. RPG-7s do not grow on trees in Somalia. I hazard to guess an RPG on the black market is also a great expense to anyone who isn't being given one by one of these groups connected to the arms trade in effort to advance their goals or position in some way.
> The level of ordinance is enough evidence that there is significant outside support. "I have no evidence, but I can't think of other scenarios so it must be true!"
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The level of ordinance is enough evidence that there is significant outside support. RPG-7s do not grow on trees in Somalia. I hazard to guess an RPG on the black market is also a great expense to anyone who isn't being given one by one of these groups connected to the arms trade in effort to advance their goals or position in some way.
They cost under $500/launcher: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/one-for-history-books... $300/launcher here: https://www.un.org/depts/los/nippon/unnff_programme_home/fel... A decade ago it wasn't terrorist groups funding them.
Much of the post-WW2 American-led world order was founded partially on the United States using its military to keep international waters open. It would be quite stunning Iran defeated the united states in this sense. The military might is there, but this administration clearly had no idea what they were getting themselves into and did not plan accordingly. (and does not have the will or public support to do so) The b…
What the US did was show it would make life uncomfortable for those who challenged the liberal trade order and politically-and-economically offer benefits for those who embraced this order.
What Trump has done is just attack Iran (during negotiations) with no real counter-offer. Iran has responded by attacking everything in sight because nothing was being offered by the US.
Clearly the result is indeed a serious failure on the part of the Trump administration but it's a failure that seems to come from not even understanding that "Pax Americana" has depended on the carrot and the stick.
Much of the post-WW2 American-led world order was founded partially on the United States using its military to keep international waters open. It would be quite stunning Iran defeated the united states in this sense. The military might is there, but this administration clearly had no idea what they were getting themselves into and did not plan accordingly. (and does not have the will or public support to do so) The b…
> United States using its military to keep international waters open Being a little pedantic, as per my knowledge, the Strait of Hormuz is not “international waters”. It’s territorial waters belonging to Iran and Oman. AFAIK, Iran hasn’t ratified UNCLOS either, and claims it is not subject to it.
Much of the post-WW2 American-led world order was founded partially on the United States using its military to keep international waters open. It would be quite stunning Iran defeated the united states in this sense. The military might is there, but this administration clearly had no idea what they were getting themselves into and did not plan accordingly. (and does not have the will or public support to do so) The b…
The power wasn't there in the first place if the administration couldn't defend Hormuz. It's all the same capital and resources that prior administrations had. The actual blunder was exposing that weakness to the world. We could have done nothing and reputation would've carried the idea that we could.
The world already knew.
The real strength of the prior admins was in simply not needing the military force. The 2015 Iran nuclear deal is a relevant example here. It didn't cost the US anything.
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Terror state, for them doesn't include genocidal colonialist invaders like Israel. These descriptions are from objective scholars including Jewish ones btw.
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It doesn't care in the slightest for Iranians and wish utter turmoil in the country, we have seen it's treatment to Arabs clear as day in Gaza and the West Bank.
