U.S. used 'virtually all' of its long-range precision missiles during Iran war

>not whatever this spitting match with Iran is.

Are you openly saying the president and the secretary of war are lying when they say they have done "massive" bombings of Iran?

No - the Iran war is a total strategic failure, but the US is very obviously 'exceptional' - I'm not saying necessarily admirable, or more moral etc but it is hugely 'stand out' in terms of capabilities. That's just a fact of reality irrespective of all of the political and moral context.

- The US did not 'lose' the majority of the wars it started - it won most of them, and arguably failed to achieve strategic objectives in some.

- "Acts of raw destruction as mean towards a goal is often not ideal " - this is a misrepresentation of US doctrine for decades. Even in Vietnam the US did not pursue 'full war' and refused to do strategic bombing in North Vietnam for a decade. As soon as Nixon did (op: Linebacker) - basically, the US 'won' right away. They decimated N. Vietnamese ability in a very material way. Were that strategy to have been undertaken in 1967, the war would have had a completely different outcome, probably more like Korean detente.

- US is very careful in their campaigns, there are chains of authority, externalizations are always assessed. The rules of engagement may shift a but - but it's false to suggest it's 'arbitrarily destructive' in targeting, it's generally minimal.

If you want to see what 'destructive' is, just look at Russian engagement in Ukraine, or Assad in Syria, or Saudi in Yemen. They don't care what they hit, it's a totally different environment.

To this day Iran's Oil Infrastructure remains intact. Just let that sink in.

All of this is outside of any moral or whatever other consideration - it's just 'what it is'.

The 'important note' here is that 'Power Has Limits' and that's truly the defining characterization of this war. This is not 'America is not capable' is that 'capabilities have limits' - and they become very obvious in difficult ways if power is applied poorly.

The Generals 100% warned Trump of all of this - this conflict is not a military failure in that sense, this is predictable. It's the political apparatus pushing the boundaries. The Generals would have none of this.

The USA has never been defeated. It's never been taken over by force and forced to submit to a foreign power. War getting a little too expensive or politically unpopular for their tastes is not really a loss, and it implies nothing about their true capabilities.

It's their relentless deindustrialization that will eventually do them in. The USA's industrial output back in WWII was staggering, its enemies had little hope of victory given the sheer number of materiel that would eventually get deployed. Since then they've been voluntarily giving up much of that industrial advantage out of greed.

It might actually be for the best to stress the system in this way. It's not practical to keep a military based only around "stockpiles" that you're scared to use up. Modern combat looks like long wars of attrition where two countries compete to see who can burn through more missiles so you need to keep the actual supply chain active.

Hopefully they're able to learn lessons from Ukraine as well and pivot towards cheaper missiles and autonomous vehicles

I imagine elements in the Taiwanese govt are pushing a massive drone network to turn the nation into a porcupine.