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

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

#201

Post by steveBK123 »

PowerElectronix wrote: post #19

Now they'll exhaust interceptors and other long range missiles like tomahawks and whatnot. And then China gets frisky with Taiwan and the US will totally not abandon them and tell them to just give up pressured by the lack of firepower to defend them, the risks of China getting back into bidding oil in international markets and the mess the treasury would be in if China raises capital by selling bonds (they just told…

Hey look on the bright side - every time we cut CDC staff by 25% or kick a 100K people off SNAP, we can afford a few more weeks of missiles.

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

#202

Post by steveBK123 »

irishcule wrote: post #169
simonh wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The health care issue in the USA isn't due to lack of funding, the US spends more on health care per person than any other country, double that of many European countries with single payer systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea... The costs of medicare, medicaid and CHIP to tax payers are about what most Europeans pay in tax for universal health care, but then they also need to pay for…

> the US military absolutely could control Hormuz. I'm confident it's quite capable of it. It's that the US public wouldn't support the immense cost in lives and treasure it would take to do it, and maintain that control I never understood these kinds of arguments and they always come from those defending US military might. Either they can do it or they cannot, if "the US public wouldn't support the immense cost in l…

Right I think its only an interesting argument in separating existential vs non-existential threats to the country.

So it means we aren't fighting in Iran the way we would in defending a hypothetical invasion of the lower 48 states, great.

But does it mean we'd fight any differently in the South China Sea, a Russian incursion into Poland, etc. Unclear, and presidential whim based.

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

#203

Post by budman1 »

closewith wrote: post #31
wongarsu wrote: post #3

That's the one glaring weakness of relying too heavily on missiles. They are expensive and difficult to manufacture. And they have a limited shelf life, making stockpiles also expensive In previous conflicts the US military could get a lot done with bombs, but that's risky if you can't get air superiority and take out all enemy anti-air systems. Which is more difficult against an enemy who can shoot at your air bases…

You have the same issue with the conventional bombs and their guidance kits, which when delivered in contested areas are not usually cheaper. The issue is general industrial capacity, not missiles specifically.

JDAM's are a lot cheaper. They are a guidance kit bolted on to a MK-82 gravity bomb. There are a lot of MK-82's in stock, as they have been made since the 1940's.

Problem is you put a crew and an expensive airplane at risk.

We are out of missiles because the current administration wants to minimize combat losses. Looking at the dollar cost; it seems like a bad idea. But is this war worth any of our soldiers / sailors / airman ? (no)

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

#204

Post by tim333 »

chmod775 wrote: post #46
PowerElectronix wrote: post #19

Now they'll exhaust interceptors and other long range missiles like tomahawks and whatnot. And then China gets frisky with Taiwan and the US will totally not abandon them and tell them to just give up pressured by the lack of firepower to defend them, the risks of China getting back into bidding oil in international markets and the mess the treasury would be in if China raises capital by selling bonds (they just told…

If they can exhaust all their firepower in a couple weeks fighting Iran, China would have no reason to feel threatened in the first place. The reality is that fighting China would be a proper all-out war, not whatever this spitting match with Iran is.

>fighting China would be a proper all-out war

I figure it would probably be like the US backing Ukraine's defense against Russia but backing Taiwan's defense against China. It would probably be quite hard for China to take Taiwan. There's a lot of sea in between and you can see how well Russia's navy has done against Ukraine's drones and missiles.

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

#205

Post by Paradigma11 »

chmod775 wrote: post #46
PowerElectronix wrote: post #19

Now they'll exhaust interceptors and other long range missiles like tomahawks and whatnot. And then China gets frisky with Taiwan and the US will totally not abandon them and tell them to just give up pressured by the lack of firepower to defend them, the risks of China getting back into bidding oil in international markets and the mess the treasury would be in if China raises capital by selling bonds (they just told…

If they can exhaust all their firepower in a couple weeks fighting Iran, China would have no reason to feel threatened in the first place. The reality is that fighting China would be a proper all-out war, not whatever this spitting match with Iran is.

But there wouldn't be a Chinese navy left which would give Taiwan and it's allies some breathing room.

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

#206

Post by tencentshill »

Squarex wrote: post #5

That's hard to believe. US with it's military spending should be able to join two large scale conflicts at the same time, not to have problem with a one minor conflict.

Missiles (BIG EXPLOSION) look better when presented in video briefings to Trump and as propaganda on Fox news. It's all optics and style. No other goals.

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

#207

Post by ksudb »

Paradigma11 wrote: post #205
chmod775 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they can exhaust all their firepower in a couple weeks fighting Iran, China would have no reason to feel threatened in the first place. The reality is that fighting China would be a proper all-out war, not whatever this spitting match with Iran is.

But there wouldn't be a Chinese navy left which would give Taiwan and it's allies some breathing room.

[dead]

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

#208

Post by rf15 »

wookmaster wrote: post #177
bluegatty wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 object…

>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. I mean if we look at all recent wars, Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam and now Iran we completely failed in our objectives. We spend billions, kill a lot of people and get a lot of our own people killed and didn't manage to instill democracy anywhere. How is that not losing the wars…

Hi, the guy with the original claims here: You can really argue this one either way - If you look at Wikipedia, the field seems fairly even, but when you start looking into the details, things don't look quite as rosy: There's a few "wins" that are literally just a plane getting shot down or similar, there's a lot of revolutions they were involved in (some turning out good, some bad) But as you've observed: the big, memorable ones they lost. even the ones Wikipedia claims as wins/mixed bags are sometimes consequences of an earlier battle that they lost. For example, Korea: the division counts as a 'win', because it happened during WW2 and the US were part of the victors of WW2. Defending the south in the Korean war counts as 'mixed' and gets thrown in with the lost counteroffensive of taking the north. You can play the numbers however you like here, it feels like.

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

#209

Post by Tadpole9181 »

notaigenerated wrote: post #51
chmod775 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they can exhaust all their firepower in a couple weeks fighting Iran, China would have no reason to feel threatened in the first place. The reality is that fighting China would be a proper all-out war, not whatever this spitting match with Iran is.

There won't ever be an "all out war" of nuclear states with each other. Only via proxies.

Until there is.

We have thus far been supremely lucky that irrational actors have not acquired a nuclear bomb. But the reality is that throughout history most leaders have been irrational.

My country (America) is behaving increasingly irrationally. I've been hearing fringe conservatives calling for nuking the middle east since the early 2000s, but the rot has spread and became deeply religious.

Now I hear talk of the end times from the most powerful people in the country, actively building bunkers. Groups of Republicans openly talking about the US being allowed to take whatever we want from anyone we want through war (Venezuela, Iran, Greenland, Canada).

Almost all of our leadership has been replaced in every branch of government. SCOTUS is clearly compromised and bought. The legislative may as well be dead. Almost all executive agencies have been purged, what remains have had their heads swapped with sycophants. Something like half of the military generals have been turned over. The DoD was renamed to the DoW with cheers, as an alcoholic prison guard was put in charge and has started touting hypermacho religious warrior catchphrases and openly advocating for war crimes.

The other day we testimony from judges before legislature who refused to say if Presidents can run for three terms or that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. Under oath, just simply refused.

And that's before getting into how the President of the United States started a war to distract from his involvement in the highest profile sex trafficking ring in human history, and has continued to use his position to perform insider trading on oil prices repeatedly for weeks.

If you said any of this would be happening in 2005, I would have laughed at how "that would never happen in the US". And now it's just... reality. Like Russia. And it seems to have no end in sight. So what actually happens if Trump gets so deranged he hits the red button? And if not him, who will the loonies pick tomorrow - someone who actually believes in "the cause", who doesn't understand it's a grift?

And what are the external long term consequences of Trump's actions in countries like Iran and Venezuela and Ukraine? The US is not to be trusted anymore, every country has a clear signal to build their own nuclear arsenal ASAP. We have a river of blood behind us, so are we just expecting to get lucky that no one in Iran, for instance, who gets to a position of power leverages an irrational hate for the US and just... Does it in a religious or hate-driven Armageddon?

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

#210

Post by padjo »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #193
wookmaster wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you start a war in someone else's country and they push you out...they won the war which means the US lost it. Your definition that the country has to be taken over to lose is a very different situation. If you can't accept we started a war, lost thousands of US lives and left without achieving any objective we set out as a loss you might need to reflect on the propaganda you've been fed and how it's affected you.

For some definition of "push you out". The US inflicted an order of magnitude more casualties than the ~60k deaths they suffered in Vietnam. The US has proven its willingness to withstand much greater losses: ~300k deaths in WWII, ~200k deaths in its civil war. They did a staggering amount of damage but were unable to secure a decisive military victory. So the war started to drag on, the casualties started to mount,…

So your argument is that they could have won in an alternative reality where it was worth paying a much higher cost for victory, therefore they didn't lose?
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