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

cnbc.com

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

#241

Post by bothers »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #137
srean wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah, because the USA pulled out. Is that and act of victory or defeat ?

[flagged]

That just means the military, aircraft carriers, all that, were so ineffective that the enemy didn't even need to bother destroying them to achieve victory. It doesn't matter what would have happened if various parameters were different, if only we had gone all out this one time, and the point of war isn't the act itself of making cool trucks shoot at each other, and it's silly to argue that your home isn't insecure after a thief absconds with your valuables, but failed to pick the lock you put on the chest-high fence gate. (Pardon my silly phrasing, I mean no hostility or condescension!)

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

#242

Post by verdverm »

> Analysts say such weapons – which cost over $1 million each – would also be important in any conflict with China.

Said without context, there are not very many places close to China where these could be fired from, so I'm not so sure how useful they would really be in any South China Sea hot wars

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

#244

Post by jghn »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #75
thinkindie wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wouldn’t be the first war the USA loose against a smaller enemy. See Vietnam, Afghanistan, etc etc.

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 h…

> The USA has never been defeated.

Did the entity now known as the USA defeat the British in the mid-1770s or did it just get a little too expensive and more of a headache than it was worth for the British to hold on to them?

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

#245

Post by KerrAvon »

Tadpole9181 wrote: post #209
notaigenerated wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The US is still fixable if young people will just fucking vote. Irreparable damage has been done, which means the old structures are gone, but they can be replaced with new ones -- a hypothetical Democratic president would need to clean house top to bottom. Obama's greatest flaw was that he didn't see the need to do that after Shrub.

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

#246

Post by WarmWash »

ndiddy wrote: post #231
_heimdall wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality is that fighting any country with a decent military has to be all-out war. We should have plenty of precision missiles left today because they should have been used only to clear the way for runs with "dumb" bombs. A war with China would be the same, it can never be fought from a distance with primarily $1m+ precision surface to surface missiles. Of course I only mean if the war was necessary to fight at…

> We should have plenty of precision missiles left today because they should have been used only to clear the way for runs with "dumb" bombs. That's what the US tried to do. The problem is that they were unable to degrade the Iranian missile systems enough that they could drop gravity bombs with impunity. This also means that they had to pull the aircraft that they would use to do bombing runs back to bases in Jordan…

China, in it's modern incarnation, and every living member of it's military, has never seen a single real battle. Nothing. No one has any rank that has bearing on any kind of combat. Just decades of self-congratulatory war games.

China has tons of weapons and resources. But it would remain to be seen if they can actually fight when every single person along the entire chain is a total day one rookie.

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

#247

Post by estearum »

SR2Z wrote: post #236
ndiddy wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We should have plenty of precision missiles left today because they should have been used only to clear the way for runs with "dumb" bombs. That's what the US tried to do. The problem is that they were unable to degrade the Iranian missile systems enough that they could drop gravity bombs with impunity. This also means that they had to pull the aircraft that they would use to do bombing runs back to bases in Jordan…

The problem is production capacity. The US has gutted the lower-value parts of its supply chains, closed refineries and foundries left and right, and is thoroughly unequipped to even produce cheap weapons at the rate required to support a war. The number of airplanes built in the US during WWII is greater than all the airplanes NOT in that category. Obviously we can't maintain that level of industry during peacetime,…

No, the problem is that nobody actually gives a fuck about this war.

The reason we don't have industrial capacity dedicated to this war is because everyone knows we're fighting it for no reason, there's no plan, it stops and starts every 4 days, so on.

Simple consequences of having actual stupid people leading our government.

If the US got into a war that anyone actually cared about, it would almost certainly snap into action at incredible speed.

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

#249

Post by estearum »

WarmWash wrote: post #246
ndiddy wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We should have plenty of precision missiles left today because they should have been used only to clear the way for runs with "dumb" bombs. That's what the US tried to do. The problem is that they were unable to degrade the Iranian missile systems enough that they could drop gravity bombs with impunity. This also means that they had to pull the aircraft that they would use to do bombing runs back to bases in Jordan…

China, in it's modern incarnation, and every living member of it's military, has never seen a single real battle. Nothing. No one has any rank that has bearing on any kind of combat. Just decades of self-congratulatory war games. China has tons of weapons and resources. But it would remain to be seen if they can actually fight when every single person along the entire chain is a total day one rookie.

NATO exercises and, ya know, the war in Iran, seem to suggest there's limited applicability of the US's experience.

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

#250

Post by ericmay »

tim333 wrote: post #204
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.

>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.

I don't think so because China would not be sure what and how the US would be involved and because it would be incredibly risky to attack Taiwan without striking US forces in the area they'll likely attempt to strike US forces in Korea, Japan, Guam, the Philippines, and elsewhere.

The best US strategy is to just arm Taiwan to the teeth by selling weapons to make the invasion as risky as possible. But China can (and this is their smart play, IMO) is to just win Taiwan over politically over the long term.

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