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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

#531

Post by maxglute »

maxglute wrote: post #224
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…

LBH US hasn't been in position to defend 1st island chain in a while, US performance vs Iran just made that obvious. The one thing we have learned in recent wars is highend hardware can shoot down subsonic munitions reliably, highend missiles can penetrate high end defense reliably. AKA PRC is uniquely positioned to blunt most of US fires (subsonic munitions) while having tons of highend fires vs US defense. But real…

@cmxch [dead] >Sure about that? Give the US a permissive RoE and the ability to ignore the CNN/MSNOW peanut gallery and then get back to us about that series of claims.

Reasonably sure given US RoE vs Iran has been extremely permissive, even more permissiveness just means depleting highend munitions faster for same marginal effect. reality is US simply doesn't have the standoff stockpiles - US can go Vietnam / close air but then you'd be dealing with more down pilots and peanut gallery unavoidable. Given that VS PRC is forgone, ROE has nothing to do with fundamental US techstack/stockpile (mis)allocation. If US cannot defeat high end hypersonics at scale then expeditionary model with exquisite tooth/tail logistics cannot survive to reach theatre to deliver standoff munitions, and given most US standoff munitions subsonic, even if they could deliver theoretically they face near 100% interception rate. US would also have to retool basically entire delivery systems around supersonic munitions, which are more expensive, larger, i.e. reduced fire bandwidth. These are geometric not RoE constraints.

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

#532

Post by rhelz »

pianopatrick wrote: post #445
bettercallsalad wrote: post #434

Not an American but live here. But I don’t understand the fixation of US in middle east theatre. With the abundance of onshore oil through fracking revolution, presumably US doesn’t need to police the Middle East. The president himself said US doesn’t need their oil. So what is this conflict all about? Is there bigger geopolitical price tag attached to victory in Iran? Or US is just besieged by corruption to the exte…

One reason among several is that middle east states fund the US fiscal deficit by buying treasuries with their oil revenues. If the US loses that source of financing then the US fiscal situation gets worse

This. Since it has been demonstrated that we can no longer guarantee the shipping of oil through the straight of Hormuz, nobody has any reasons to price oil in USD or to finance our deficits.

Get ready for the mother of all tax increases.

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

#533

Post by SmirkingRevenge »

chmod775 wrote: post #68
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.

Of course there can be - likely with a gentleman's understanding that neither would use them, and each side careful to not back the other into a corner where they'd have nothing left to lose. It's just going to be your typical meatgrinder and attrition warfare.

I think the biggest risk of war between nuclear powers is from mistakes and accidents that might trigger nuclear escalation/MAD. Systems can malfunction. War can spiral out of control, fast.

We had some very close calls in the cold war.

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

#534

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

tintor wrote: post #354
nemothekid wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that any of that actually matters. Wars are not Call of Duty. It's politically difficult to invest actual manpower in Iran and Unless China were to nuke Hawaii, an all out war with China would also immediately be politically unpopular. China, like Iran, wouldn't doesn't need to defeat the US, they just need to hold out long enough for the US economy to collapse, which would happen way faster if China is…

> The only reason we don't have $6 gas right now ... I see you are not in California.

California has both very high taxes on gas and a custom formulation that is only used in California... which is just about the most Californian thing I can think of.

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

#535

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

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,…

Ship production is in much worse shape.

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

#536

Post by mrguyorama »

sssilver wrote: post #277

I'm always confused by prices of "highly regulated" goods in the United States. When I get a $150,000 bill for a 15-minute hand-reconstruction surgery, how much of that bill is the total margin vs self cost? And how much of that is warranted / acceptable? When a single Tomahawk missile bills the taxpayer $3,600,000, how much of that bill is the total margin? When I say "total margin", I mean not just the margin of th…

RTX, formerly Raytheon, has the same revenue and net income as PepsiCo. PepsiCo has a higher profit margin.

Most of these companies are public and you can find their stats.

A Tomahawk missile is $3.6 million because it uses specialty components, all made in small batches using very expensive American specialist labor. It's also staggeringly more capable than a drone, or a shahed. Those extra capabilities are enormously expensive, because they are hyper niche.

A single American Artillery Shell is $3000.

Meanwhile, your $150k surgery bill example is completely different. It's a fake number, made up to cause a process to generate an actual, intended price somewhere. Your insurer and the hospital play some insane game of chicken where the insurance promises only to pay a percentage of what they are billed and so the hospital submits a fake number to get what they actually want (or nowadays the system is even more byzantine)

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

#537

Post by rhelz »

slashdev wrote: post #485
bettercallsalad wrote: post #434

Not an American but live here. But I don’t understand the fixation of US in middle east theatre. With the abundance of onshore oil through fracking revolution, presumably US doesn’t need to police the Middle East. The president himself said US doesn’t need their oil. So what is this conflict all about? Is there bigger geopolitical price tag attached to victory in Iran? Or US is just besieged by corruption to the exte…

Maybe I’m missing the subtler geopolitical point here, but I don’t think it’s about oil. It’s about preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons and threatening the region via their missiles, drones, and proxies. Whether they succeed at it or not is an open question, but it seems clear that’s what it was about. Take operation midnight hammer last July. That was clearly only about the nuclear issue.

Trump doesn't give a flying flip about Iran having Nuclear weapons. If he cared at all, in the slightest, he wouldn't have unilaterally broken our treaty with them.

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

#538

Post by elcritch »

cwnyth wrote: post #502
ifwinterco wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Occam's razor explanation is that it's all about Israel. They're the only country that actually benefits from all these misguided Middle Eastern adventures, and it's not like it's just one, there's a pattern and it's always the same

Saudi Arabia benefits just as much, if not more, from a diminished Iran.

Not just Saudi Arabia but the UAE, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Egypt, and Gaza.

Iran has funded terrorism and religious extremism in the region leading to massive death tolls in many of them. Not to mention Iranians themselves.

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

#539

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

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.

Taiwan is one of the most heavily armed land masses on Earth (they buy mostly from the US).

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

#540

Post by lbreakjai »

Jtsummers wrote: post #406
pendenthistory wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Not American, need to preface with this) I think the US military has shown itself to be extremely competent in the last war. Reading about Desert Storm and later the invasion of Iraq it's just insane. It's still possible they miscalculated how rapidly warfare would change, but to call them morons... As far as I can see, there are only three proven militaries in the world, the US, Israel and Ukraine, and the US is or…

> Have we already forgotten what happened to Maduro? What other country in the history of the world could pull something like that off? Venezuela was a raid, not a full on war. And it was so lopsided it was like putting Michael Jordan against a 10-year-old and based on that performance determining that Jordan is the GOAT. It demonstrated that against a remarkably unprepared and unready opponent the US can do well, wh…

Venezuela was also a palace coup. They didn't raid, they came to collect.
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