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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

#541

Post by cyberax »

mattlondon wrote: post #43

North Korea has a bunch they're willing to sell. Russia is buying already so get 'em while they're hot. I have been vaguely watching the Ukraine conflict over the past few years. From my distant and zero experience observations, it seems like missiles are extremely effective BUT also extremely limited. So you blow up that one building or SAM you targeted. Well done. What about the other 10,000 static targets? What ab…

Russian missiles have been mostly useless in the Ukrainian war. They are overwhelmingly used against civilian targets as a means of intimidation.

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

#542

Post by greedo »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #194
simonh wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Except for the capability to prevail in those conflicts. On the other hand the US did prevail in Iraq, and often prevails in smaller interventions such as K…

> Except for the capability to prevail in those conflicts. Doubt. The US suffered around 60k deaths in Vietnam before it pulled out, yet it has proven a willingness to withstand at least 5x more losses than that. WWII cost the US around 300k deaths, its civil war cost around 200k deaths. I think they just didn't want to commit more american lives to whatever objectives it is that they had. They definitely had and sti…

Civil War casualties were over 700K...

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

#543

Post by Jtsummers »

lbreakjai wrote: post #540
Jtsummers wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That as well, what resistance was present was reduced from what it could have been (not everyone was in on it).

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

#544

Post by [deleted] »

ifwinterco wrote: post #479
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…

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

[deleted]

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

#545

Post by rhelz »

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…

The real problem isn't the price of the missiles. I wouldn't even care about the price of the missiles if they actually worked. But Iran kicked our butts. We don't have air superiority, we cannot guarantee the shipping of oil through the straight of Hormuz, or anywhere else in that hemispheres, our bases and our aircraft carriers are useless.

I wanna know what they've been doing with our trillions of dollars, because it sure as heck wasn't making an effective military.

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

#546

Post by timacles »

rayiner wrote: post #399
mikenew wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a tactical failure of the US; it's a strategic one. The US operates a tremendously powerful military, but that doesn't change the fact that the war with Iran was a tremendous strategic blunder. "Moronic" is a pretty fair characterization.

But running out of missiles—which is the accusation being made above—would be a tactical and logistics failure, not a strategic one.

You have tactics and strategy mixed up. Killing Iran leadership was a tactical success. Continually shooting long range missiles into a giant country is a strategic failure.

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

#547

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

analognoise wrote: post #214
peyton wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could fight conventionally over logistics chokepoints. China’s not going to lob nukes just because their oil’s dried up.

China imports food and has stressed or extremely stressed fresh water reserves. You take out the method they keep alive hundreds of millions of citizens, you think they won’t launch a nuke? Although for all the strategic thinking we’ve seen out of the “department of war” (that offers gender affirming testosterone shots and then runs out of missiles), I wouldn’t be shocked if you worked at the Pentagon, hahahaha.

China is already sending their fishing fleets to just off the EEZ of South American and is rapidly depleting their stock.

https://latinamericanpost.com/americas/environment-en/a-sile...

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

#548

Post by wbl »

lumost wrote: post #351
pandinus wrote: post #301

"There's no such thing as public opinion, merely published opinion". While on the one hand we should never discount the impact of incompetence, gross negligence, or deliberate mismanagement there's a reason this story is circulating. For the most-dominant military power in the world to "whoopsy" run out of weapons because of a low-stakes engagement isn't readily believable. Suspicious me likens it to the supposed "wa…

It's been discussed for decades that the US would run out of precision munitions in any multi-week conflict. The presumption was that the US would either be in a nuclear war at that point, or a ground campaign would complete the task along with dumb munitions. That the US decided to expend it's precision weapon stockpile on a conflict of choice with no ground or dumb bombing campaign to fallback on is a mystery for l…

The US is always going to slap a JDAM kit on for better effect.

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

#549

Post by Jtsummers »

californical wrote: post #408
overfeed wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was left scratching my head why Ukraine would be there, but not Iran, on the basis that it too has stood its ground in what the superpower aggressor planned to be short and decisive conflict.

Have they? Obviously there have been a ton of issues due to the US’s strategy in Iran. But almost nobody in the US has any affect from this war. Gas prices are up a bit. Mildly inconvenient for the majority of people, and that’s the biggest failure people are mad about. Meanwhile Iran is in rough shape

> Gas prices are up a bit.

A gross understatement.

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=E...

Zoom in on this year and you'll see it's below $3 a gallon in January and February, then by the end of March it's over $4 and mostly above after that. That's a 33% increase. That's a substantial and sustained hike in a short time.

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

#550

Post by elendilm »

pendenthistory wrote: post #347
justin66 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For the most-dominant military power in the world to "whoopsy" run out of weapons because of a low-stakes engagement isn't readily believable. Wow, yeah, you'd need to have morons at the top of the chain of command and subordinates afraid to speak out in order for something like that to happen. Nothing like the US government today at all.

(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…

Ahhh. The Maduro operation. You remember a soldier from Maduro's guard saying they were brought to their knees by a wonder weapon.

Shame the wonder weapon didn't surface in Ukraine nor in Iran nor in Yemen where it was desperately needed.

But we hear about the wonder weapon and how wonderful it was on TV. Must be really true :).

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