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

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

#691

Post by sph » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 6:14 AM UTC

freehorse wrote: post #300

WarmWash wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> China, in it's modern incarnation, and every living member of it's military, has never seen a single real battle. I wish people would take a short stop here and contemplate a bit on this sentence.

Well of course not, they are not an aggressively imperialist and expansionist power.

That said, they have been tempted by the juiciest prey right off their coast.

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

#692

Post by elcritch » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 6:27 AM UTC

elendilm wrote: post #593

elcritch wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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> Tell me who funded ISIS.

Oil funds predominantly along with theft and ransoms according to the EU near ISIS's peak [1]. This was while the US was still directly fighting ISIS in Afghanistan and Iraq.

1: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/IDAN/2017/6038...

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

#693

Post by tomhow » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 6:38 AM UTC

elendilm wrote: post #592

mrweasel wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't really stockpile missiles, their explosives and fuel needs to be replaced with some interval, so having a massive stockpile doesn't make that much sense, because it's as you suggests expensive to maintain. In the case of an war (like you know, a war-war) the US is perfectly capable of ramping up manufacturing to ungodly numbers (but it won't be cheap). I would however like to see what Ukraine does, if they…

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> Source - trust me bro

Please don't post snark on HN, no matter how right you are or feel you are. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#694

Post by ifwinterco » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 6:46 AM UTC

elcritch wrote: post #692

elendilm wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Tell me who funded ISIS. Oil funds predominantly along with theft and ransoms according to the EU near ISIS's peak [1]. This was while the US was still directly fighting ISIS in Afghanistan and Iraq. 1: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/IDAN/2017/6038...

Iran was fighting them though, the Shia leadership of Iran have absolutely no time for Salafism.

You need to be a bit more specific with exactly what you mean by “religious” extremism, you seem to be conflating things that are in many ways opposite

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

#695

Post by maxglute » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 7:01 AM UTC

audunw wrote: post #669

missedthecue wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How hard would it be for China to make sure no ships or airplanes arrive to Taiwan for a few weeks? The island has only days worth of food and energy. No bloody D-Day landings needed to force a political capitulation. To continue to borrow from your example, Russia has completely shut down all commercial Ukrainian seaborne and airborne traffic.

A blockade of Taiwan could be met with a blockade of China. China can survive much longer on their own supply and reserves. But it’s still something to make them think twice. They don’t have the blue water navy to respond to a blockade. Land connections do not have the scale to work around it. There’s a small port on the east side of Taiwan which could be used to supply some of the bare necessities. I don’t know if U…

USN on paper not capable of blockading PRC anymore, refer to latest Pentagon China Power report, PRC missiles coverage up to west CONUS, likely further, which means USN is globally vulnerable. Iran's shit tier A2D2 can push USN to standoff range, PRC can push USN out of hemisphere. This not mentioning PRC answer to energy/food blockade is proportional CONUS energy infra strikes to deny CONUS energy. PRC doesn't need blue water navy to break US blockade. Highend rockery breaks USN model at scale, on the cheap, relative to bluewater. There is US subsurface but do the math, US subs will run out of VLS cells before they meaningfully dent size of PRC merchant fleet.

There is no part of TW that is not within PRC land base munition range, every inch can be hit within 7 minutes. Of course PRC would hit US ships in blockade scenario which is by definition war. If USN doesn't blockade, then FONAP does nothing, anything supply ship to west TW would be trivially sunk, NVM legally any ship during PRC TW blockade scenario is running PRC blockade (read: entering sovereign One China waters) and can be treated as hostile. US either tries to blockade (goto war with PRC who will run blockade / test US resolve), and if turns hot, risk its westpac / global replenishment chains (including CENTCOM/CONUS) being blown up, or CONUS hits. Just hitting USN replenishment ships, which are exquisitely vulnerable (has to spend hours in port) means USN becomes single deployment assets, i.e CSG in high tempo operations will exhaust fuel (escorts), munitions in days. USN expeditionary model simply isn't viable vs peer who can cripple US logistics tail within ~10000km radius of PRC. Or US does functionally nothing, i.e. FONAP in TW blockade scenario is theatrics.

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

#696

Post by lifestyleguru » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 7:23 AM UTC

mrguyorama wrote: post #634

panzagl wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This should be higher, the Army never had a lot of ATACMs to begin with as launching missiles at things is not really their job. Doesn't make the points about this administration not having a real plan invalid though...

>Army never had a lot of ATACMs to begin with as launching missiles at things is not really their job It's called the Army tactical missile system FFS. It was literally built for them. It's rocket artillery ! We built only 3500 of the missiles total. We stopped investing in rocket artillery because they get very close to IRBMs, and those were banned until recently. The Marines had some, but not anymore (IIRC). Other…

> AGM-158 JASSM: This is our bread and butter Air launched cruise missile (There isn't an air launched version of Tomahawk!). They only cost about $800k each! Lockheed claims they can someday build 1000 a year. We built 10k total. We fired 1100 in Iran so far and only have 1500 left.

What exploded last week in Poland, a NATO country, was a fully armed Russian equivalent of JASSM. Poland has maybe few dozen of JASSM and even fewer F16... ohh and last year Poland pointlessly wrecked one of its F16, the only platform capable of launching JASSM it posses. Russia is watching really closely these shenanigans.

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

#697

Post by nobody9999 » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 7:31 AM UTC

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…

>So what is this conflict all about?

The evangelical Christians who are among the largest of the Republican Party's voting blocs believe that the biblical "end times" are nigh, but Jesus Christ won't return to bring peace and prosperity until the middle east is destroyed by war[0][2][3] (often called armageddon[1]).

And, as Peter Medawar (quite correctly) observed[4] some years ago:

   The USA is so enormous, and so numerous are its schools, colleges and 
   religious seminaries, many devoted to special religious beliefs ranging from 
   the unorthodox to the dotty, that we can hardly wonder at its yielding a more 
   bounteous harvest of gobbledygook than the rest of the world put together.

I'd suggest drawing your own conclusions (as the above is only part of the story -- fossil fuels, islamophobia and good old-fashioned bigotry fill things out somewhat -- and not the entirety of it) based on the enormous amount of information you can glean from public sources.

[0] https://www.tomorrowsworld.org/booklets/the-middle-east-in-p...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armageddon

[2] https://harvest.org/resources/gregs-blog/post/israel-iran-bi...

[3] https://theconversation.com/as-iran-war-expands-some-conserv...

[4] https://www.azquotes.com/quote/1064507

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

#698

Post by gbuk2013 » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 7:54 AM UTC

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.

> every living member of it's military, has never seen a single real battle

How I wish for a world where the same could be said for every other army!

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

#699

Post by theshrike79 » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 7:57 AM UTC

renegade-otter wrote: post #500

laughing_man wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The USAF has a pretty substantial inventory of stand-off weapons, and an absolutely enormous inventory of guided bombs.

They do, but the current leadership does not have any appetite for entering Iran's airspace after the last downing drama. If Iran captures a pilot, there is going to be no more room for market manipulation.

Where and who is the pilot who crashed btw?

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

#700

Post by Tadpole9181 » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 8:10 AM UTC

KerrAvon wrote: post #245

Tadpole9181 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In several states we have moved well beyond "fixable". For instance, in Texas, where they are outright saying that they are redrawing districts with the explicit goal of preventing Democrats from being represented. Not only that, they're saying they campaigned on the promise and are therefore obligated by their constituents to institute a single party state through the denial of representation of their political opponents.

I genuinely don't believe the US can be fixed anymore. We're on a slip-and-slide and far too much damage has been done to stop it. There aren't even adults left at the table to try.