511–520 of 775 posts
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.
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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…
> As for controlling Hormuz, 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. This is like saying "I could easily afford a Ferrari. It's just that I wouldn't be able to make the interest payments on the loan". Military conquest is more than just gun…
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Health insurance company margins are 3% to 5%. The book America’s Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Back-Room Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System (2015) by journalist Steven Brill blames mostly wasteful practices in hospitals, pharma and device manufacturers, government and corporate health administration costs.
I think the most correct and probably most discouraging answer is that American healthcare costs about what it should.
3 generations of wealth poured into the most expensive military in recorded history - the reason that we don't have health care, clean energy, decent social safety nets and so many other things... and they can't even control a small stretch of water. What a waste.
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…
Many defense contracts are cost plus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost-plus_pricing
US apologists thought this is Hollywood. That Iron man and Thor will fly down from the sky. Instead we saw videos after videos of Iranian missiles rain down from the sky. There is a reason distributed systems are resilient. Iran's military doctrine of decentralized mosaic has proven to be a masterclass in military organization.
Indeed fellow current events observer, this will portend the imminent collapse of the cowardly west and the grand rise of the stalwart and wise Ayatollahs of Iran (I was not paid by state actors to write this)
US apologists thought this is Hollywood. That Iron man and Thor will fly down from the sky. Instead we saw videos after videos of Iranian missiles rain down from the sky. There is a reason distributed systems are resilient. Iran's military doctrine of decentralized mosaic has proven to be a masterclass in military organization.
Indeed fellow current events observer, this will portend the imminent collapse of the cowardly west and the grand rise of the stalwart and wise Ayatollahs of Iran (I was not paid by state actors to write this)
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 US benefits from causing instability as it prevents a true rival peer power from forming.
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 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…
US missile production is extremely, painfully slow. From Standard missiles used by the Navy to Patriot. From THAAD to PrSM. LRASM, Tomahawk, you name it, we have a Tiffany weapons arsenal. We're winning so much, we just put the F-15 back into production; a plane that entered service 50 years ago.
Historians used to mock the Nazis for continually developing wunderwaffe; while the Allies overwhelmed them with Sherman and T-34 tanks. Now we've become the Nazis (in so many more ways than one.)