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Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz

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Re: Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz

#911

Post by foobarian »

kjellsbells wrote: post #409
jandrewrogers wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An aerial drone capable of materially damaging a modern navy ship costs $1-2M a piece. Anything much cheaper doesn't have the range, survivability, or required warhead to do much more than scratch the paint. A cheap drone is only useful against soft targets. It is the reason Ukraine is scaling up heavy cruise missile production even though they already have vast numbers of cheap long-range drones. Being "cheap" isn't…

Do the Iranians have to win against a Navy ship or an oil tanker? Asymmetric warfare suggests they would ignore the well fortified ship and wreak havoc on commercial shipping to get the same result. The Strait of Hormuz is so shallow and narrow that they only really need to sink two or three tankers to shut the whole thing down.

> sink two or three tankers to shut the whole thing down.

How so? The narrowest point is still 20 miles wide. Is there a deepwater lane that's narrower than that, but still impacted with a wreck?

Re: Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz

#912

Post by jacquesm »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #854
curiousElf wrote: post #474

Must be nice for western arm chair commentators to discuss this without once feeling the consequences of the actions of their elected government. Where I live - we face a severe shortage of LPG fuel due to this. Quite a few restaurants have shut down temporarily. Migrant workers around the parts who have no access to a kitchen because they live in tiny quarters with a bedding and a common toilet are struggling to fin…

Blocking the strait is Iran's doing, not the US's. The US attacked them yes, but they were the ones who responded by threatening to blow up the ships of innocent third parties. They couldn't hurt the US, so they decided to hurt you instead. Why the world is tolerating this behavior as if it's a legitimate strategy and blaming it on the US is beyond me.

This is one of the dumbest things I've ever read on HN and I've been here for a while.

Iran was always going to blockade the strait of Hormuz if attacked, as would any other country in their position. What do you expect, to tell them to play by some imaginary set of rules while the US is setting the rulebook itself on fire?

It's almost as dumb as expecting Ukraine to allow russian oil to transit their territory.

Re: Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz

#913

Post by ceejayoz »

foobarian wrote: post #911
kjellsbells wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do the Iranians have to win against a Navy ship or an oil tanker? Asymmetric warfare suggests they would ignore the well fortified ship and wreak havoc on commercial shipping to get the same result. The Strait of Hormuz is so shallow and narrow that they only really need to sink two or three tankers to shut the whole thing down.

> sink two or three tankers to shut the whole thing down. How so? The narrowest point is still 20 miles wide. Is there a deepwater lane that's narrower than that, but still impacted with a wreck?

You shut it down by making the next ship go "lol fuck no".

Re: Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz

#914

Post by amluto »

don_esteban wrote: post #588
b112 wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big mistake here was simply underestimating the scale of Iran. There is value in much of what you're saying in your post, even though I don't necessarily agree 100% with all of it. However, no one involved in planning or starting this attack, underestimated the size of Iran at all. All of that would have been covered by all briefings. The US admin and military knew all of this, and frankly has planned all of this.…

Re: I'd be astonished if 1000s of exit strategies weren't deep planned, maybe a dozen best-outcomes planned, before a single plane bombed anything. The US knows how to exit this. Isn't this just wishfull thinking? I mean, more mature administrations than Trump's have blundered into Vietnam/Iraq/Afghanistan without real exit strategies... Re: Iranian drones to Russia: Russians now (for quite some time) have their own…

> Re: I'd be astonished if 1000s of exit strategies weren't deep planned, maybe a dozen best-outcomes planned, before a single plane bombed anything. The US knows how to exit this.

> Isn't this just wishfull thinking?

The administration could have asked their favorite LLM to plan 1000 exit strategies, kind of like how, if you asked an LLM to make up a reciprocal tariff formula, you would have gotten approximately the administration’s formula.

None of this means that the results are at all useful.

Re: Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz

#915

Post by lostlogin »

fny wrote: post #898
LtWorf wrote: post #892

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I personally know many, many Iranians who welcome the attacks along with their families. Yeah florida is filled with former cubans who want the USA to destroy cuba. The issue is what do actual iranians think? What people who used to live in iran or never lived in iran think is not that relevant really.

I know actual Iranians--not just expats, and I know even more people who hold Iranian passports. The NPR article also quotes people on the ground who have managed to get messages out.

It’s quite possible everyone is right.

90 million people is a lot and actually polling them is impossible if the state of Iran doesn’t allow it.

Re: Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz

#916

Post by AnthonyMouse »

zimpenfish wrote: post #640
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 50% of PRODUCTION, not plants, as in a few plants responsible for 50% of US refinery / LNG production. This is making a pretty big assumption that the long-term US energy mix is going to stay the way it is. The primary historical impediment to electric vehicles was high up-front cost, in turn driven by high battery costs. However: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-battery-cell-pric... We're soon to have el…

> This is making a pretty big assumption that the long-term US energy mix is going to stay the way it is. It's the stated goal of one of the parties to keep or increase fossil fuel usage, isn't it? > Meanwhile the US administration flips parties every four to eight years Magic 8 Ball says "yeah, in the past, 2028 isn't looking good though" > next time they're Democrats they'll be trying to hasten that result Which wi…

> It's the stated goal of one of the parties to keep or increase fossil fuel usage, isn't it?

The stated goal of the same party is to have "cheap energy" and the way voters judge is by things like how much they're paying for electricity. Which means their incentive is to make a lot of noise about how much they hate windmills and love coal while not actually preventing data center companies from building new solar farms to power them. One of their most significant benefactors is also the CEO of the largest domestic electric car company.

> Magic 8 Ball says "yeah, in the past, 2028 isn't looking good though"

Two years is forever in politics. We also have the leader of the Republican party doing all the pandering he can right now because he's trying to sustain a majority in the midterms, whereas in 2028 he can't run, and what's Trump going to do in the intervening two years during which he has no personal stake in the next election?

> Which will be blocked and/or immediately overturned by the current/next Republic Congress/Senate/SCOTUS/President.

That's not what happened last time. The electric car subsidies were introduced in 2008 and sustained until 2025.

We're also at the point where these things are going to get rapidly adopted during any period without active resistance to them.

How many years of the majority of new vehicles being electric or plug-in hybrids would it take before there are enough in the installed base to cause a long-term reduction in petroleum demand, and in turn a reduction in the economic and political power of the oil companies? Also notice that this still happens if Asia and Europe adopt electric vehicles regardless of whether or to what extent the US does, since it's a global commodity market.

Re: Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz

#917

Post by dinkumthinkum »

integricho wrote: post #535
asa400 wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Worst outcome is the US attacks Cuba, Cuba allies with Iran, it turns out that Cuba has been stocking up on Iranian drones, and Cuba becomes a forward base for drone and missile attacks on the southern US. If this happens and Cuba decides to launch drones/missiles against the US homeland, it's not an exaggeration to say that Cuba is flattened and invaded that same afternoon. After 9/11, there's no world in which an…

It is so rich hearing that America can attack anybody, but godforbid an attack on the "homeland" is an unforgivable act that will invoke nukes immediately.

I don’t know what rich means here or why homeland is in scare quotes but that’s the way it is. An attack on the US will be met with unrelenting and unstoppable force. I see a lot of delusional posts that seem to indicate people think the US military capability is weak but I assure you it is not. Also, you do realize the Iranian people were pleading for the US to attack. All these people holding vigils are fir the Ayatollah are just embarrassing themselves.

Re: Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz

#918

Post by mo7061 »

venzaspa wrote: post #716
kqr wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having difficulty projecting force from the air with fighter bombers launched from air craft carriers and refueling caravans from the Indian Ocean or Mediterranean Sea This is not to be underestimated. It is very rare to be able to project military power far from one's capital. That the US is able to do it at all is remarkable. We should not expect it to be easy.

This is in large part because the US relies on their bases in allied countries at their grace.

The uk, what the USA refers to as the unsinkable aircraft carrier

Re: Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz

#919

Post by dinkumthinkum »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #676
lawgimenez wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USA “flattened” and invaded Afghanistan but decades after Taliban is just back again. I don’t know, maybe it’s time for USA to just stop getting involved in wars.

For any country, really; wars cannot be won anymore unless you exterminate its inhabitants completely. At best you can force a regime change, but as Afghanistan showed, that's fragile and tenuous at best if it's not fully backed by the population.

Afghanistan and Iran are not the same. Afghanistan is filled with people that don’t know the Earth is round. Iranians or Persians are educated and largely do not support this regime at all.

Re: Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz

#920

Post by dinkumthinkum »

maxglute wrote: post #455
asa400 wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Worst outcome is the US attacks Cuba, Cuba allies with Iran, it turns out that Cuba has been stocking up on Iranian drones, and Cuba becomes a forward base for drone and missile attacks on the southern US. If this happens and Cuba decides to launch drones/missiles against the US homeland, it's not an exaggeration to say that Cuba is flattened and invaded that same afternoon. After 9/11, there's no world in which an…

The real thought experiment is ~600m people in central/south American within ~6000km, i.e. IRBM range of US gulf coast, where ~50% of US oil refinery and LNG plant production are. Now that Iran has validated mid tier power can cobble together precision strike complex, it's only going to be matter of time before relatively wealthier countries realize only way out of M/Donroe is to build conventional strike against US…

You think the lesson from recent events is that these countries can challenge the IS militarily? Is this real?
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