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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

#931

Post by flextheruler »

dinkumthinkum wrote: post #919
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do they support the governments that started this by blowing up 100s of children at their school? Give me a break, even the left-wing Iranians who hate the theocracy also hate Israel. Hell nearly all left-wing young people in the U.S. despise the Israeli government's actions and U.S. support of said actions and that's only for things that have happened in the last year.

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

#932

Post by wiseowise »

asa400 wrote: post #438
Animats wrote: post #426

A big mistake here was simply underestimating the scale of Iran. Iran has 90,000,000 people. More than 2x Ukraine. More than 2x Germany. More than 2x Iraq. More than any country in Europe. About 2/3 of Russia. Expecting to win a war on the cheap was a fantasy. Especially since Iran has been fighting Israel for years. On the naval front, Ukraine sunk the Moskva with a few truck-mounted missiles. That finally made it u…

> 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…

[dead]

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

#933

Post by xorcist »

decimalenough wrote: post #688
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> After 9/11, there's no world in which any attack on the US homeland, however small or local, is met with anything other than overwhelming retribution. Yes remember when they invaded Saudi Arabia? That taught everyone an important lesson on the consequences of terrorism on American soil.

The hijackers were Saudi nationals, but the operation was in no way sponsored by the Saudi state, which is a staunch US ally. Which is why the US proceeded to (attempt to) flatten Afghanistan instead.

> the operation was in no way sponsored by the Saudi state,

We do not know this. There are plentiful evidence to suggest direct involvement of the state itself, and the bin Ladin family is certainly hard to untangle from the Saudi state. That is just from what we can know from unclassified sources.

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

#934

Post by flextheruler »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #574
Animats wrote: post #426

A big mistake here was simply underestimating the scale of Iran. Iran has 90,000,000 people. More than 2x Ukraine. More than 2x Germany. More than 2x Iraq. More than any country in Europe. About 2/3 of Russia. Expecting to win a war on the cheap was a fantasy. Especially since Iran has been fighting Israel for years. On the naval front, Ukraine sunk the Moskva with a few truck-mounted missiles. That finally made it u…

> The US can't just pull out, either. The enemy gets a vote on when it's over. Israel, Iran, and Yemen now all have to agree Is that really true? Just claim that Iran's Nuclear ambitions have been destroyed, and anyone who needs oil can "Buy it from the US or get it themselves from Hormuz" - mission accomplished! With the US withdrawing (or atleast not attacking), Iran can stop the drone attacks and open Hormuz - col…

Why would Iran stop attacking the GCC and Israel?

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

#935

Post by wiseowise »

mortarion wrote: post #712
meitham wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The global Shia’s population is even larger than Russia’s population, and more willing to fight the US/Israel. Russia is of course superior to Iran technologically but Iran has the larger support worldwide.

Russian military technology has not evolved since the 90s

The point still stands.

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

#936

Post by testing22321 »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #212
kashunstva wrote: post #10

Whether or not professional military strategists and planners anticipated this shift in carrier-based projection of power in the era of low-cost drones, it is nearly certain that the Commander-in-Chief of the United States military has not. And if the Commander is involved in the either the day-to-day operations or the strategic level of planning, I can’t imagine that whatever reasoning about these shifts in power dy…

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…

Fly thousands or tens of thousands of $400 drones at the carrier, Chinese light show style, while the carrier uses up all its anti-drone Defense ammunition.

Then fly in the high explosives.

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

#937

Post by BigTTYGothGF »

fny wrote: post #747
Animats wrote: post #426

A big mistake here was simply underestimating the scale of Iran. Iran has 90,000,000 people. More than 2x Ukraine. More than 2x Germany. More than 2x Iraq. More than any country in Europe. About 2/3 of Russia. Expecting to win a war on the cheap was a fantasy. Especially since Iran has been fighting Israel for years. On the naval front, Ukraine sunk the Moskva with a few truck-mounted missiles. That finally made it u…

The big mistake was underestimating the appetite for rebellion despite 70%-80% wholesale opposition to the regime.[0] I personally know many, many Iranians who welcome the attacks along with their families. All of the high-profile assassinations involve intelligence from Iranians. However, no one has guns, and government-backed militias roam the streets to maintain order.[1] There is no possibility of military coup.…

> I personally know many, many Iranians who welcome the attacks along with their families

Does anybody else remember "we will be greeted as liberators" from a previous debacle in the region?

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

#938

Post by testing22321 »

throwawayffffas wrote: post #401
mayama wrote: post #392

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. Problem isn't a single drone, it's the cost of intercepters. Iran could launch a swarm of 100s of drones with few antiship missiles mixed in to hone in at same time. CSG has to spend $million+ interceptors and…

> Could launch a swarm of 100s of drones. As far as I know we have never seen that happen against a single target. I believe the reasons are operational not cost related. A single truck can fit like 5 shaheds. For 100 at the same target at the same time you need to coordinate 20 crews just to get them in the air all these drones need to be controlled to some degree as well. It's possible but we have not seen such an…

Have you seen all the Chinese light show drone videos?

See them fly in massive coordinated swarms with precision?

See them automatically land in charging docks in waves by the thousand?

Those videos are not showing the world just a pretty light show.

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

#939

Post by sfRattan »

tdeck wrote: post #599
sfRattan wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an American, I think a better metric for outcomes of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq is: were we trading with the before the war and are we trading with them one generation after the war ? The same is even true of WWII, a more important marker afterward is that we spent the rest of the 20th century trading prosperously with Japan and Germany. Korea: the south became an economic powerhouse with whom we now tr…

> As an American, I think a better metric for outcomes of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq is: were we trading with the before the war and are we trading with them one generation after the war? At least you're honest. Personally I can't believe someone would think it's OK to invade someone else's county and massacre civilians on the scale of Vietnam or Korea in order to establish profitable trading relations.

> Personally I can't believe someone would think it's OK to invade someone else's county and massacre civilians on the scale of Vietnam or Korea in order to establish profitable trading relations.

Strange. I don't remember writing that trading relations afterward justify the initiation of a war. Instead, I only remember writing that it is a better metric to assess the outcomes.

It's stranger still that you read these things between the lines, when my comment specifically includes a recollection of my own disquiet with the Afghanistan War, probably the most justified war of the four enumerated, that I felt while the war was happening.

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

#940

Post by pas »

chii wrote: post #837
woeirua wrote: post #419

This gives drones way too much credit. The USN knew that Iran could block the strait of Hormuz back in the 80s. Anti-ship missiles were already effective and plentiful enough to do it then and they’ve only gotten more lethal since. The long term solution here is to build pipelines that eliminate the need to sail up the strait. Why this wasn’t done already is beyond me.

how do you pipeline fertilizers?

ask any Factorio aficionado! the rookie answer is a conveyor belt, the better answer is a railway.
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